War of the Worlds 2.0

Hope everyone had a Happy Halloween! If you didn't notice, my last two blog posts were a little... unusual.  While stargazing is a favorite pastime of mine, a few of the things I wrote about were... shall we say... "slanted" for entertainment purposes.  Hey, at least I'm telling you.  Hollywood never extends you that courtesy when they stretch scientific truths.  I'm talking to you, "The Day After Tomorrow" (though I still loves ya in my geeky way).

Everything I wrote about in my "Planetary Stargazing" post is 100% true.  Every time I take my telescope out, I look for Saturn and Jupiter first (and then I head over to the Orion Nebula and the Andromeda Galaxy, if the time of year is right).  It was, however, a setup for an online mulitplayer reenactment of Orson Welles' famous radio broadcast of "War of the Worlds."  It was called "War of the Worlds 2.0" and it was set in motion by these folks at Twitter.  Twitter, as many of you know, is a sort of broadcast mini blogging system.  Those of us who took part in the broadcast offered updates throughout the day as we made our way through the carnage and terror.  The puppet masters at WotW 2.0 told us what was going on so that we were all on the same timeline.  Obviously, I made more of these updates via Twitter than I did via my blog because in the event of an alien invasion, I would be FAR more likely to have my iPhone with me for Twitter updates than I would be to carry a laptop around for making coherent, lengthy observations.  Whether or not said iPhone (or even Twitter) would be up and running in such an event is another matter.  Hey, it's still fiction.

Which brings me to my "Flee?  Not me!" post.  Yeah, this one was a crock.  I mean, it's all real, but it wasn't observed two nights ago and no one was fleeing (that I know of).  The first two videos I linked to were taken about two years ago by local Colorado news traffic copters.  It is actually footage of a Russian rocket body re-entering the Earth's atmosphere.  It is NOT, as the idiots at Fox "concluded" the Quadrantid meteor shower.  For my full, original rant on that subject, read my post on Chicken Little and the Notion of God.  I mention it about halfway down.  The third video is footage of a fireball (big freakin' meteor) that someone captured.  I offered them up here on my blog as the kind of post a quizzical astronomy enthusiast/healthy skeptic would write if alien cylinders were raining down on the planet.

I, for the record, am not that healthy skeptic.  I would simply assume they were UFOs and run around pointlessly through the streets, praying to whatever god would take me.  I mean, I've seen movies.  Duh.  Ahem.

If you are interested in reading about my "very bad day," I will be posting my tweet feed within a day or so (I have to move into my new house first).  I'll included a couple of other folks for clarity's sake (because I "reply" to them), but there were too many players who made this fun for me to really list everyone.  You can also see the archive of the entire War of the Worlds 2.0 event here.

Planetary Stargazing

I have to say, it is always a pleasure to look at the planets when stargazing. They are sometimes shockingly bright. Venus is so striking that it is often called in as a UFO when it is at its brightest. Even if you don't have a telescope, the planets "stand out" in their way in the heavens- they don't twinkle as much as their neighboring stars, they are always in a different place in the sky, and their colors tend to stand out (particularly Mars, which is a bright red/orange). However, if you DO have a telescope, they can be a real treat. The first time I looked at Saturn through a telescope, I remember seeing the shadow cast by the rings on its globe. I suddenly felt very dizzy and became keenly aware of the fact that I was standing on a similar globe- a "planet" called Earth. I realized that the solid ground upon which I was standing was in fact a sphere hurtling faster than I could imagine through the vastness of space (a sphere many times smaller than the one I was looking at through the telescope).

Many people never experience this sense of smallness and wonderment. I might add that many of these people also tend to be the "skeptical" voices when it comes to life outside of this planet. Once you start reflecting upon the vastness of space and the variety within our own solar system, extraterrestrial life doesn't seem to be so far-fetched. In fact, we seem to be making new discoveries of extra-solar planets, and possibly even Earth-like planets, every day. Just one more variable becoming more of a certainty in the famous Drake equation supporting the likelihood of extraterrestrial life!

If you have clear skies and even a good pair of binoculars, I suggest trying to find Jupiter (and its four largest moons, which are easy to see with a small telescope), Saturn (and its rings), and of course, the red home of many a terrestrial science experiment: Mars (and its ice caps). I plan on doing so tonight, as we are having unseasonably warm weather and crystal-clear skies! In fact, it's odd how still it is right now...

Don't Vote. Wait... what?

The original sarcasm video went viral and prompted thousands to go and register to vote (reverse psychology works every time... or doesn't it?)  This is Steven Spielberg's remake (or a spoof remake, anyway).  I think it's hilarious.  You know, just in case you aren't one of the people swayed by reverse psychology: Oh, and if you live in the USA and are registered, go vote.  Even if you're cynical about it.  Seriously, we are required to do so little to actually live in this country is it really that big of an inconvence to make some federal-level choices once every four years?

