I have officially and permanently switched to wordpress. rsaclolo.wordpress.com/ ---is now my main squeeze. i'll keep this blog up to make sure people direct themselves to my new blog when needed. I'd also like to keep this up so I'd be able to comment on other bloggers which i somewhat frequently do. Cheers blogger! it was a decent year and a half or two.

http://rsaclolo.wordpress.com

posted by karbonatedkiss @ 9:41 PM 0 comments

I'm considering switching to Wordpress for my blog. I enjoy the usability of it, its quite nice. Their simple templates are fine for now. So, for those of you that follow my blog... go here for now. I'll give you the final word on both blogs to let you know whether it'll be a permanent or temporary switch.

http://blog.rsaclolo.com/

posted by karbonatedkiss @ 10:25 PM 0 comments

Me_Jenna_rocky?

another older photo i got from home. Also in gradeschool, we used to have school picnics. I have one good memory from one of those picnics where a bunch of us went with our principle at the time, St. Jane, on one of the hiking trails. It was hot out and it walking was getting a little tiresome. We found a little house/barn thing with a water pump and ran up to it after we asked for permission. I guess we were kinda loud from drinking and spashing water around because someone came out and St. Jane quickly apologized before telling us to go back to the on the trail. That's all I remember though. The girl besides me in the photo was one of my friends before, Jenna, who loves horses and was very cool. The guy in the right side, i found out from Sam's screening at columbia, is Rocky is now a badass working at Midway according to sam. He was in the grade above mine, if I remember correctly.

posted by karbonatedkiss @ 10:06 PM 0 comments

andrea_me2

i found this when i went back home. In grade school we'd take skiing trips. surprisingly, even though i sucked, I actually liked it. Im not usually one for sports. Goddamn i hated those ski suits. I remember my mom making me wear them. I felt like the Michelin Man. - Andrea, heh heh, i thought this would be funny to show. o how we've changed.

posted by karbonatedkiss @ 9:55 PM 1 comments

The Works of Director Michel Gondry was such a good DVD to watch. I spent part of my day yesterday gushing over his work. It was a real pleasure to see. I felt so relieved learning about his inspirations and how some of his ideas develop. Many of his videos are inspired by dreams, childhood memories, music, etc. I feel this sense of relief because over this past semester I was constantly worried about this obsession I have to explore my dreams, childhood memories, and connecting them with the present. I was worried that the subject matters were getting too redundant and maybe not interesting at all. Maybe I shouldn't worry so much. I don't know really. But at least now I feel okay with the thought of going back to them.

Sometimes I wonder if I'll run out of ideas, and really this past semester I think I did. I felt mentally and emotionally burnt out. I knew that that state wouldn't last forever so that's why I wanted to go travel so bad to a place I'm not familiar with and where no one knows me. That's why I wanted to go to Japan this summer, but that quickly fell through. I would've just wandered around sightseeing and take pictures, write, and people watch all day and find random night life spots in the evening. It would've been nice I think. My next choice was New York to attend the Aiga Move3 Convention. I've never been to New York, every summer I suggest it though. I thought this would've been my chance, but in the end when I went home last week in hopes of asking my mom to let me go I couldn't bring myself to ask. 1) I'd be going alone 2) My mom was complaining about money issues. It would be cheaper to just go to New York and not attend that convention though. So I'm still thinking about that. The third and most likely choice to happen is Vegas to visit my brother and sister. I'm sorry, but I dislike Vegas a lot. It's annoying, I would never live there. To me Chicago is 10 times better than Vegas for various reasons. Don't worry, I wont list them. This is the place I'll be most likely to go this summer but I really, really don't want to. I want to visit my family but that's about it. Everything else about Vegas doesn't seem to interest me at the moment.

