ChasingLilly.net

A little gif of an upcoming video. y’all best be GETTIN PUMPED

IV Hunga Games start

Happy Trails,
Sam.

Still workin’ on it. Thought you all could use an update. It seems weird, even for me, to get on my site supposedly devoted to the Hunger Games series and see [honey] bunches o’ LOST pictures. I get it, I’ve just run into some problems… as ALWAYS. I was psyched to get my theme up and running some sweet Flash animations. That idea has since fallen through. So then I decided I’d like a nice clean UI or homepage from which to view my posted pictures/videos, casting, fan projects, etc. I want to include a link to my photography/video cache. Maybe even include a link to previous info about LOST or my other obsessions. So I started updating my home page in anticipation! Head on over to the chasinglilly.net home pageand check it out! Currently it looks a little funky on a few Safari/iPad browsers I’ve tested it on. But as long as you’re running Firefox you should see it and think it’s cool. Hey, it’s only temporary so I was not about to put too much into it!

I was able to start a mini photoblogging site for my pictures. It will also be home to some sweet videos once I get a break! You can check it out at chasinglilly.net/artsyfart. You can also click the homepage banner to visit it, as my new instructions point out! I’ve got it set up to post a new photo every day till the end of August. Hopefully by then I’ll have some more time on my hands to shoot some new ones and get some videos running! W00t!

Back to the Hunger Games train-of-thought: the new UI ideas fell through as well, though the menu has made a MENTAL COMEBACK IN MY MIND! Long story short I’m coming close to finalizing my ideas for it and such. Looks like it’ll use some .gifs in the place of flash animations for this particular design. I’ve never really worked with .gifs much before (mainly because I can’t help but think “1990s” when I hear the file extension), so it’s a bit of a learning experience for me! As a test I placed a fiery mockingjay .gif on the home page. I’m also going to put into use that slick Hunger Game countdown clock they’ve got going over on the Hunger Game movie site. That’ll take some flash coding anyways, I suppose. The blending of all the elements will really make the site “catch fire” if you get my drift I’ll keep you updated. If all goes well, I plan to have it up by this time next week! Exccciiiittteeemenetenetentent inDUCING, I know!

I even updated my banner up top from “The whole world stopped on May 23, 2010…” to “I’m workin’ on it, OKAY??” just so you guys know!

Happy Trails,
Sam.

That’s right, banner picture! As previously mentioned, there will be some big changes coming soon! Most notably, the site theme is due for a change. It’s not that I love LOST any less, but the show has been over for more than a year and … wow it really hurt me to even write that … but it’s just been past due time to update. In addition I haven’t been writing on here as much as I used to and chasinglilly.net just hasn’t been as popular as it used to be. A change has been long-coming. The change will be abrupt. Indeed, many of you who dislike the idea of layout changes may be quite cantankerous toward the fact. Those of you who follow my Twitter may not actually find this change very surprising. I’m not going for a general template. I’ve never been much for them. The new theme will follow:

The Hunger Games.

Yes, my new theme will be based on the best-selling book series by Suzanne Collins, which is also being turned into a movie by Lionsgate to be released next Summer. For those of you who have never heard of it, do yourself a favor and PICK UP A COPY! They’re amazing books, and I am so incredibly psyched for the upcoming film(s).

The change actually makes a lot of sense. For a while now my blog has been utterly baseless. I’m sure most people who visit the site react like…

It’s fine. It’s cool. But there’s nothing to latch onto. Other than the LOSt-inspired theme, there is no commonality upon which to build a group of readers. It used to be based around LOST with the Dark Territory podcast and write-ups on the episodes and such. That was my (to steal a line from Jim Groom) digital story. For the past many months the blog has kind of LOST it’s way (heh see what I did there?). My realization of this fact makes me feel…

So, yeah, this Hunger Games decision is great! I’d been planning to hack out a template based around it, but the entire writing theme blew my mind! And it just came to me tonight and my reaction was like…

Thus beyond simply being a blog-image-template, The Hunger Games is going to be my new THEME. This will help me get posting more, start spreading information, and help me get involved in the various communities surrounding the series. I’ll be posting stories related to the books, news on the upcoming film, Suzanne Collins in general, etc. Don’t worry, I’ll still be posting pointless stories about my life. It also helps that The Hunger Games fan base is really just starting. Of course, that’s not to say it isn’t already rather well, okay HUGE. But compared to Harry Potter or LOST, the fan base is starting it’s exponential growth period. And I want to be part of that.

