I've been writing these yearly posts for a while now, and I'd like to believe I'm getting closer to achieving my goals. Since this sort of assessment can help shape my reality as well as describe it, I'll keep the spin positive. ;)
This year's overview is that I've made decent progress, but I'm perhaps farther from my goals than ever -- due to moving the goal posts. So let's dive into the status on my usual long-term goals, and wrap up with my new ones!
Relationships
This was my biggest goal category from last year, -- a very important part of life to focus on, and one where I feel like I've done well over the past year.
I am very lucky to have an apartment that is so perfectly suited to guests. We have a nice guest room, plus we have extremely convenient access to downtown Zürich as well as to beautiful forests for hiking. We've had some wonderful visits from family, and hope to welcome many more friends and family in 2015 and beyond. With those who haven't had the opportunity to visit, I've had some great skype visits. And I've had lots of awesome parties and outings with local friends!!
I've also made some great new friendships in addition to building up the old/gold ones. I even feel like my relationship with my husband has been warmer and more fun. (Not that it was ever bad, but when you see someone every single day it's easy to become apathetic.)
Kids
This has been the biggest, most stressful goal category of 2014. The kids are doing OK in school, but not nearly as well as they should be. We've made some progress getting them to do as much of their homework as possible on time, but they're nowhere near being self-motivating about it -- and they waste their energy on fighting us to get to do the bare minimum and call it "good enough." I really want them to learn that it is easier for everyone in the long run if they'd just expend that same effort getting it done.
The kids have done some programming and other tech projects (some great ones were thanks to my dad during his recent visit), plus we had a bit of Math/Science fun at Camp Quest, but I would like to have done more. I'm hoping to re-launch my Math Club at the beginning of the 2015 school year, but I'd like to feel like we've gotten them out of the woods with respect to grades before focusing on that.
The kids have come up with a few independent projects on their own (such as Nico's new YouTube channel), yet I somehow feel like they're not very ambitious. OTOH (spinning this positive), maybe it's just that they're not insecure. They enjoy playing together for hours on end, inventing elaborate stories and dramas together (which is part of why it's so annoying that getting them to write a 200-word essay for school is like pulling teeth, grr). My two kids get along great and hardly ever fight with each other.
Work + Languages
My German is increasingly fluent, and I've been speaking more German at work, even for technical discussions, instead of always pulling the discussion back to English. We got a new colleague from Germany, so now my two closest colleagues are German. This is cool because when they discuss our projects among themselves, there's no temptation for them to slip into the Swiss German dialect (which I wouldn't understand), and I can join in the discussion in German.
As far as the work itself is concerned, I've done lots of interesting projects this year, including some where I've taken the initiative to suggest a project that needed to get done and that I could do. My biggest problem is probably the fact that I have so many non-work-related projects that I'm excited about, so it's sometimes a challenge to stay enthusiastic and motivated. Perhaps I should put that on my goal list for 2015. ;)
Between friends and my husband's colleagues and trips (not to mention at home), I have had quite a lot of opportunity to keep up my French, despite how little French is spoken in Zürich. I'm happy that I've had the opportunity to take a French-language yoga course for the past four years and counting -- I think it had been great for my physical and mental health (in addition to multi-tasking as French conversation practice with the other students before and after class). My German class is almost like multi-tasking as well since I like my German teacher -- my weekly skype lesson with her doubles as chatting about my life with a friend.
New Stuff!
My biggest new goal that I came up with in 2014 is that I would like to produce a comic book / graphic novel. I've always wanted to do it -- comic books (especially ones that are (semi)autobiographical and/or take place in unfamiliar cultures) are my favorite genre of books to read for pleasure.
Over the Summer I came up with a story idea but despaired of being able to produce it (because I don't draw that well, as you can see from my online novel). But then I thought "you know, it's not rocket science." I have all of these ideas and pictures in my mind of imaginary people and places I would love to draw -- and the distance in technical skill between where I am/was at and where I need to be to draw what I want to draw isn't insurmountable.
