TL;DR IndieTV

0^th, The Fine Brothers. (Mostly about the flak YouTube earners got [due to jealousy], but also this:) How many people truly want to watch short form television style content inside the web? We’ll tell you how many. TONS. Hundreds of thousands, millions, but you know why they don’t watch your show? Because you have not built a connection to them, because you haven’t built a personal brand and experience for them to climb aboard and want to support, because you don’t have a real reason for the show to be distributed online beyond just “making something”, and surprisingly a lot of the time because you haven’t created a very good show not just for the web, but for any platform.

1^st, Barrett Garese. Stop making short-TV or short-films and putting it online and calling it "online entertainment". It's derivative, and TV does it better already.

2^nd, Barret's followup. We’re going to start having to think of the medium first, and the story second.

3^rd, David Nett. Where Barrett is wrong, in my opinion, is in the underlying assumption in his tip: that we want to be pioneers in online entertainment. Rather than whipping ourselves into a frenzy over Barrett’s perfectly sound advice, I believe a creator should ask him or herself plainly, “what am I trying to make? Am I trying to make a TV show, and the web is the best current distribution option for my show?” If the answer is yes, then in my opinion Barrett’s advice simply doesn’t apply.

4^th, Marc Hustvedt. There’s a flawed point of logic in the argument that web video should always be something different than what’s on TV or film.

Finally, New Mediacracy (via) which lead me to the others. Barrett Garese, Brett Register, Craig Frank, Jamie Blair, along with NM regulars Chris McCaleb, Zadi Diaz, and Steve Woolf get together. Conversation really needed David and Marc, but what do you want? Your money back?

Adventures in Surgeryland

So, I have sleep apnea, which means that I stop breathing in my sleep.

I went through a sleep study, and got a CPAP. So I won't die in my sleep.

But it wouldn't be a blog post if that's all that happened. ^_^

My nose is all messed up (partly because of genetics, and partly possibly because of the bike accident three years ago). Recently, one side closed up and I can't really breathe through it. At night, the other side closes up as well, meaning I couldn't use the CPAP. So... that's bad.

My ENT recommended surgery to fix my deviated septum and reduce my turbinates (this is after multiple meetings and tests; I really don't like surgery). This should allow me to breathe through both sides again, and if it doesn't fix my apnea it will at least let me use the CPAP. So I won't die in my sleep.

So my surgery was scheduled for yesterday afternoon. Something I didn't really think about beforehand was that I couldn't have any coffee that morning. I've had surgery before, but it was way early in the morning so this wasn't an issue. Oh man, I sure love coffee though.

ANOTHER thing I didn't think of was that I would have all morning to worry about the upcoming operation. So I was probably more nervous for this one than the previous one. And did I mention the lack of coffee? Coffee...

But that wouldn't be enough for a Phoenix story.

I'm at the surgery center, getting interviewed by the anesthesiologist. I'm moments away from being put under.

And the fire alarm goes off.

And it eventually becomes clear that this is not just a drill. The entire building is evacuated into the parking lot.

Luckily no one was in surgery at the time (only because I was a couple minutes behind schedule), but two people were in recovery and their unconscious forms wheeled out on gurneys. How awesome would that be to wake up from surgery in the sunny outdoors? A firetruck came and the firemen went through a quick building inspection. While we were waiting, I lamented that I didn't have a camera with me, but a nurse had her phone on her and snapped a couple photos of me and my IV. UNFORTUNATELY they didn't save properly, so I still ended up with no pictures.

So that's the surgery adventure. I'd write more, but I'm doped up on vicodin right now.

Video Games Can Be Art

So, recently, Roger Ebert (whom, to be clear, I adore) once again declared that video games are not art, and CAN NEVER BE!

Which is absurd. Of COURSE games can be art. Everything about Shadow of the Colossus is art, not just the fantastic visuals, not just the story, but even down to the controller itself! But it's clear that Ebert has never played SotC. (This, despite it being mentioned several times in reader responses the first time he brought this up). His initial argument is "Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control." But, games like SotC has its plot on rails; the player has "choices" but really, the player has to move the plot forward. If the player goes off exploring, the game pretty much just waits. Ebert just appears to be completely unfamiliar with the wide range of games and gametypes available (he also appears to believe that ALL games have winners and losers, which has never been true).