Of course there are already quite a few great fan sites out there like mockingjay.net, Hunger Games Movie, Hunger Games Trilogy, Down With the Capitol, and The Hob just to name a few. Those are just the ones I follow on Google Reader. Of course there are many others, but I would like to make an impression of some sort on the community. And with support, we can! I think it would be awesome if I could start blogging news and maybe Will and I could even start up a little podcast of our own about the series. I converted Will to a Hunger Games fan a few weeks back. In fact we have already been talking about doing a Hunger Games short film as a future project, something I am very supportive of. I hope this idea has your

and that you all will support me in this endeavor. And be sure to go support the fan sites already in existence listed above!

Happy Trails,
Sam.

I promised myself I wouldn’t write any more blog posts during or the days before finals week in order to study. Well that week has come and gone, and so has the next. And here we are today! I did pretty well in my classes this past semester, and just transferred to “Transitional Housing” on campus because I’m staying here in Fredvegas all Summer!

What am I doing down here, you ask? Well I got a job with the campus IT Department and have for the past week been working the Help Desk phone line. So if you called for help and got a steamy, lucrid man’s voice on the other line… it was 100% most definitely my lungs breathing hotness upon your eardrum by way of my good bud Alexander Grahmcracker Belt. I don’t know why he likes being called that, either, but he always insists when I blog about him that I use his nickname that his wife uses. And no, I don’t know where that name came from, and I probably don’t want to.

Anyways it’s been pretty good so far, though it’s a bit daunting answering peoples calls like that. In terms of computers, I’m a software guy, not a hardware guy. I wouldn’t know a quad-core from a pelican, or even a Super AMOLED from a pelicula. But I can tell you the subtle differences from Adobe’s CS4 and CS5 packages and use all of them proficiently. There’s another group of people who got hired who are working on capturing, photoshopping, tutorialing, and blogging how-to’s about our new “social” education platform we’re replacing Blackboard with for next semester. And they keep asking me for help with photoshop, wordpress, or whatever else. Why couldn’t I be there? *Sigh* Maybe I’ll talk to mi boss ’bout it.

In other news: as of next Sunday I’m homeless, which is pretty weird. First, it’s super weird spending my first Summer away from home. And to add, I have nowhere to live here, either. I had a housing contract to live in Eagle Landing for Summer, but I didn’t get into the class (photography) that I wanted to, so Res Life is saying I can’t live in campus housing. See, in the agreement you have to check that you will be attending classes, otherwise you’re on your own. The only exception they’ll make would be if my boss tells them the IT Dept is “sponsoring” me to live on campus, which would involve them paying for my meal plan. It’s all just such a big hassle that my parents and I finally decided it would just be better if I got my own apartment that I could keep for the Summer and then maybe room with someone next semester. Today my dad and I were out scouring the Fredscape for apartments and we found some surprisingly good places! This leads me to my next point…

My good friend Williamson McDungheap (AKA Will) got into Mary Washington! Now I don’t know if he’s going to choose here, but that’s super cool for him. If he comes down, who knows? Maybe he’ll end up being my roommate next year. Time, patience, talking, thoughtfulness, and flatulence will only tell!

