blacksundae

SEVERAL years ago, I built a robot whose sole purpose in life was to create an even smaller robot just like himself… So much like himself, that this robot endeavoured to create yet another tiny robot, ad infinitum. This continued for a while until an extremely tiny speck of robot tried to endow purpose upon a cloud of molecules with ruinous result.

Link!

When Frank and Ollie retired from production on the same Friday I was the next animator on Ollie’s desk the following Monday; the very desk he had used for decades to create so many indelible animated moments. I was properly awed as I sat down in Ollie’s chair, at his desk.

As I was checking it out and getting the feel of it I noticed the pencil sharpener was full of shavings. Instead of throwing them out I poured them into a glass jar, labeled it and set it atop the desk. Good luck shavings… a simple reminder of the hard work required to create magic. My own jar of real Disney dust. The last jar.

Read on. [via Waxy.org: Links]

A live picture of a spinning globe had been shown before BBC programmes since the Sixties. When colour came to BBC 1, a curved mirror was added behind the globe, and the effect this produced continued to be seen on screen for over fifteen years. But technology had moved on and time was running out for this mechanical symbol.

A solid state device had generated the symbol on BBC 2 since the end of the Seventies. Subsequently, electronic clocks on both networks had replaced the mechanical clocks. And in early 1984, work began on a project to generate a digital symbol for BBC 1 too.

Read on And here’s its last airing. [via Reddit]

Cutting-edge computer games use different graphics subsystems — so-called 3D graphics engines. Source (used in Half Life 2), Unreal Engine (Unreal Tournament), idTech 4 (Doom 3), CryENGINE2 (Crysis) or Clever’s Paradox engine are well-known among the players and the game industry experts.

It’s time to learn a new 3D game engine name: Microsoft Excel.

It is understood that Excel is an all-round office tool, but probably it is unknown that it has a bunch of features that makes Excel a high-class 3D graphics engine.

In this article I will demonstrate Excel’s arithmetical facilities, the embedded rendering subsystems (there are two of them!) and the revolutionary approach which might just cause a paradigm shift. I hope you will discover that Excel effectively and efficiently incorporates practicality, tons of features, the multi-platform portability and the high performance with the unique and futuristic 3D engine features.

Read on (and see demos). [via MeFi]

How’s this for a hot date? My first day off in weeks and we go to… Macworld. Thank God Brooke is a nerd. She zeroed in quickly on the Nikon and Canon booths. It was sexy. She’s a catch.

Okay, so I’m not a big tech blog with press access, but I still saw some pretty nifty stuff yesterday with my measly exhibit hall pass. Here are some highlights:

• An impressive demonstration of Toonboom Studio 4. Cartoon animation made… not easy, I suppose. But accessible. The interface reminded me of a slimmed down and very specific version of After Effects.
• fluid mask 3. Really amazing keying for still images. Great demo.
• TileStack. These guys set out to design a service that enabled non-coders to create custom, embeddable web apps. They ended up reinventing HyperCard. In addition to creating your own stuff, you can upload old HyperCard stacks so that people can run them through the site! NERDGASM! It’s not open yet, but I pre-registered for an account, and so should you.
• Mac Heist. Spend $49 on $428.65-worth of Mac software. Sound good? 25% of that $49 goes to charity. Fucking A. No brainer.
• Holy shit. This next demonstration made my day: GridIron Software’s Flow. Why bother to explain what makes this software so cool when John Nack has already done it for me. Can’t wait for that public beta to start up.
• Good news: one of the guys at the Ambrosia Software booth really liked my Dinosaur Comics t-shirt (given to me by none other than Non-Shannon). Bad news: There are no new Escape Velocity games in the works.

And… here are some lowlights:

• The jackass working the softpress booth.
  