He also never played Braid, although he knows enough about it to discounts its possibility as art. Well, I say he knows about it, but clearly his opinion is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the premise. Ebert's entire article was prompted by Kellee Santiago's TED talk (which you can see here). Here is a quote from his piece:

Her next example is a game named "Braid". This is a game "that explores our own relationship with our past...you encounter enemies and collect puzzle pieces, but there's one key difference...you can't die." You can go back in time and correct your mistakes. In chess, this is known as taking back a move, and negates the whole discipline of the game. Nor am I persuaded that I can learn about my own past by taking back my mistakes in a video game. She also admires a story told between the games levels, which exhibits prose on the level of a wordy fortune cookie.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Braid doesn't allow you to go back in time and correct your mistakes, it FORCES you to go back in time and correct your mistakes. That's a fundamental part of the game mechanic, arguably the entire POINT of the game. It's not 'taking back a move' and negating the discipline of the game, it IS the game! And his remark about 'wordy fortune cookies' is another indicator that he never played it. Yes, you are given tiny snippets of a story, but the larger story becomes clear as you play. If he HAD played Braid, he would understand that.

So let's talk about Chess (which he also mentioned). Santiago says that Chess isn't art, and can't be art, because it's just a set of rules. No matter how elegant the set of rules, it's not art. Fine. I'm not going to argue that point. So, let's try this thought experiment:

Imagine there is a PLAY about Chess. The actors dress up like the pieces, you can have fights between the white pawn and the red knight, eventually one king is killed and the play is over. You don't see the chessboard itself, the play is just using a Chess theme.

Can that be art? Of course. A play can be art, even if its theme comes from a game.

So, now imagine that towards the end of the play, the white king can send his knight or his queen to fight the red bishop. OK? Both parts are scripted, but it's up to the audience to shout out their preference for that performance. The play has two different endings, depending on the outcome. Everything else about the play is the same.

Can that still be art? I think so. The presence of a choice by the audience does not negate everything else in the play. The audience's choice isn't the art, it's still the writing/acting/etc.

So, now imagine that the audience has a choice twice during the play. Or three times. Or twenty. Everything else is still true, there are scripted scenes for the players to act out. Eventually, the audience could have enough choices to play an entire game of Chess.

Is that still art? Again, I think so. There doesn't come a point where the fact that the audience has choices negates the art in the rest of the play, because the art is NOT about their choices! The art is always about the play, and what is shown to the audience.

It is the same with video games. The art isn't about the player's choices, it's about everything else.

As the Penny Arcade guys said, Ebert's simply a man determined to be on the wrong side of history. And that makes me sad.

Not A Spiral

Following up on this article, which was shared in Reader.

I wondered why it seemed to spiral in counter-clockwise. Dan suspected that it was the orientation of the corner diamonds, so I made a second image with the black and white squares reversed, which you can see below (mouse-over the original). Does it reverse the spiral for you?

Magic

Content-Aware Fill is making the rounds. Here is yet another example video: Show/Hide


Mwahaha


And stunningly, it turns out that the basic technology (texture synthesis) has been around FOR A DECADE. That's right, nerds in the know were running magic in GIMP ten years before Adobe posted their sneak peak at CS5. The upcoming Photoshop with this magic isn't yet available, but the GIMP version is right now (resynthesizer and heal selection), so I thought I'd run it through its paces. I couldn't find the original hi-res photos anywhere (0 results on TinEye), so I had to make-due with screencaps from the original video.

(rollover for originals)



In the first picture, everything except the sky was an easy Heal Selection. The sky didn't turn out right, and I ended up using clone-stamp to cover up the weirdness, and then Heal Selection over that.




For the desert, again I had to clone-stamp part of the scrub-brush over the road first, and then Heal Selection over that.




Finally, for the panorama (which was actually the first image I tried), I didn't use anything except Heal Selection, BUT I had to do the picture in steps (first one corner, then the next, etc).