I can’t think of anything else at the moment… they didn’t clean up Eagle Landing any before they moved us in… I found peoples’ clothes in my drawers, for instance. The third episode of Neature Walk was released from vicscrappyvideos! Woohoo! IT’S A BEAR. I THINK. I’ll post more about ideas and projects coming up soon…

I’m thinking of getting a Canon Rebel T3i (600D), that would be the most amazing thing ever. Either a Rebel T2i or T3i… though the swively screen is neat, I’ve heard the T3i is a little better with video, which is what I really want from my first DSLR camera. Now I just need money I have no doubt all of our videos would be a billion times cooler if we had anything better than the DV camcorder. Not that the hardware makes things automatically cooler, it’s just hard to find inspiration worth being reviewed by people with that thing. Bleh. We’ll see. (pictured is the T2i, of course)



Happy Trails,
Sam.



PS – Here’s a picture of an alien colony I took:

I’ve been helping some people with their blogs lately. The three I’m specifically mentioning here are Will, Billy, and my mom.

Will really liked my LOST theme I did here for my blog, so I told him a while back that I’d make him a Fringe theme for his blog. He’s a bit of a “fair-weather blogger” (all credit and royalties for that just-coined phrase you can give to me personally), but lately he’s been pretty good about posting. He posted his lengthy review of the LOST video game, Via Domus (Will’s right, it’s so terrible), some stuff about McGrimmys, and even some of his favorite videos. With all this text flowing forth from his fingers, I figured it was time to upgrade his theme. You can go check it out at http://www.violentblue.net/willmccarry/! It’s pretty snazzy, and is obviously Fringe-based.

A portion of Will's theme

My mom was having problems putting up posts. She got a fancy new iPad for Christmas and has since been blogging from it about her experiences at work at Hancock Fabric. Some pretty interesting and funny stuff happens there, so go check it out. Thankfully I got her blog all sorted out! You can check her blog out at http://renerodgers.wordpress.com/.

Of my friends I pestered to blog, Billy was my last holdout. I even hacked him up his own awesomely/obnoxiously cool theme to try and coax him into posting. After nearly a year, he finally called me yesterday and asked me for his user info! Horray! He put up his first post today and he tells me he has a few more he’s cooking up, so go check his “Blog of Wonders” out at http://www.violentblue.net/billybacci/

Happy Trails,
Sam.

First off, good luck to everyone working on this project! It’s obnoxious and unfair because we had no supplies. Jake said the wire would be supplied to us so we wouldn’t have to spend any more money on this way-too-expensive class, yet there has been literally no wire since Friday. Either it all ran out (which is highly unlikely due to the “miles” of it available on Thursday), or else someone stole it (which is stupid and also way more likely). Now we all emailed Jake about the problem, but he never answered. Thus, many of us had to go out and buy our own wire. Not only that but neither Lowes nor Home Depot had the correct gauge of wire, so we were all forced to use incorrect wire which is either impossible to bend or else extremely easy to break for the majority of our projects. I actually got a small gauge of galvanized steel wire instead of the aluminum 16-gauge wire we were told to use. Those of us who didn’t want to go buy more wire are simply making do with what little they had from class (which is almost nothing). To add to this…

I’ve been incredibly sick the last few days. I hope it’s a just a bad cold and not the flu, but working on this new design principles project has not worked well with my health. I spent about 15-18 hours on the latest project, a wire sculpture of an approved object done to a bigger scale. And now it’s done. I had to restart it, so that’s why it doesn’t look as amazing as it could. The joysticks actually work and move a lot like a real joystick feels it would :-]. It also looks a lot better in 3D perspective than my terrible camera angle I took while sickly slaving away in Melchers for my third-straight 6 hour Melchers visit ending at 1 AM. But don’t worry, I’m not bitter or anything… >.<

Happy Trails,
Sam.

Update – Thankfully, and against all logic, I got an ‘A’ on this project. Though it was only through Jake’s messed up idea that the students should not only put the projects best to worst, but then give them grades. In fact, he first even mandated that every grade letter be represented (thankfully, I didn’t have to say who should take the ‘F’). Ah well, we still have another project due soon for class, we’ll see how that goes.

