Reel Expression

Here’s a sneak peak of the shoes set that should be released in the next few days. It’ll be either Friday or Saturday. Let me know what you think.

Cheers
Luth

Jet lag sucks. It is one of the most disorientating things you could possibly do to your body. If you’ve never experienced it before, count yourself lucky. I really don’t think our bodies are meant to move that fast and when you arrive, your entire consciousness takes at least a week longer to arrive. After a particularly horrible set of flights, it takes even longer. William Gibson said it best in his book Pattern Recognition, that it feels like your soul is still trying to catch up.

Five hours’ New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.

It is that flat and spectral non-hour, awash in limbic tides, brainstem stirring fitfully, flashing inappropriate reptilian demands for sex, food, sedation, all of the above, and none really an option now.

She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.

I walk around in a haze. My appetite is lost and yet I want to eat. I’ve been sleeping 12 hours a night and yet still almost needing to pass out by 6pm. I force myself each day to stay awake until my usual sleeping time, but my body usually wins around 11:30pm. I’m just now starting to get some mental capacity back.

From door to door, it usually takes about 18 hours to get here. But with my past horrible experiences with different airlines and their lack of any sort of padding in the seats, I went a different route with Delta. Big bloody mistake. Ok.. yes the seats were more comfortable so my bottom didn’t start the extreme pain until 6 hours into the 9h 30m flight. You’d think since I sit on the captain’s chair for 12+ hours a day that I could handle the flight. It must be something to do with the cabin pressure and the extreme height exerting more gravity on your ass. Possibly added that the contours of the chairs just aren’t meant to actually be comfortable.

For the past 4 years, I’ve flown on many different airlines but each one has had the personal video screens on the back of the seat. What that means is that they can have various movies to choose from, including the “kid safe” crap so the real films aren’t edited out. However, Delta is still years behind with the large screens hanging down. Crap “kid safe” films.

All that would have been livable had things turned out differently in Atlanta. When I purchased my tickets, I was to fly Heathrow -> Atlanta -> 2h30m layover -> Omaha. About a month ago, expedia sent an email saying that my flights had been drastically changed and that I had to call them. What is drastic to one, is not drastic to others. They had moved my 1pm Heathrow flight back by 5min which knocked me out of being able to take that, since you have to have a certain amount of time to get through customs. I spent 2h on the phone with them while they tried to get me to fly London -> Ohio -> Denver -> Omaha. That’s not what I paid for. Then they tried to get me to change airlines and add $500. Finally they found a flight that left London at 11am and I had a 2h longer delay. Fine. Book that. Wish they would have told me it was out of Gatwick instead of Heathrow. Could have missed my flight had I not checked on Delta’s website.

Ok.. so I get to Atlanta, jet lagged, tired and cranky and the insane airport doesn’t seem to actually have an exit. I leave customs, give my check-in bag to the airline again, follow the exit and I’m bloody well in the terminal again. How the hell does one find a place to smoke when there is no exit? I thought I was in hell. Actually if there was a hell, the Atlanta airport would be it. It’s these never ending corridors that look exactly the same and no exits. Finally asked someone about how to leave the bloody place and found out that you could smoke in a glass box in each concourse. Fucking hell.

I smoke a couple of rollies, find my gate, smoke again, and have dinner. The place was so packed that I had to share a table with someone else while I attempted to force myself to eat. About 20min before I’m supposed to board, I go to the gate to see they had changed it to another concourse. Run over there, find a seat and wait. And wait. And wait.

Plane was supposed to take off at 7:45pm EDT. Delays. Plane isn’t there. 9:45pm we finally board.

10:30pm - we are still sitting on the runway, the air conditioning is broken. Do you know how hot and muggy Atlanta is in July? I’m telling you… the place actually is hell. Pilot comes on the intercom and says that the plane is having issues… one of the hydrollics is out and we are going back to the gate. Right when we are about to deplane, a lightning storm starts and they can’t work on it until it passes. I shit you not.

11:45pm - storm has passed and plane is fixed (hopefully) and we board again. Air conditioning is still broken however. I pass out.

12:45am - after sitting on the runway for an hour waiting in line to take off, we finally do.

1:45am CDT (2h later) - land in Omaha.

I finally got to my parents house at 3am CDT/9am BST 26 hours after I had left.

It’s almost a week later and I’m still in pretty much of a haze. All I’ve really been doing is watching movies and swimming. I had planned to get the first set out last Friday or Saturday but I’ve been far too out of it. Since I’m feeling more myself, I’ll be working on getting that out later today or tomorrow at the latest.