So what did I find? Well, although the Resynthesizer tool 'works', it's not nearly as easy to use as what is shown in the CS5 preview video. And some of the results were a little wonky. But it's fairly quick and easy, and the output will usually pass a quick glance (but not intense scrutiny).

What you'd need to do this yourself:
GIMP itself
Updated Resynthesizer (compiled for windows, sorry)
The patched Heal Selection script
Other References:
Another guy Resynthesizing the photos
Another guy testing it out last October
Other handy GIMP tips/tools:
Tweaking GIMP to replace Photoshop (sorta)
The Liquid Rescale plugin
The do-everything G'MIC plugin, although its predecessor GREYCstoration has better examples
The FX Foundry is a good collection of scripts
(Gimp Guru used to have good tutorials, but then they switched to WordPress and lost all the graphics)

Radio Lab

"I've got a story to tell you. It's a good one, too. Imagine, 1962, rural village of Kashasha, Tanzania. Girl's boarding school. Girl is sitting in class.

She begins to laugh.

The girl next to her, maybe to her left, hears her laugh and she begins to laugh.

Across the classroom a third girl joins in, the teacher gets upset, but it's too late. Soon four girls, and eight -- the entire class has begun to laugh, and then cry, and then laugh, and then cry..."

"At what?"

"Just 'cause, I don't know. Anyhow, a girl outside at that moment walking down the hall, imagine she hears the laughter from the classroom. She starts to laugh, and as she walks and laughs her laughter goes into other classrooms, and soon the whole school is doing this: laughing, crying, laughing, crying... Teachers cannot control these girls; when they try to, the girls get violent!"

"They get violent?"

"Yup. The principal then has no choice, he's gotta close the school.

They open the school a week later, and it happens again. So they close the school a second time.

Meanwhile, the girls who started all this, they go back to their villages many many miles away, and this ... thing, whatever it is, spreads. Up and down the coast of Lake Victoria..."

"You mean people in the villages start to laugh?"

"Yup. In one village, 217 people start to laugh and cry. A second boarding school has to shut down.

And no one knows why."

Thus begins a Quite Interesting segment from Radio Lab's February 22^nd 2008 episode.

I had never heard Radio Lab before (the only other NPR show I've really gotten into is This American Life, and even then I prefer the video adaptation). But now I suddenly =get= why people listen to NPR.

Because it's fascinating.

Primer

The recent XKCD has brought Primer back to the collective foreground.

I've seen many MANY people explaining the timeline in Primer, and with the exception of the 'birds nesting in the attic' (which I didn't catch when I watched it, because it was too far away from the Big-Reveal), they don't seem to add much to the conversation. The timeline didn't really seem complicated enough to need an explanation; it is internally consistent. The Big-Reveal follows the movie's logic. So, what's to explain, right?

So, is this an Internet joke? Like the 3-wolf-moon t-shirt reviews? It didn't occur to me until today, but is everyone just playing and I didn't get it? Like, if we all pretend that Primer is really complicated and unknowable, that makes it funnier? I kind-of get that.

Honda U3-X

I briefly mentioned this on my Enicycle post (or, in the comments, actually), but a new video has surfaced so of course I had to share it. Show/Hide


RAMPANT are the comparisons between this device and those chairs from WALL-E. I don't get it. This is MUCH too small to support such weight...

Things They Don't Tell You

(CLICK THE IMAGES TO PROCEED THROUGH THIS COMIC)

Ze Frank recently buzzed about this, and I thought it was interesting enough to pass along. For me, there were two pages in particular that I thought deserved a comment.

#1:

Aha! I'm normal, bitches!

#2:

Argh! No, no, no. Money is not evil.

It's the *LOVE* of money that is the root of all evil! This is an important distinction! Timothy 6:10, look it up!

Removed

Here's another reason (of many) that I like Google:

If they block some results, for any reason, they will TELL YOU.



Right there at the bottom of the page. Not in tiny text either. They practically bold it and surround it by flashing lights.

Yahoo didn't. Bing didn't. And I couldn't find any results that they were showing that Google wasn't (because maybe they weren't asked under the DMCA to remove any results), but Google also shows more results on the first page (15 vs 10@Yahoo vs 14@Bing).

