Mike Milo’s Journal

So the last week has been extremely difficult and frustrating for me concerning my computer…My computer. What can I say? It’s not happy and no I ‘m not typing it so I did not solve the problem.
On Tuesday I came up to my studio (a converted guest house in the back) to find a command prompt with the words

Can Not Find the file hal.dll… Please reinstall it and continue.

Well that first of all sucks because it means that my data on there is gone… but that’s not really that bad, having so many other times where I had problems with hard drives etc. I have been diligent with backing up my files and seldom even put them on the C Drive so I was pleased with myself that I had beaten Micro$oft in it’s attempts to destroy me!

I actually laughed out loud!

Still, it meant a complete reinstall which bites.
Fine.

So I fire up my trusty, fully legal I might add, copy of Windows XP but guess what…

The #@%$@^^ computer won’t start from a %!$@$#^ CD.

Greeeaaaaaaat!

I tried 12 times but it wouldn’t start no matter what I did.

I know, I know… there are those of you thinking right now that I needed to set the BIOS to boot from CD first right?

Well I DID that.

Still didn’t work.
So now I’m thinking my computer is fried. Completely gone… crying in the Netherworld heap of dead computers wailing in some cyber-world of doom. Crying for me.
DAMN IT!

Well, I just turned the damn thing off and cursed for a while as I do, kicking things in my path as I stalked around my tiny little studio inventing new curse words and vowing to destroy all computers because I hated them fiercely….

I stalked out of the room raising my one fingered salute towards the new-born door stop that was once my friend.

About a half hour later I came back and remembered I had left my boot disk in the drive so I fired it up fully knowing that it was going to blatently laugh at me with it’s missing file. taunting… DARING me to find new words to curse it with.

Well I was up for the challenge!

I started that sucker up and thought of a few choice new curses made up explicitly for my stupid computer.

But it didn’t happen.

The damn thing started up and booted from the friggin’ CD!

WTF!?!?!?

Anyway, so I reinstalled the operating system and all was great for about two days… My computer and I had made friends… we danced merrily hand in hand in cyber space glancing at one another furtively… There qas nothing that could break us apart.

Or was there?

Suddenly in the midst of my exploration of 3D bliss and learning my selfish and careless computer absent-mindedly lost the frickin hal.dll file yet again! STUPID FOOLISH COMPUTER!

SO NOW?

I JUST DON’T KNOW.

It’s dead. My computer is gone. In the archives. Deceased. An EX Computer.

And me?

HAH! I’m using my Mac Mini!
The one I loathed and sneered at, laughing at it’s silly slow ass beach ball and it’s lazy candy cane attitude dancing happily as I turn it on.

I HATE that.

A man and his wife are awakened at 3 o’clock in the
morning by a loud pounding on the door.

The man gets up and goes to the door where a drunken
stranger, standing in the pouring rain, is asking for a push. “Not A chance,” says the husband, “it is three o’clock in the morning!”

He slams the door and returns to bed.

“Who was that?” asked his wife. “Just some drunk guy asking for a push,” he answers.

“Did you help him?” she asks.

“No, I did not, it is three in the morning and it is pouring out!”

“Well, that wasn’t a very Christian thing to do.

Can’t you remember about three months ago when we broke down and those two men helped us?”

I think you should go help him, and you should be
ashamed of yourself!”

The man does as he is told, gets dressed, and goes out into the pounding rain.

He calls out into the dark, “Hello, are you still there?”
“Yes,” comes back the answer. “Do you still need a push?” calls out the husband.

“Yes, please!” comes the reply from the dark. “Where are you?” asks the husband.

“Over here on the swing!” replies the drunk.

An atheist was walking through the woods.
“What majestic trees”!
“What powerful rivers”!
“What beautiful animals”!
He said to himself.

As he was walking alongside the river, he heard a rustling in the
bushes
behind him. He turned to look. He saw a 7-foot grizzly charge towards
him.
He ran as fast as he could up the path. He looked over his shoulder &
saw that the bear was closing in on him.

He looked over his shoulder again, & the bear was even closer. He
tripped & fell on the ground. He rolled over to pick himself up but saw that
the bear was right on top of him, reaching for him with his left paw &
raising his right paw to strike him. At that instant the Atheist cried out,
“Oh my God!”

Time Stopped.
The bear froze.
The forest was silent.

As a bright light shone upon the man, a voice came out of the sky.
“You deny my existence for all these years, teach others I don’t exist and
even credit creation to cosmic accident.” “Do you expect me to help you out
of this predicament? Am I to count you as a believer”? The atheist looked directly into the light, “It would be hypocritical
of me to suddenly ask You to treat me as a Christian now, but perhaps You could make the BEAR a Christian”?

