jkatkina

The aivi + surasshu show was fantastic. Before they were on, we got some rad chiptunes folks from the local scene, and one other pair up from the Bay Area that had a fun funky transhumanist sci-fi aesthetic. Turns out that this show was the first time aivi + surasshu had played a show outside the Bay Area themselves, which, wow?! We got something special. Aivi was an absolute sweetheart. Surasshu had an amazing glowing hat. We bought merch.

My hopes for SU music were not unmet. They started with a Peridot medley, which was funky and hilarious, and carried on to do several character and fusion themes, and. Get this. Not one, but tHREE SINGALONGS I was in heaven. A whole ton of Vancouver nerds, including (yes) several folks from work, belting out SU music to the accompaniment of the actual composers of that music. As fandom experiences go, it was actually the best.

You know what else they did? A gorgeous pianos-and-chiptunes rendrition of Yuri on Ice. It was everything I never knew I wanted. UGH.

Since I've mostly been doing social Dreamwidth stuff at lunch during the work week, the weeks when work gets busy are turning out to be weeks when I disappear. This week, I had a bunch of broad high-angle neighbourhood shots. So many houses. I've never done that few backgrounds in a week before. Shame!

I've been working on more writing. There's a challenge up on rainbowlounge for Valentine's Day -- if you've seen me posting writing in this journal before, it's been for that community mostly. The skinny is that you pick prompt lists in the form of "colours" from rainbowlists and write stories based around prompts or combinations of prompts -- it's kind of a rad way to get the juices flowing if you're out of ideas or just want to write drabbles, and it's helping me fill out Kaitan and Tuanada's backstory. The comm's quiet lately, but I'd love to see it have a resurgence, with this shot in the arm DW's had lately. Check out rainbowfic for the writing, or Fensirt for the stuff that I've submitted over time!

And as for the actual valentine's challenge...

rainbowfic writing challenge Caught Sweetly Between Love and Family Join us at rainbowfic to write some sweet Valentine's Day and Family Day original flash fiction. Contest runs from February 14th (today) to February 19th. details 💗 Each entry must be between 100-1000 words 💗 Entries must be posted to rainbowfic 💗 Post stories about fluff, romance, families and friendship 💗 Choose at least 1 colour list of prompts from rainbowlists to flavour your entry 💗 Get more details here MAIN COMMUNITY PROMPT LISTS SOCIAL/OOC LOUNGE CHALLENGE LINK COMMUNITY RULES

Fun thing this week: amongst the bajillion layers and folders of layers, each of which must be labelled appropriately in regards to their content, I found a folder labeled 'feeeeeeeeets'. This was, in fact, appropriately labelled as it contained the feet of a statue, but it also did give me a giggle.

Today I did some sleuthing up the pipeline to see who in Layout did that BG before passing it on to Paint, and called out the fella on the work network.

He replied with "sometimes after labelling 200 layers, you go a little crazy", and told a story of the time he had to draw a bunch of incidental crowd members and started giving them biographical layer names like "single mom who is excited to pay off her final car loan" and "Aspiring youtuber who can't break 1k followers". I FEEL YOU, BRO.

(It's also his last day at the studio, which is DUMPS. But I'm sure in this industry I'll see him again.)

Thinking about Kaitan leads to drawing Kaitan.

( non-graphic nudity under the cut )

Okay, so — you know how TL and I ran into a group of people who know someone we used to live with?

I’m waiting for the third in this series, because everything happens in threes.

The second requires a bit of explanation.

I work at an animation studio. It is, perhaps literally, a dream job of mine. This is a studio a friend of mine used to work at before they had two kids in quick succession and had to take on full-time childcare duties. I got to know how cool this studio was through them, mostly; they invited TL and I to the 5 Second Day shorts screening. It blew me the hell away. (Seriously check out that link.)

Fast forward four years and I’ve managed to get a job at this studio, and my first 5-second day rolls around. Now, this is a big studio, near 300 people split between a couple of locations, so six months in I’ve only really met a fraction of the people. The animation community in Vancouver is also deeply incestuous — people cycle between the several animation studios here constantly, based on what projects they fit with and which studios they love best. So I definitely know people who know people who work here, but I hadn’t really come across any yet.

So I figure, my first 5-second day, I’m a painter and not an animator, I’ll take it easy and help with someone else’s project. A rando puts up a cool DnD-based project up on the company facebook, and I ping them, asking if they need another painter. They say yes, and I go to pick up whatever needs painting.

This Sunday, we had the first meeting of our DnD group in about a month and a half, and we get to talking. Now, an FX animator friend of ours from school is part of this group, and we get to talking. I mention 5-second day; she asks what I’m doing.

I say I’m working with a team, she asks who. I stumble over the slightly unfamiliar name of the project lead, and she grimaces and says his name.

This person is her ex. That she had talked to us extensively about when they broke up and she was trying to deal with the fallout. Who did her pretty dirty, and basically just sounded like a really shitty person. And I’ve found myself working on his project.

