Note: this was originally published in Weighted Tangents, my Substack newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.

I love to fight. I feel like that’s an important thing to know about me, because it’s the biggest piece of myself that I’ve lost since the start of the pandemic.

In the before COVID era I was in the gym 2—5 hours a day, six days a week, training. My favorites were boxing and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ), but I’d take Muay Thai, kickboxing, and conditioning classes as well. I’d get in the ring (or on the mat) with anyone, and found out pretty early on how much I loved sparring. It got to the point where I was beginning serious training for amateur boxing matches and considering BJJ competitions and wondering if my late 30s was “too old” to go pro.

As a chronic over-thinker there were three things that training to fight did for me:

1. It forced me to deal with the present moment. I didn’t have time to worry about the ever-expanding list of all of the hypothetical things that could go wrong in my future, because at the present moment a 6’5” 300# man was trying to walk me down and punch me in the face.
2. It gave me something incredibly challenging to focus on learning, with progress and results that I could literally see on a daily basis (I was horrifically awful when I first started training - most of us are - but I thought I had a natural talent 💅).
3. It taught me to take myself a lot less seriously and to live more boldly. What’s the worst thing that could happen to me if the thing I did for fun involved full-speed combat sports? (I still get nervous sending emails though.)

The outsized influence Rocky IV has had on my life

As a kid I re-watched Rocky IV like my life depended on it. I can’t explain the chokehold this movie had on my life, only acknowledge it, because I grew up wanting to be Rocky. Which was a tough gig to get when your parents forbade you from learning how to fight. (They also heavily discouraged my passion for art and animation — look at me now, mom and dad!)

Rocky IV is notorious for many reasons, not least of which is this 9 minute banger of a training montage. At some point I’ll do some research and subject the world to a video essay on everything that’s happening here, because Rocky IV came out in 1981 against the backdrop of the Cold War (spoiler alert). It is, I am almost certain, a propaganda film that was meant to appeal to the ‘murican inside us all, but I don’t have anything other than a gut feeling to substantiate that claim. Yet.

Bring it home, Mostipak

I mention all of this because animation is the only thing that ever come close to fighting in terms of love, passion, and dedication. It’s a different kind of challenge, but it’s also something I’ll happily sit down and do for 5+ hours every night after work. I fell in love with animation slowly, then all at once.

Although it’s not like I don’t procrastinate. I’m writing this newsletter instead of doing my animation homework, which consists of animating a personality walk cycle. This assignment represents the first time they’ve let us off leash to make our own creative decisions, and while my classmates are choosing skips, sneaks, and stomps, I went with a roundhouse to the face.

1– I was surprised at how fast I’ve gotten with 3D character animation. When I sat down to plan out this assignment I figured it would take 20—30 hours, at minimum. When I had it done and was happy with it after ~8 hours it felt like I was missing something or had done something wrong.

2– Having done this drill myself (albeit without kicking as high) gave me a ton of insight into how it worked. I did work from a reference video, but knowing how it feels to be up on your toe, kicking your leg out, and how the hips should be positioned made this infinitely easier to reason about.

3– This is also the first time we’ve really had to consider all of 3D space, and wow did I make a mess of it. I did my first blocking pass using nothing but the side view that you see above, but when I looked at the animation through the front-view camera, I had feet on one side of the screen and the body on another. The bulk of my animation time was spent cleaning up this initial mess.

4– This is the most fun I’ve had animating in a really long time. Sure, I’ve enjoyed my previous assignments, but this? This was at an entirely different level. At this point I’m pretty sure that if I were left to my own devices I’d spend my time animating combat — all kinds of combat. Sword fighting, hand-to-hand combat, large battles, fist fights on stairwells, you name it. The dual challenges of animating the sheer physicality and the raw emotion of a good fight scene really appeals to me.

Release the drafts!

All of my half-baked thoughts from this week’s TV binges

I’ve reached Season 8 of GoT, and having just finished The Long Night (AKA The Battle for Winterfell AKA Arya Saves the Gang) and knowing what’s in store over the next six episodes I might just call it quits here. We’ll see.

• There’s no way you can ride a dragon without freezing or falling off, and just by holding on to some horns? No ma’am.
• The first sign that season 8 was going to be a flop was when they butchered the opening title sequence.
• Even though the world doesn’t need another white knight story, I’d watch the absolute shit out of a Jamie Lannister biopic.
• I will never not be mad at how the season 8 show runners did the Dothraki dirty.
• Daenerys is an awful leader.
• The way Beric Dondarrion gives his life to save Arya 🥹