So my site was hacked a while ago — it took a while to figure out how, because it was sneaky, and I was busy hunting bears in the outback.

Mildly interesting details follow.
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Turntablism, courtesy of the Scratch Perverts and director Chris Cairns of Partisan, with visuals by The Mill.

More at neurosonicsaudiomedical.com.

The guy at the end is Plus One scratching Schlomo.

There’s some 3D in there for flava, but the heads themselves are relatively lo-fi: it’s likely just time-remapped video, synchronized with its own audio track on the vinyl. Clever lads.

[Via Motionographer.]

YouCity‘s New York map is what I always wanted to make in SimCity, but more so. You can browse around the map on their homepage.

Watch in HD at Vimeo.

[Via Digital Urban.]

The venerable online design magazine Netdiver, which just celebrated it’s tenth anniversary, has included my modest animation Tlingit vs. Haida in its Best of 2008 collection.

For your viewing pleasure, here it is in terrible YouTube quality.

I’ve been meme-tagged by an Internet friend of a sort I’ve only cultivated in the last few years: one with whom I’ve never directly communicated. She has a blog at drinkerthinker.com.

Here are the rules.

The Rules:

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

So. The Facts:
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(Via Transbuddha.)

In a satisfying validation of my Internet heavyweight status, YouTube finally took the hints I’ve been dropping and started the slow, insidious process of upgrading their image quality.

According to this Motionographer post, YouTube has begun offering higher-quality versions of some of their videos, available either via a link underneath the video or via an alternate link, which is the original URL plus “&fmt=18″.

There’s also a Firefox plugin available which will select this option by default when viewing videos.

More info at the Wired how-to wiki..

(via Motionographer.)

DivX is shutting down Stage6, according to this blog post. It’s too bad — they’re by far the best-quality video hosting site online.

The post, in summary: they couldn’t sell it or find a way to spin it off into a separate company, so they’re turning out the lights. Something else will come along to take its place eventually. DivX was rather perfectly placed to support such an enterprise; its codec is more-or-less exactly tuned to streaming high-quality video. Hopefully the loss of Stage6 will bring market pressures to bear on somebody with a better business model.

In the meantime, I guess this means the search is back on for a video host for my animation… aren’t we all tired of youtube’s ultra-low quality yet?

I can see outer space!

Coilhouse recently posted a gallery of some awfully odd-looking models.

The primary distinguishing feature among the group seems to be those wide-set alien eyes, as exemplified by the gelfling to the right, Masha Telna. Lawdy!

I have difficulty believing she isn’t one of Chris Cunningham‘s creations, as seen in the Playstation ad he did in 2000, “Mental Wealth:”

I’m led to believe it was done by keying deformers on the video, by hand. That’s a lot of keys.

“Mad Eye” Sergio

Once upon a time, the STRUT crew held a character design contest; from the winners, they assembled a team of artists to construct a free 3D character, rigged in Maya, for release on the site.

“Sergio,” the result, looks great; I’ve downloaded the character and played with it a bit. I had to tweak the texture paths to get everything working, but it seems to be a solid rig with a lot of potential. He’s not as limber as something like Generi, but he’s also closer to what you’d find in a commercial production: high-quality design, with the limitations and restrictions of a character with a unique shape and personality.

As a bonus, there’s a making-of page. It’s long and has a lot of fluff, but the modeling and rigging sections are a good walk-though of the high-to-mid-level processes involved in character construction.

“Sergio” was designed by Joel Smith, modelled by Lisa Griffiths, and rigged by Andy Seredy.

The Riddler Brick

Joe Maller updated his iTransmogrify! iPhone bookmarklet, which now converts many more types of Flash-based video embeds to clickable iPhone links.

So I’ve updated my own auto-iTransmogrify! script, suitable for embedding on your own site. Once embedded, when an iPhone visits your site, all convertable elements will automatically be converted for it, and any future updates to the script will be automatically propagated. Yes, it will be magical.