  [Brooke and Shannon are walking somewhere purposefully]
  SOFTPRESS GUY: Need help with the web? [thrusts flier at them]
  SHANNON: [not clear on question] Uh, no thanks. I do my own web design.
  SOFTPRESS GUY: What do you use?
  SHANNON: I hand code it, generally.
  SOFTPRESS GUY: Well, wouldn’t it be easier if you could… [launches on clumsy and oddly aggressive pitch for his company's WYSIWYG software.]
  SHANNON: [tunes SOFTPRESS GUY out]

• The most common type of exhibitor? Laptop bags, followed closely by skins/cases for iPods and iPhones, a lot of them sporting tacky-ass trendwhore designs. While it’s cool that computer technology has reached that level of casualness, this does nothing to dispel the stereotype of Mac users being a bunch of pseudo-arty hipsters who view their computers as status symbols instead of tools.* It would have been nice to see more open source or shareware represented in the exhibit hall instead of accessory retailers.
• The Macbook Air. I’m just not sold on the thinner is better thing. And no optical drive? No FireWire? What the hell? I’m not in the target audience, I suppose. It is pretty, granted, and very light. I guess I’m just ticked that Apple didn’t announce a big upgrade to the MacBook Pro line so the prices would go down on the previous generation. This is me shaking my fist at them.
• Nobody at the Adobe booth knew when After Effects is going to be patched for Leopard compatibility.

God damn, that was fun! Here’s to hoping I can make it next year. It’s an exciting time to be a geek.

UPDATE: It looks like GridIron Flow won a Best of Show award at Macworld. I guess I wasn’t the only one impressed. Really, do look into it. It’ll also be available for Windows, so don’t let the Mac stuff put you Windoze nerdz off.

*SEE Nomad Cafe in Berkeley

The New York Times will soon “make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain.” Here’s the Long Now blog on the subject:

They put this out there like it does not require any explanation. As though no one might care about what happened between 01922-01987.* I would think that the time frame encompassing such events as Prohibition, The Great Depression, World War II, and the conflicts of Korea and Viet Nam might be worth at least a footnote.

I would venture that what happened was Steamboat Willie. The first appearance of Mickey Mouse was in the twenties, and therefore the de-facto line in the sand drawn through our culture, from which Disney will never allow Mickey (and by default, anything else) to fall out of copyright. The Disney copyright lobby has done much to keep copyright increasing by more than one year - per year, in order to keep its “intellectual” property safely in their hands. While I am certainly fine with Disney continuing their reign over the little mouse, depriving the rest of us of works of great cultural value, such as 62 years of The New York Times, during some of the most formative years of our nation seems a bit out of whack.

I would assume that after 01987 The New York Times is able to attribute all its work and photos in accordance with modern copyright laws, and therefore are able to offer that (which is actually no small feat). But for the 62 years of unsharable data, there is apparently no good solution. The question that this begs in my mind is… What is more valuable to our culture? An [sic] make believe mouse, or 62 years of The New York Times?

This 62 year copyright gap does a nice job of pointing out where our intellectual property laws have become so onerous, that a large and venerable institution such as The New York Times simply cannot clear the rights in their own archive. Much smaller groups and individuals are in an even worse bind, we have lost great pieces of cultural history to this problem such as “Eyes on the Prize“.

I wonder what people will think about this time far into the future? A dark ages — not created by war, famine, depression, or even technological failure, but a small whistling mouse.

*According to the Long Now Foundation website, they use five-digit dates: “the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years.”

William Sellers at the University of Manchester, UK, argues that this type of comparison can be misleading. “Such calculations can accurately predict the top speed of a six-tonne chicken, but dinosaurs are not built like chickens, nor do they run like them,” he says.

Instead, Sellers and colleague Phillip Manning used an approach they dub “evolutionary robotics” to generate new estimates of the top speed of several two-legged dinosaurs. They built computer models featuring the leg bones, muscles, and skeletal structures of five groups of dinosaur: Tyrannosaurus, Velociraptor, Allosaurus (which looks like a miniature Tyrannosaurus [albiet more gracile and sporting the typical three digits on the front limb, as opposed to rex's two. - Shannon]), the slightly smaller Dilophosaurus, and the chicken-sized Compsognathus.