So, I've been spending my tram commute copying photos from the free newspapers in order to improve my skills at drawing people in natural postures and positions. And I've improved a lot in just this short amount of time.
I got a (computer) drawing tablet for my birthday, and I've been drawing all of my characters' faces from various angles in svg (scalable vector graphics). I am almost done with my initial drafts of my characters faces, then I will move on to making a series of hands and feet, and then I will try my hand at a group portrait. Then comes the architecture (which I've also been practicing and coming up with ideas for).
Just yesterday we took a family trip to Neuchâtel (to see the new Asterix film in French), and of course we took time to visit the bookshop. I didn't find any comic books I really wanted this time, but... I found I was a little disconcerted by how good the artwork was in all of these random comics I've never heard of. I don't mean the photo-realism, but rather things like the techniques for making simple backgrounds interesting, and the use of stylized eyes on otherwise realistic people, etc.
But, now to spin this positive. I have been collecting and poring over comic books for years, of various styles, and I've always appreciated and analyzed the ideas for how the drawings are composed. And after making a real effort to try my hand at doing it, I'm noticing even more details and techniques than before -- which is a key part of improving my own hand. None of these other artists created their work utterly ex nihilo out of their own heads. Like me, they loved and appreciated the works of others, and felt inspired and came up with their own ideas as well.
My other new goal is more a fantasy than a goal, but I'll throw it out there since it's something I've fantasized about doing this past year. I'd like to incorporate my three websites as a non-profit organization, and (through ads or something) pay some people to work part time as editors and publicists to help authors of LDS-interest works -- plus pay people to write good articles for MSP (to keep good, regular content there, to increase readership, to help monetize the site to pay for the editor/publicists). Maybe even turn MAA Books into an indie publisher.
The reason this is a fantasy is because in order to make it work, I'd basically have to work full time on it, and I'd have to pour a bunch of my own cash into the project, which would require me to increase my hours at my day job to full-time. Perhaps you can see the problem with this. I figured I'd mention it, though, just in case a giant cache of money magically descends upon me -- or if someone else out there has a similar dream and wants to discuss joining forces.
So that's about it for this past year. Please wish me luck for 2015. Good luck on your own dreams and goals!! :D
The Adventures of a Friendly French-American ExMormon Atheist Mom Living in Switzerland!!!
Sunday, December 28, 2014
Sunday, November 30, 2014
What I love (and don't love) about the Lego Movie!
If you've followed the Legos tag on my blog, you can probably guess that I approached this film biased towards wanting to like it. So you can take that as your grain of salt when I tell you that I found this film loads of fun -- and I felt that its clever and imaginative aspects were original enough outweigh the flaws.
The big item The Lego Movie got right was exactly the point the Lego Universe role-playing video game got wrong, as I explained a couple of years ago on one of my other blogs. "Lego Universe" (the game) was basically a generic adventure video game in which the characters and backgrounds happened to be made out of Legos -- but it totally ignored what makes Legos so addicting. You want to buy a given set because of the clever ideas they showcase in the instructions, and then when you get bored of that set, you can take it apart, put together the pieces (and ideas) in your own new ways.
The Lego Movie was built around the idea of how Legos really work. The tension between following the instructions and doing your own thing was the central conflict of the film (and neither was presented as the one right answer). I know that doesn't seem like much of a moral dilemma to base a film on, but it's a real question, and one that's unique to the world of Lego. So they took advantage of their assets to make something original.
Another original point I loved was the treatment of the prophecy trope. I just don't get what is supposed to be so compelling about the story of the young protagonist who is destined by prophecy to solve the universe's problems. I discussed this recently in Harry Potter and the three tropes, and then when my kids recently decided to re-watch the Star Wars films, I noticed they used the same damn three tropes. (Well, with one difference -- in Star Wars, but mom didn't sacrifice herself for her kids so much as randomly die when the plot required it.)
