This concludes the Dutch portion of tonight’s program
Yup, thats right; it’s August 18th, and that means after a nearly unbearably long flight home, this summer’s adventures will officially be over. I want to thank everyone who read my blog and supported this 93-day extraveganza into the wild Dutch-lands with my wits, a friend, and a vague goal of kicking ass at an internship. It’s been one heck of a crazy trip.
Now for some stats, because who doesn’t love a conclusion with a summing up of everything in a number heavy paragraph?!
Over this summer I’ve written 59 blog posts with 115 tags. You all have left 85 comments, and 143 spam posts have been blocked from our virgin eyes.
I’ve also uploaded 349 photos to my flickr account and 22 deviations to my DA account, not to mention modeled and textured 37 objects for Mirage 3D.
And, assuming all is well at the airport, I’m actually in the air as you are reading this as I have this blog set to self-destruct publish 15 minutes after boarding. See you on the otherside of the internet, and of the world!
And brought him strings and sealing wax and other fancy stuff
So yesterday was the last day of my internship. I finished my last model and made sure all my files are in the right easy-to-find places etc…Robin gave me an official Mirage 3D polo, and a woman came into the office to get information/pictures for an article she’s writing. I’m mostly sure it’ll be in Dutch, but I still hope to see a copy.
After work Laura and I met the boys at Fiddlers for one last night on the town. We had beers and had fun. There was a guy sitting alone at the table next to ours listening in, so I included him in a conversation we were having and then we slowly ended up joining him (since he wouldn’t join us. Ha!). Turns out his name is Xander, which was entertaining, and he’s an English teacher who agrees with me on the Oxford comma (ha Robert! Take that :-p ). He was entertaining, and gave the boys a lot of crap about being young and immature, but it was quite apparent he was glad for the entertainment and company from us.
Around 12:30ish Laura and I decided to go home so we wouldn’t miss the last tram, but we did anyway. They should really run later, especially in the summer/weekends. I’d say at least until 1:30. So we ended up having to catch a taxi home and fell asleep pretty immediately (especially since my laptop wouldn’t connect to the intertubes).
Today I got up, relaxed on the intertubes, had a dose of Jon Stewart and hopped a tram to try out a coffee house (real coffee, not THC “coffee” :-p). I ordered a small cappuccino which had fantastic foam (<3) and was served with two little bite sized cookies, which were also delicious. The girl behind the counter was super cute and nice too. Too bad we’re leaving soon; although I am looking forward to being home and having stable internet among other things (I’ve been booted twice while writing this).
Just a couple more days before leaving. Tying up ends, packing, buying last minute gifts, finishing drawings and such, this weekend. It’s pretty surreal. I didn’t realise how used to being here I was. It’s going to be weird being home again. Going to make some brownies and finish watching House with Laura now.
YEAH BOOOOI
Headed to bed because it’s just after 1am and we still have one last day of work tomorrow, but I wanted to share this with you all
Thats nearly 100 pictures documenting the ride from Work to Peters. The wood bridge over the construction we have to get off our bikes and walk. If you watch closely one frame features this crazy lady who is always following me on my bike.
I’d also like to share the debut of the Flava Flave logo. Laura and I have named our comic series Flava Flave (inside joke), and obviously it needed a cool logo to tie everything together. I’m thinking about doing a website too, so we can do these more regularly and that will need a banner/logo. Thinking ahead win! We’re both totally in love with this logo. Laura drew colored, I logo-ized.
Just a quickie
to announce my official first post in my lasting-after-this-trip-blog-for-anything-and-everything!
That Ginger Kid is waiting for your visit.
Happy Birthday to me!
Authors Note: To fully appreciate todays update, it is suggested you are a teensy bit familiar with The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Dark City. If you are not, it is highly suggested you go introduce yourself to these fine works of fiction RIGHTNOW. Bonus points if you saw Public Enemies, Ice Age 3 and Transformers 2, as well.
Yup, today I’m officially legal to drink in the US. I can also apply for a gun license and… uhh… I can’t think of anything else, but those are both pretty cool. I woke up this morning thoroughly disappointed because it was cloudy and gross outside and I was planning on wearing a pretty sun dress. I also don’t like overcast and it had been so nice and warm the last couple days I figured “of course the weather would suck today.” And then as if to spite me again, the weather got nice just after we got to the office and stayed brilliant all day.
Work was… work. I finally figured out a name for my new regular blog. I haven’t posted anything yet, but I’ll prolly start updating it before I’m done with this one; do some double-duty (lul I said “duty”) for the next week. I just find all this stuff I want to share and this is not the place for it. But now I have a cubby especially for all my quirky internet loot. After I finish my inital post and decide which widgets I want I’ll post a link here for you all to migrate to *winkwink*.
