At least I’m still working at a post a month, ish. I was worried that I hadn’t used this blog at all in December.

A lot happened in December, but it was mostly work-related. Projects have picked up at March, and the project I wanted to work at March to work on is now in full swing. If you haven’t heard about it, it’s tentatively titled Yoko, Mo, and Me, and if you saw the designs you’d be as excited to work on the show as I am. It’s 26×24′, and while it’s geared at young girls it should have enough fun and action to appeal to anyone.

I finally passed a first hump with Live. I actually sat and read through most of the manual. The funny thing is, all the difficulty I was having with it was because I was looking for complexity where there was none. It astounds me how well Ableton has made Live’s workflow so quick and easy to use. You can open the program, load up an instrument or two, and have a song going in minutes. Minutes! Maybe it’s just how my head works but I don’t think GarageBand is this easy. Anyway, my next trick will be figuring out drum loops. I’ve sorted through Live’s Drum Kits and a lot of the samples that came with Live Suite, but I need to decide which ones will be in “my” kit. I’ve been reading a lot on sites like [xxxxxx], and I saw this one bit of really good advice: Choose all your samples and sounds to start with, and then see how you can use them in multiple ways. Good advice, especially when you’re trying to maintain a kind of acoustic consistency between tracks.

As far as 2010 goes, I went to a Christmas party in December where everyone wrote down their goals for 2010. I guess they were supposed to be private but I’m going to post them anyway. I have no doubt I’ll only be able to accomplish a few, what with how busy I’ve been, but having the goals is important.

• Find a better balance between work and life.
• Write at least three songs.
• Make soap in Toronto. (Need to find a good place to get the supplies at a fair price.)
• Get the book for my TV show idea off the ground.
• Find a drawing teacher or a music teacher.
• Write one new story or more chapters of my book.
• Have a masquerade ball for my 30th birthday.
• Make at least one game on my own.

Funny thing is, I wrote all that down before I started watching Bones and before I had a few conversations about technology, and suddenly I’m not so sure what my goals should be for 2010.

Bones and I had a rocky start. Part of it was Emily Deschanel; I had a hard time with the fact that Zooey Deschanel had a sister who wasn’t either Katy Perry or Emily Blunt. I also wasn’t ready to get in bed with a David Boreanaz who was both religious and not a vampire. But a few weeks ago I left it on in the background while I was working one night and really enjoyed the episode. (Coincidentally it was the one with Zooey on it.) I’ve since watched every episode from season one onwards, DVD by DVD to on-demand.

It’s funny; I’m not usually drawn to science-oriented shows. Science Fiction, sure, but pure science? Bones tends more towards real science than shows like CSI. (Warning: Spoilers follow.) Part of it is the characters’ connections to each other. Temperance and Booth evolve together almost as a single character over the five seasons. The addition of Cam in season two added a much-needed mother figure to the cast, strengthened by the addition of a ward in season four. And the burden of comic relief gets put on Brennen’s interns, meaning the main characters feel like they’ve grown, become older (although Hodgins is still attempting to blow things up).

The thing that’s struck me the most about the show, however, is the idea of forensic anthropology. Every episode that goes by, I find myself less and less shocked by the gore and more interested in the ways they keep identifying the bodies. Granted, the show is full of Hollywood flair and the plots are very neatly set up, but they’ve made a serious effort to keep the science as close as possible to real life without alienating a lay audience, and I find the science fascinating.

In fact, I found it fascinating enough to order a book on the topic and I’m considering classes in biology, osteology, or forensics if I get to the end of the book and find I still like the topic.

It’s been a while since a new topic lit a fire under my imagination like this. I love my job, and I love reading papers on code / rigging / rendering techniques, but this is different. This is far outside my field(s), and yet, my mind keeps wandering to it. So I have to add a new item to my list of goals: figure out what I like so much about this topic, and see how far my interest takes me.

I’d like to write more on it but I should have been in bed an hour ago already, and I have to hop on a plane tomorrow. Animation Mentor graduation: it’s time to take California.