The Lego Movie gave us a far more interesting and entertaining look at how prophecies work. The film explored how belief a the prophecy affects people's behavior, and showed people continuing to hold their beliefs even in the face of contrary evidence (like the fact that Emmet was "the special" but wasn't a master builder).
One trope The Lego Movie unfortunately used in the traditional phoning-it-in way was to have the entire conflict center around the protagonists having to fight the villain who is evil just for the sake of being evil. As I've said before, I really hate this trope, and it drives me nuts that it is so ubiquitous. Can't we as a culture come up with anything more interesting than that to offer our kids? But I forgive The Lego Movie for this, and even for using the painfully unoriginal formula in which the villain ties the hero to a time bomb and leaves him there (to escape). I forgive The Lego Movie because Lord Business and Bad Cop were pretty entertaining as villains go -- and because insisting that films not use the "evil villain" trope would be to hold them up to a impossibly high standard, more challenging even than the Bechdel Test.
Speaking of the Bechdel Test, yes, The Lego Movie passes it. Not with flying colors, but, happily, one of the fun jokes of the piece (where Unikitty is listing off the things Cloud Cuckoo Land doesn't have) was an exchange between two named female characters. Overall, the treatment of gender wasn't too bad, but could have been a lot better. I essentially agree with this article by Tasha Robinson about how Wyldstyle's awesomeness served mostly just to demonstrate Emmett's awesomeness.
Although I think Robinson's analysis is right on the money, I want to temper it with a couple of remarks. First, it's not really true (as Robinson claimed) that "Her only post-introduction story purpose is to be rescued, repeatedly". Wyldstyle has action sequences throughout and saves the day multiple times. The climactic win in the end was due to Wyldstyle's broadcast encouraging the ordinary citizens to use their own creativity to build whatever they want. Of course her brilliant idea centered around her great epiphany that Emmet was actually awesome -- thus proving Robinson was right with the second half of her claim about Wyldstyle's purpose: "to eventually confer the cool-girl approval that seals Emmet’s transformation from loser to winner."
I mention my one technical quibble with Robinson above because I want to contrast it with what she said about How to Train Your Dragon II. I read her article before watching How to Train Your Dragon II, and thought about her claim about Hiccups mom, that "once the introductions are finally done, and the battle starts, she immediately becomes useless, both to the rest of the cast and to the rapidly moving narrative. She faces the villain (the villain she’s apparently been successfully resisting alone for years!) and she’s instantly, summarily defeated." And I went into the cinema thinking, "Oh, come on -- it can't be that bad." But it was!!
The mom's uselessness in the end of How to Train Your Dragon II struck me as really weird and incongruous because the action scene was just so damn long. Like a lot of films, the whole last section of the movie is a sequence of action segments as the heroes eventually defeat the villains. In all this time, they couldn't come up with one thing for this amazing mom character to do that is critical to saving the day? And it's the contrast with the Lego Movie in particular that makes the problem in How to Train Your Dragon II especially striking: in the action sequence at the end of the Lego Movie, every single one of the main hero characters (Emmet, Wyldstlye, Vitruvius, Unikitty, Metalbeard, Benny, Batman) gets an individual moment of doing something critical.
Of course, listing off the main characters like that gives another hint about the Lego Movie's gender problem: of these seven heroes, only two of them are female. OTOH, it could be worse -- it could be just one. Unikitty, by the way, is very cool and entertaining. She's not defined in relation to some male character. She's a princess, but her princessness is about running a fun fantasy land, not finding a prince. Plus, she has her own interesting personal conflict trying to remain cheerful at all times -- and learning how that doesn't exactly work (reminiscent of the "Turn it off" number from The Book of Mormon).
In The Lego Movie's favor, they cast a black character in a role that would stereotypically be played by a white character (instead of putting a black character in a stereotypical black role) -- and they played it up in a funny joke where Vitruvius confuses Gandalf with Dumbledore. I wish they could have done a little better at mixing it up for the ladies.
