 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
So, I spoke with my manager earlier this week. Isilon is growing and we're implementing a formal education reimbursement plan and all that goes with it. I have a very strong grasp of the entire stack of C/Python/Ruby/Perl/Appservers/Webservers/D atabases on the server side side and HTML/DOM/ECMA(Javascript)/CSS on the client side. But I told him that I was never quite happy with my grasp of visual design. I can do it, but mostly without much inspiration. It's not something that comes naturally to me, and it takes a lot of practice to wake it up. He thought my graphic design sensibilities were fine for the industrial applications I wrote for Isilon (and F5, and Carbonwave, and all the contracts I did for CompuServe), but agreed that if I thought that was a skill I need to improve then, by all means, I should take a class and submit expenses and all that. I am an idiot because today, while I was playing with my wacom pad, I figured out what layers are for. I mean, if you're a graphic designer, let that sink in. I've been doing this for ten years and only today did I figure out just how useful layers could be. I've always done all my prototyping on paper and then just scribbled it into photoshop all at once. Bleah. All that wasted time. Tags: art, design
Current Mood:  annoyed
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
JWZ was one of the first people to originally mention the Orangina octopus somewhere where I could see it, although I didn't find the video until PZ Meyers pointed it out to me. JWZ then issued a challenge to turn the squirting octopus scene into an LJ icon. I have, uh, attempted to rise to the challenge, and my contribution is visible there on the right. If you go to JWZ's LJ you'll see many worthy variations, although right now I'm holding out for ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) dossy's as the best so far. To make this, I first cut it out with mplayer: mplayer -vo png -ss 00:52 -endpos 00:56Then created a common map with netpbm: for i in *.png ; do pngtopnm $i > $i.pnm ; done pnmcat -lr 0*.pnm | pnmcolormap 48 > map48.pnm Then created a collection of cut, scaled, and remapped gifs (I determined the dimensions of my cut with GIMP): for i in *.png ; do pngtopnm $i | pnmcut -l 93 -t 34 -w 243 -h 243 | \
pnmscale -xy 100 100 | pnmremap -mapfile=map48.pnm | \
ppmtogif > ../$i.gif ; echo $i ; done And then assembled them together with gifsicle: gifsicle -d 24 --loop=forever -D bg -O2 *.gif > anim.gif I did some judicious removal of frames with rm (I could always rerun the script to regenerate them) and it took a little tweaking, but comes in at 38,410 bytes. Because there are so many dropped frames, I slowed it down a little, from 160ms to 240ms. I think the frame jerkiness suggests watching something in slo-mo, and tweaking the speed emphasizes that, so the experienced viewer won't be annoyed by the painfully low frame rate. Tags: art
Current Mood:  amused
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
So, I had an opportunity recently to spend an evening at the Seattle Art Museum. I'm afraid I'm only a little bit happier with the SAM than I am with the Olympic Sculpture Park, which I visited earlier this month. The new space is quite beautiful, and the lighting is much better, but I miss the majesty of the old marble steps with the Middle Eastern lions watching as you ascended into the space. It is less crowded and they do have room for more. Unfortunately, I find their idea of "more" to be somewhat wanting. First, there's the huge art piece which consist of nine Ford Taurus's suspended from the ceiling with lit cables come out of them, called Inopportune: Stage One, which is free to anyone who walks into the lobby. Nifty, in a way, but hardly communicative: it looks like the sort of thing one takes on for the mere technical challenge. "Look, I can hang cars from the ceiling!" There's the piece Some/One, which is impressive for the amount of effort that goes into it, and it's nice to see it have enough floorspace. There's a big new section on Pop Art, which is kinda fun if you're into that thing. It has Warhols, and the different galleries as you walk through them try to explain the evolution of modern art, with sections on impressionism, abstraction, surrealism. They've got a few Rothko's, which are important pieces for their day, but the Warhols just leave me cold. There's the flat anime-inspired Red Eyed Tribe by Chiho Aoshima (who's other work, A Divine Gas, I think is gorgeous and hilarious all at the same time), which was interesting but begs the question: is a photoshop-drawn mural that can be printed anywhere, anytime, really a fitting piece for a museum? SAM really is a "thing you'll like if you like that sort of thing" place. I guess I wasn't muchly inspired by it. Then again, given the reasons I was there, I was distracted and not much in the mood to be inspired. Tags: art, life
Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Wolverine, Again?
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I'm addicted to Drawn!, a beautiful website that brings me daily lovely art from around the world, highlights great and important illustrators, and generally makes me want to cry with envy at the talent that's out there. Drawn yesterday brought me Jen Wang's beautiful Dance of the Flight Attendant (SFW). The latest addition to my art addiction is Ping!, an English-language magazine published in Japan. I mention these two because Drawn several months ago brought me Gez Fry, a manga-style illustrator who prior to 2002 had never thought of himself as an artist or illustrator. This month Ping! (why does that name remind me of the robot ("I'm a non-H model, dammit!") from Megatokyo?) brought me an interview with Fry in which he revealed that he went from being unable to draw to being one of the hottest illustrators on the planet right now-- in two years. To me, that speaks to the real intersection between talent and expertise. Innate ability is nothing: practice is everything. Fry analyzed each and every drawing he did and asked himself how he could make it better. And that's really all there was too it. Oh, yeah. Speaking of dedication, 752 words this morning. Not a great start, but at least the really big orgy scene is done. Whew! I definitely broke many of the rules: "One exclamation point per chapter." Broken. "Don't have characters shout 'I'm coming!'" Broken. "Don't write the way porn movies speak." Broken. All by Zia Tau because she (and the upcoming Ash & Arwen) are characters from the pornoverse who just happen to have dropped into the Journal Entries, and nobody's quite the wiser for it. I haven't written something that long and involved in a long time. I wanted to get back to my roots as a pornographer. Unfortunately, the writer in me is getting in the way, demanding that I tell a story about these characters, who they are and what they want. This is definitely gonna call for some rewriting. But it was nice to write something with the kind of relentless, careless pace that defines much of the writing on ASSM. Tags: art, writing
Current Mood:  envious
Current Music: God Module, Resurrection
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
giggly
