Reel Expression

121 Random Poses:
Months ago I sat down for 3 days to see how many poses I could do in that time period. I mainlined tea, hardly talked to anyone (ok that’s kind of typical) and went through more jolt gum than is probably healthy. Sometimes I like to push myself just to see what I can do. It keeps things interesting. I averaged about 30-50 a day, as there a bunch of sitting ones that took longer than the standing ones.

Today I put all of them in the discount section for L$50 each and L$4800 for the set. Does that make up for not releasing anything for months?

- All of them are from source photos
- Some of the sources are previously used
- Some of them had been scrapped because I couldn’t work out the kinks
- Some had been scrapped before just well.. because I didn’t like it.
- The only tweaking to them was fixing major breaks and balance issues, so they are lower quality than my usual.
- I couldn’t use previously made poses as a starting point
- I couldn’t use my excel cheat sheet

Pro Posers Hunt:
So I have some free (previously unreleased) poses out for this hunt. It ends on the 30th.

In other news:
You may or may not know that prior to working full time in SL, I was a film editor. Part of my moving back to the States was to venture back that direction. I missed editing. A lot. I love making poses, but it’s not editing. It’s not telling a story with pictures, at least not like editing is.

I have this love/hate relationship with both SL and the film industry that I’m not going to bore you with here. SL was a nice break from it, but it’s time for me to go back. I’ve been spending the past few months relearning old stuff, figuring out what’s changed since I left, setting up my online reel and getting ready to put myself out there again. About a month ago, I got a job editing a feature length documentary and I’ve been knee deep in it since. Contract negotiation, production meetings, and other such nonsense that I still haven’t touched a bit of film. Hell, I haven’t even opened Avid.

What does that mean for Reel Expression? A lot less releases and slower customer service response time. I try and log in often, but sometimes I just can’t. I still have pose ideas bouncing around my head screaming to get out, but I’m working on them very slowly. I’m also working on a sim rebuild and attaching it to my dear friend Aems Case’s sim.

So no, I’m not rage quitting. You can’t get rid of me that easily.

Cheers
Luth

Hi all. Just a quick note on why I’ve been so quiet. I’m in the midst of an acute wrist tendinitis flare-up. This is actually the worst it’s been. Typically when it happens, taking a day away from the computer makes it go away for months. The only thing constant I found was that any yoga position with my hands supporting most of my body wasn’t very comfortable.

I suppose all these years of video games, animation, video editing, and other computer things finally caught up to me. I still blame it on Vanguard’s crafting system.

This time around, getting rid of it is proving to be difficult. Luckily it happened right before I went on holiday, but a week off the computer didn’t do very much. So, I spent another week on the couch. Nothing. Ice. Nothing. So I finally broke down and went to my health go to person - aka mom - who suggested a rather strict regiment. Ice it 20min, rest it 20 min, heat 20 min, rest 20min 4 times daily. That eats up 6 hours of my day alone. The rest of the time I can work, but every hour I need to take a 15min break to pace around my apartment doing wrist exercises.

It’s working. I now can rotate my arm without screaming. There is pain, but nothing like it was. But the new poses are taking a while to get out.

Cheers
Luth

In my daily google news search for when the damn thing is going to be released, all I ever see is loyal iphone podguys ranting how it’s going to be dead on arrival for x amount of reasons. Who cares what they think? They have a phone they like and aren’t actively looking for something different. One article that was supposed to be a comparison spent 2 paragraphs about how the guy loved his iphone and reminisced about standing in line for a gen 1. I personally think they are being paid by apple, because I have no idea why anyone would be that loyal to a company. Especially apple. It really doesn’t make you cooler or better. If you think it does, that makes you a douche. A tool. And some other nasty words.

My current US mobile is the cheapest one I could find and on my mother’s plan. Yes I’m 31 and sharing minutes with my mother. Before you make any assumptions, there is a reason….

When I was visiting the US in ‘07, I needed a cell phone for the extra traveling I was doing. In the UK, most people I knew who didn’t have a mobile via work was on a prepaid service. So I figured going that route here would work well. I went over to the AT&T store, picked out a cheap phone, and did pay as you go. I specifically asked if there was a time limit on money put into it, they said no.