Character Tweets

@wilw brought to everyone's attention that the Big Bang Theory characters have Twitter accounts.

Penny
Leonard
Sheldon
Wolowitz
Raj
Leslie

I don't know who's running the accounts (I do know that they aren't officially affiliated with the show) but whoever is doing it manages to do a FINE job of staying in-character. Tell me you can read Sheldon's tweets and not hear his voice?

Rainbows

Israel Kamakawiwo'Ole 'IZ' 'Somewhere Over The Rainbow' Show/Hide


Driving home from work today, I saw a rainbow.



Actually, that's not true. I saw the place where a rainbow was. I couldn't see the rainbow itself.

I'm colorblind. Whereas a person with normal vision sees a spectrum like this:

I can basically see two colors: Blue and Not Blue

Or maybe I should say: Blue and I-Don't-Know.

(I'm guessing on that 2^nd spectrum. I ran it through a filter, but since I can't really see the colors...)

When people find out that I'm colorblind, it inevitably leads to the game: What Color Does This Look Like To You? To save time, let me just say: Unless it's BLUE, I DON'T KNOW.

Another game is What Color Is _______? Look, I know Grass is Green. I'm colorblind, not ignorant.

I don't really get upset by these things anymore. It's human nature to be curious. People who can see colors want to know what it's like to be colorblind, just as I'm curious what it's like to see colors.

In my mind, I picture it to be like music. The different colors join together like notes in a song. Two notes come together and make a new sound; likewise two colors come together and make something new. Three notes can get you a chord, three colors combine to make up what a normal person can perceive*. Each spot you see, each patch of color is its own instrument in the orchestra of life. The world is a visual symphony.

*Some women have two distinct red/green receptors in their eyes, giving them FOUR-color perception. I literally CANNOT imagine what this is like.

Now, of course I know it isn't really like that. I'm overselling it because it is unknown to me. But I have to wonder if you appreciate it. Or do you take it for granted?

You live in a world that, to me, would be like a dream, but you don't even know it.



Driving home from work today, I didn't see a rainbow.

But I really wished I did.

Pi

(via)

Statements like this bother me, because intuitively they seem correct, but are actually wrong. Just because something is infinite and non-repeating DOES NOT mean that all possibilities are expressed.

For example, consider the infinite sequence: 17, 34, 51, 68, 85, 102, 119, 136...

It increases by 17 each time. It's infinite, and it never repeats, but the number 2 is never going to exist in this set. Or 3, or 4, or 5, or 6, etc... 16/17 of all numbers will never be part of it. Infinity doesn't mean the same as everything.

UPDATE:
Well, now I had to make this:

(store)

Unseen Academicals

Football has come to the ancient city of Ankh-Morpork - not the old fashioned, grubby pushing and shoving, but the new, fast football with pointy hats for goalposts and balls that go going when you drop them. And now, the wizards of Unseen University must win a football match, without using magic, so they're in the mood for trying everything else.

The prospect of the Big Match draws in a street urchin with a wonderful talent for kicking a tin can, a maker of jolly good pies, a dim but beautiful young woman, who might just turn out to be the greatest fashion model there has ever been, and the mysterious Mr Nutt (and no one knows anything much about Mr Nutt, not even Mr Nutt, which worries him, too. As the match approaches, four lives are entangled and changed for ever. Because the thing about football - the important thing about football - is that it is not just about football.

Here we go! Here we go! Here we go!

Terry Pratchett's latest Discworld novel Unseen Academicalsis out now, and I've just finished reading it.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about it yet, as until three quarters of the way through it was my favorite Pratchett book to date, but it fell apart at the weak ending.

Still, before the ending there were a number of great and moving bits, some snippets of which I will share with you below.

Here the Patrician and the Archchancellor are talking about soccer:

'In my day we were all so... so relentlessly physical. But if I was to suggest so much as an egg and spoon race these days they'd use the spoon to eat the egg.'

'Alas, I did not know your day was over, Mustrum,' said Lord Vetinari, with a smile.

