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| Sunday, May 18th, 2008 | | 10:36 pm |
Sunday art   Managed to get two pieces done tonight although I had to spend a couple extra hours after the deadline to get the full color treatment finished. Personally I can't figure why anyone would draw Yappy in a maid outfit when they could have drawn Lilly, but hey. Current Mood: artisticCurrent Music: Dave Brubeck - Unsquare Dance | | Thursday, May 15th, 2008 | | 4:34 pm |
Nanohex example I tried looking up the movie intro for Metal Gear Solid 2 because this was one of the most blatant uses of the Nanohex Technobabble I talked about in my last post. In watching this again I noticed one aspect of the hexagon that I had completely forgotten: its presence in the chemical forumulas that are briefly sketched out amidst the flying text and diagrams. It's been a long, long time since I spent any time with chemistry and so I'm curious if these formala diagrams are legitimate or just another example of the hexagon usage for fanciful technology purposes. No matter what though you'll see hexagons aplenty here, and perhaps after watching you'll start recognizing their appearance in numerous other presentations. ...and since Youtube continues to be problematic for me here's a link to the video rather than an embedded file: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifPZsRgJIXE&feature=related# Current Mood:  thoughtfulCurrent Music: Portal - You're Not a Good Person | | Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 | | 11:38 am |
The nanohex technobabble. Or: Geometry as the face of the future. I thought I’d share an observation I’ve made recently. In visual entertainment it’s very important to convey ideas with symbols and other instant recognition traits for the viewers to grasp and understand, and I was struck by an example I’ve seen being used a LOT lately. I’ve dubbed this the “Nanohex Technobabble” and essentially it’s nothing more than this:  This simple shape is used over and over to represent cutting edge black-helicopter technology and you’ll see it everywhere: hyperadvanced mesh-weave battle suits, alien energy shields, fictional operating systems, and even virtual reality landmasses. I’ve even seen this shape used to show the fusing of “nanobots” with human blood cells to explain a type of regenerative superpower. There’s little rhyme or reason to the feasibility of this shape for each application aside from it’s usefulness as visual shorthand for “high technology” and because of this I’m finding humor in spotting all the places it pops up in, especially when it's plainly used for this symbolic purpose. I would trace the early appearance of this technological association with the hexagon to the pioneering work of Buckminster Fuller’s volumetric space designs and the subsequent “Buckyballs” but I don’t know the basis for the modern usage of the hexagon as hypertechnology building blocks and I’d be curious to learn if anyone has a good reference. This observation got me thinking to how technology was visually symbolized before the nanohexagon gained prominence and I figure that the square was where it was at in the 70’s and 80’s and before that stretching back to the 50’s was the triangle. The 70’s and 80’s saw the emergence of the computer as a commonplace tool whose language of mathematics was perfectly displayed by a rigid grid of right angles, or at base the square. I’ll bet everyone can think of a Hollywood or videogame example where a computer readout wouldn’t be complete if it didn’t have a grid display as part of the operating system or bootup sequence (and I’ll toss out the targeting displays in Star Wars as a freebie). Now that computer graphic displays are so commonplace and people are quick to claim video or photos as computer fakery the simple square gridlines have been superseded by the nebulous qualities of the hexagon, but you can still catch echoes of the square if you want to convey old technology or some level of very basic structural analysis. Going back further than the 70’s requires a different way of thinking because technology was visually linked to physical implementations rather than theoretical or virtual concepts. Back then the triangle, or “delta” was the in-shape to use because of its link with supersonic space-age rocket airplanes, and you could see the appearance of the delta in equally offbeat places: car fins, jacket collars, corporate logos, etc. I could make an argument that the circle or better yet the cone was the dominant technology shape for this time period but for me the triangle is much more appropriate in terms of symbolically depicting the concept of breaking into new territory. So that’s my random thought for the day. What examples can you come up with? And for extra entertainment what shapes would you think of that sum up the popular culture expression of the various technology eras? Current Mood: thoughtfulCurrent Music: X-Ray Dog - Heartbeat of Man | | Monday, May 5th, 2008 | | 10:26 am |
Activities Tracy's parents are in town visiting and we've been out and about or playing with Samantha since they arrived. We spent some time going through the farmers market on Saturday and then wandered through the downtown outdoor mall, and the weather was very pleasant... springtime weather that's neither cold nor yet hot and muggy. Quite enjoyable. For lunch yesterday I had some of the leftover Chinese food I brought home from work and I think I picked up some sort of stomache virus from it. I'm largely okay but my insides were very uncomfortable all night long. Still not fully recovered but I'm at least functional. No sunday art this week because I was busy with the inlaws, however I've been making updates to my convention art gallery at http://toonfox.artspots.com. Current Mood:  uncomfortable | | Thursday, May 1st, 2008 | | 4:07 pm |