>8U gdi

Hey, universe. Can the next one of these be someone who won’t make me feel vaguely dirty by association, please?

I wonder if there’s a point at which life starts getting less complicated rather than more?

We went to look at a place yesterday. A very weird situation: we looked at the suite, and then after chatting with the folks who lived in the upstairs section of the house, found out that they knew someone we moved out to this city with, through a friend of theirs. This mutual acquaintance was, in fact, someone we lived with for a while, and with her husband.

Not, in this case, a cause for celebration: we really hit it off with the other folks in the house, but our mutual acquaintance is someone my partner and I have fallen out with for reasons personal enough that we couldn’t just blast em out right there. Since we hit it off with these random strangers so well that we’d been talking about hanging out even if we didn’t end up housemates, it was kind of a pisser to be blindsided by this mutual acquaintence.

It was a bit like being offered a donut, and then told, oh wait, but you have to eat it in this room where someone’s ripping these gigantic nasty farts. And this person just keeps showing up in our social circles, turning up like a bad penny. And what precipitated the falling-out is something she and her husband rug-swept like immediately when it happened, so it’s not like we’re ever going to get closure on it, to the point where I’m not even sure she knows we’ve fallen out. We just don’t really want anything to do with this person, because she reopens some old wounds.

It may be a moot point, in any case. We had to turn down the suite for practical reasons rather than social, but god knows that might have soured these possible new friends to us anyways. I guess I’ll see, and then have some unpleasant decisions to consider.

Went to get ramen for lunch with a coworker today, a good dude who's actually around my age amongst all the recent-grad babies that surround us. This is progress: I am Pretty Bad with being social on my own, which is one part palm-sweating social anxiety and one part being really self-sufficient and comfortable on my own, but I have decided that I don't want another workplace where I know no one and no one knows me, so damn it, I am making friends.

There was a post going around the blue hellsite a while ago about friending people at work, as filtered through the lens of "humans will pack-bond with anything". It was a fascinating take, and rung much more true than any other take I've seen. The basic premise was that, for those of us more inclined towards self-sufficiency, treat making friends at work like any other small maintenance task: make time for it, engage in it mindfully, have a strategy for understanding the cues and mores. Ultimately at some point, if you work in a company, there'll come a day when you'll need help, or you'll be able to offer help, so start thinking about that before you need it.

And honestly, I really like the kind of people I'm encountering at the studio? Animators are good people. The Christmas party was a gosh darn tiki-flavoured delight. They do barbeques on Fridays in the summer. I want these people as my friends.

I feel pretty optimistic about it. There's a really interesting thing that seems to happen in a city with multiple animation studios -- people move very fluidly between the big studios, based on what projects are going on at which studio. People cycle through and circle back. A coworker I'd just started forming a connection to just left to go be a head animator for the next season of Rick and Morty, but before he left, he said, "I'll see you when I'm back. As soon as this season is over, I'm coming back to [studio I work at]." Like it ain't no thing, right?

It feels weirdly cozy, like, the longer you're in the industry, the more you know you'll have friends in any studio you jump ship to. I love it.

Anyhow, lunch with Shea was nice. We're both sort of gunning to climb the ladder; he wants to get into storyboarding, I want to be doing colour keys or be a team lead on something. I told him we'd have lunch together again in ten years and delight in our success stories.

It's a good start.

Man, for all my stoke it’s taking some doing to get back into the habit of using journalling sites! Commenting, and replying to comments, doesn’t feel intuitive anymore — but then, I hope it’s like art, where if you put down the pencil for a while, you can trust that if you sketch for a while, you’ll find your bearings again.

I’ve been playing a shitton of Pokémon Go lately. Boxing Day sales for the Switch were absolute trash, so I didn’t end up getting us Pokémon Let’s Go, and I’m salving the hurt of not having dropped a cool $400 on a vidyah game. Thankfully, from all the pokewalks we’ve gone on, TL and I know a good chunk of other players in the city who have Switches, so we’ve both managed to get that sweet sweet Meltan goodness.

For all the playing I do, you think I’d do more fanart for it. Maybe tomorrow??

In other news though I’ve started in on this year’s lunar new year picture (last year’s was the fox). I’ll post er when I’m on on the iPad, i.e. the world’s worst UI for image processing.

Hey, y’all!

A million years ago I started this journal as a writing side-journal from my main (and now oh so defunct) personal livejournal. Dreamwidth was touted largely as a writing and RP community, and heck, that was my jam.

Now, with the mass tumblr-bail, it seems like some of the more writing and community-oriented folks are coming here! I can’t overstate my glee. I liked tumblr for what it was, but it never really held a candle, in terms of community interactivity, to UIs where people can properly leave and respond to comments.

This mix of community folks can only be a good thing. Welcome, to those of you who were never here before, and welcome back, to other journaling alumni. Let’s build something cool.