Month: April 2005

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Comic Art Effect

Ben-Grapefruit-Orig    Ben-Grapefruit-Comic

Experimented a bit last night with this Photoshop tutorial — how to turn photographs into comic book art panels (click for larger versions). Fairly involved – nine pages and nine layers, but took less than 15 minutes. Could probably trim that to five minutes with a bit of practice. Actually, some of the built-in posterization options in later versions of Photoshop get you fairly close to this effect, but without the halftone screen and cross-cut hatching that “sell” it as comic art. Pictured (before and after): My father-in-law Ben picking grapefruit in Palm Springs last winter.

Music: The Carter Family :: Little Moses
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Post-Consumer Industrial Beauty

Steeldrums Chris Jordan photographs the overflow of consumer culture as panoramic portraits of steel drums, piles of crushed cars, sawdust, mountains of cell phone chargers, shipping containers, gas cylinders… production and its waste are not without beauty.

Music: The Slits :: Liebe And Romanze
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QTSS on XServe

We’ve received the first replacement server in our coming move to an all-Mac campus: The QuickTime Streaming Server we use to webcast events and event archives is no longer running on Windows, but on Panther Server from a dual 2.5 GHz XServe with 2GB of memory. Any future bottlenecks will be at the NIC or switch, not due to I/O. The machine is dreamy, and the XServes really do look great in a stack. :)

Was looking forward to using the QTSS Publisher utility you get with OS X Server for batch/automated hinting of files, generation of .qtl files, etc., but was sorely disappointed — Publisher is really geared for environments that don’t already have a workflow system in place. Assumes too much, and isn’t very configurable. But soon discovered I now have access to the qtmedia and qtref command-line tools (not available for Linux or Windows), so spent most of the day writing a shell script to batch re-write metadata, generate .qtl reference files, add hint tracks (our broadcast software doesn’t hint the files at run-time), and relocate movies to a final resting place on the streamer. In with Flynn.

The script is available for download here.

Music: King Solomon :: Baby I’m Cuttin’ Out
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Diego and Susy

Family portraits, taken in a similar orientation once per year since 1976, presented as photo essay. A family floating through time, children evolving to become echoes of the parents and yet not. A beautiful record.

On June 17th, every year, the family goes through a private ritual: we photograph ourselves to stop a fleeting moment, the arrow of time passing by.

Try keeping your eye on a single column, then scrolling the page vertically – like a filmstrip animation of a person’s biological life.

Thanks Susanna

Music: Graham Central Station :: Tell Me What It Is
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NonJunk

Studying email headers of a spam turdlet that slipped through the net, found this in the headers, trying to pass as header lines added by SpamAssassin:

X-IMAPbase: 1113505409 1 NonJunk
Status: O
X-Status:
X-Keywords: NonJunk

The cat-n-mouse game is never-ending.

Music: blur :: country house
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What About Engels?

Miles grabs a book at random from the shelf, runs toward Amy, holding it high. “Do you like THIS book, Mommy?”

It’s a copy of The Communist Manifesto.

Music: Robert Wyatt :: Life Is Sheep
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Freefall

Amazing screensaver for the Mac called Freefall — tracks data, motion, and areas of coverage of 850 sattellites in real-time over spinning, zooming, panning 3-D renderings of the earth and continents. The quick video preview on the web site doesn’t come anywhere close to doing it justice — the experience is immersive and somewhat psychedelic. Wild to be able to visualize just how many satellites are orbiting at all times, and how scarily close their path vectors come. Satellite data updated over the internet as needed.

The satellites are spinning,
a better day is breaking.
The galaxies are waiting
For planet Earth’s awakening.
(Sun Ra)

Music: Radiohead :: Palo Alto
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Gnoppix DataRescue

A student with a borked PC-formatted FireWire drive called – the drive had failed and all of his thesis work was on it — 8.5GB worth of video, ProTools audio projects, images, documents. We have a variety of Mac-based rescue tools, but didn’t have anything but Norton on-hand for PCs. Google turned up ProSoft DataRescue. 40MB download, burned to a CD, which booted… a custom version of Gnoppix(!). Went straight to its own interface, no Linux desktop. DataRescue’s philosophy is that trying to fix drives can cause more damage, so it only scans, builds databases, and offers recovery (but you gotta pay for the recovery part!). Three hours to scan, and it turned up about 95% of the lost data, which it then copied to another drive we plugged into the system. A thing of beauty.

The hardest part was creating a valid destination drive. We only have FireWire drives here, and DataRescue wanted one that was FAT-formatted, not NTFS. But… surprise! WinXP no longer knows how to format drives FAT or FAT32 — NTFS only. That meant we needed a PC with a FireWire port that wasn’t yet on WinXP. We turned up exactly one in the whole school, which saved the day and let us create a valid destination.

Boring yeah, but somehow you end up with this feeling like you’ve just pulled a body from the river, gotten it breathing again.

Music: Doof :: You Never Blow Your Trip Forever
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Did Jesus Wear Birkenstocks?

The concept of “stewardship” as described in the Bible: “We are not owners of creation, but its stewards, summoned by God to ‘watch over and care for it’ (Gen. 2:15).”

Position on the environment of some of the most extreme anti-environmentalists of the religious right: “The truth is,” writes Carter [author of a widely circulated paper warning against the lure of creation care], “the whole of nature has been delivered over to man for him to use as he sees fit. Man is not simply the head of the natural order, rather, that order was made for him.”

The Bible supports environmentally sound thinking, so the first step in encouraging pro-environment Christianity is dismantling the James Watt-derived notion that Jesus would actually want us to milk dry the earth (“After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back”). [Update: A commenter points out that this widely-circulated quote was not actually made by James Watt, but attributed to him by Grist.] There are still many Christians who believe that Rapture is imminent, and that there is therefore no need to take care of the earth.

Nice piece at AlterNet on the greening of the Christian Right.

Conservative evangelical Christians are getting worried about the fate of God’s creation. Can the greening of the GOP base happen fast enough to derail the party’s scorched-earth plans for Bush II?

Despite the efforts of old-guard religious conservatives like Carter to squash the growing Christian environmental movement, many national Christian groups, such as the National Association of Evangelicals, are working to teach churches that you don’t have to sleep with hippies to care about your world. The memes are slowly changing.

Roosevelt had it right:

Today’s GOP likes to toss around the name Teddy Roosevelt, but it has no use for the party philosophy expressed by T.R. when he declared, “[S]hort of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendents than it is for us.”

Baby steps.

Music: Modest Mouse :: Beach Side Property
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DreamHive

In general, I like to think of the old birdhouse as a sort of time capsule — an immutable web-based record of interesting things artists were doing online when the web was catching fire in the mid-90s. But every now and then, an artist contacts me to say that they’ve moved on, are doing more interesting things these days, and would prefer not to have the dusty old content online anymore. Just got a request like that from surrealist William Carr, who is now doing most of his utterly wiggy visual arts in video and Flash rather than the static graphics he was doing back then. His new site is called DreamHive, and is a trip. Bye William!

Music: Modest Mouse :: So Much Beauty In Dirt