Embedded Youtube videos question I presume this must be happening to other people so I'll ask and see if anyone has a solution. On both my home and work computer I'm running the latest version of Firefox with Adblock Plus running. These do a fantastic job of cleaning up the web browsing experience but I think they're contributing to the problem I'm about to explain. The problem is that when I go to the collected livejournal viewlist and see people posting Youtube videos invariably the videoclip is either blank or displaying a video that someone else had linked to in a different post than what is actually intended to be displayed. There's no rationale to what is shown save that it is always a video that was seen on the LJ list. None of the videos I see directly through Youtube or other sites which display embedded Youtube content get scrambled up in the LJ lists. When described this way I wonder if maybe there is something about Livejournal itself that is interferring with the proper display of videos. If I go into a person's direct LJ post then the video will play back properly, but in the aggregate view list it doesn't. What could be causing this and can it be fixed without making major adjustments to the way I've configured my browser? Current Mood:  curious | | 12:22 pm |
Fortune cookie Today for lunch we had Chinese food, which naturally means we also had fortune cookies. Normally these are entirely disposable pontifications that make you feel like several braincells died just from reading the inane thing, but today mine was a doozy: "German proverb: No trees ever reach the sky." I was a little taken aback by this as images of a German infiltration unit taking over the Chinese fortune cookie factory filled my imagination. I showed it to Betty whose father used to run a Chinese restaurant and she was as perplexed as I, -except that she's the sort who has to figure things out and she set about to googling the damn thing and came up with this wonderful blog post by someone else who also got this same fortune. Great stuff! http://untiuntiunti.blogspot.com/2008/02/fortune-cookie.html Current Mood:  amused | | Sunday, April 27th, 2008 | | 8:51 pm |
Sunday art  I couldn't come up with a (good) gag to go with this so I just had fun drawing. edit: Also I've uploaded some other things recently to my gallery. More to see here: http://toonfox.artspots.com/ Current Mood: busy | | Thursday, April 24th, 2008 | | 11:19 am |
Steam question
...and I guess I should clarify that I'm talking about the Steam download service rather than just plain old *steam* steam.
Back when Half Life 2 came out I bought it off of Steam. Total digital distribution means that I didn't get a box with a cd / dvd disc for installation but rather I can just download the files from Steam whenever I need to install it again. My question is if I buy the Orange Box retail (which requires a Steam account) does that mean I'm able to access the downloadable installation of the game?
Curious how this works. | | Sunday, April 20th, 2008 | | 8:58 pm |
Sunday art  Whole bunch of references to today's date tonight. Couldn't get away from them. All over the place. Current Mood: busy | | 12:32 am |
CH-53 building I've finally gotten my photos edited and assembled onto my Flickr account and ready for viewing.In all I ended up taking 1147 pictures and 6.15 GB in a timeframe of less than nine hours... that's a new record for me! Next airshow I go to I'll be better prepared with extra batteries. I completely missed the chance to take photos of the giant fireworks show that took place after dark. One of the things that I don't know if I could have taken photos of at all would have been the nighttime formation flying team "Lima Lima". I don't know if this team is unique in their performance, but what they do is put special coordinated lights on their T-34 aircraft and fly different patterns over the demonstration area and create some really amazing illusions. The key is that the performance is well after sundown and the night sky hides the body of the planes leaving only the strobing lights visible. Instead of seeing six planes in a delta arrangement you simply see a giant delta shape of lights flying in the sky, and the real kicker is that the lights are synchronized together so that each plane isn't doing the same thing but working together to create the appearance of one big platform. What's more is the two planes on the outer edge of the delta have smoke trails turned on and a high intensity light shining down the length of the trail and the visual effect is of a heavy thrust pulse that further enhances the sensation you're looking at some sort of lit up UFO. It's very easy to imagine that someone would think they WERE looking at a UFO if they didn't get a good enough look or listen to the demonstration. Very, VERY cool. Unfortunately the weather was uniformly cloudy all throughout the day and so most of my photos ended up poorly lit and I had to do a lot of Photoshop manipulation in order to bring them back into an acceptable exposure range. Hopefully the end results are still entertaining enough. What I wouldn't give for a sharper, brighter telephoto lens... | | Friday, April 18th, 2008 | | 10:07 pm |
Happy birthday, Brad!
