Too busy with our new home to do any animation. Here's an animation I found on Drawn! As a kid I used to draw maps of "Wobbelonia", a country not half as weird as this Wobblyland. Apparently it is completely logical for kids that when you squeeze a tree, it makes a noise that reminds me of air being let out of a balloon while you pull and stretch the opening wide. Kind of like this silliness.
I am not particularly fond of software that tries to be smart and guess what my intentions are. This usually results in weird suggestions that break the flow of things. So after contributing to the Firefox 3 download World Record attempt, I was quite annoyed with the location bar that is supposed to be "awesome": not simply auto-completing what I type but suggesting unwanted alternatives!
Of course I immediately went to the preferences in order to turn off that feature. I know they are trying to compete with Microsoft, but did they really have to bury this preference that deep? At least it is accessible. But when you turn it off, it turns off auto-complete altogether. D'oh!
So I turned it back on, and try to live with it. It is supposed to be self learning, maybe in time it will understand that I want it to just suggest a straight forward auto-complete....
Boing Boing today has a post on Long-exposure shots in St Petersburg, Russia turn people into ghosts, about these great photographs by Alexey Titarenko, who moved to New York the same year I moved to the area (random trivia). These images are reminiscent of one of a somewhat dormant project of mine: CityFlow. Here's the (HC) version:
The last few days it has been to hot to work to work on my workstation. Our only AC is in the living room, and that's where I sat with my Macbook. Inbetween other stuff I have been playing with Blender again. I had temporarily abandoned the Python scripting experiment that led to this plane render. I could not get it to animate. But I finally figured it out:
Still using a bit of a roundabout way, but inching closer to making it work for me.
Yesterday, after escaping the first heatwave of the year into the New Museum to see Paul Chan's great show called "7 Lights" (Flickr), we happened to run into outdoor book sale. In the sweltering heat people were filling cardboard boxes with books to buy. Who says nobody reads anymore? It might have helped that each book was only one dollar.
It was a sale for a good cause. Amongst the donated books I found one by a favorite author of mine: H.G.Wells. I have actually only ever read his classics, but just had to buy this one. It is a first edition of "Mr. Brittling Sees it Through" from 1916, the year it was first published. It must have been a bestseller right away, since it was reprinted ten times within two months. Another nice detail: according to the adds included at the end of the book, an edition like this would have cost about $1.50 at the time. So I got it fifty cents off after more than ninety years!
I used to get my daily dose of Bizarro though the Daily Comics Widget, but that link broke so I now get it directly from Spokane.net. I just had to post todays, which isn't all that funny come to think of it...
The widget isn't itself broken and still brings me daily Dilbert. No. I insist: I'm not a geek!
Unfortunaly I cannot yet say that I am finishing up my EyeBrain animation. I am about to send my previous work, Seeing Red, to a couple more festivals I have decided to finally attend to the last fixes that were needed on that animation. Almost done!
Have been working on the new animation as well: a lot of set dressing. The image to the right is part of that :)
No blue death screens for two days in a row: fingers crossed...
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