In the Gondry DVD he would talk about his dreams and the reasons for how those dreams came about. There's a few recurring dreams I've had during my childhood. One of them was in a snowy landscape, or snow filled forest, or something like that. Everything would be white. I remember seeing a big dark brown bear walking through the snow in the wind. There was one time when the dream changed and it was a light brown baby bear. I remember feeling like I needed water and that I was deserted there in the snowy landscape with the bear. Most of the time I'd wake up with a sweat. That's all I remember really from that one. I think I started having that dream after reading The Call of the Wild by Jack London. That's where the snowy landscape came. It's been awhile since I'd read that book. I have other dreams relating to that book for some reason, too. The bear, I can't really explain that except that when I was a kid, after seeing that dream many times, I started liking teddy bears. Maybe its from learning about bears in science class, or seeing a bear in the zoo at one time, or something I saw on TV. Could be from any of those.

posted by karbonatedkiss @ 8:18 AM 0 comments

The semester is finally over and after two weeks of many all nighters, missed meals, and misdemeanors I have completed it. I'm so glad.

--in my english (intro to moving image arts) there was one day where we just sat and watched other classmates play video games. It was somewhat interesting and amusing. Its like those friends I have where if I visit them at their house, it's basically just me sitting there while they play videogames, which depending on the games, can be engaging or a complete waste of time.
--The final for that class included making a final video and than an in class essay. I ended up not making a video for it and just showed the "Panda Panda Panda" video I made for Video 1, but didn't say anything about that. I changed one of the spit screens in one scene. Luckily, I got good responses. The essay final was pretty coo. We watched two Michael Gondry videos - Foo Fighters' "Everlong" and The Chemical Brothers' "Let Forever Be". Two great videos, I remember loving both of them, especially the chemical brothers' video, when they came out.

-For my photo final, I left it as the least important thing for me to do, but I still did it. I just shot items that I had that belonged or was given to me from my dad and paired it up with images of seemingly found places or just places that look unused or abandoned. A memory piece really. If i had bigger paper I would've printed two images together...but no I didnt have the energy to go out and buy more paper than what I already had. They weren't very good at all, but they got done, at least.

-my video final assignment was to basically make bad deciosions, "So Bad, It's Bad." I wont upload it or anythin because its really not even worth seeing. I shot a good 15 minutes at one of the get-togethers at sam's place and used that with basically almost every type of effect in Final Cut Pro. In the end, it said it was going to take 4 hours to render out am mpeg-2. So I opted to render it as a Quicktime movie, which took maybe 20 minutes. I didn't win the contest for worst video but I did get 10 out of 16 votes for it.







-for graphic design I worked my ass off. I was glad that I was able to kind of combine assignments during the semester. I used some photography I shot for classes in the book and than took excerpts or whole poems. The aim was to revisit and revisualize them typographically paying attention to visual sound, effects to describe words, and overall to evoke the experience of the poem instead of being able to read it. I took me basically three days to print and on the day that it was due I ended up having to reprint it because I had some problems. For that day I was there from 5pm to 7am either waiting, pouting, and printing. It felt like torture. It was good that other people were there printing, too, so I wasn't alone in my gripes. There was one lucky thing though, one of my jobs was processing for printing and I had to cancel it because someone else needed to print something smaller. This girl in my class used vellum and the printer accidentally printed one my pages on it. So she gave me that sheet. I just printed my name on it and used it as a flypage in my book. Oh, another good thing is I didnt have to buy any paper for the book. I used the superfine stock in the Graphic Design Lab and a plain black cover. Overall, I'm just glad I got it done. There's so many little things that keep me from being fully satisfied for it, but that's just normal. It was the first project we did where we came up with everything and executed them on our own. No abstract assignments and things that we would question whether to put in our portfolios or not. People in my class seemed to like the book a good amount. It was good experience to do this project. I wish I didnt have so many other so i could just concentrate on this one.

=-The last week of the semester is always a weird one. Weird social encounters and odd types of good byes. I noticed after I showed my music video in my english class, only than, did people start talking to me and asking me questions. I'm not one to talk much in a lecture courses and I'm very critical of my own work so I didn't expect the response I got. Even during the final when I was writing my essay, someone put a note on my desk saying something like, I liked your video! :) maybe we should hang out? ... (thierphone#). I felt like I was in highschool. After class during the week, I was smoking a cigarette and a man named Tyrone came up and asked me to sign and pleged for a cancer walk. We had a nice chitchat despite my smoking a cancer stick and I promised to try to attend. Here's the link for it.
-After my graphic design class, the good byes sounded like, see you later - see you next semester - lets hang out over the summer types of things. There's this one kid who I chat with sometimes, he's a good designer and nice guy in a band. I find him kinda funny though because he frequently quoted from wikipedia for his ideas on philosophy of identity and personal identity for his project. I'm not saying that there's anything really wrong with wikipedia, because they do go into nice briefs on those, but it's just kinda funny. Will all the up and coming modern intellectuals quote wiki in the coming years? I wonder how many kids in grade school and highschool have quoted from them in their research papers. Wikipedia's great though, I know that I personally have been informed by manythings because of it. such as leet. hehe I saw this awhile ago but it keeps popping up everywhere.