Eat cake, have fun, and be well!
Current Mood: busy | | Thursday, April 17th, 2008 | | 2:57 pm |
Where's and whens
For those who are interested we've gotten confirmation of our dealer's table for Further Confusion 2008 now, so that's another year we'll be in attendance. We've also got tables reserved for Anthrocon in June and Fur Fright in October. Hope to see lots of folks there!
Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Unreal Tournament - Botpack Nine | | Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 | | 10:53 pm |
Happy Birthday, Ruggels!
Hope things are keeping real for you. Good luck with all that you're involved with! | | Sunday, April 13th, 2008 | | 9:32 pm |
Cold audience So far I've only got one photo up from the weekend but I wanted to make a brief post to say what I was doing this weekend. I'll cut and paste from the Flickr description: ------------------------------------- I've been to a lot of airshows over the years and one of the things that has commonly let me down is the lack of aerial helicopter performances. I was talking with my brother about this last fall and he suggested that I ought to try seeing Thunder Over Louisville because that airshow had quite a lot of helicopter demonstrations. No need to twist my arm! Louisville is close enough (relatively) that I could go out and back in a weekend and so I did... and am bleary-eyed now typing this after spending so much time on the road getting there and back. But man what a show! The whole event is part of a long celebration leading up to the Kentucky Derby which is held locally at Churchill Downs, and "Thunder" is the big kickoff. There's an ENORMOUS fireworks demonstration that is the climax for the day's activities and I definitely wasn't disappointed. I *DID* however run out of batteries and wasn't able to shoot any of the fireworks... first time I've ever taken so many pictures that I ran down two fully charged batteries. Wow. The temperatures were shockingly cold... 38 degrees with the windchill and I was not adequately prepared as I had been told the previous year had been hot and sunburn-weather. Fortunately Dad had a spare sweater he loaned me and Kevin brought a spare pair of gloves which helped out tremendously. Definitely going back next year as the helicopter demonstrations were outstandingly cool, even if they were on the smaller scale of things than last year. | | Sunday, April 6th, 2008 | | 8:59 pm |
Sunday art  Quick update with tonight's artjam piece. The real triumph of tonight is that for the first time in a good long while I had no fear at all of my computer crashing or applications failing while working and was able to take it easy. I may need to look into my scanning procedure however because my black ink lines are becoming riddled with single pixel white values instead of black and that's making it a lot more work to create colored lines and proper color flood fills. I don't know if the scanner settings have been altered or whether the scanner itself is suffering problems because these aren't typical results that I'd gotten consistently in the past.... Current Mood: busy | | Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 | | 12:42 pm |
W00t! I had to make a post about this, oh yes. After years of turmoil with the Alienware mess of tech support I've finally gotten a new computer. Bought the components from Newegg.com last week and got the parts assembled yesterday after work, then went home and started the process of installing the OS and applications. I've only had the thing operational now for a few hours but in that time I can say that the performance is really nice and capable of running some benchmark software that my old computer couldn't. I also have decent to great warranties for all the parts which serve me well if anything goes wrong. Today I put the various rebates in the mail. Here's the breakdown of the components: Motherboard: Asus P5N-D PSU: 610w Case: Antec 900 CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4ghz RAM: 4gb DDR2 800 Corsair Video: EVGA GeForce 9600GT Sound: Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty OS: Vista home premium The rest of the parts (hard drive, cd/dvd, floppy, monitors, keyboard, mouse) I transferred over from the old computer. Very happy now. | | Sunday, March 23rd, 2008 | | 10:05 pm |
  I was running dry on ideas tonight and so I ended up using my fall back of violence and implied violence. I should have worked screaming in there as well to make this even better. :) The other picture is a fun interpretation of Erika's new costume. Current Mood: busyCurrent Music: Air - Don't Be Light | | Monday, March 17th, 2008 | | 8:00 pm |