So when I had the nightmare flights last summer, my prepaid phone should have worked right? Nope. They had given my number to someone else and I needed to go into a store to get a new one. WTF. They took the $75 or so I had left on it and completely fucked me. Thanks AT&T. Because of the confusion of the flights and few payphones in the airport, my parents had to sit at the Omaha airport for 3 hours waiting for me.

My mother was livid. You could assume that my angst came from being gen-x and never really “growing up,” but you’d be incorrect. OK, maybe only a little incorrect. I curse a lot more than she does, but her having words with someone is pretty fucking scary. The people over at At&T were somehow immune to her - fucking shit customer service - and she drove us across the street to Sprint.

We didn’t even have to demand actual answers as they were completely upfront about if you don’t top up your phone in a certain amount of time, they’d kill it. 10 points for Sprint. But since my mom is on a family plan with my Step-Father (cause she gets a discount for being a health professional) and they never use all of their minutes, adding me was a no brainer. 10 more points for the Sprint guy explaining that was the cheaper and more stable option.

When I was pricing things I needed to get when I moved back to the states, I decided to finally go with a decent phone. And the research began…

iPhone:
While I am no fan of Apple, I have always wanted one. I love the touchscreen vrs annoying menus to cycle through. Plus I’ve been a mostly happy ipod owner for a very long time. Until I purchased an ipod touch. I paid more for the damn thing then an iphone costs, and yet I have to pay for the big updates for programs that the iphone already has or gets for free. Fuck you apple. Plus getting it to connect to wifi is a PITA. Typing of the touchscreen keyboard is slightly annoying as it tells me often that I’m trying to type 1 word, when I’m going for something else. And I have to go back, delete what it auto entered and hope it doesn’t fuck with me again.

I get why people like having macs, but I’ll never understand the intense brand loyalty. The mac vrs pc debates can get pretty fucking nasty typically on the mac side. I had one friend for a while who I constantly wanted to slap because of it. I’d like to chalk that experience up to he was an arrogant douche who happened to also be an arrogant idouche. Which does seem to happen more with mac converts instead of those always being mac lovers.

And not to mention the fact that the entire stigma of geeks using macs vrs pcs is an advertising fabrication. That if you use a mac you suddenly become geek chic. There is no such thing as geek chic, as you are still a geek. The uber geek friends of mine use linux solely. Everyone else, save for a couple friends, either dual boots with linux or uses windows only.

And not to be a snob, but I’m still sort of pissed off about the FCP crap being cheap enough software that everyone thinks they can edit, when they can’t. OK yeah. I’m a snob. But the amount of CVs and reels I went through finding my replacement for my editing job in SF, proved me right on that. Just because you can afford FCP and put a few clips together with transitions, doesn’t make you an editor. And I’m at a throwing shit level of angry for apple buying shake (awesome composting software) and making it mac only.

The mac vrs pc debate really comes down to a few factors:
1. What you know. I know technically mac OS is better than windows. I’m not deluded. However, I can build myself a pc with XP 64 and never worry about it. I never upgraded to vista because of the bad reports I got from friends, so I don’t have that bad taste in my mouth. When something goes wrong - and honestly it’s pretty rare - I know how to fix it. My little pirate serves me well and she even is covered in glow in the dark pirate stickers.

2. It’s what you plan to do with it. I’m a gamer. I know you can run windows games via the mac OS, but why would I bother fiddling with it? I have friends who do it, and they don’t have a lot of nice things to say about it. While 2d works better on macs (photoshop and the like) 3d works better on linux and then windows. Film/Video editing works about the same on both and is another long debate of avid v final cut which comes down again to what works better for your own work flow.

3. Cost. Parts for PCs are cheaper because of the large amount of competition. I’ll hear from mac people it’s because the parts are worse but I’ve never had anything break down before it needed an upgrade anyways. I’m a constant upgrader, which is just easier and well.. affordable to do with a PC. I can buy a comparable machine for 1/2 the price and then fully upgrade it 2 years later for still less than a mac costs. But that’s me. I know what parts to buy and how to put them in. For someone who wants a computer to last and not have to fiddle with the parts, by all means buy a mac. Because prebuilt PCs fucking suck, unless you go to a small computer shop and have them build one for you.

