.: culture : mash :.

I don’t mean to turn this into the Leyla/father relationship blog, but sorry folks, that’s as active as it’s getting here for a bit. It’s a pretty big deal for me to have my 76 year old Dad stuck in the Motherland for over 4 months now, and have it extend another 2, on what was supposed to be a 2 month trip max.

For those of you who don’t know, my father has gone back home after over 20 years to sell his home and be able to retire with these funds back here in Los Angeles, his current home. This got a little sticky when he arrived in Tehran, to find that the government had seized his property, and he had to pay over $40k in legal fees to try to retrieve his property. Yeah, if that doesn’t make you patriotic, I don’t know what does. At any rate, as honest as I’m sure the mullah regime and federal court must be, it’s been a tough time even getting a judge to reside over my father’s simple case, as the appropriate judge has conveniently been on holiday for the past 2 months.

All this pending, the phone lines in Iran blow. Imagine trying to get a phone signal in Malibu… times like ten. So the main form of communication I have is email. Now I’m totally grateful for my father even knowing at his age how to use email. I mean he’s 76, my 55 year old mother barely understands the concept of a mouse. So this is a big deal, he can communicate. Granted his emails are usually either forwarded folk legends of emails telling me to not flash my headlights or use my cell phone at the gas station, but my father uses most the emails as a way of sending me pictures.

This morning, I logged into my Gmail account to find over 45 separate emails, each with one to three jpegs attached. About 4 of these photographs were of my dad and various unknown family members or friends, cousins I don’t know and colleagues I think look geriatric. In the bulk of these emails however, were over 40 pictures of Persian rugs. Yes, exactly … some were even pictures of rugs depicting rugs. I’m not kidding. I have to show you a sample of this, because the entire act is just so fucking puzzling.

Now remember… these are ALL rugs. I have to restress this, because he did so in every email.

A seductive stare:

Cyrus the Great:

An old bazar for selling rugs:

a $15K silk rug:

the store he saw a lot of this at:

And perhaps the most perplexing, the chicken children:

I don’t know what the hell this is, but I definitely want it.

So let’s go over some statistics. No , really, there’s a point behind this, and while my writing is terribly indirect and non concise, you’ll be glad you followed in this beginning part.

• My mother got married when she was 17, and had her first child when she was 18.
• My grandmother got married when she was 15, and had her first child when she was 17.
• My great grandmother got married when she was 11, and I don’t know what age she was when she had her first child. But I do know that for a fact, she played with her two stepchildren. Not like a nanny play with her kids, like you played in the back yard with your neighbors way back when. That’s how they played.

Naturally, this needs to be plotted in some sort of graph. Because I’m pretty certain my coordinates are drastically apparent.

Now if I recalled anything from my college statistics course in business undergrad, I’d have done a way better data graph that concluded with some regression analysis. But I got a C in that class, so this is all you get. Sadly, this graph also assumes that I’d be getting married before I turned 28, which is like 20 days away. But even still, my data points are the obvious outliers. They aren’t even REAL and they’re still terribly different from that of 3 other generations of women in my family.

Now what I really wonder sometimes, is if I’ll even enter this chart. And for some reason, I think that if I should enter this chart, if I’m still fertile to have children, they’d need to be born like at age 15 so I’m not geriatric by the time she needs a training bra.

Either way you look at it, I’m off the fucking chart.

I’ve replaced the children in this photograph with an iPod and a beer.

Last week I attended the annual SIGGRAPH convention in San Diego. Now I know it may seem that I make a fortune just from my fame off this blog, you know … the same one I contribute to like twice a month. However, I actually have a day job as some of you know working for Side Effects Software, creators of Houdini.

I started working at Side Effects straight out of college, in fact, my entire career was born out of a marketing internship I started while in my last year at USC. I still remember interviewing, and working with someone who is now one my closest friends and mentor, my old manager Sarah.

“So you’ll notice this industry has some pretty cool people. Mostly guys, but like really geeky sweet guys.”

“Oh, I’m used to nerds, I’m into a lot of that stuff.”

“Yeahhhh, this is like a REAL nerd though. I mean, these guys, bless their hearts, they like telling math jokes.”

Four years later, I really know what she meant. It took me ages of spending time with various breeds of nerds to truly appreciate the type I surround myself with.

You see, I think we can really divide the majority of the modern nerd world into two segments, the web/graphic designer nerd … and the 3d minded, math nerd. I’m not really sure if one is better than the other, but I have noticed their apparent differences.

Web Nerd:

• Dresses well
• Has hip girlfriend
• Interested in modern applications of practical internet web usage
• Reads Digg and Wired magazine
• Got into web design to make clean, pretty designs and make a difference.
• Will help you with your computer
• Ahhs when the new Mac stuff releases

3D Nerd:

• Can dress well, but usually slaps on whatever is clean due to 70 hour film production schedule. Also, will generally wear a vendor t-shirt at least 3 out of the 7 days of the week.
• Makes math jokes, but more importantly…expects others to get it.
• Got into visual effects to fulfill childhood dream of creating film fantasies.
• Refuses to help you unless you consider switching to Unix.
• Ahhs when they see flawless wet hair in CG.

Anyhow… a few pictures from SIGGRAPH 2007.

Darrin from Black Ginger and Angie Jones (Spicy Cricket). Remind me later to blog about the differences between FX kids and character animators. These are $3 margaritas, naturally we had about 4 each.

Houdini Expert Panel, organized by moi.

My friend Phillip Prahl, presenting on using Houdini 9 Alpha on Transformers.

The annual get.hip party I helped organize.

Exhausted with Jamie and Samir.

Live Touch visuals done by Greg Hermanovic and Derivative Inc.

PS: A great in depth report and retrospective on SIGGRAPH ‘07 on Thinking Animation.