NASCAR Food City 500 Pretty tired here after a busy weekend. I spent my time travelling to Tennessee to meet up with my brother and attend the big NASCAR Food City 500 race and had a pretty good time despite my relative lack of knowledge about the intricacies of the sport. I left on Saturday and had a pretty decent drive until bad weather just north of Tennessee fouled up my attention resulting in me getting lost and an additional hour tacked onto my drive. After finally meeting up with Kevin we headed out for dinner and tried to find a good place for a baked potato. Ended up at Applebees which had a potato, but not really as a meal potato. Eh. Kevin had brought his laptop along with some Netflix discs and we watched "Into the Wild", which I'd been interested in seeing for awhile. It was just as I'd expected and really fed into my own enjoyment of road trips. The story was a really fascinating portrayal of a young college guy whose idealism for nature and self determination took him further than his experience could support, but for all the tragic underpinnings of the story the movie rarely wavered from confident, upbeat point of view of the protagonist. Definitely a film I'd like to see again sometime. Got up bright and early on Sunday to make our way to the speedway and tried out a different parking lot than we used last year, which turned out to be a huge improvement. Since we arrived a couple hours before the start we killed time by playing old emulated NES games on my DS, -Kevin got a hoot out of playing Tecmo Bowl and Castlevania again while I made progress on Blaster Master. Our seats were a little higher than last year but that made little difference since the stadium is so compact by other speedway standards. We saw everything save for those views blocked by the people who might be standing in front of us. I don't follow the season and point standings so I have little awareness of the different teams and drivers but I remember having a good time watching the 31 car from last year's race and decided I'd keep an eye on him for the duration. Jeff Burton (#31) did a good job in sticking reliably in the 5th position throughout the race but he seemed to give up a position without much trouble and I figured that he'd eventually wind up somewhere in the bottom half of the top ten, but surprisingly there was a lot of shakeup in the last ten laps and some bad luck with the leadership and he wound up overtaking the lead in the very last lap to score the win. Sweeeeet. I spent most of the race trying to take a bunch of interesting pictures. Since #31 wasn't constantly making changes I kept my watch on other potential competition areas (ie: groups of cars bunching up) and tried to understand how you drive so fast and so tight and not suffer intense pileups. It was definitely engaging and the various breaks for spins and cars breaking provided some extra excitement. The sight of the #84 car (pictured here) trailing a huge lick of flame was one of the most interesting by far, but since I couldn't hear anything above the din of the engines I still don't know what actually happened. If you'd like to see some of the other photos I took from the race check out the surrounding images in the set I've uploaded for the race. I think there's some good ones there. After the checkered flag was waved Kevin and I quickly returned to our cars and managed to get out of the parking lot a heck of a lot faster than last year: 30 minutes in the lot and 30 minutes to the interstate, as opposed to 60+ minutes for each leg last year. That was a relief and meant that I was able to get back home around midnight instead of 3am. | | Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 | | 9:35 am |
One of the signs you work for an engineering company: Pi Day
Every month the company celebrates the various people whose birthday falls in that period. Usually this occurs on or near the last day of the month, but today's email announced that March's birthday celebration will be known as π Day, which (obviously!) will mean instead of birthday cakes there'll be pies served at 3:14.15pm on Friday, March 14th. Did I mention the company also has a high percentage of geeks?
I apparently had a touch of food poisoning on Monday which left me feeling a little confused because my gut was uncomfortable, my joints were aching, and I'd have brief chills, but none of this was accompanied by sinus problems or headaches which left me thinking I must have not gotten a good night's sleep rather than being truly ill. I took some ibuprofen after coming home and slept for 11 hours and work up yesterday feeling a lot better.
I missed the opportunity to post about the Space Shuttle launch on Tuesday, but since the launch occured around 2am local time I wouldn't have been able to see it anyway although perhaps folks on the west coast would. The current mission finally adds the Japanese to the ISS the first portion of their laboratory. Also lofted is the new Canadian robot "Dextre" which will provide extra remote manipulation control outside of the station without the need for as many spacewalks. I was amused by one interview with an astronaut who described the robot as rather "monstrous" but qualified his remarks with obligatory (hah!) comment that he wasn't worried "about the robot taking control of the station".
I'm still holding out hope that I can make a trip down to the cape in August to see the planned shuttle launch to the Hubble telescope. As always the biggest hurdle will be in deciding whether or not I can take the time off without any real guarantee that the launch will occur within even a month of its desired schedule.
Current Mood: busy | | Monday, March 10th, 2008 | | 12:38 am |
Lundon icon  It's Lundon's birthday today and here's a little LJ icon in recognition of that. No prizes for guessing the reference used here but the real challenge of this icon was to make the reference clear enough that you could figure it out in the first place. Lots of different photoshop stuff going on here that I don't normally employ. :) Current Mood: artisticCurrent Music: NES Blaster Master - Theme of AREA 3: Techno (Photophage) |
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