“Very Well,” said the voice.

The light went out. The sounds of the forest resumed. And the bear
dropped his right paw, brought both paws together, bowed his head & spoke:

“Lord bless this food, which I am about to receive from thy bounty
through Christ our Lord, Amen.”

Here’s some animation I did for the show Tazmania back in 1992. I did what is called the key poses, meaning all the major poses. then we sent it overseas to Taiwan and they in-betweened my poses. Fun huh?

Bananamation is a short film my fellow students and I made back in 1988 for our senior year at The Joe Kubert School of cartoon and Graphic Art in Dover, NJ. each student took the last drawing of the previous student and used that as their first drawing. My animation is the banana trying to get away from the pumpkin and the banana at the end as he turns off the TV.

I am so glad that I had kids! My daughters are beautiful and sweet and funny and smart. They make me a proud father.

It’s interesting to note that being a father is really the only thing that has allowed me (forced me) to grow up. It’s alos given me a way to understand God’s grace for us, or for me at least. I have often wondered how God can forgive me for being the ass that I am, the things that I repeatedly do wrong and the trouble that I cause myself and His Kingdom. then I look at my daughters and mine reationship and I suddenly understand ti all. god feels the same way about me that I do about my kids. Sure they do stuff that ticks me off and that I think is bone-headed. sure, sometimes I want to yell at them. sure they annoy me at times. But even if they drove a car through our home and in to the pool I would still love them.Still forgive them and still eventually be fine with it. I believe God is the same way.

Yeah He hates when you act like an idiot, yeah He hates it when you do something He specifically told you to not do. Does He still love you? Sure! Does He still want to be with you? Of course! Is He mad at you? Sometimes. But He still loves you no matter what you do. some people think that there is no way that God can forgive them for the stuff they have done in ther lives. “Oh I could never go to church, it’d fall down when I walked inside.” I have heard that phrase more than once but the truth is that God, like a true Father, you no matter what sort of crap you get yourself into and He’s always ready to give you a hug when you need it.

So this Fathers Day, I say thank you to the original Father… God.

…and of course to my own Father who never yelled at my brother and I when we crashed through a hallway wall and into a closet. Or when we yell at him for not visiting us enough or not taking our advice when we all invested in a restaurant and he lost it.

I love my dad, regardless, just like he loves me.

Happy Father’s Day to all you Dads out there., it is one of the greatest gifts you can receive.

It’s the end of an era.

Warner Bros Animation, after almost twenty years of cranking out hits and more than 22 Emmy Awards is shutting it’s doors. I have heard they will restructure on the Warner Lot in Burbank and I am sure they will succeed yet again but for me it’s still the closing of a huge chapter of my life.

WBA started the 2nd Golden Age of Animation and really in a lot of ways ushered in the way for studios like Nickelodeon, Disney Channel and Cartoon Network to start up themselves. Back in 1989, they OWNED kid’s TV and I am extremely proud to say I was a part of it.

It’s really sad to see WB close it’s doors. For me it is like a family moving away, one you’ll never see again. The kind folks at WB gave me my first break on Tiny Toons way back in 1989 freelance in-betweening for a studio called Kennedy Cartoons (when they sub contracted the work out to them) while I was still in NJ. Then again they gave me my next big break when they hired me to work full time on Tiny Toons, Animaniancs and Tazmania doing layout for them. They yet again helped me when they gave me first directing job years later on Pinky and the Brain (I moved up) Histeria and Detention.

They next gave me yet another big break when they collaborated with Cartoon Network to help me make Swaroop, the first cartoon starring an East Indian boy. But wait! There’s more! A few years later, they hired me to not only direct Xiaolin Showdown, but also picked up TWO development projects (Knights of Sherwood and The Jackalope Boyz)  with me at the same time!

I spent 8 years there off and on during my career and some of the memories were the best I’ve had professionally and personally. I met my wife through a P.A. working on Tazmania. I got married while working on Animaniacs, my wife had our first daughter while I was working on Pinky and the Brain and I lost my grandmother as well during that show’s production. We had our second daughter during the production of Histeria. I lost my mom during production of Swaroop.

A large part of my personal memories are tied in some way to that studio. I owe quite a debt to Warner Bros. and Jean McCurdy, Tom Ruegger, Christopher Keenan, Linda Steiner and Sander Schwartz. They have helped to keep me employed and gave me many good years of memories.

That’s all Folks!