Don’t Vote

Magic Mirror

I think I need one of these.  The more I think about it, the more I know it to be true. Interactive Mirror from Alpay Kasal on Vimeo.

The Evil League of Evil

It's pretty safe to assume that when I do not update my blog regularly, it is because I am working on a project.  There have been quite a few things I've wanted to write about: how disappointed I am in this new season of Heroes (and conversely, how NOT disappointed I've been in Fringe), how excited I am that the winter constellations/Messier objects are coming back, how much I LOVE my new PS3 (favorite games so far: Everyday Shooter, Ninja Gaiden Sigma, Echochrome and Stuntman: Ignition. I have others, but I haven't had time to really play them enough to know if I "love" them. Oh, and the Blu-Ray player is pretty nice, too.)   Ahem.  Yes, all of this and more has been on my mind lately. I find it hard to write coherently when something "big" is occupying my thoughts, however.  Lately, that's been quite a bit.  I injured my foot, which, despite the fact that it is purple and swollen and painful, my doctors have assured me is "nothing to be concerned about."  Whew!  All I have to do is stop using it ever.  While I don't invest heavily in the stock market, the financial weather has kept me patiently sitting at home, doubting my desire to just jump into L.A. in the immediate future.  That's fine.  In fact, it's so fine that I've signed a 1-year lease for a new bachelorette pad here in Boulder, not that such a thing cannot be broken if Pixar decides to hire me (which wouldn't be L.A. anyway, but that's beside the point).  My workload at my day job ballooned last week.  I've also just purchased a new (and by new, I always mean "used") car from a friend who is currently in Europe.  Oh, and I'm officially "single" again, which has been a strange realization.  To summarize: breaking up, buying a car from someone in Italy, busy at work,  moving, foot injury, and working on a new project (in addition to planning a website overhaul, but I'll save that story for later).

Now for the Project:

I would hope that the people who read my blog have seen Joss Whedon's "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" by now.  If you haven't, go watch it for free from hulu.  It's three 15-minute episodes.  Go ahead.  I'll wait.

You back?  Cool.  Fantastic, wasn't it?  What an outstanding trio of talent, guided by that Whedonesque sensibility!

So, now that you have the background, I will give you the scoop:  The DVD version of this "show" is going to be coming out relatively soon.  The creators have decided to hold a video contest in which we must make our argument for why we should be included in the Evil League of Evil.  The winners will be featured on the DVD and viewed by dozens and dozens of geeks worldwide!  I wrote and directed the below video and made it with my friend Robert Bowen, who is probably a bigger fan than even I am.  Camera and sound (and fancy equipment) by Carl Fuermann.

Oh, and there is some vocabulary you should be aware of:

Deus Ex Machina: any artificial or improbable device resolving the difficulties of a plot. Perepeteia: a sudden turn of events or an unexpected reversal. Anagnorisis: the critical moment of recognition or discovery, esp. preceding peripeteia.

All three will make an appearance...

Firefly

That was a great show, wasn't it? It made me love Summer Glau, who I've mentioned before on this blog. Her ballet performance as Cameron in "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" was way cool. Add that to her awesome butt-whooping scene in "Serenity" and it equals me as an uberfan. Any female who loves ballet and can kick major ass at martial arts ("sci-fi" martial arts, to boot) is a person I'd like to meet in real life someday. Alas, I didn't make it to her panel at Comic-Con (where I'm sure we would have met, had coffee, discussed politics and martial arts, exchanged phone numbers and like totally become BFFs- or not). The awesomeness of Summer aside, I'm not talking about that Firefly right now. I'm talking about the one that is in the upper right quadrant of this blog. It's a pretty cool little application. Well, it's not really "cool" on my blog (yet, anyway), but go to their website at firef.ly and play around with it a bit. Basically, if you turn it on, you can "tag" my page with graffiti or chat with other users (all one of you). Go ahead, try it out. You can "rewind" the history to see what others have said. "Others" being mostly me and any friends I've forced to use it. You can even send anything you write on my page to your Twitter account. Tight.

Speaking of Twitter, I have been pretty much obsessed with it lately. If you feel that I don't update my blog often enough, just check out that little orange bubble in the sidebar for 140 character (or less) blurbs of randomness 5-10 times per day or "follow" me. Another cool social networking application is last.fm, also on the sidebar menu. It lets you listen to what I (or other users) are listening to, create playlists of your favorite artists and discover new artists that you might like. Finally, the thing I've been using to pull it all together is friendfeed. This application lets you pool all of your social networking tools into one place and gives you updates when your friends post something to flickr, twitter, youtube, delicious, digg, or even when they add new movies to their netflix cue!