My art design principles class and I have some serious problems. Most notably, it doesn’t seem to respect my time. I can’t just be constantly worrying about it, and it needs to understand that it’s not the only thing in my life. I’ve had classes before it, and I’m sure I’ll have classes after we’re through. Even now I have other responsibilities that I can’t keep up with while spending my nights (late into the night!) working to make sure everything’s perfect with it to make sure it doesn’t have a spaz out and blow up in my face. I’m just not sure this is working out.

My blog here, for instance. I need to have enough time to write stuff on it! And I haven’t because I’ve been constantly doing obnoxious art projects.

However, our latest art project is finished. If you go to UMW, you probably saw the projects today, or at least did in years past. They’re the “giant inflatables” project. Basically we were tasked with creating a [much] larger-than-life replica of some creature using only trash bags and masking tape. On the day of grading (which was today) the teacher, Jake, bring out his moon-bounce inflater and we all inflate our enormous beings into life. This year the theme was “Halloween creatures,” so everyone had to choose different things. One group chose a skeleton dog (with a bone in it’s mouth), one a spider, one a crow, one a UFO, etc… my group and I chose to do a gigantic rat.

We named him Templeton, named after the character in Charlotte’s Web, obviously. (apparently)

You can see pics below:

Ahh! So cute and scary!

being blown up. evil eyes.

i know it looks like he wants to hug you. but trust us, he doesn't.

It worked flawlessly, and I’ve rarely been more excited in my life. What? You think that’s a bit of an exaggeration or something? You don’t understand! You weren’t there when Templeton was born!!
So anyways it worked perfectly, and we were the only group who’s inflatable didn’t rip or come toppling over!! As it was being deflated, I heard Jake say “That was totally awesome,” which you could say was a pretty good sign. After everyone inflated theirs, Jake had a meeting with the team leaders. All the leaders voted our very own Templeton as the best of the class, and Jake is going to keep just ours for next year.



But first, he says he’s taking the rat with him down to Richmond, and he’s going to blow it up in his small yard for Halloween. So if you’re in the area and see a giant rat, go say ‘hello,’ it’s actually pretty nice, and it won’t bite.

So I’m sorry to say that I don’t think we can go steady anymore, Design Principles. However, this looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Happy Trails,
Sam.

Our latest project for art class is a photo scavenger hunt. I’ve spent the last week photographing and brainstorming ideas, and I’m finally done! Below you will see the slideshow of all the pictures. We were assigned 15 things to take pictures of, and see if you can guess what they are. If you can get it right, then I’ve done my job correctly! Of course… if you want to be lame a cheat the answers are below the slideshow.

The categories (in order) were:
1. Animal
2. Vegetable
3. Mineral
4. Pride
5. Greed
6. Envy
7. Wrath
8. Gluttony
9. Lust (somehow this one got deleted along with Joy, though I was able to upload Joy again)
10. Sloth
11. Joy
12. Fear
13. Creation
14. Light
15. Man vs. Nature

I’d like to thank my roommate Soo Min for being my most-used model in the pictures.

Some of those might have been a little bit tricky to guess. I spent a lot of time on this project, mainly in photoshop. I photoshopped each image quite a bit, actually, so go head on over to my flickr set and start squinting, maybe you’ll see something new you didn’t before! Now that I’m done with it, I’ll admit I spent a lot of time on nine of the pictures. As in, I thought them through, planned them out completely, etc. A few of the others I just find the needed time and/or place to correctly take them like I wanted. For example, I wanted envy to be taken during a class from an over-the-shoulder POV with the teacher walking away in the blurry background. But I just couldn’t find the time. And I did spend a lot of time on this project. Ah well. I’m pretty happy with it, and a few of them are pretty funny/cute (meaning the dog in the first one).

Happy Trails,
Sam.



