Life is going swell. By swell, I mean... there's been quite a few twists and turns, but it's been mostly positive.

I won't bore you with the details about school. It ended on a fairly high note, what with me getting an award for my short film and securing my on-campus job for next semester. The bad part is that the school is acting terribly negligent towards the film department, which is detailed in the post below this one.

My summer has been a clusterfuck of I don't even know what. Part of me is relieved to not have to worry about things like schoolwork and rent, yet the home life here can have its stressful moments as well. I do, however, get to sleep in however long I please, get meals cooked for me, and only have to perform chores in payment.

The REALLY bad part of the summer was when our student loan apps didn't get approved with my mom as co-signer. Thankfully, that got resolved when my aunt stepped up to the plate and helped out. Woo!

In my spare time at home I've been playing WoW. The guild I'm running with are a nice batch of folks, if not a bit out of my age range. My typically crude/immature comments are sometimes met with less than stellar response. Ah well. At least I get to see Ulduar!

Beyond that... well, nothing new on the front. I might not update again until I arrive at college in another month, if not a little before then. Adieu!

I have grown very bitter with Ringling (my college) over these few years, and for good reason. It seems as though the school is trying to destroy what it has worked so hard to build through its ever-growing expansionist movement, courtesy of Larry Thompson.

I arrived at Ringling in '06 as a Computer Animation major. The CA major is the best in the country, and for good reason--its graduates have gone on to lead successful careers. However, after observing the program, its (mostly miserable failures) teachers, and its department head... really, the major is performing a downward spiral.

Firstly, the success of a student in CA is entirely credited to themselves, NOT the teachers. The teachers are there only to teach you the programs and some limited 'theory' about animation. The rest of the time, the faculty sit there and argue over stupidly asinine things over students' work, and their opinions about a crit flip-flops more than John Kerry at a Waffle House.

In Traditional Animation, I had one of the (supposedly) best teachers in the department. Our classes consisted of her handing out sheets telling you how to animate, giving a 10-minute "lecture" and then she'd offer five minutes to critique our animations. I once showed her a piece of animation, she said "Yeah, it's good" and the woman proceeded to BITE MY HEAD OFF when I asked for advice a little while later. When I got my grade back on said assignment, she complained about the specific area I tried to show her. Thanks a lot!

I got sick of the politics and general bullshit in the Animation program quickly. The teacher barely taught anything. I did not come here to learn from a hand-out, and when I said I wanted to leave the program, they showed little interest in keeping me. The faculty members I spoke to might as well have said "Good riddance!" Talk about a major that really cares for its students.

Well, I learned the school was building a Digital Film program and went screaming towards it. The program itself does cartwheels over Computer Animation when it comes to individual attention and actually giving two shits about its students. The (previous) Department Head always had his door open for critiques or just talking about anything. Our teachers actually cared about individual development and (gasp) actually taught us as opposed to giving us print-outs!

However, no program can develop without the school itself caring. The administration at Ringling, simply put, do not care about the film program.

Why? I really don't know. It might be due to a lack of understanding as to how a film program works. It isn't like Animation where all you need are a few labs with Maya. We need labs, AND camera equipment, AND classroom facilities, AND lightning equipment, AND a stage... the list goes on. The administration probably didn't anticipate the cost of the program.

What also frustrates me is the incompetence with how the money is spent. Instead of helping kids with more scholarship money (I have a motherfucking 3.5 GPA which is nigh impossible to achieve at Ringling and I got a measly, pathetic 1k scholarship that is like a drop in the bucket), Mr. Thompson sees the cash being better spent towards pet projects that really don't help the school. The man dropped I don't even know how much money into changing the school's name and logo, which were completely and utterly unnecessary. Now, in his infinite wisdom, he is building not one but TWO new buildings. One is for Freshman housing... which is awesome when upperclassmen are already struggling to find housing after Freshman year. The other is an actually much-needed academic building--I realize that the school desperately needed more painting studios. However, it comes with 'perks' that are unnecessary. The recently-build building, the Student Center, has new mailboxes that are perfectly fine. One of the new buildings, lo and behold, has MORE MAILBOXES. Just what we need! Boy, I would be lost without the brand new, completely unneeded new mailroom.

I have met Larry Thompson in-person during a film shoot off-campus and he's a very nice guy who knows how to market the school. However, he fails to realize that the majority of Ringling's student body aren't rich kids who can breeze through the 15k tuition. We're mostly middle-class who are struggling with the current economy. Ringling needs MORE GODDAMN SCHOLARSHIP MONEY. The fact that I am pulling a 3.5 GPA and getting almost nothing for it is inexcusable, and I'm sure everyone else who is getting that pathetic excuse for a "scholarship" agrees with me.

All in all, when I graduate in two years, I would ward any prospective students away from Ringling. It's going the way of SCAD--loose admissions and a program built to suck money out of people. It is already losing its notoriety in the art world, and over the next few years, fewer and fewer companies will come here to recruit. Better get in while you can!

Have you ever opened up an old journal/chat log/whatever, read the contents, and then go "What the fuck was I thinking?"

Well, I just had one of those moments.

I put the atom bomb to this LJ, effectively performing a small-scale Holocaust on over three years of personal history. Some entries were amusing, but most of them were just plain pathetic--blathering, whiny bouts of self-pity that rambled on for paragraphs. The fact that I even wrote such things, much less posted them on the internet for anyone to see, is embarrassing.

Nevertheless! This blog is reborn. Like a phoenix from the ashes, a new era of not-suckage springs forth from a festering pile of horse turd. What now, you ask? I will write about a few things: happenings in college, fandom-like things, gaming stuff... really, whatever I had in here before stripped of the emo.

Well, there it is. Fun fun!