+4 Stamina.

Yes, it's true, K and I have become drawn into World of Warcraft and may soon follow the example of the couple in Korea who were prosecuted for neglect after their child died because they were addicted to WoW.

So if you want this joy for yourself, drop me a line... we have three ten-day trial keys ripe for the taking.  Just make sure to join the Sisters of Elune realm, and look for Emmawyn and Squelchy.

(She's a night-elf, I'm a gnome.  In other words, just like real life.)

Can you guess where we're going?

"Zach Brewster-Geisz!  You just finished first in the Daytona 500!  You also single-handedly won the World Series, brokered a peace deal between Israel and Palestine, killed Osama bin Laden with your bare hands, and won the Nobel Peace Prize!  What are you gonna do next?"

See you when we get back!

Not a moment too soon department.

So we bought me a new MacBook Pro yesterday. I went through the whole rigaramole of getting the files transferred over via FireWire, and it went pretty flawlessly.

I figured I'd give the kids the old PowerBook, so I started to reformat the drive, and zeroed out all the data. Then I started the process of installing Tiger.

While the installer was verifying the erased disk, I started hearing a sound very much like a metronome, so I cancelled the procedure and restarted the computer.

Well, turns out I had just had a catastropic hard drive failure--my first ever. So the PowerBook is going to ebay, for parts only.

But talk about dumb luck! My first hard drive failure--the day after I successfully backed it up!

Somewhere, the Devil of obsolescent hardware is firing the dude in charge of timing.

Edit: And it's on eBay!  Bid here if you're interested...

We get letters!

Robert wrote:

Now, seriously, with your acting career blooming and all that do you really need to be spending another lifetime learning CD4 just to get back to doing what you were already doing with (app that dare not speak its name)?

Come on back! We still love you there. Well, 99% of us do, ok?

Two points about that:

1. An acting career that is "blooming" in community theater is kind of like being the proverbial "world's tallest midget."  Get back to me when I'm getting paid.
2. More germanely, I have no confidence whatsoever that said app will continue to be supported on Mac OS X, now that Ken has left; and with other programmers leaving in droves I'm not fully convinced the thing will exist at all in a couple of years.  And besides, the C4D renderer is so much nicer!  Even if I can't wrap my head around its character tools yet, once I do, my work will look so much better it won't even be a question.

Inner necessity...

Vintage article from Joel Achenbach:

Leon Botstein, the composer, says you can't plan your breakthroughs. You just have to keep plugging away, and wait, and hope.

"Breakthrough is not when you want it, it's not when you expect it. It's a function of the constant activity. It is only the constant activity that generates the breakthrough."

And what causes the constant activity? It's not money. It's not glory. It's an "inner necessity," he says. Unless you have this inner necessity to create, you'll probably never do anything of brilliance, Botstein believes.

"Without constant, almost irrational, obsessive engagement, you'll never make the breakthrough," he says. "The difference between you and the person you consider great is not raw ability. It's the inner obsessiveness. The inability to stop thinking about it. It's a form of madness."

So this is what separates the great ones from the rest of the world. It is not simply that they are smarter, savvier, more brilliant. They are geniuses because they can't stand to be anything else.

Just a test.

Woo, hoo!  Compose mode!  It's Safari-3-tastic!

"Parallel Play"

This is my son, and in many ways it's heartbreaking, because I don't know if he'll wind up like Tim Page or like the homeless person Page briefly describes halfway through, obsessively scrawling the genealogy of the Hapsburgs on the walls of the New York subway.

The essay does put Page's recent unpleasantness in a new light, though.

Alert!

Relearning is hard. I really wish there was just a red pill I could take to remember how to design characters, because that's what I need to do for my new short film. But no. I won't even allow myself to hire other artists to do it for me, since my ultimate objective is to learn how to do all this stuff myself. Gah!

And this failure is affecting me in other ways, as well, making me more touchy and irritable. Or is the tail wagging the dog? Am I both irritable and having character trouble because of some other, deeper issue?
All I know is that for the first time since Dad's death I actually Have An Idea, yet it's so so so fucking hard to implement it!

Oh, I really should mention...

By the way, my (ancient!) short film <ESC> was a runner-up for Best Animation at the Philadelphia FirstGlance Film Festival this year. Woo.

God damn it.

I am pissed off at NARAL.

Al Wynn used to be my representative, before I moved to Steny Hoyer's district, and he's every bit as bad as Digby says he is. I was really pulling for Donna Edwards in 2004 2006, and she almost beat him. Here's hoping this year makes the difference.

Here's her website. Donate today if you can.

(Edited to fix the error in the space-time continuum.)

Feast or famine?

Someone explain to me how, after doing virtually nothing "professional" for the past several months, suddenly TWO emails jump into my inbox this morning with what might be significant offers?

I couldn't beat 'em.

The domain is dead.
Long live the domain.

Nothing will show for another couple of days, of course. But alas, someone owns my name now, so I need to set up a whole new one. GAAA!

This also, unfortunately, means I need to re-do my logo and teaser for the top of all my films. But maybe that's not such a bad thing; in fact, maybe it's the kick-start I need to start animating again (not to mention learning C4D in earnest).

Do I have any legal recourse?

AAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!

At least they didn't say I was a natural nerd.

The Baltimore Sun reviewed Shallowford albeit too late to draw more crowds our way. They liked it, especially our leading lady. But I got a decent notice, too:

Seen last season as Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest, Zachary Brewster-Geisz took on a much different role as sci-fi buff Lonny Hutchins, convincingly portraying a 17-year-old boy experiencing his first love.

Read the whole thing here. It's much more of a proper review than the last one, which was more of a cast list and synopsis.

NaNoFuckedUpMo!

See my progress and read my excerpt here.