Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

I watched today’s fights, and WTF was up with that Matt Hughes vs. Henzo Gracie fight, especially the last round? The last time Hughes faced a Gracie (Royce Gracie at UFC 60) was odd enough, with his opponent refusing to tap out (so Matt let him go and knocked him out a moment later rather than break the stubborn ass’s arm), but the final round of tonight’s fight was too weird. Matt was dominant throughout the match, but every time he’d get a solid hit, he’d back off and allow him time to recover. By the last round, it looked as if Henzo could be knocked out with a single finger, and in one case, a single blow put Henzo to the matt. Instead of finishing the fight, Hughes waited a moment as Gracie recovered, and then — I kid you not — helped him to his feet. WTF? At this point Gracie was just stumbling around, and eventually Matt threw a few half-hearted punches to get the fight stopped as a TKO — punches that I’m pretty sure even I could survive, and I’m quite certain were thrown only so that a TKO could be announced from the fight’s action, rather than Henzo Gracie just collapsing of his own accord.

Given that Matt Hughes promised to “bring back the violence” to MMA during this fight, what a joke it was. One of the lamest fights ever, and really not something I would have expected from either of these two so-called “legends”. Boo! BOOOO!

At first, Anderson Silva’s headline fight was hilarious, and wow, he really seemed so far out of the league of his challenger… It was as if he was fighting a child. That said, really weird as well with over-the-top clowning, a strange sort of fuck you to everyone that the crowd had no idea how to react to — I’m not entirely sure what he was trying to say and I wish he’d spent a little more energy finishing the fight and a little bit less entertaining me (and good for the ref for eventually penalizing him for it). The reasonable explanation I suppose is that he gassed unexpectedly, and then played it safe to ensure that he wouldn’t lose his title (and his record). Either way, highlight of the night.

[Edit: Caitlin says that her friends are saying both fights were rigged].

I doodled this during the fights…

I just love doodling mini-animations (I’m sure you’ve already noticed the one by my comments form) and one of the nice things about Pencil is that its extreme simplicity means you can get right to animating, as if you had a pad of paper and a lightbox and a pencil. I’ve got to come up with a cool one for somewhere on Caitlin’s blog next, but I’m not sure what to draw… I really could do these things endlessly, but unfortunately, it’s not something one can make a living off of.

I’m quite looking forward to this upcoming week, because I’m “going back to school”. That’s exaggerating a little bit but not much — the truth is that I’m actually taking a few three or four month courses, one in Maya (3D animation), one in Massive (“Multiple Agent Simulation System in Virtual Environment” — I anticipate much joy in this $20,000 tool), and a more general one in compositing, with classes starting this week in each. I’ve been having so much fun doing 2D animation in Pencil that I thought I’d get my feet wet with some more advanced stuff.

I think also that it helps me a lot, in terms of the placebo/distraction element of pain control, to do activities that require concentration and satisfy a certain repetitive self-hypnotizing obsession that causes one to focus for long periods on something other than physical discomfort. I’ve been having sharp shooting pains inside my thigh muscles, which is unusual because most of what I have is more of a dull throbbing pain, and I realized that the pain was surrounding the location of the muscle biopsy surgery in which I was opened up and a finger-sized bit of muscle was amputated for analysis. I assumed that by now it would be healed and my leg would be back to “normal”, but the chasm where it was taken out is not only still there, but it’s larger, and there’s a large groove in the muscle through which I could probably touch the bone if I wanted (but I don’t). Equal parts gross and frightening. There are other troubling problems but nothing worth thinking about this late at night lest it murder nice dreams.

In about a week I’m heading in to the hospital to have a suite of new genetic tests done to try and narrow down the specifics of the disease, which is also good because it will answer the horrible questions like whether Nefarious or any future children are (or could be) carriers, or worse yet, could be affected themselves. I would feel awful if this turned out to be true.

Also in a week, and in much more fun news, we’re going to the pinball and coin-op auction to see if we can find anything good for the studio. Dave’s got his eyes on a Jurassic Park pinball that sounds like it’s great entertainment, until the noise drives us nuts that is.