Today is Day Sixty of the Sixty Sixty, and you know what that means.
Clip show time!
But first, other people’s stuff.
This show looks completely awesome.
The Burka Avenger! A heroine for our times!
I mean, we already think women in burkas kind of look like ninjas, so why not go with it?
And so much of the show just seems right for our times.
By day, she’s a mild-mannered teacher. Perfect! It’s a feminine enough job to be acceptable for a woman even in somewhat sexist countries, and yet, everyone also knows that teachers have to be quite tough and tenacious (as well as kind and understanding) to do their job.
She fights (fairly) nonviolently. At least, we don’t see her hacking off limbs or beheading people. In traditionally sexist places, the image of women as soft, kind, and gentle is extremely important to keeping the sexual dynamic functioning, and you don’t go changing that too fast or you will get the knee-jerk responses that, sadly, can endanger women’s very lives in some part of the world.
But most importantly, she fights for the children. Not even the most sexist asshole can argue with that. Even a full blown entitled patriarch would expect the mother of his children to fight like a tigress to protect them, no matter the circumstances.
So having a teacher do so is not just acceptable, it’s heroic.
And it looks like it has enough simple, goofy comedy in it to keep the kids entertained
And speaking of simple, goofy comedy, check out this claymation romp about a dad, a baby, and aliens.
Oh. And a hell of a lot of alien goo.
I love this thing. It has such a full on, no holding back, childlike enthusiasm that it just utterly charms me and and makes me love it. What it lacks in subtlety, it makes up for in sheer immature gusto.
It doesn’t take itself the slightest bit seriously and throws itself into the job with all the uninhibited zeal of a child playing with his toys. It is fast, funny, silly, gory (in a cartoony way), crude, disgusting, scary, violent, wonderful entertainment and I love it to pieces.
Plus I like that it is very clear that Dad did not instigate the carnage. He started off being very friendly and nice, inviting the aliens in for a cuppa, and things only got violent after the aliens took his baby and seemed intent on microwaving it.
That’s unacceptable behaviour no matter where you are from. They’re not just aliens… they’re total dicks, and they deserve (more or less) all the gooey death bestowed upon them.
Kids must absolutely flip over it. I certainly would have when I was a kid. Heck, it’s my inner child that loves it now. It has everything in it that kids love, even a little gross-out humour regarding nappies.
Plus, the joke at the very end made me laugh so hard. I won’t spoil it, but damn. Like the rest of it, it’s crude and simple and yet totally delightful.
To round out our trio of animated shorts, we have this little take on that timeless modern ritual of being woken up by your alarm clock in the morning.
Hard to believe that’s s student project, isn’t it? It looks quite professional, and as an animation buff, I really admire how well constructed each gag is. Everything is precisely where it needs to be to convey the comedy and keep that momentum going, and I have mad respect for that kind of precision and understanding of just what makes a toon tick.
I have never had the problem of falling back asleep after waking up. For some reason, I have the ability to go from asleep to fully awake in around three seconds, and after that, I am good to go, at least until the next time I end up having to sit completely still again.
As long as I am doing something, I can stay clear-headed and focused on pulling myself together and doing all those little things we all do in order to pull ourselves together in the morning.
I have often thought that it’s like somewhere in the night, as we sleep, we forget how to be human beings, and in the morning we have to go through a quick version of evolution all over again as various parts of our brain boot up and come online.
“Come back in five minutes, I’m barely Australopithecus yet!”
Aaaand finally, today’s vid.
Don’t worry, it’s not the last one!
It’s the second-last one. I realized earlier today that there was no way that either I or my computer could it if I tried to pick out the best bits of all sixty episodes at once.
As is, the software completely choked when I tried to make it render the file in the accustomed MPG-1 format. Even after clearing a whole whack of hard drive space and giving my computer a completely cold boot, it still could not handle rendering something with pieces of so many different files in it.
The prospect of having to cut the project in half and render each half loomed large, and let me tell you, that is nowhere near as easy as it sounds when you are talking video that is still in a zillion pieces in as many different files.
Luckily, when I switched to WMV, it rendered just fine, and much faster than usual even. And the file seems a lot smaller. So maybe I will do all future efforts in WMV instead.
If it can handle what I put it through today, it can handle pretty much anything I do.
Tomorrow, of course, I will make the other half of the story, Days 31-59 (because summarizing 60 would be rather silly), and then I will be stuck trying to figure out what to do with myself again.
I sure as hell can’t go back to just blogging. That would not nearly be enough now. I am going to need something far more absorbing than that.
I will see what inspiration comes.