Dustball
Check out this cool Shockwave. I know…you’ve seen stuff like this before, but this one is an especially good exploit of Flash’s animation characteristics. Style, as the man say, is based on limitations.
See, in Flash, little chunks of animation are wrapped into packages called symbols. Symbols can be nested (so you could have an eye-blink animation inside a larger head animation as part of a larger character animation) and can include sound. Symbols only have to be downloaded once and can then be used multiple times in the larger animation — a whole lot of shaking for a very small download.
By using symbols in different sizes, with different starting points, flipped in different directions, apparent crowd scenes can be built out of a few components. You can zoom in and pan around and move characters and it’s all, in bandwidth terms, free. It’s a technique you’ll see used a lot in animated banner ads, which are almost always Flash these days.
This is also an obvious use of rotoscoping — animation derived from tracing live action film footage. Rotoscoping was invented by Max Fleischer (later the father of Betty Boop) in the teens. It’s been in use ever since — most recently in A Scanner Darkly, a 2006 animated film made from a Philip K. Dick novel. It’s supposed to be really impressive…ummm…so I’ve just ordered a copy, because I totally meant to see it in the theaters.
Rotoscoping is easy to spot. It always has a certain look to it. It’s fun to watch, but there’s a stiffness about the animation that conventionally-drawn characters don’t have. Disney often used rotoscope characters for the humans in his films. Contrast the rotoscoped Snow White with the conventionally animated Seven Dwarves to see what I’m getting at.
It works very well in this example. He’s thrown a fat vector line around (presumably) himself. It takes half a dozen of these clips to build an effective percussion set out of himself. The intro and outro movements of each character are separate animations.
Not to take anything away from this guy — he’s done quite a bit of animation — but one of the neatest things about this piece is that it didn’t take insane art or animation or programming skillz. Just a good idea. I’m really enjoying this whole interwotzit democratization of content thing.
Anyhoo, the artist is Dustin McClean, aka Dustball. And now I’d better get back to my desk before somebody realizes I’ve nipped over to the lobby of the building next door.
June 5, 2007 — 12:00 pm
Comments: 5
Shall we play a game?
Oh, man. Here’s one for the I Wish I’d Thought of That pile: Victimhood Poker. Ever wonder why it’s okay when Muslims stone women to death, but not okay when they murder dusky persons in Darfur? It’s because blacks rank higher than Muslims, but Muslims rank higher than women. Word.
Get complete rules of the game at the Dicks List.
Finally, player 4 receives a hand of Black, American Indian, Muslim, Transgendered and Gay. This is the most valuable 5 card hand in the game of Victimhood Poker, and is commonly referred to as a Brown University Bash. A Brown U. Bash is worth a whopping 58 points, since a Gay Transgendered Black Native American Muslim is the best initial victim possible in the game.
Found via Small Dead Animals, my favorite Canuckian blog.
June 4, 2007 — 8:18 am
Comments: 8
Mooshi-Mooshi, Lord of Ticks
I went to the University of Rhode Island’s Tick Awareness Event on Saturday. My friend the nurse dragged me along. She was like, “it’ll be fun.” And…it was. There were doctors and microscopes and a picnic and giant inflatable ticks and everything.
Seriously, peeps…Lyme disease scares me juiceless. I’m out in the woods all the time, and we’ve got hella Lyme around here. It’s not the big dog ticks you have to watch out for, either — it’s the little teeny bastards. The deer ticks. Usually in the nymph stage, when they’re the size of the period at the end of this sentence.
You might notice the tick. Eighty percent chance you won’t. You might get the tell-tale bullseye rash. Seventy percent chance you won’t. You might test positive, but the tests are very unreliable. My doctor gives me a fight every year when I ask for one. He thinks they’re useless. No matter — there’s no medical consensus what constitutes a true positive, anyway. And, if you test positive, there’s no medical consensus which drugs to use or for how long.
At first maybe you get something like the flu. It goes away soon. A few years down the line, you might (or might not) develop a mysterious arthritis. If you pass that milestone without anybody figuring out what the hell is wrong with you, then you have a shot at tertiary Lyme, which is a lot like tertiary neurosyphilis. No, really. They’re both spirochete diseases.
Symptoms may include fatigue, muscle pain, joint pain (with or without arthritis), inflamed nerves, rash, cardiac arrhythmias, tachycardia, adrenal disorders, immune suppression, urinary disorders, muscle twitching, polyneuropathy or paresthesia, Bell’s palsy, encephalitis or encephalomyelitis, vision problems, severe sensitivity to sound and vibration, balance problems, seizures, myoclonus, ataxia, panic attacks, anxiety, depression, short-term memory loss, sleep disturbance, hallucinations, depersonalization, neurocognitive impairment or psychosis.