Cheers
Luth

So the past few months I’ve been animating like a crazy woman. I wake up, watch a couple of eps of TV with breakfast and tea, work, eat dinner (at the desk), more work, watch a film or more TV eps and then go to sleep. Sometimes I’ll take a break to do things for the holiday coming up on Monday. Like converting films to my iPod Touch, getting all the files and programs ready, looking for my passport and US mobile, or whatever random thing I think about. But mostly, I’ve been glued to the Captian’s Chair (hubbies nickname for my huge plush leather desk chair).

You saw part of it during the opening and the rest will be released while I’m away. What I really wanted was enough items to put out stuff consistantly where all I had to do was make the ads. I don’t mind laptops, but animating on them is probably the worst thing possible.

By the time I leave, I will have (hopefully):
3 AOs - Casual Female, Casual Male, and Party Dress.
4 Pose Sets - Posh, Fashion Series 5, Shoes (you know.. show off the shoes in an interesting way) and Material Girls - for showing off the jewlery.
4-6 Couple’s Poses. 4 have been made, the problem is that I’m waiting to hear back from Trinny about standing in for Alle while I make them. If not, I think I can come up with something else to make for the rest of the weekend.

But do look out this weekend as I’ll be releasing something new before I leave :P

Cheers
Luth

First episode is up! 2nd will be up on the 17th and act 3 on the 19th. However, they will be only available until midnight on the 20th! www.drhorrible.com

Never heard of it? Well then…

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

During the writers strike, Joss Whedon (Writer/Creator/Producer of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, and the upcomming Dollhouse) decided to do something new that circumvented the studios. At least something good came from that huh?

So the entire thing is seriously low budget. But for once, its showing how low budget can actually be very good. Who better to give us something not only entertaining, but something to shove into the studio execs face, then Joss Whedon who’d been screwed over by Fox with Firefly? (If you haven’t seen Firefly, I highly suggest renting it)

It’s a “supervillain musical.” With Neil Patrick Harris as the geeky semi-competent supervillian Dr Horrible. Do I need put his past stuff in parentheses? Who can forget Doogie Howser, M.D.? (laugh) Or his recent brilliance in How I Met Your Mother - the only show with a laugh track that is not only watchable, but really good. Then you have Nathan Fillion - Captain Mal from Firefly!! - as Captain Hammer the over the top sex symbol type hero.

The writing of course is brilliant. From Act 1 (the set up) we see Doctor Horrible doing his video blog - “wow sarcasim…how origional.” We learn he’s trying to get into the Evil League of Evil. There is (of course) a girl whom he fancies, but can’t talk to. He sings about his freeze ray gun (and the girl) - the first song with brilliant lyrics. Doctor Horrible gets a response to his application for The Evil League of Evil from the leader - Bad Horse -, calling him to pull off something big. And hilarity ensues.

The editing is so subtle that I didn’t even notice it - and that’s what good editing is. Costumes are perfect - I love Captain Hammer’s T-Shirt with a hammer on it. The camera work, sound, everything is just right. The quality of it is rare in large budget productions and even more rare in low budget - just look on youtube for thousands of examples of bad amateur crap. Anyone ever see quareter life? That webisode series was just plain bad. This however is anything but bad.

Now, there are a lot of people who can’t stand musicals. My husband is one of them - I still can’t twist his arm enough to see Moulin Rouge. But, this isn’t one of those kinds of musicals. It’s over the top, campy and very very funny. Definitely reminiscent of “Once More, With Feeling,” that great musical Buffy episode. The songs are just humourous and catchy. I keep watching it over and over.

Not only would you be missing out if you didn’t watch them, but I hope you try it a 2nd time. For me, it gets better each time I view it. Also, if you want to support these types of ideas of new media you can buy them off iTunes and a DvD will be available later.

People tell me that I don’t blog enough. Most of the time it’s because I don’t have anything about SL to actually talk about. How many posts can I write - “Today I made poses?” I’m a bit slow on the news front and there are just better blogs out there. I’m not into leaving my sim, so I can’t really do yet another fashion review site.

Alle and I are working on the SL machinima review site, but that’s one of the projects I’ll be finishing while I’m away for the next couple of months.

Pre SL, Reel Geek used to be my blog for film reviews. I had stopped blogging and couldn’t think of a better name, so I nicked the blog of the SL stuff and deleted all the old posts. But there are still a lot of times when I really feel like writing my thoughts on something I’ve seen that I really enjoyed or hated.

I dunno how much I’ll post with it, but who knows…

Cheers
Luth