Apparently the Dutch congratulate the birthday person. Instead of “Happy Birthday”s I got “Congratulations”s and handshakes (the Dutch do enjoy their handshakes). My inital thought was “congratulations? Like you didn’t expect me to make it this far? Like I could have failed aging and been stuck at 20 for another year?” Which is an interesting thought. But then after another second (and another congratulations! *handshake*) it made more sense; just a different way of saying “Hooray an event in your honor, usually involving cake!” like graduations, baby showers and weddings. Saying congratulations there is expected, and cake is a common occurance too. We didn’t have any cake though, but I did get an overpriced cup of ben n jerry’s chocolate brownie fudge ice cream later on.
After work Laura and I hopped the 9 tram to Spui, bought tickets for the 20:15 showing of Public Enemies and mosied over to the Italian place I’ve mentioned before. You’ll never believe what we found on the way over there…. The Narnia-style Coffee shop square (AN: I do mean coffee like Caffine, not like THC). The one I mentioned that disappeared from space like it was moved ala Dark City minus the memory altering. I’m still not convinced it didn’t move, but I am convinced I can find it a third time. Just 2 minutes before finding the place Laura and I were all “lawl, what if we find that one coffee shop.” And then we did. It was very Room of Requirements. Yes, I know I’ve now referenced three movies, but thats how intense this situation was. I was totally blown away. Sadly, and very un-room of requirements like, the place was closed. So I vowed I’d go try it out on Saturday, simply because the place was so elusive before.
Dinner was tasty, but uneventful really; I did say something and I remember thinking “remember that quote, it needs to go in my blog. But I can’t remember now, so we’ll skip on to the movie. I thought it was quite good other than two major technical complaints. The first being that whoever set up the project is UBER FAIL. The right 4th of the screen or so was blurry the whole film, and you know it wasn’t intentional because the right bit of the captions were blurry too. Who makes blurry subtitles?! No one, that was how I knew it wasn’t a style choice, but a retard. The top couple inches were blurry too, but it was less of an issue then the right side. Second complaint was the sound mixing. This I don’t know if it was the movie itself or the retard in the projection room again, but the music started good, and then the first 5 or so lines of dialog were waaay too quiet, I nearly missed them. Then a scene would be loud again and then quiet. It got better as the movie progressed, but it was still horrid. I would have complained about the sound and blur, but I didn’t want to be that snobby American who has to find something to bitch about, so I dealt with it. Other than that though, the movie had a fairly unpolished feel camera wise, which was neat since it was set in the Great Depression and made it feel like you were there holding the camera yourself. A lot of free handed shots and everything was really tight and close in. I don’t know if I’ve ever counted skin pores in a movie before. The acting was great, the costumes and dialect were great, the story was entertaining (to me at least) for the full 3 hours. It had class, it had excitement, it had cocky!Johnny Depp and a classic good quality movie experience. I enjoyed it much more than Transformers and Ice Age 3 combined.
And now it’s quarter to 2am and I should get some sleep. 3 more days of work! So crazy. Tomorrow will be the last Dutch Sawman (aka hump day) I get.
Aaaand it’s done
Finished Darwin’s Chimney area. I’d tell you that I’m proud of it, but I’ve seen it so much in the last month and a half that I don’t feel or see anything now. Give it a couple weeks and then I’ll give testimony.
As the artist comments say, the scene is a monster 48355 Polys, with 27 individual objects (2 duplicated for 29 objects in the scene), attached to 43 Shaders containing 57 texture maps from 2-4k in size. Most of them are color and normal, but I have one or two alpha and I think one specular in there as well. The fireplace and the mirror took the longest, I think just over two weeks for the both. On average the other objects took 1/2-3 days. I definitely got quicker at them as time went on too. If I were to redo the fireplace and mirror I don’t imagine they would take so much time. And if you’re curious, my folder containing all the files I created in making this render (working files, pds, reference) is just over 2GB.
Laura and I took one last trip to Amsterdam on Saturday. We went to the NEMO science center, which was a Dutch version of the Exploratorium pretty much. Minus the copious amounts of impolite kids EVERYWHERE it was pretty entertaining. They also had a replica of a Dutch-India Trading company ship floating outside, which we explored and rested on. After that we went to grab some food and shopped around a bit. Bought presents for friends/family and I bought a couple birthday gifts for myself, since it is my birthday tomorrow after all *grin*.
We’ve got 4 more days of work, the weekend and monday before we’re back on a crazy-long plane ride home. It’s starting to get a little surreal to think about returning home, now that it’s looming so close. I am looking forward to being home, but I can also tell it’s going to be weird when it actually happens.