The best part of my end of the semester was going to Smartbar and seeing Mylo and Elliot Eastwick spin. I'm glad sam invited me to go because I had no idea about the show from being too busy. I really pestered him for months and months just to listen to Mylo when I found out about him. I remember I'd be freaking about about Mylo, Brazillian Girls, and whatnots, and sam would be like, oh I havent gotten around to it. In the end, he did of course. ;) --The show was sooo fun. It reminded us of the time we saw Aphrodite at the Metro. Just that all night of dancing and just enjoying music type funness, which is what I prefer when going out to a club/rave event. It was my first time at Smartbar. It's actually nice and cozy. People were dancing and most of them were nicee. We got there during Elliot Eastwick's set. Many of the tracks were so smooth, lush, and yummy. AH it felt good. Later on Mylo walked in the room in a stripped black and white jacket and a white golf cap and made his way to the stage. Mylo bumped into me.!. heh. :D I loved it when he would play tracks from his album, and you could tell that it got the crowd going too. He would then bring it down alittle with other tracks, some where great some were just okay, i think. Both djs, had great sets. At the end of Mylo's set, it was curious. He played Rhythm Is A Dancer by the Real McCoy, than an Irish funeral song and split. -so good- That night in the bathroom a girl was really excited about Mylo's set starting and recommened M83 to me while we were waiting in line for a stall and chatting about music. so far sounds fantastic :)

posted by karbonatedkiss @ 6:50 PM 0 comments

banner

I changed teh banner.  yay.

posted by karbonatedkiss @ 4:19 AM 0 comments

My latest video project. - Untitled #2
the assignment was to make a video with some type of narration, text, or story and make it to a specific audience. It can be a true or false story.

After the critque today I cleaned it up alittle so that some of the transitions arent so mucky. I'm just glad peopple got the jist of the video. When I was making it I felt that I might have been packing too much in. I got a good response though so thats good. Another girl today though got burned pretty bad. Seemed like my teacher was saying the right things to her as far as her project went. oh well.

two more weeks of classes. damn i need to haul ass.

.........
lastest movie rundown

-amores perros ( life's a bitch) - very gewd very gewd
-tokyo story - i saw it before at the gene siskel theatre for free and i still like it as much as i did the first time
-ice age: the meltdown - cute. I liked the first one better, of course. This one was cute though. I like how they always slow down the pace alittle to give the viewer a little break with the squirrel segments. I think those type of slow downs helps the viewer take everything else in.
.........
last week for my english class we went to the MCA to check out their video art selections. I think it was the worst visit to an art gallery that I've been to so far. They had the Andy Warhol exhibit and I wasn't impressed with how they presented it. As far as video art goes, with this visit at least, it was pathetic. I'd been there before when they had impressive video art showing but this time it sucked. hopefully they'll do better later.
...........

posted by karbonatedkiss @ 1:15 AM 0 comments

asdf jkl;

i got a new external keyboard for my laptop yesterday.  For my english class we went to the mca, so afterwards I went to CompUSA and got a kensington keyboard.  It was the cheapest mac compatible keyboard there.  I like it though.  It's alot different from what I've become used to with my powerbook.  I found that with my powerbook I would type alot faster than with my dell's keyboard.  With this new keyboard I find that I am typing slower and it also feels like more effort to press the keys farther down. So it's actually a more conventional typing experience.  I don't mind going back to the conventional though.  but I think overall, it is more enjoyable to type papers with my laptop.  It is nice having an external keyboard though so I dont have to reach as far to type on my laptop.  All I need to get now is a laptop stand.  This is all to help improve my workstation and posture really.  It'll be worth it I'm sure. 

posted by karbonatedkiss @ 7:13 AM 0 comments