Jhonen is 1 year old today! Hooray!
And of course we have the obligatory chocolate cake pictures. Enjoy. 
And just for kicks and grins, that one there at the end is a reminder of what he looked like this time last year.
*Sniff* My little boy’s growing up so fast!
Here are a few more cleaned up pics. One of them shows a better view of the beautiful pirate treasure chest that Jhonen’s great-grandpa made for him.
When we were up in Kansas City over Halloween, we got some good pictures taken of Jhonen by a semi-pro photographer, who gave us the DVD with all the original high-rez photos. Nice. So I’ve taken a couple of the better ones and retouched them a bit. Jhonen didn’t do much smiling, unfortunately, but he still looked pretty cute anyway.
Finally got a new stick of memory, so I can actually open Premiere without wanting to kill myself. Here’s a video from a couple months ago, just a few days after Jhonen had learned to crawl. He was still a bit unsteady. He’s a lot faster now, of course.
PS. I’m still trying to figure out how to use Premiere/AfterEffects to clean up the video a little bit. I know I just have a crappy consumer-grade DV camcorder, so I’m not expecting Lord of the Rings or anything. But cleaning up the graininess and evening out the lighting just a bit would be nice. If only I could edit video in Photoshop… *sigh*
Good to see you all again. Sorry about the whole shutting down Se7enet thing. It had to be done, you understand. It makes me unbelievably sad, too, to see it go. But it had to be done. It was bound to happen sooner or later, and I’ve poured far too much of myself into it to allow it to simply fall by the wayside and never get updated again – which, I have no doubt, would have indeed happened eventually.
On some level, I think, this is something of a polar opposite to what Se7enet was. When it was in its heyday, and I was a young and dumb college kid with all the time in the world, Se7enet was a place where I poured my creativity, such as it was, into the design of it. Admittedly, I don’t think I was ever that good. But I was proud of it, for whatever that’s worth. I would spend hours, days, weeks even, playing with Photoshop and 3dsmax and all kinds of programs that, if I am being totally honest with myself, I had no business playing with (at least then… now I’ve actually got formal training in some of them, so I’m a bit better off, right?), just to make something that, in my mind, looked awesome. Form over function, and all that rot. Hell, the entire existence of the site was because of some crappy desktop wallpaper I made back in high school where I’d stuck some goofy logo and the words “The Se7enet Project” down in the bottom corner.
Anyway, excepting the lovely Silk icons that adorn the various post details, there are exactly three images that comprise this site design. And two of those consist entirely of typography – which, for certain things, I am too much of a perfectionist to rely on a browser and your computer’s font selection to render. Every other part of the site is made with pure HTML and CSS. Rounded corners (for those of you using a real browser, anyway), padding, margins, floats, all that stuff… that’s what I do now. That’s what I like, and that’s what I like to spend my time on. That, and typography. Actually, come to think of it, given an unlimited supply of cash and the ability to change careers on a dime, I think typography designer would give game builder a run for it’s money. Graphics and all that Photoshopped goodness, all it does is get in the way, I think. (Believe me, I know better than anyone how insane and sacrilege that sounds, coming from me.)
So, welcome. This is me, now. Closing Se7enet was among the hardest things I’ve ever decided to do. But it was a necessary evil, and I am glad I did it. Because, like I said, this is me, now. Welcome to the new Jamin.
Let’s get things started with a couple videos. These are a bit old, from a few months ago. We’ve shot a couple newer videos of Jhonen crawling and stuff, but for now they’re still being worked on. One of the memory sticks in my computer died, so for now, opening up Premier is an exercise in futility. Once I get replacement memory ordered and installed, when I can actually edit video without my computer having a coronary, I will get the newer ones uploaded.
But for now, these will have to do. Click the links to view. If you don’t already have it, you will need Adobe Flash Player to watch them.
Here’s a couple pics of Jhonen’s awesome bath hair, because I need to test gallery posting.
I am still doing quite a bit of testing and tweaking on the new site, so please forgive anything that doesn’t look quite right. Once I finalize everything, we’ll try to be a bit more regular with the updates.