Surfin Cali-for-ni-a
It’s actually starting to feel like summer here. Up until… well yesterday I’ve been in a kind of suspended spring. Being only a short tram ride to the North Sea keeps the weather here pretty varied and MUCH cooler than home. Most days are sunny but cool in the mornings and then partially cloudy by afternoon and then a bit of rain by evening. The days that aren’t like that are the same combo in a different order. Today though, it’s gotten up into the low 80’s and there is barely a cloud in the sky. I think Mathijs, Laura and I are going to head to the beach after work. The sun doesn’t set until 10:30 or later, so not getting to the beach until 6 still means we have plenty of time to hang out.
This weekend we’re making one last trip to Amsterdam to buy gifts and probably visit the wax museum as next weekend we’ll be busy packing and doing last minute things in Den Haag (like one last trip to that italian resturant I wrote about before). It’s kinda crazy to write “last” so many times in the last couple sentences. We’ve been here for over two months now and daily life here has become so normal; it’s weird to think we’ve only got one more work week. I’ve never lived away from home for such an extended period of time. Most programs and vacations are a week or two, not 11. I have to admit, I’m really excited to be going home soon. Laura and I are both ready to return to our friends, families and beds.
Anyway, I was taking a break from work to write this and I should probably return to the grind stone.
So give me reason to prove me wrong
Oh man, you guys are fucking brill. I’m super glad I asked for input from the masses. I’m definitely taking your suggestions into very serious consideration. :-p
On slightly less sarcastic notes, one of the other wonderfully entertaining things wordpress does for me is let me know what the top searches are for people who click on a link to my blog. I have all sorts of great creativity, but my favorite is hands-down, “fucking in den haag.” It’s not just the vulgarity of that search, but the thought process that I imagine went behind it. There are two main paths depending on if I know this Google-fu™ master or not.
I like to think the first went like this:
“Crap, what was her blog called again?… well I know she’s in den haag, and I remember her cursing. I’ll just search fucking in den haag that should be close enough.”
Which is apparently brilliant enough to work. The second is perhaps more entertaining:
“Man, I could really go for some Dutch City-porn right now. *typetypetype* Oh, whats this? A redhead?! Excellent…aww what?! Clothes?! Writing?! This is not at all what I wanted.”
If Mr. or Ms. “fucking in den haag” is still reading this, I applaud you.
Back into the realm of the physical, Peter let Laura and I borrow his car to head to the office after hours so Laura could update her SVN and I could have some stable interwebs for a bit, off work hours. I drove (which only gets better as I get used to his 35 year old mercedes. The thing is SOLID and it’s great) and we took the long way. It was great just cruising along the roads and exploring a bit. We went through an upper-middle class neighborhood which was very pretty and nice, and I even managed to never get lost.
While we were gone Peter made some progress on laying down wood boards for the flooring in the living room. It’s nearly finished. Well, it has to be sanded/sealed/waxed still, but it’s better than the construction bareboards. It’s also nice for the downstairs neighbor surely, as it helps dampen the sound of our footsteps.
Not much else to report. Work is still work. Internet is still shakey at best. Robin is still on vacation this week. Laura and I still miss home.
Oh, Laura and I did concieve of our best collaboration image yet. Everyone at the office is HIGHLY entertained. Peter even put it as the wallpaper on his phone.
He’s a wet dream for the webzine
Laura and I decided to take the weekend off, so not a lot to share. She’s been doing some modeling stuff for the Chico State Game Studios Game, DAVIS and I have been doing some storyboards for my production class next semester (which is going to rock, btway). I’ve also been making the trip to/from the office to get some decent interneting in. The great internet we found at Peter’s place had a password placed on it; just to spite us I presume. And there is a ghost of some other unlocked internet that comes and goes but it is a super frustrating tease.
Of course today I get to the office and pull out my laptop and realise I forgot my power supply. *facepalm* So I shot Laura an email that was all “plox halp!” Hopefully she’ll get my S.O.S and feel pity. Otherwise my internets are numbered.
Along the same vein of internets, I was thinking of starting a real blog. Like one that I would continue to update after I leave Holland. It would just be all the cool pieces of internet I seem to trip over on a (nearly) daily basis. Videos, articles, other blogs, pictures, stories… your basic blog stuff. Right now I just spam whoever is “lucky” enough to be on gtalk. I thought maybe I’d give (mostly Jeromy) a break and share all this cool stuff en masse. After all, being in Holland is turning me into an internet hipster, and I thought to myself “why not embrace this new development?”
What do you guys think? Good idea? Bad idea? Would you be interested in following my writing over to a new url? Cuz blogging without audience is like cooking without appetite; could still be fun, but it’s really just pointless. It would be another wordpress blog for sure, I really really like this site.
