Archive for the ‘Web’ Category

Bradbury’s Secret

Saturday, December 15th, 2007

From Wikipedia’s article on Ray Bradbury:

He attributes his lifelong habit of writing every day, with no known exceptions since he was 12 years old, to an incident in 1932 when a carnival entertainer, Mr. Electrico, touched him with an electrified sword, made his hair stand on end, and shouted, “Live forever!”

…so far, so good. Cf the prophet Isaiah.

The whole story is on Bradbury’s website.

Pascal Campion

Monday, November 26th, 2007

A tomato thief.

Pascal Campion, champion short-attention-span animator, has some of the tightest timing I’ve seen anywhere. His work is clear and effortless, even in scribble-form, zooming past in fractions of a second.

From the main page of his site, pascalcampion.com, select the “Animations” link to view his gallery of wonders. He also has a blog which he apparently updates in his sleep every night.

He’s currently in California, but spent formative years in France, where there’s apparently something in the l’eau.

Transbuddha

Friday, October 12th, 2007
Quarter-inch thick Plywood 59 Chevy Impala
Well there’s yer problem

Transbuddha.com (“A rest stop on the road to enlightenment”) is one of the feeds I rely on for “random cool stuff” in the absence of like-minded coworkers. I file it somewhere between Boing Boing and Fortean Times.

I am pleased to see that my Space Bunnies animation has made their cut, and now ranks with the likes of the Death Star Dam Busters and the Plywood Impala. Thanks Transbuddha!

MayaWikiOnline

Thursday, October 11th, 2007

I discovered mayawikionline.com only a few weeks ago, by blindly googling “Maya wiki” in hopes one existed. Behold and lo, Ed Caspersen, a student at ITT Tech in Grand Rapids, had apparently started just such a thing in August, and had entered the vast majority of content on his own.

There’s certainly a need for this sort of resource. The bulk of home-grown online advice seems to be in forums, a format prone to spam, abuse, rambling conversations, tangents, and redundancy — it’s really not suited to any kind of communication apart from the ad hoc and ephemeral. So I was excited to find such a wiki, though it was clearly in its very early stages. I edited a few articles but hadn’t become very involved, and today I checked the site again to see how it was going. This is what I saw:

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Seadragon and Photosynth demos

Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

In the giant logjam of data that has been the internet for the last 10 years, something finally just gave.
Try the Photosynth demo.

Song of Civil Revolution

Saturday, June 2nd, 2007

Nobody rocks Frère Jacques like Red China.

WordPress Video Switcheroo

Wednesday, April 18th, 2007

I majored in video. No, really. So I’m picky about video quality online. YouTube is all well and good, but it’s still like four inches across, and so compressed it’s like watching the neighbor’s tv through their living room blinds, and you have raw eggwhite dripping in your eyes. I wanted a less egalitarian solution for my high-res output.

70's LED TV alarm clock
Now with less eggwhite

I wanted to post videos here on zoomy.net that were hosted on someone else’s hard drives, that didn’t come encrusted with extra interface, that didn’t require installing fancy plugins or obnoxious P2P servers, and that were the highest possible quality to minimize compromizationalizement of my pure artistic visionalism. As of this post, you can’t get there from here all at once, but with Stage6, Vimeo, and a bit of JavaScript switchery I have a workable solution.

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