Personally, I'm the parent who is as interested as the kids in playing with our Lego collection. And I thought it was fun that the Lego Movie included such a parent character. The sad part is that if they'd cast that part as someone who looks like me -- i.e. a woman -- it would have been criticized as "tokenism" or as unrealistic or something. We're not at the point where I can simply watch an ordinary movie and expect to see a character I can relate to, in my own gender, and have it be perfectly ordinary and not even noteworthy. We've still got a long way to go, baby...
This point aside, the film has a lot of really clever, funny stuff in it. Looking at all of the amazing details of the Lego worlds in the movie makes me want to get to my Lego table see what I can build! (With the kids, of course.) We can make our own little world where everything is awesome!
The big item The Lego Movie got right was exactly the point the Lego Universe role-playing video game got wrong, as I explained a couple of years ago on one of my other blogs. "Lego Universe" (the game) was basically a generic adventure video game in which the characters and backgrounds happened to be made out of Legos -- but it totally ignored what makes Legos so addicting. You want to buy a given set because of the clever ideas they showcase in the instructions, and then when you get bored of that set, you can take it apart, put together the pieces (and ideas) in your own new ways.
The Lego Movie was built around the idea of how Legos really work. The tension between following the instructions and doing your own thing was the central conflict of the film (and neither was presented as the one right answer). I know that doesn't seem like much of a moral dilemma to base a film on, but it's a real question, and one that's unique to the world of Lego. So they took advantage of their assets to make something original.
Another original point I loved was the treatment of the prophecy trope. I just don't get what is supposed to be so compelling about the story of the young protagonist who is destined by prophecy to solve the universe's problems. I discussed this recently in Harry Potter and the three tropes, and then when my kids recently decided to re-watch the Star Wars films, I noticed they used the same damn three tropes. (Well, with one difference -- in Star Wars, but mom didn't sacrifice herself for her kids so much as randomly die when the plot required it.)
The Lego Movie gave us a far more interesting and entertaining look at how prophecies work. The film explored how belief a the prophecy affects people's behavior, and showed people continuing to hold their beliefs even in the face of contrary evidence (like the fact that Emmet was "the special" but wasn't a master builder).
One trope The Lego Movie unfortunately used in the traditional phoning-it-in way was to have the entire conflict center around the protagonists having to fight the villain who is evil just for the sake of being evil. As I've said before, I really hate this trope, and it drives me nuts that it is so ubiquitous. Can't we as a culture come up with anything more interesting than that to offer our kids? But I forgive The Lego Movie for this, and even for using the painfully unoriginal formula in which the villain ties the hero to a time bomb and leaves him there (to escape). I forgive The Lego Movie because Lord Business and Bad Cop were pretty entertaining as villains go -- and because insisting that films not use the "evil villain" trope would be to hold them up to a impossibly high standard, more challenging even than the Bechdel Test.
Speaking of the Bechdel Test, yes, The Lego Movie passes it. Not with flying colors, but, happily, one of the fun jokes of the piece (where Unikitty is listing off the things Cloud Cuckoo Land doesn't have) was an exchange between two named female characters. Overall, the treatment of gender wasn't too bad, but could have been a lot better. I essentially agree with this article by Tasha Robinson about how Wyldstyle's awesomeness served mostly just to demonstrate Emmett's awesomeness.
Although I think Robinson's analysis is right on the money, I want to temper it with a couple of remarks. First, it's not really true (as Robinson claimed) that "Her only post-introduction story purpose is to be rescued, repeatedly". Wyldstyle has action sequences throughout and saves the day multiple times. The climactic win in the end was due to Wyldstyle's broadcast encouraging the ordinary citizens to use their own creativity to build whatever they want. Of course her brilliant idea centered around her great epiphany that Emmet was actually awesome -- thus proving Robinson was right with the second half of her claim about Wyldstyle's purpose: "to eventually confer the cool-girl approval that seals Emmet’s transformation from loser to winner."