Now, if I do this, the biggest hurdle will be naming it. Ideas? I’ve been asking a couple people, and thinking myself and researching but nothing has really jumped out at me yet. Scott (friend, not father) and I were playing with a random name generator, which was entertaining, but not quite hitting the spot. Rise of the Internet Warriors was fun, but sounds like an 80’s sprite-based video game.
I think that is sufficent amounts of off-topic chatter for this post. Back in “Dutch-land” as we sometimes fondly call it (yes even Mathijs has used that nickname), I’m nearing the end of Darwin’s chimney, which is good since we’re also nearing the end of the internship. I have a handful of models to do and a handful +1 textures to do. I believe my scene is up to 40,000 carefully handplaced polys 😉
I’ve learned a TON from being here, about modeling/texturing and about Holland. Lesse a basic overview of the things (modeling-wise) I’ve learned/improved.
Before this summer I had:
- Unwrapped only one model, with a tutorial in class *cough*raptor*cough*
- Which in turn means I had textured non-procedurally only one model.
- Other than Lindsey’s wood paneling tutorial, I had never created a tilable texture.
- Never really attempted photorealistic models.
- Never used/created normal maps outside of zbrush or specular maps at all.
Now I’m comfortable with:
- UVing by hand in Silo, and the cylindrical mapper in Maya.
- Using photos to create believeable textures.
- Creating and using normal maps to enhance everything.
- Many shotcuts and tricks in Maya.
- How to manipulate the simpler maya shaders.
- Creating specular and alpha maps by hand.
- Much better idea of what to model and what to map.
- Modeling/texturing at production quality in a professional setting, which is super important because now I have confidence that I can find a job when I graduate in the field. I don’t feel under-prepared as severely as before this internship.
As I’ve said before, when things sucked; given another chance, I’d still come do this internship. It’s been perhaps not as plesant as expected, but still just as educational. That list doesn’t even include the social/cultural stuff either; the living-in-a-big-city-in-a-foreign-country-which-speaks-a-different-language stuff.
And now I need to move because the janitor at the office is here mopping the floor.
Toodles!
P.S Nothing feels more old school than rolling your pant legs up and doing laundry by hand in a half filled tub. Enjoy your washing machines people!
Random is as random does
No big story for this entry, just a couple random tidbits.
Fat ducks, fuzzy dogs, apple fritters and cement.
Thanks for tuning in!
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*turns around* Oh, don’t believe me?! That’s not very nice.
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Ok, fine. I do have a bit more substance to share with you all 😉
So, it’s completely normal to have sprinkle toast here for breakfast. Laura and I had seen the boxes before in the store, but didn’t think about it too hard until we discovered Peter often has sprinkles on some buttered bread in the morning. We tried that today, and it was exactly how I expected. Peter had chocolate and anise sprinkles. I tried the chocolate ones and laura had both.
Also, keeping my consipiracy theory up about Holland not wanting us to have internet access, the market internet we had been using with glee at Peter’s suddenly developed WEP protection. It happened within a 20 minute time span last night. We watched a youtube video on how there can only be 10 dimensions, Laura went to take a shower while I talked with Peter and Mathijs, and then when Laura got out of the shower, she tried to get online and it was locked.
Speaking of 10 dimensions, Mathijs, Peter and I had a great conversation about that theory, and about infinity (Robert: you don’t understand infinity! has to be the motto for For Science I think), and about how we can’t really understand absolute nothing, and what gravity is. It was a lot of fun, and I expected to dream crazy science stuff, but I discovered the internet was locking me out right before bed and ended up dreaming about internet instead. </nerd>
Oh btw, we decided that the most logical answer to gravity is 1 dimensional aliens. They are holding everything down all the time; and we can’t see them because they don’t have any length or width. They are just points in space. Things that seem heavier just have more aliens on them than others. I think when I get home I’ll submit our hypothesis to a journal for publication. Hopefully someone can fund research from there.
Weekend is coming up quickly, but I don’t think Laura and I have any real plans. Going to do some laundry the old fashioned way, and lounge about. I do have a bunch of storyboards for production to draw though, so I’ll prolly do my best to get as much of that done as possible too.
Oh! How could I forget; when I got to work today I naturally checked my email, and had a message from FinAid saying my offer has changed and please go check. I figured maybe they were offering me more loans since they raised tuition, and instead I discovered I’ve been granted a $2500 scholarship! I have no idea where it came from, but I’m super thrilled. I just wish I knew so I could send a thank you letter (and brownies or something).
I had an interview with Rotary before the last semester ended, but it was preliminary and they told me they’d call to set up an interview for a specific scholarship and then never contacted me again. Other than that, I haven’t heard anything from anyone. Bryson pointed out that Clarke may have put my name somewhere, but it’s not a university scholarship; my FinAid says “External Scholarship Agency 1” O.o
That pretty much covers things for now, Cheers!
Een Roodharige in Den Haag 
