Pond Scum: Partygeddon

Pond Scum: Partygeddon is a film about three lowlifes, Algee, Oozer and Ewwglena, who set out to throw a party to end all parties, and get a little more than they bargained for. Their scrappy friendship will be all that keeps them alive by the end of the night. The film is hand drawn 2d animation created in Toon Boom Harmony and composited with original, hand-painted, watercolor backgrounds in Adobe After Effects. The soundtrack is a mix of original songs by the bands Pond Scum, Lord Scum, and Sh*t Rat. This paper is both a documentation of the process of making the film, as well as a reflection on the motivations and the inspirations to do so. It’s a rare opportunity to be able to follow your own creative path and not without its own pitfalls, but for some of us a comical amount of student debt is no deterrence against pursuing the creative life. As my grandfather would say about buying a car on credit, “Five hundred dollars down and the chase is on.” This film is my opening sprint in the chase. Pond Scum: Partygeddon is an homage to the spirit of Do It Yourself, and to everyone who attempts to create the world they want now, without waiting for permission. The film hides its heart behind belches and clouds of smoke, but proudly raises a salty salute to losers, miscreants and weirdos everywhere. As American media is consolidated into fewer and fewer hands, and our culture ossifies around this monolith built by the hoarding of wealth and power, the only place for creatives to go is into the basement, the garage, the bedroom. As unfettered expression is pushed to the fringes of society, the polish gets rougher, the art noisier and the mess bigger. To me, Pond Scum: Partygeddon is that mess, and it’s a mess dear to my heart -- a loud collaboration with friends for the sake of collaborating, a god awful ruckus in the middle of the night that wakes up half the neighborhood

Pronunciation Keys in Dictionaries of Place-names

Place-names are part of the vocabulary of speakers of English as well as an important category of proper nouns in print. Like the rest of the lexicon of English, place-names, spoken or written, have had a long history of change and development. Spellings of most of the general vocabulary have evolved toward a standardized form, with the letters of the alphabet in ideal cases paralleling the sounds of the spoken form. Nations employing the alphabet often aim toward a phonemic spelling of the word-stock, with one symbol or sequence of symbols representing one phoneme, or distinctive sound, despite the fact that many mismatches or anomalies may have been inherited in traditional spellings frozen in previous centuries. With its Anglo-Saxon and Romance roots and classical borrowings, the English language is especially noteworthy for its numerous exceptions to a close relationship between the sounds of the words and the letters of the spelled forms. This mismatch is one of the reasons why many dictionaries for schools, offices,and libraries record both the accepted spellings and the pronunciations of words (Collins 1987,American Heritage 1992, Canadian Oxford 1998)

Caring for Monsters

There are five overlapping ethical objections to the creation of chimera: 1) Unnaturalness; 2) Species Integrity; 3) Moral Taboo; 4) Environmental Risk and 5) Chimera Welfare. This chapter will briefly outline the first four, before arguing that considerations of chimera welfare provides us with a strong reason against the creation of some, but not all, chimera. According to the argument from unnaturalness it is simply not our place to intervene in the basic mechanisms of nature. Critics of this view often challenge the coherence of any distinction between nature and human convention and the implicit assumption that nature is perfect as it is . Furthermore, it is often argued that, ad absurdum, the argument leads us to condemn as immoral the damning of rivers and the ploughing of fields..