I mention my one technical quibble with Robinson above because I want to contrast it with what she said about How to Train Your Dragon II. I read her article before watching How to Train Your Dragon II, and thought about her claim about Hiccups mom, that "once the introductions are finally done, and the battle starts, she immediately becomes useless, both to the rest of the cast and to the rapidly moving narrative. She faces the villain (the villain she’s apparently been successfully resisting alone for years!) and she’s instantly, summarily defeated." And I went into the cinema thinking, "Oh, come on -- it can't be that bad." But it was!!
The mom's uselessness in the end of How to Train Your Dragon II struck me as really weird and incongruous because the action scene was just so damn long. Like a lot of films, the whole last section of the movie is a sequence of action segments as the heroes eventually defeat the villains. In all this time, they couldn't come up with one thing for this amazing mom character to do that is critical to saving the day? And it's the contrast with the Lego Movie in particular that makes the problem in How to Train Your Dragon II especially striking: in the action sequence at the end of the Lego Movie, every single one of the main hero characters (Emmet, Wyldstlye, Vitruvius, Unikitty, Metalbeard, Benny, Batman) gets an individual moment of doing something critical.
Of course, listing off the main characters like that gives another hint about the Lego Movie's gender problem: of these seven heroes, only two of them are female. OTOH, it could be worse -- it could be just one. Unikitty, by the way, is very cool and entertaining. She's not defined in relation to some male character. She's a princess, but her princessness is about running a fun fantasy land, not finding a prince. Plus, she has her own interesting personal conflict trying to remain cheerful at all times -- and learning how that doesn't exactly work (reminiscent of the "Turn it off" number from The Book of Mormon).
In The Lego Movie's favor, they cast a black character in a role that would stereotypically be played by a white character (instead of putting a black character in a stereotypical black role) -- and they played it up in a funny joke where Vitruvius confuses Gandalf with Dumbledore. I wish they could have done a little better at mixing it up for the ladies.
Personally, I'm the parent who is as interested as the kids in playing with our Lego collection. And I thought it was fun that the Lego Movie included such a parent character. The sad part is that if they'd cast that part as someone who looks like me -- i.e. a woman -- it would have been criticized as "tokenism" or as unrealistic or something. We're not at the point where I can simply watch an ordinary movie and expect to see a character I can relate to, in my own gender, and have it be perfectly ordinary and not even noteworthy. We've still got a long way to go, baby...
This point aside, the film has a lot of really clever, funny stuff in it. Looking at all of the amazing details of the Lego worlds in the movie makes me want to get to my Lego table see what I can build! (With the kids, of course.) We can make our own little world where everything is awesome!
Sunday, November 02, 2014
First, catch a wild mommy!
According to Leo, that's the first step in building a custom Lego set.
This is a rock-climbing cabin set I designed, based on the Creator "Mountain Hut" set.
On first glance, it might not be obvious how this is different from the three versions in the official instructions. Basically, I took some components straight from the set instructions, but I combined them in a new way and added a bunch of my own original elements and components.
It doesn't seem like much, but it's trickier to do that than you might think.
The kids also requested some custom play-sets for some of their favorite characters. Nico requested a zombie fortress that could be used for fighting the plants (as in plants-vs-zombies):
Complete with a tower and turret for the Yeti-Zombie and a winged flying-ship with a landing-pad in the fortress.
On first glance, it might not be obvious how this is different from the three versions in the official instructions. Basically, I took some components straight from the set instructions, but I combined them in a new way and added a bunch of my own original elements and components.
The kids also requested some custom play-sets for some of their favorite characters. Nico requested a zombie fortress that could be used for fighting the plants (as in plants-vs-zombies):
Leo wanted a fortress for his "Rabids" a.k.a. "Lapins Crétins" :
I actually made and photographed all of these sets in March, but I postponed posting the photos because I was planning to make an stop-motion animated YouTube short of my mountain cabin. But with the number of projects on my plate, it looks like that's never going to happen, so I figured I might as well post these photos.
Enjoy!
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