PS – No, seriously, thanks Soo Min, for being a Wrathful, Gluttonous, Fearful thing of Envy
PPS – No pun intended by the use of “PS” for that mention, btw. At least not directly…

Just a few days ago I set up a blog for my good friend Billy Bacci. He’s in our band Violent Blue, so I set up his blog on the violentblue.net domain we got. You can go check it out at violentblue.net/billybacci. It’s actually a pretty simple modification of the Silent Film theme you can find on wordpress.org.

The original theme

It’s pretty funny and cool looking in my opinion, and it got Will McCarry jealous as to why I “made a cooler theme for Billy than for me! Mine just has a weird cat thing in the header!” That combined with my previous mention of how I wanted to hack some other themes got me actually wanting to do it. So I am.

I’m currently making a Star Trek theme and a theme for Fringe. I decided (after much intense debate) that I’m going to give the Fringe theme to Will. I mean, really, he can have the Fringe theme, I have the LOST theme, and LOST is better. So anyways I’m basing the Fringe theme off a pretty popular theme right now entitled Aqua Blue, and the Star Trek theme off a theme I’ve previously used entitled Inanis Glass.

Aqua Blue for Fringe	Inanis Glass for Star Trek

I see exactly what I want to make each of them, though I have a feeling both of these themes are gonna be kinda hard/confusing to make. I also don’t know exactly how I want to go about implementing the theme, because I kinda want to keep the LOST theme up. If there were a way to select a theme at the homepage or something, that might work. Though that might involve making separate blog directories, and then I’d have to worry about RSS feeds and page views and links matching up and other stuff… blehh we’ll see, I’m only just now starting to work on them. I’ll keep ya updated!



Happy Trails and Namaste,
Sam.

PS – If you’re wondering what happened to that home page project I had going a while ago, well… it’s still being worked out. Once I get some serious free time from homework and classes I’ll be able to really sit down and start dat der coding for it.

My best bud Will McCarry is just now releasing his long-awaited debut solo album, In Flight. He’s been working on it for quite a while, and it really shows. It’s an awesome selection of songs, and you should all definitely pick it up. Yours truly even makes an appearance on at least one song. Right now the only way to get the whole album is from him, though I’m working with him on a way to put it up online for free. Maybe I’ll even host it here on ChasingLilly.net! You can, however, check out some of the songs at either his Facebook Fan Page or his Myspace. And while you’re over on Facebook, be sure to become a fan!

In preparation for the album, our quite good friends Mel Kobran and Nathaniel Tonelli worked on an album cover for the CD. You can see the finished back cover/cover (respectively) for the album below. They did a really great job, and Mel did a great job putting it all together in Photoshop. All the elements are real, from the hand drawn planes to the coffee stain (which is actually an orange juice stain, but who needs to know?). As always, click to enlarge and by doing so, enjoy.

While they worked on the cover, I simultaneously worked on designing the inside of the album booklet. I finally finished yesterday at 4 AM, and figured I could share a few of the pages with you. But I won’t share them all, some surprises should be left for when you get your hands on a copy of the album!

In Flight booklet pages 1 & 2

In Flight booklet pages 5 & 6

I think it turned out quite well, but then again I am a bit biased. So far the response has been positive, though, so that’s a good sign. Regardless it was a lot of fun branching out into the design of album art. The awesome photos from the booklet were taken by Mel as well. She’s a photography major at VCU, so go over to her flickr or some place and support her. Another friend of mine, Billy Bacci, is also releasing an album soon (he claims next week) and has asked me to do something for him. I can smell another late-night-team-album-art-creating venture coming! Where’s my album? It’s coming…

So go pick up a copy of In Flight from Will, and I’ll keep everyone else updated on where they can download a copy of the album on the interwebz. Soon, very soon. In fact by tomorrow. No joke. I know, it’s crazy how much I’m suddenly blogging. And yes, I realize I’m just having a conversation with myself at the computer.



Happy Trails,
Sam.