To begin with, each model could move in a huge variety of different ways, too many to analysis properly. To narrow the problem down, Sellers and Manning generated a virtual population for each group, containing lots of models with slightly different gaits. They then raced these models against each other. Those that fell after only a few steps were culled while the fastest went on to spawn another generation of slightly modified gaits.

After hundreds of generations, this simulated evolution arrived at an efficient, workable gait for each dinosaur. The same method has previously been used to model the gait of extinct hominids, but “we are the only people to have tried this on dinosaurs,” Sellers says.

Read on.

I had a dream last night. I was wandering around a cineplex looking for a specific theater. The cineplex was unique, as it was one theater stacked on top of another, twenty high, with a carpeted path coiling up around them like the exit ramp of a parking garage.

Each theater was decorated differently. I saw a few of them (a Tiki theater, a theater that looked like the deck of the starship Enterprise), but I couldn’t find the one I was looking for, which was covered in a dome of glass. Beyond the glass was salt water and fish and sea turtles. Kind of a reversed fish bowl. I had only seen pictures of this, and really wanted to see it for myself.

After searching for a while, I decided to ask someone and tapped a security guard on the shoulder. He spun around and, to my surprise, turned out to be Fred Ward. We talked about his career for a while. He was still bitter over the critical and commercial failure of Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins, and blamed that for his having to do things like star in Tremors II: Aftershocks and work as a security guard.

I woke up right about then.

Speaking of theaters, some of you may know that I work at one now, and am a manager trainee there. Last night I was helping to clean up after a showing of The Simpsons Movie as the credits were still rolling. So I’m sweeping up, and this row of theater seats show up at the bottom of the screen and this pimply, animated teenager starts sweeping around them.

“Being assistant manager isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” he mutters.

I laugh, smiling a bit sheepishly, as I navigate around leaving patrons.

He continues, “Four years of film school for THIS?”

“Oh, COME ON!”

Not cool. Not cool at all.

Transformers, 2007
Dir: Michael Bay
[rating:3.5]

I have one word for this film: “Wheeeee!”

I won’t go into too much detail. We know the “plot.” Giant robots that turn into vehicles. Explosions. Uh… I know I should think of a third item in order to comply with the rule of three, but… I know! Shia LaBeouf! He’s great in this. It’s been said many times before, but LaBeouf is going places.

Anyway, yeah… This movie is big and gloriously dumb. It’s an adaptation of a Saturday morning cartoon/line of toys, and it wears that pedigree on its sleeve. Underneath all of Bay’s trademark camera jiggle, hyperactive editing and patina of “grittiness,” this is the kind of movie where the lead bad guy wakes up from a 100,000 year sleep, immediately roars, “I… AM… MEGATRON!” and proceeds to destroy whatever the hell is within reach. Keep in mind that the name of the giant frozen robot had been firmly established by this point, so he identifies himself in such an overly dramatic fashion because… well, because that’s the sort of thing that overly-dramatic-giant-robot-bad-guys do when they wake up.

Transformers is an odd mix of thrill ride and camp. When a bad-ass Camaro screeches into frame, pops into the air and assembles into a kung fu posing ‘bot before it hits the ground, you “whoop” and pump your fist at how bad ass/ridiculous it is. Then it opens its chrome-plated mouth and you laugh at the cartoon dialogue.

I think this movie shows what Bay is capable of when he’s not being self-important (Pearl Harbor) sadistic (Bad Boys II) or sappy (Armageddon). It’s just giant robots doing what they do best.* It also seems that Spielberg’s involvement had a tempering effect on Bay’s oft incoherent visual style. This is good.

A final note on the visual effects: hells yeah. It’s very easy for animated robots to turn out like clusters of geometrical shapes. The animated characters here sport some great texture work and some genuine heft, the later of which is rare for large CG characters in movies. Other than an ill advised break dancing scene, the Transformers seem physically real. To see what I mean, check out this exclusive clip from the movie.

*Fucking shit up.