I bet hardcore stalkers are a little miffed right now. I mean, it's not that hard to figure out what people are doing at all hours of the day- it doesn't take the skilz it once did. We're pretty much just telling you. I was reluctant to do all of this for a while after someone broke the "online/real life" code of conduct and kind of freaked me out, but I figure psychos will always be out there and it's fun to network with the sane people.

Not only that, but jeeze! What else could I possibly tell you about myself? I'm pretty much telling you everything I do, eat, dream about... "Get out of my tree. Get into my blog!" Could be a catchy tune...

ch-ch-ch-changes!

I'm giving The Cutting Room Floor a much-needed makeover. While the "Darkwater" theme that comes as a plugin with WordPress was very nice, I didn't really think that it visually represented me as accurately as it could. I feel that this new imagery does a much better job. The background image is something I made in Maya. I took great care to be as accurate as I could. I measured out a typical piece of 35mm film, complete with Dolby, SDDS and optical soundtracks, accurately measured out the sprocket holes, aspect ratio, etc. For the texturing (which involves the colors, images, and actual "texture"), I made as detailed a reproduction as I could in Photoshop and then applied it to my filmstrips. I then mapped the color channel into the transparency channel and set a slight bump map to accurately portray the ridges of the film emulsion. I rendered the whole thing with mental ray. That was a whole lot of technical! If you understood it, cool. If not, just check out the images and marvel at their accuracy and coolness. :) I've been working on it for a while and just got the time to render it recently. Below- the Photoshop reference image :

Compare that to this image from wikipedia. The most interesting part to make was the soundtrack. The "static" shapes between the sprocket holes contains the information for the Dolby Digital soundtrack (see the little "DD" symbol? that's really there!), the two blueish strips of "noise" on the edges contain the information for the SDDS track and the black and white sine wave patterns are the optical soundtrack, read by a lightbulb in the projector.

Pretty cool, eh? I stuck some countdown leader in the middle of the frames and then deformed the strips and added some cool glowey light and some metallic sphere thingies in a sort of "orbit" around the light (just going back to the astronomy interests). I'd love to hear feedback on it- especially if you find it detrimental to the blog reading experience. I tried to be kind to the eyes and I'm still working on the page layout...

Super Spectacular Uber Summer Blockbuster Fantastic

I am a sucker for action flicks. While I love artful, thought-provoking films (my most recent favorite that I think falls into this category is "The Fall" by Tarsem- a really touching and beautifully shot film), I also love pigging out on popcorn and watching slick effects, exciting chases... basically being "entertained" for two hours in a dark, cool room. This summer, I was taking a class on making sound/music for film and multimedia. I have since dropped it. It was a time-sucker class in which the "teaching" was "here is a keyboard, here is the computer, here is the program you need, now play around with it and make stuff." This is fine, but I have all of this equipment at home and access to online tutorials for all of it, so this class was kind of a waste of time and money. Also, it's been a while since I was a student. It's hard for me to make any video project that is "just enough" to get a grade. I kind of like work that looks completed and professional and that takes a lot of time to do. It's not something I can just "do" on a weekly basis with a full-time job.

Still, I did finish one project. Behold! The blockbuster to beat out all blockbusters! Even this one feels a little unfinished to me, but it's a spoof, so it doesn't bother me as much. Our assignment was to download some video and put some music to it. Here's a great ad for Apple. I got stuck on their trailers page. I started noticing visual "similarities" to all of these trailers. I downloaded as many different ones as time could allow and edited them with Quicktime Pro (this was part of the assignment, I would never choose to do this). I then played sounds and put music to it with Garage Band (which I loved). It took me a couple of hours to do, once I knew what I wanted to do. Enjoy!

Obama in 30 seconds

It's a little late to be posting this- voting closed a long while ago. I felt it was appropriate, though, seeing as how it looks like Mr. Obama is going to be our Democratic nominee. It's also appropriate because, well, I actually have time to post it! It looks best if you click play and then the little "monitor" icon in the middle of the right hand side to play it full screen. It was drawn in pencil. At such a small size, it's pretty hard to see. I made this for moveon.org's contest called "Obama in 30 Seconds." Obama was my second favorite Democratic nominee (and no, Clinton was not my first, though I liked her too). I really do like the guy, though, and I'm happy to vote for him. Politics aside, there was a $20,000 prize (redeemable in video equipment) and it gave me a chance to play with character animation. I drew several pictures that I scanned and animated in Flash. The lip sync was a little tricky because Flash seemed to want to play the video and the audio at two different frame rates, so I just had to trust my dope sheet (I'll try to post a page from that tomorrow and explain what it is). The animation is a little... basic... but it was my first full-blown character animation with lip sync and it was supposed to look "grassroots" (which is now an adjective). It's really amazing to see a character that you drew come to life before your very eyes. Carl Fuermann was the voice of America.