OK.. that was a tangent. And it’ll probably piss off a lot of SLers. I know a lot of SLers (especially fashion designers) use macs because its better with Photoshop. Which is where they are better.

AT&T:
I really hate the idea of a phone being only on 1 carrier. Especially when that carrier is AT&T. Other than the story above, which should have been avoided anyways because of past experiences with them, I hate AT&T with such fierce passion. My first cell phone was with AT&T. But their customer service and constant dropped calls in bloody San Francisco made me switch. Saddly, I went over to cingular and when they were bought out from AT&T, somehow my good service went to shit. How many days could I not call into work after missing the horrible 1 bus per hour to Sausalito? I’d either have no service or that the system was busy. In my apartment, which had full service with cingular, I’d have to hang out the window to make a call.

I’ve had no problems at all with my current Sprint phone, so I don’t understand why all this bitching about the Palm Pre being only on Sprint for the beginning. Please note the last word of that sentence. The price of plans for AT&T v Sprint is about the same unless you like txting. Plus with Sprint you get some extra stuff like Sprint TV.

Blackberry:
My brother is a diehard blackberry user and he seems to like his. I’ve taken a look at the Storm and wasn’t all that impressed. And it’s only on Verizon. One of my good friends I’ve known for something like 12 years - he’s the male version of me and that’s what I call him - works at Verizon and loves his blackberry. I’ve had absolutely no experience with them, but their prices are way high. But why would I pay extra every month for a service I’m not sure about when I already know Sprint doesn’t suck?

Palm Pre:
I did look at a few other phones I could get on the Sprint network, but I kept going back to the Pre. I keep reading that there was this lame survey recently to see if people would change to Sprint and the Pre which only came to about 4%. But where is the survey of people who don’t already have a smart phone? Or a survey of anyone else but idouches and blackberry fans?

It seems to me that the pre is targeting those of us who aren’t idouches. Those that hate AT&T. That want a touchscreen, but also like the idea of a qwerty keyboard. Granted I’d much prefer a landscape slide out keyboard, but I’ll go with what I can get. It has an ap store which is supposedly easy to write aps for. Personally I hardly care unless someone updates the space trader game. All those iphone/ ipt aps are interesting for like 10 seconds. Cept for the twitter and the lolcats ones.

It has everything I need…
1. GPS - How awesome it would be if my phone would tell me which direction to walk in a city I don’t know yet?
2. Email
3. Web
4. Calendar would be awesome if I ya know.. needed one. I have an awesome memory and rarely forget the few things I have scheduled.
5. Keyboard for txting. I <3 txting.

I had a plam pilot once. But all I ever used it for was playing a space trader game where I was a pirate and smuggled a lot. I played it during really boring classes like intro to producing. Being a space pirate was way more interesting than talking about budgeting films. And with the emulation software, maybe I’d be able to play it again while on the train. Or they’d update it. Oh fuck yeah.

If you’ve been paying attention to my plurk or twitter accounts, there is a good chance you already know what is going on.

I have moved back across the pond. I am no longer an expat. \o/ I think in my complete lack of sanity near the end, I forgot to mention the Chicago series was in part because I was moving here.

Let me tell you… transatlantic moves suck. Not in the ways that all moves suck. Take the regular annoyance of a move and times it by 100 and you may just understand. It’s what I’ve been dealing with for months now and pretty much slammed with it since the last release.

Take packing for instance.
To move all your crap overseas, you have to decide what is important enough to take for the huge price of it. Are you going to fly it over? (super expensive) Or have it sailed over? (takes 4-12 weeks and still pretty fucking expensive). Which of your items are worth the shipping costs and possible length of time it takes? To give an example, the cheapest option - sea freight and 1 of the smallest size of boxes - starts at £195.00.

I also had to write out a full inventory of every item I packed, including length of time owned and amount it is worth. These are for the customs forms and as a returning resident, anything I’d owned for a year or more was exempt from paying duty. Type it all out into a clean excel spreadsheet, print, and hand over to the shipping company.

Don’t forget the rest of the forms - about 10 pages.