If you get there, you’re fucked. You have worms in your brain. You will not get better. The best possible outcome is to avoid getting any worse. This guy at work spent several years battling mystery symptoms — fatigue and weight loss, mostly — before they figured out it was Lyme. Now he’ll have to take fistsful of antibiotics every day for the rest of his life just to tread water.
The best plan: avoid ticks. Deer don’t carry Lyme (mice do), but deer carry the ticks that carry Lyme. In experimental settings (islands and the like), researchers have discovered that eliminating the deer does for the ticks, too. Sadly, eradicating all deer is not considered a viable option. I blame Disney.
So here’s the deal: ticks don’t live in the grass. Too dry. They don’t fall out of trees, either. They live in the moisty undergrowth, down low, latch onto anything that swings past, and start crawling UP. So treat your outdoor clothes from the bottom up: shoes and boots, then socks, then pants. Also gloves then shirts, if you garden. Okay, your hat, too…in case you fall face-first into the rhododendrons. Because we’ve seen you do that.
DEET is great for mosquitos, not good at all for ticks. You need permethrin for ticks — it flat out kills the little bastards. Curl up and die. The spray is okay for boots and gloves and the occasional touch up, but you really need to soak your outdoor gear, inside and out. Remember, ticks crawl up…your pantlegs, your sleeves.
This is the deal the URI people (and the military) recommend: roll up your outdoor pants, shirt and socks and put them in the bag provided. Add the bottle of dilute permethrin and two bottles of tapwater, squoosh it around and let it sit and soak for a couple of hours. Then take the outfit out and air dry it. Once dry, it’s odorless. You get a small fraction of the permethrin dose the FDA thinks is okay. Good for six weeks, including laundering. I wanted to ask how long it would last if you didn’t wash, but I didn’t want to sit alone at the picnic.
I know, I know…a total scary downer of a not-funny Monday post. But I’m all about the minions. Goodness knows the last thing you people need is more brain damage.
— 5:41 am
Comments: 6
Five centuries of faces
Click the image to see this great YouTube, 500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art.
The guy has taken a series of portrait paintings in chronological order and morphed between them. Ho-hum, right? Yes, but he’s done a fantastic job choosing the right examples so that the sequence looks less like morphs between disparate images, and more like one continuous animation of a single woman’s face.
I started watching with the expectation that I would see the standard of feminine beauty shift continually and noticeably over time, but it doesn’t. Well, it does really, but not in this film. The particular faces he’s chosen are more alike than different and all would be recognizably beautiful to everyone in the time span. (Until, of course, we get to the puddle of sick that is ‘modern’ art).
Anyhow, I wrote to the guy who posted it to make sure he was the actual creator. He is (sign your stuff, man! Cast your bread upon the waters and the ducks will eat it). Check out eggman913. He does nice work.
— 1:13 am
Comments: 7
Friday, June the Onest
June 1, 2007 — 7:31 pm
Comments: 23
Eighteen hundred and froze to death
I’ve heard that expression all my life without realizing it was a real year. 1816. Also known as “the Year Without a Summer” and “the Poverty Year.”
“February, according to old records, was rather warm and spring-like, but cold and storms held away in March. Vegetation had gotten well underway in April when the real cold weather set in. Snow and sleet fell on 17 different days in May.
In June there was either frost or snow every day but three. July was cold and frosty. In August there was an ice storm, the formation being nearly an inch thick, killing every green thing in the United States. In the spring of 1817, corn kept over from 1815, sold from $5 to $10 a bushel for seed only.”
That was in New England. It wasn’t relentlessly cold; there were terrible temperature shifts, from normal or above to far below. From nearly 100 degrees to nearly freezing in hours.
In hindsight, climatologists think it was down to three things. Volcanic activity, especially one particular eruption in Indonesia in 1815. The “Dalton Minimum” — a time of low sunspot activity that lasted from 1795 to 1823. And the peculiar dance the sun does around the center of the solar system, thanks mostly to the gravitational pull of Jupiter and Saturn.
It hit worst in the US Northeast, Northern Europe and China. There was widespread famine. Europe, still smarting from the Napoleonic wars, had food riots. Americans hitched their wagons and moved West.
It snowed brown in Hungary. It snowed red in Italy. It rained so much, Mary Shelley couldn’t go out to play, so she stayed in and wrote Frankenstein. Joseph Smith had crop failures, moved to New York and turned religious, leading inevitably to the Book of Mormon. There were vivid sunsets, leading inevitably to Turner.
Oh, it was a terrible thing.
— 4:57 am
Comments: 33