(Note: heated/bigoted/negative political comments to this post will be deleted- sorry, but that's what every blog seems to become these days and no one ever said mine was a democracy! I alone hold the power of comment approval! Mwa ha ha ha!)

The Rest of Chicago

After three days of the Adobe MAX conference, I started craving art for art's sake, rather than art that is design which is supposed to maximize profits and provide a better, faster, and slicker "user experience." I didn't have time to go to the Art Institute of Chicago, which is unfortunate. I've been there once and wanted to return to the Joseph Cornell collection. I did get a picture of it from the outside, however:

I also got to walk around the city a little bit. Alone with my iPhone full of great music and its little camera, I was inspired by many city scenes:

I fell in love with that mirrored sculpture. I love photographing reflections:

This is a really cool water sculpture. The face towers are actually video images (that's my one complaint with my iPhone- no video) lit by little LEDs within glass or plastic bricks of some sort (see the bottom photo):

I really like Chicago. I think it's a beautiful city. I wish I'd been able to see more of it on my trip (as well as visit some of the folks I know who live out there)!

The User Experience

The title of this blog is one of many phrases I got sick of hearing while attending the Adobe MAX conference in Chicago earlier this month. Others included "integration" (mixed with a variety of other words), "client-side," "runtime," and "Adobe is the king of the world." Okay, I didn't actually hear that last one, but that was the general point of the conference, so I "sensed" it enough. In fact, many of the workshops and lectures I attended seemed to offer more of that sentiment than actual "information," but some of them offered some new tricks and tips that I have been able to use in my job and my creative life.

One of several Adobe pep rallies- this one was the unveiling of new products to the crowd of eager geeks (of which I was one- when I learned that Flash may start "integrating" inverse kinematics tools in their product, the animation nerd in me got all choked up).

I got so bored in one of my morning workshops that I encrypted my notes to keep from dozing off:

Indeed, I am a geek among geeks.

I also got a little sick of filling out surveys every half hour (that is NOT an exaggeration) and eating potatoes. The potato thing got so bad that one of the parties featured potatoes in a martini glass. Them's fancy taters!

To be fair, I won a great book on Flash video and learned how to shave time off of some of my projects. Mostly, though, I just received confirmation that I do things right. Oh, and I also got to attend an over-the-top party, the theme of which, from what I could gather, was "80's pop/geek culture and stuff that makes you go, 'oh yeah, I remember that!'"

BMX bikers and skateboarders show the crowd what can be done when you are not sitting in front of a computer all day:

A giant game of "Operation" (oh yeah, I remember that!):

Oh yeah! I had one of these:

And these (things are cooler when they are big): Remember this movie (I was deemed too intoxicated to go back to the future)? And the Fusion engine from the sequel (beer make car go fast): This conference really was just kind of over-the-top for the most part. The conference center employees revealed to me that it cost half a million dollars just to unveil the new products to the crowd- I can't imagine how much the party cost. Shareholders take note. Ahem.

I had fun, though:

Arriving at the party.

Preparing for the Segway obstacle course

The band. I actually like these guys. They did a swing version of the Spongebob Squarepants theme song and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana.

Jell-O shots. Without alcohol. Still pretty, though.

This was a huge virtual graffiti wall connected to Wii remotes. You worked with another player to create your wall and then a picture of the wall was sent to flickr. But I took my own picture:

iPhone, iSlack

I've been so neglectful of my blog lately. I jumped the gun on the technology bandwagon and got myself an iPhone before I really had the time to learn how to use it to write blog entries. I figured out how to do it technologically, but the actual writing threw me off.

Don't get me wrong, the iPhone has an excellent keyboard. It's actually very easy to write. What it's not easy to do is edit! I've basically become addicted to cut and paste. It allows me to write fluidly and then go back and make edits after I've thought about how I want to communicate an idea. So far, I have not figured out how to do this with an iPhone, or any other mobile device.

Until then, I'll have to just play catch up when I have the chance to sit at a computer and type. Or, I'll have to learn how to hack the iPhone to get a text editing program on it. Or, I can figure out the best way to post photos directly from my iPhone because the thing takes gorgeous pictures!

(it's always important to test a cell phone camera with a self-portrait first)

(flowers)

(fungus)

(the soap on my windshield at the car wash)

I recently took my little phone with me on a trip to Chicago and then New York. I plan to post pictures and stories from those trips this week.

I do love my iPhone. I had my music on me at all times and could take a photo whenever I was inspired to do so. I was able to watch movies on the airplane and share my own films with interested parties. I could check my e-mail from the road. I could wander through the cities with my phone, search for a place, get directions or go to the website or call them directly... I'm not going into the details here. You can go to the apple web site to see all of the tricks it does. It really is a magical little device! I've never owned an iPod or anything "Mac." I'm very impressed!