You are what you eat

First day of summer school, 3 hours of nutrition class, one hour break, then another 3 hours of physiology. Summer is best known for 'crash courses', like compressed biscuits. What could've been stretched out for 4 months is ruthlessly squeezed into half the duration. Various articles seem to suggest that the average concentration span of an adult is 20 minutes. How many '20 mintues' are there in a 3 hour lecture? My neurons can't just keep firing to keep my brain awake. I managed to stay attentive during nutrition class but failed miserably during the first half of physiology. The prof was going over the structure of plasma membrane for ??? see if I care to count the no. of times they go over that age old topic. Just get over it and keep going!

"You are what you eat." there's an equivalent saying in Chinese (not sure if there exist more international versions of this consensus). If you eat junk potato chips, you're gonna be a fatty couch potato with unsightly soft layers around the belly. The Chinese perception is more amusing. I was thinking over that as the lecturer expanded on couch potato syndrome. Say you eat pig skin, which might call for 'yaks' from Western consumers, but we Asians don't give a damn. Some of us somehow believe that will nourish our own skin. And if you eat walnuts, you'll be smarter coz the shape of walnuts resembles the surface of grey matter. That's our understanding of 'you are what you eat'. The nature (shape, structure) of food complements and improves the corresponding part on our own body. This isn't totally unreasonable as the basic building block of living organisms doesn't differ much. Pig skin has collagen, the stuff you might injest under eyebags to puff ur withered skin up and make it smoother.

Canadian government is ridiculously particular on food labelling. The size of that 'nutrition fact', a small patch of data sheet on every food package has to be the exact dimension, specified to milimeter, or else you poor law ignorant manufacturers can wait for them to give you a heavy fine and have all your products pulled off the shelf. That's just the way it works. There're also so called general and specific claims, which might go something like 'This product does not contain any fermentable carbohydrate which may cause dental caries.' Guess how many millions of dollars they dump into research just to get this claim approved?! This amount of money could've saved millions of starved children in underdeveloped country and nobody gives a damn whether the sugar will dirll holes in their teeth! Sometimes I do think the Westerners are hypochondriacs, calculating calorie intake, carbo content, fat percentage... Blame it on thy diet! In 3 weeks' time or so I'll be able to do a complete nutrition analysis on my own diet. How brilliant!

Was starting to worry (maybe unecessarily) about the future of 2D animation. The advent of computer modelling and this blooming 'paperless industry' is threatening to overthrow traditional cell drawings, which are almost if not all aborted by Western animators anyway. Read a short review on current softwares such as Wacom and Cintiq which allow animators to draw directly on digital screens using sensitive pens. The great leap in efficiency will eventually overide any sentimentality of old paper art. Guess my 2D complex isn't the crux of concern. Sure you can model your art back to 2D or create digital watercolour effects(as applied in the Ghibli feature film 'My neighbour the Yamadas') or even more varieties, crayons, sketches, graphites, papercuts, clays and everything else within the realm of software magic, it's the ideologies and cultural elements within animation productions that play major roles in fortressing audience loyalty. That's why I prefer Ghibli/Production I.G./Go Fish films to Disney, or say Pixar animation (Pixar's not bad actually) The formers can be serious art house movies while the latter is targeted more towards younger fun-loving children and the magic's just waned on me. Whatever the reason, I do hope more markets will open for new competitors, and really wish our own country can pick up the pace soon. The upcoming Ghibli film 'Gedo Senki' is near production's end. I'm interested to know whether it's a hit or flop. The impact will be major, not only financially.

I haven't written a proper blog for so long. Feels good!