Importing the kittens was surprisingly easy. So easy in fact that it seemed too easy which led me to do far more research then necessary. In the end I went with a pet travel agent who picked them up the day before, filled out the paper work, supplied the carriers, and got them to the airport and on my plane. It was about 3x the amount of my ticket. \o/

Furniture:
Of course I didn’t have any when I got here, due to the entire shipping annoyances. But the thing about renting a flat in London is that you generally get them furnished. Which is awesome when you get there and not having to deal with it during moving but you rarely get a choice of quality and what it looks like. Plus if you move to a place with no furniture at all, you have to buy it all in 1 go.

My first week here, I had an air mattress. That’s it. Last weekend, Keiki drove up for a visit and we went on a massive ikea shopping spree. I very much have a love hate relationship with ikea. I hate shopping so much that I like to go get what I need and leave. You can’t do that in ikea. The place is a maze. Plus everyone has to go down just about the same paths and you have to walk at their speed, which is bloody slow. But its great because you can find random stuff you never thought you’d want but can still afford.

Ikea is awesome when you have to furnish an entire apartment on a budget but by the time you get through the endless sea of crap they expect you to be able to find the correct furniture. I don’t know if it was the jet lag or annoyance of 3 hours of shopping, but I well.. didn’t do so great. The pieces are the correct type, but the chest of drawers is the wrong colour. \o/ And I’m thinking there might be colour miss matched bookshelves too. Those are still in the boxes as I don’t have my books yet.

With no car I don’t have much options in getting it changed. So, I’m just going to live with it. Who needs matching furniture? It’s ikea stuff so it’s not like it’ll last for the rest of my life. And knowing me I’ll pick up and move somewhere random in 5 years again.

Given all that, I built all the stuff all by myself. Even the bed. \o/ Fear my power screwdriver.

On Monday my desk arrived then the stuff from ikea on tue. It’s getting there, but I still don’t have a tv or couch. Soon hopefully.

Landlord from hell
Here’s what I don’t get. I’m in a pretty decent 1 bedroom apartment. Brand new rehabbed place. It’s got all sorts of new appliances for the kitchen - even a dishwasher… how I missed having one. Granite counter tops, new cupboards, nice wood floors, marble bathroom with whirlpool tub. And yet my landlord is about as responsible as the rumours you hear about slum lords.

When I got here, there was no heat turned on at all. The gas wasn’t hooked up. No heat. No hot water. I learned about this when I called to change the utilities to my name before I left and the earliest they could get here to turn the gas on was a week after I got here. FFS. After finally getting that entire thing sorted on tue, comes to find out that the hot water heater just isn’t working. Maintenance came out last week, said they would be back in a couple of mins, 5 days later and I still can’t have a hot bath in less than the 3 hours it takes to fill it with water from the stove.

I live in a 3 story walk up courtyard building, which is rather typical here in Chicago. Before you actually get through the courtyard to the door of my part of the building, there is a fence and a gate. The first couple of days, the gate was unlocked. Then one day I left to walk up to walgreens to find it locked and me without a correct key. They had given me 2 front door keys instead of a gate key. Awesome.

When Keiki and I went shopping, I’d left tape over the latch so we could get back in. It was off when we got back. I stood in the rain for perhaps 30min when I finally scaled the fence. Monday the cable guys came, needed to get into the basement - same key as the gate - and after 10 calls to the landlord I still couldn’t get a key. Luckily a neighbour happened to be walking down the alley, stopped over for a chat and opened the door for us just as I was rescheduling.

Daily calls and their daily promises and it was a week until I got it.

According to what I’ve read, there is a city ordinance that says landlords have to supply a recycling program. We don’t. So my living room is filled with recycling - mostly boxes - while I decide what I’m going to do with them.

I don’t have a door buzzer. Ok. I’m in the back end of the courtyard. Meaning I’m across the entire courtyard from the gate. UPS gets to the gate, how are they supposed to get to me? And how am I supposed to know they are there? Luckily I’ve had a chat with the regular driver, he comes this way at a specific time and yells really loud.

My upstairs neighbours stomp around with shoes on (wood floors), scream at each other constantly and then have loud make-up sex. They also break up and slam doors every day.

