I think it’s fair to say December has been rough this year. Well, this Year has been rough this year, but purely from the standpoint of time management, December has been ridiculous. Case in point: tomorrow will be my first day off in 16 days. Amendment: tomorrow will be the first day where I don’t have to go to one of my two meatspace jobs, and instead will be able to stay home and work on one of my three freelance gigs. All the work I didn’t have all year seems to have come splurting out all over December. But hey, at least I’m working.

What this means is that it’s time for a traditional “sorry I haven’t posted in a while” blog entry, which I have decided to do in advance of the real dry spell. The Jigsaw season finale will not air for a bit, because I used that time to go Xmas shopping for my family and I have too many paid deadlines coming up that demand my attention.

I’m pleased that I’ve finally figured out what I want to do with the Spam column, i.e. do a weekly illustration based on the contents of a junk email, but again, there just isn’t enough time in the day to guarantee anything. Which is a shame, as I was just starting to build momentum. Sigh.

Meanwhile, it’s the final day of 2008. Tomorrow, I request that everyone take the time to kick 2008’s corpse in the face, just to make sure it’s really dead. Made it through the year, folks. Give yourselves a big toast. But check the jam for botulism first.

Working two jobs today. Best get moving.

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Watch festively in Quicktime.

Silent Night cracks me up every time.

(seasons greetings in the comments)

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Andrew over at the Puppetvision Blog wrote a really lovely piece on the show the other day. Puppetvision is a great resource for news and clips of and about puppetry; absolutely all of the good puppetry stuff I saw online in the last year or so I read about on his blog.

So if you like puppetry (I’m assuming you do), it’s worth throwing a link to Puppetvision in your RSS reader of choice.

www.puppetvision.info

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Last night, I was uploading the new video to YouTube. This turned out to be the hardest part of my day (harder, in fact, than setting up a wifi router, or dealing with confused and bickering artists in a production meeting, &c).

First, it was too long. So the first upload was a big waste of time. Then I split it in half and uploaded both halves. But the second half, the sound was so far out of sync it was unwatchable. So I recut the file. Sound was still out of sync. I repeated this process four times, it took a few hours of my life, and I finally gave up and went to bed.

Where I proceeded to dream, vaguely, about YouTube for a couple hours before needing to get up to use the WC.

When I returned to bed, I discovered the dulcet tones of Rick Astley were lodged in my head.

Yes, somehow, in the night, I managed to Rickroll myself.

This is more embarrassing than the Xacto knife in the leg.

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Watch in Quicktime hereabouts.

One thing that is nice about this new era of Hope is that I suddenly feel less pressured to preemptively defend sincerity.

Yes, this video is 15 minutes long, and is a fairly straight-forward behind-the-scenes look at the making of the Regibor puppet. Not a lot of irony here; I thought maybe somebody might be interested in how I work. Especially the younger viewers.

Also, and there’s no reason why you’d know this, but I’m working on a show at a local theater (Live Arts, for the Cville-knowing), and I’m designing a puppet and some live special effects. It’s a youth show, and all of the production staff have youth apprentices, and my apprentice is this super-awesome middle-school kid named Danny. Seriously, if I could spend about a week teaching this kid a few things, I could retire and let him work the play. He’s really awesome, and has a great love of puppets, and I feel like I’m not giving him enough to chew on.

So yes, this video is partly a placeholder so I don’t have to end the series on the Xmas special, and so I can have a bit of time to film the last two episodes. But mostly, it’s a special episode for Dangerous Dan. And even just a few months ago, I would have felt the need to apologize for that, but now, I’m fine with it. Because dammit, it’s my show, and if I want to direct it towards a single viewer, I don’t see anything wrong with that. Sincerity is GOOD.

And no, I have NO IDEA what happened halfway through to make the screen suddenly go completely bonkers with digital artifacts. For a behind the scenes show, I can’t be bothered to care. I blame iMovie.

Actually, that’s a whole other rant, not one even worth having in this space. Selah.

Comments? You can leave those if you like.

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