Virus

Today I spent my day at work writing and receiving mails. Pretty much this is all I did: read, type, send, read, type, send. By modern standards this was a very productive day, I distributed work all over the place, gave answer to some pending questions, stated my opinion and read what everybody else had to say. I organized some meetings and trips and rescheduled everything that presented a conflict under the criteria of Outlook's calendar. Read, type, send, read, type, send.

So yes, a waste of a day.

While leaving the officeI thought that it would be great to create a virus that automatically inserts a star system type of rating at the end of any mail and the phrase "please help us improve by rating this mail".  The screen would then be blocked until you do the rating, at which point a response mail is automatically generated and sent to the original sender with a text explaining that his score in the last mail he sent has been rated at whichever level, and on the bottom a new request saying "please help us improve by rating this mail"...

If anybody is keen of virus coding, feel free to steal de idea.

Simply Milo Manara

While on vacation near Cadiz (Spain) I found in a small market a whole bunch of issues that were published by NORMA Editorial in 1999 containing MILO MANARA's work. Issues 9 to 11 cover the full INDIAN SUMMER story, which I bought for a couple of Euros.

Now, this is significant since this story is not only in black and white, but also it has almost no shadows. It is pretty much just virgin line work but at the same time it needs nothing else to be a complete work of art, a masterpiece of story telling.

I am trying to put together my first sequentials, and passing from pencil to line work is as far as I can take my current skills for now. I have done two very short stories and for me they look unfinished, lacking the shades and color, but the Maestro MILO gives me new hope.

I want to be just like Fernando

I just bought ZORA, a comic from 1980 by FERNANDO FERNANDEZ, and man, this thing is just too good: a psychedelic retro space feel, lovely art, great story line. This guy is awesome!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Fernandez_(comics)

Remainder

Please remind me to write about creating, producing and a spanish cook with a temporary hearing impediment....

MRI

Today I had an MRI performed on both my knees. The doctors tell me that I have a lack of cartilage in my joints which explains why my knees make cracking noises every time I bend them. This MRI will help them determine how advanced is the damage and so they can assign proper treatment for this little annoyance, but the interesting thing is that I fell a sleep during the test. For the MRI, what they do is to put you in a nice tight tunnel where you have to rest still for about half an hour (fifteen minutes per knee), they give you wax earplugs and then place in your hand a panic button for in case you get all claustrophobic and wish to be pulled out, then the noises begin. The hammering and static tones are just like taken out from a seventies science fiction movie. If you have a chance google "MRI sounds" and listen to this thing, in a strange way these sounds soothed me out to sleep five minutes after starting on my left knee.

Future

Today while coming home from my parents, it struck me that there is something wrong with the way we visualize the future. I realized that when we picture ourselves doing something in a future time, we do it in the exact same way as when we try to visualize something from the past, the images we project in our heads are similar. It seems that we do is more like thinking about how we will remember the future once it has passed, and this concept for the first time bothers me.

When we think about a past event we take something that we have previously sensed and recall it. We basically replay a movie from the material we have stored in a past time, and the images we project in this movie can be more or less representative of the reality as it happened. On the other hand, when we experience the present we don't really recall much, we sense the events as they are happening to us and try to react to them. If our brain can not interpret something in real time, then somehow it fills in the gap by fabricating a fictitious sensation based in our past experiences, but in any case the present is a time of feeling, of sensing the moment.

Now, if in the scale of time the future is closer to the present than to the past,  then why when we think about the future we first build the images and sounds like if it were a memory, and from those memories then generate feelings? Shouldn't it be the other way around? Shouldn't it be more coherent to try to just "feel" the future and then, as a second process build the images and sounds that can help us interpret those feelings?

UNDER RE-CONSTRUCTION....