Crazy Kittens:

When I got them here, they were so happy to see me that they just wanted out of their carriers and follow me around. You are supposed to (according to my vet) lock them in 1 room until they calm down. That was… impossible. They cried and scratched at the door. So Chuck (pictured here) walked around with his big fluffy tail in the air shaking it he was that scared.

Pretty much straight away they figured out how to get on top of the cupboards. 8′ in the air. A few days after getting here, I woke up to Chuck pacing and crying. Hunter was missing. I searched for a while and then remembered the tile in the bathroom that isn’t attached because of the whirlpool motor is behind it. Of course, the tile is flat on the ground and the cat sized hole is exposed. I tried for a while to coax her out, but she wasn’t having anything to do with it.

Chuck on the other hand really wanted to be in the hole, so I closed him in the bedroom. Big mistake. He peed on my air mattress and blankets. I have no idea why I didn’t remember he does that when I lock him away from what is going on. As soon as I let him out, he went into the hole. He’s a bit on the tubby side and couldn’t get very far… just sat there staring at me. So I took a picture.

Since I didn’t have a key and worried about being locked out to leave, I had Keiki bring me some aluminum foil and duck tape to close the hole once they got out. Which they did… eventually.

They were a bit worrying for a while as they weren’t eating very well. They get 4 small meals a day, mostly so Hunter will eat it all so Chuck doesn’t finish it for her. Until a couple of days ago, Hunter would only come out of whatever hiding place she was in to eat once, and never eat it all.

They are getting better and now asserting their dominance over the apartment. Demanding cuddles when/where/how they please, jumping on me as a “feed me” wake up call, and standing on the desk for giving me headbutts.

It really isn’t all that bad…
Lots of annoying crap has been thrown at me to deal with, but it’s starting to look up. Which is good because Chicago is a great city. Like Bill Maher said when I went to see him debate Ann Coulter on Tue, Chicago is like NY without the attitude. London I’d say is somewhere in the middle, with really shit customer service.

People in general are friendly and helpful. I’ve had neighbours stop by just to introduce themselves and welcome me to the building. Shop cashiers are a level of friendly that you don’t get in London. The cable installers stuck around for 2 hours while I tried to get someone to open the basement door and didn’t complain. They were chilled and just chatted with me. At the theater for the debate, the people sitting next to me (perfect strangers) asked what I thought of it when it ended. As did a group of people I ended up walking next to towards the El.

3 blocks away I have a coffee shop with free wifi with a nice and chatty barista who’s been perfectly OK with me still sitting there with my eee pc after they have closed. The red line El stop is 4 blocks away. 2 blocks is a decent sized grocery store. 7 blocks away is the only kickboxing school I could find that teaches the style I know and like. 6 Blocks is the lake/park/beach. An Organic grocery store is 8 blocks away. It took less than an hour to get to the loop (downtown) which I was rather worried about because I’m pretty far north. In London, my place looked close and only took 20mins to get to Oxford St by tube, but door to door it was about an hour. 30min walk + you can never get on the first central line train.

I have this thing I do when I move to a new city. I hide out for a week or 2. Alle says I’m a cat like that. When I moved to SF 10 years ago, it was the first time I’d ever moved to another city. I was staying in hotel and had 2 suitcases. I’m pretty sure I didn’t leave that room once in a week. 5 years later I moved to London. It was a bit different as I was staying with a friend and he made me leave a few times. I remember very clearly that first night on no sleep, experiencing massive jet lag for the first time and the mass amounts of drinking we did. I was hurting for days after that. Now in Chicago, I’ve ventured out a few times to get things that I needed… but meh. I really just need my bearings first and then venture out when and where I need to.

I spent a lot of the first couple of weeks sorting things out when I had to and watching TV in the bedroom whenever I could. I’ve still got a bit of jet lag, exhaustion or weird sleeping schedule so I’m a bit out of it. Today I woke up itching to work and have been since. Still sorting through the 2 weeks of IMs and notecards, so please continue to be patient. Hopefully I’ll have some new poses out soonish.

This week maybe I’ll ring up about starting kickboxing again and we’ll see what happens.

Cheers
Luth