For even greater ecstasies of convenience, I’ve put the script in a .js file, downloadable here:

iTransmogrifyToo!.js

Include this script in your footer, or after your page’s </body> tag, by referencing it as below:

<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="http://zoomy.net/iTransmogrifyToo!.js"> </script>

You may either hotlink directly from my site by using this code verbatim, or use your own copy by uploading the .js file to your root web directory and replacing “zoomy.net” in the script reference with your own domain name.

So far this update doesn’t affect my own site, as all but three videos I’ve posted are on YouTube, and those three are in formats which aren’t yet supported. But we live in hope.

On December 31, Steve Ogden, founder and writer of the online independent animation zine AnimWatch, called it a day. Disappointed in AnimWatch’s low readership after its four-year run, he announced his decision to stop producing the website in order to devote more time to his own films.

AnimWatch’s focus on independent animation was unique. Its thoughtful edited content, including film profiles and interviews with independent animation producers, clearly took a lot of time and effort. In his announcement of the site’s demise, Steve consoles himself with this thought:

If there were an easier way to run a site like AnimWatch, someone else would be doing it.

Well, maybe. It’s easy to think that since the world is so chock-full of nonsense, all the good thoughts must have already been thunk, but I have more faith in the infinite number of monkeys.

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Lego of mystery

I noticed that the YouTube movies I was embedding in my posts (as well as all embedded YouTube videos everywhere) showed up as “broken plugin” icons on my iPhone, even though the iPhone supports YouTube videos and can play them from links.

Last week Joe Maller released a bookmarklet for the iPhone called iTransmogrify! that fixes this problem in an ad-hoc band-aid sort of way. You download it to your computer, then sync it to your iPhone, and then when you find a broken embed you hit this bookmarklet and some JavaScript trickery replaces the embeds with follow-able links.

I didn’t want that extra step when testing my own site, so I made an automatic workaround.

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In early 2004, somebody created a Newgrounds account in my name and submitted five old Flash pieces of mine — Shinji-San and the four Oddgods episodes — using descriptions apparently cribbed from the pieces’ original HotWired Animation Express entries. They got my hometown right, but listed my age as 42.

I didn’t learn about any of this until three years later, when I discovered it while tracking down hotlinked images, looking for unauthorized versions of my stuff online. Once I got past the mystification, I had a lot of fun reviewing the comments on my pieces. I hadn’t ever seen any large body of response to any of my work before — it all went online before the great populist wave of feedback culture happened, and I only ever got emails from people, including a Russian stalker who used to send me flash files with pieces of my animations chopped up and rearranged. I kind of miss that guy.

Anyway, the comments included some really nice stuff — in fact, overall, the three years’ worth of responses discovered all at once like my own personal Dead Sea scroll encouraged me to go back online. But this comment struck me as particularly amazing, speaking of “Shinji-San”:

It’s like you went “Hey, let’s take a pointless series of images, combine it with vague ideas, add in lots of color and low-level suburban white man racism, claim its abstract art that’s simply beyond the comprehension of its critics and get rave reviews.” This is, at its heart, empty, pointless, and meandering. It’s not a child’s story, nor does it even count as nonsense. It’s not art; it’s crap. Try again.

Honestly, this is the beauty of the Internet. Step 3: Profit!

Animators need good timing. So to practice my timing, over the weekend I moved this site to DreamHost from another, lesser host. It took me a while to migrate my SQL database because I’ve tried never to give myself any reason to use the phrase “migrate my SQL database” and DreamHost’s support pages are written by their users in a wiki, rendering it inedible.

*This guy

My timing was peccable: this morning somebody* at DreamHost typed “8″ when they meant “7″ causing the billing system to think it was December 2008 and that nobody had paid for their hosting in 12 months. Then the system charged all their clients a total of $7.5 million and started shutting their sites down for delinquency. Ohhhh the internet is not happy.

So if my site a splode it’s because I’m delinquent — IN THE FUUUUUTUUUUURE.