2007 was a good year, plenty of good things happened in my life. But personally, it was a year in which I felt I lost some of my creativity. In '05, when I started this blog, creativity was flowing through my veins in dangerously high quantities. In fact, there was a day when I actually saw creativity coming out of the pores of my skin. Crazy stuff. There was a slight decline in creativity for '06. But last year, the decline was drastic.

Let's all take a moment to weep for me...

(pause)

And... pity party over.

For Christmas, the boy received the Pixar Animated Shorts DVD. The boy and I are huge Pixar fans, and the DVD has been a big hit in our house. We've watched the shorts a million times (with a couple of exceptions, because they're not really 3-year old appropriate). One night, I sat down and watched each short film with the director's commentary turned on, as well as the 20-ish minute documentary on Pixar itself.

Since that night, for the first time in a long time, I've felt creatively inspired. I've been back to doing things like photography (for fun), beatboxing, doodling, and making up songs in my head (though I only sing them at home, so don't expect any on-blog performances).

I've decided that this will be my theme for 2008. Creativity. Though I know I can't make myself be creative (I tried it last year, doesn't work), I can do things to help foster creativity, and I can certainly stop stifling it.

In going with that theme, I was thinking about some things I plan to do on this blog, like make the final "The Chase" movie (Volume 3 was in December 06! I can't believe it's been that long!), or working on the next blog redesign. While doing that, I started thinking about whether I finally wanted to give the ol' blog a better name. So I found an anagram finder online, and I put in "omarphillipsnet" to see what it would come up with. Though I didn't find any really fitting candidates for this site, there were several amusing ones (including a few that don't use PG-rated language), and it led to me spending way too long coming up with pretend themes for blogs with names like "Lineal Shrimp Pot." It was late, I was a little loopy. But it's exciting for me, because that sort of tom foolery often leads to some pretty fun creations.

So here are a few of the highlights from that evening, unnecessarily placed in the form of a looping animation. (There were many more that included the word "pimp," but I only included the two that were my favorites.)

opnet2.gif

I'm not sure I'm ready to rename this blog, but should I ever create a new one, it will be named either "Lethal Pimp Irons" or "Thin Plop Realism."