By the Way: Hair

For the record... a few weeks ago, since I'm working at home and no one had to see the "awkward stage", I decided to grow some facial hair:


The frustrating thing about this is that the hair is effectively blond! I have no idea why, and it pisses me off. I think it would look half-decent if it were dark. I was kinda hoping to get a Gordon Freeman thing going on...



Go ahead, laugh. I am baby-faced. : |

Why

Knowing why you want something is more important than knowing how to get it. Probably far more important.

Recently, I've been trying to re-evaluate my personal goals. It wasn't going well. I had a simple enough time coming up with ideas of what I wanted to do, but none of them were really grabbing me, making me jump to action. Then it dawned on me that I had been neglecting the whys.

I have to admit, this is something that the religious types have as an advantage over the rest of us. : ) "Doing God's work" is a powerful motivator. The ostensible secular response, "because it makes me feel good" is just hedonism. There's a basic human need, I think, to contribute to the world, not simply take what we want from it.

But I do have a kind of faith: a faith in the universe itself. Particularly its creative aspects, its tendency toward beauty. I think my "why" should be a reflection of this: try my best to realize my own potential in the scope of the universe.

Sounds a little cheesy, sure, but I think dramatic goals require dramatic whys. : )

Another Bloody Good Question:

Are we searching Google, or is Google searching us? [via]

Hallucination

I thought maybe I should back up my bit about hallucinations. ...And who better to do that than one of my personal heroes, Derren Brown? : )


Derren Brown-The Invisible Man - on MetaCafe

Storytelling

Here's a theory: people love a good story.  ...And here are some extensions of that, each their own little theory:

• People are most convinced about one point or another by the most compelling* story.
• If a story is compelling enough, people believe it.
• Our cultural past is kept alive primarily (and until recently, exclusively) through stories.
• Story-telling is prone to exaggeration, to make the story more compelling.
• Most information is best conveyed using stories, particularly analogy.
  
• People store a majority of their information in the form of stories.  These may be the story of how they learned something, the story that made it significant for them, or--perhaps most commonly--analogy.
  
• People tell stories to explain the things they do not otherwise understand.  These stories are subject to revision, of course.
• Stories form the framework of human cognition.

Complete conjecture, based on this train of thought:

How many religions of the world began as bed-time stories?  Imagine, if you will, parents telling their children something Santa-Claus-like, meant to still an overactive mind.  But those stories ended up believed, and told to the next generation as truths.  And over time, more was added to these stories, through analogy, misinterpretation, confirmation bias, mass hallucination, or deliberate abuse of power, until a critical mass was reached and the story graduated to a belief system?

And a bonus question:

If pictures are worth a thousand words, what is an experience worth?




* I'm using an ambiguous word precisely because the criteria for what is "compelling" depends entirely on the prior experiences and disposition of the subject.  That's why no one story will convince everybody, ever.  : )

Heh.

Wonky Wacom Tablet (jumping cursor with short strokes)

You probably don't want to read this message unless you landed here with a Google search. This is a message of hope to all of you Wacom users that are experiencing this very bizarre behavior with your Graphire or Intuos tablet on a Mac. (I'm using a Graphire... for now...) That said, I hear it's also a problem with Cintiq tablets. Here are the symptoms:

• When you draw short strokes, the cursor jumps back to the beggining of the line for a fraction of a second.
• At first, this seems like a lag problem, but it's not... it's specific to short strokes and always involves the cursor jumping back.
  
• Thus, if you draw a series of short strokes (for example, writing words), your lines will stutter and be all over the place (and look horrible).
• It works fine on a PC.
• It doesn't do the same thing with the (Wacom) mouse.
• Problems are worst in Photoshop or Painter, but they actually do exist elsewhere in the system (it's just not really noticeable much).

The problem is that you have your "Double-click distance" too far. ...I found the solution, after much searching, on an Adobe forum. The solution is to go to your System Preferences, Pen Tablet, Pen, Double Click Distance, and pull the slider all the way to the left (older versions of the driver may even let you turn this off). ...Of course, it doesn't need to be all the way to the left... you can experiment with what works, but... you get the idea.

Basically, the driver is causing the cusor to jump back to the beginning of your line in anticipation of a double-click. This strikes me as a driver error, but I'm not holding my breath for Wacom to fix it.

PhotoPainting

So, I discovered that Painter allows something called "Photopainting". Essentially, it's like the "painted" filters in Photoshop, but on steroids... and then you can easily paint over the results. At first, I thought... god, this is cheating... there's no skill involved here!

Then I said... wait a second, this is exactly the effect I was going for in my older stuff.

So I decided to give it a shot. And in 15 minutes, I had something better than any of those older pieces (click to embiggen, of course):


There is actually a good amount of painting involved, here. The basis took all of five seconds (totally NSFW source)... the 15 minutes was spent defining the image and adding detail (with a "brush", not filters).

I'm not sure how I feel about this. On one hand, it's certainly the result that matters. ...This image, and thousands more like it, are what I've been aching to get out of my head and onto the screen (or paper, or canvas). I'm just not sure how I feel about how easy it is with Painter.

Strangely, it makes me a little sad. I've been working really hard at learning to draw... and with this tool, I could completely skip all of that.

Hmmmn.

Cloverfield

I watched Cloverfield tonight, since my wife is on a trip.

Incidental details that may have influenced my opinion:

• I was alone.
• I watched it on a TV (reducing nausea-cam effect).
• I was bored when I put it in.
• I fast-forwarded through the whole intro. ...Essentially, I started the movie at the first "earthquake".
• I went into it expecting to see this (and looking forward to it):

I liked Cloverfield. A lot.

I do, however, wish there were more action and less interaction. The latter was lame. My reaction to the actual monster was mixed: I thought the image above was really cool... but I think they made it a lot more... freakishly demonic. Evil, rather than just dark/lovecraftian. It immediately brought the Doom mythology to mind.

Go ahead. Make fun of me for liking it.

Magenetic Movie

Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

Guess it's a big night for posting cool movies. Sorry!

Creepy Grace Jones Gets Creepier

Here, have a really creepy video for your Friday (or perhaps late Thursday) amusement:

Painter

After repeatedly finding myself frustrated with the lack of "feel" that Photoshop gives with the tablet, I bit the bullet (not saying all that much, since I got a huge education discount) and bought Painter X. Here's my first "real" sketch with it:


It's definitely far better to use than Photoshop for this kind of thing. It gives you some modicum of a "feel" for what you're drawing, with much better sensitivity for pressure and speed. Also, PS happens to "stutter" while I'm drawing, which made it very frustrating. That doesn't happen with Painter (and I was quite afraid it would).

Anyway, I like it. Hopefully, this will get me drawing more. Unfortunately, it has me wanting a bigger, better tablet. And those start at around $700.