Here the mysterious Mr. Nutt talks to Trev (a street urchin with a wonderful talent for kicking a tin can) and Glenda (a maker of jolly good pies) about Trev's father, a soccer legend killed by the game:

'Your father loved you, did he not?'

'Wot?' Trev's face reddened.

'He loved you, took you to the football, shared a pie with you, taught you to cheer for the Dimmers? Did he hold you on his shoulders so that you could see more of the game?'

'Stop talkin' about my dad like that!'

Glenda took Trev's arm. 'It's okay, Trev, it's all right, it's not a nasty question, really it isn't!'

'But you hate him, because he became a mortal man, dying on the cobbles,' said Nutt, picking up another undribbled candle.

'That is nasty,' said Glenda. Nutt ignored her.

'He let you down, Mister Trev. He wasn't the small boy's god. It turned out that he was only a man. But he was not only a man. Everyone who has ever watched a game in this city has heard of Dave Likely. If he was a fool, then any man who has ever climbed a mountain or swum a torrent is a fool. If he was a fool then so was the man who first tried to tame fire. If he was a fool then so was the man who tried the first oyster, he was a fool, too–although I'm bound to remark that, given the division of labour in early hunter-gatherer cultures, he was probably a woman as well. Perhaps only a fool gets out of bed. But, after death, some fools shine like stars, and your father is such a one. After death, people forget the foolishness, but they do remember the shine. You could not have done anything. You could not have stopped him. If you could have stopped him he would not have been Dave Likely, a name that means football to thousands of people.'

Nutt negotiates with a dwarf:

'Her? The Dark Lady? She can kill people with a thought!'

'She is my friend,' said Nutt calmly, 'and I will help you.'

Nutt has a mantra about Being Worthy, leading to this discussion with Trev:

'It is a skill. It can be learned.'

'An' that makes you worthy?'

'Yes.'

'An' who judges?'

'I do.'

(Not entirely unrelatedly, I read this passage in The Little Prince today:


"Then you shall judge yourself," the king answered. "that is the most difficult thing of all. It is much more difficult to judge oneself than to judge others. If you succeed in judging yourself rightly, then you are indeed a man of true wisdom."

)

Some characters have undergone little changes (not sure how I feel about those yet), such as the teetotaler Patrician drinking a beer while telling this story:

The Patrician took a sip of his beer. 'I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I'm sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature's wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that's when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.'

Nutt tells Glenda an interesting thing about ships:

'The interesting thing about ships is that the captains of ships have to be very careful when two ships are close together at sea, particularly in calm conditions. They tend to collide.'

'Because of the wind blowing, and that?' said Glenda, thinking: In theory this is a romantic-novel situation and I am about to learn about ships. Iradne Comb-Buttworthy never puts a ship in her books. They probably don't have enough reticules.

'No,' said Nutt. 'In fact, to put it simply, each ship shields the other ship from lateral waves on one side, so by small increments outside forces bring them together without their realizing it.'

(this is a metaphor about relationships; it even puns 'ships)

Glenda cleared her throat again. 'This thing with the ships…Does it happen quite quickly?'

'It starts quite slowly, but it's quite quick towards the end,' said Nutt.

If I could put smart in water...

'Can't you wizards do something?'

'Yes,' said Ponder. 'We can do practically anything, but we can't change people's minds. We can't magic them sensible. Believe me, if it were possible to do that, we would have done it a long time ago. We can stop people fighting by magic and then what do we do? We have to go on using magic to stop them fighting. We have to go on using magic to stop them being stupid. And where does all that end? So we make certain that it doesn't begin. That's why the university is here. That's what we do.'

Ah, punnery:

'We shall have to change our tactics to suit, then,' said Nutt.

'Are you nu—insane?'

Another thing I found interesting was that Amazon paired it up with And Another Thing...(the 6^th Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book) penned this time by Artemis Fowl author Eoin Colfer. Of course, no one could ever replace DNA.

Threeway

Love that search engine.

So, someone recommended Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture to me recently. It sounded interesting, so I decided to check the Spokane County Library page to see if they had it.

I threw the title into the search engine, but forgot to set it as Title and it searched as Words or Phrase.

The first result was Threeway sex, whose only result was Triangles (Interpersonal relations), whose only result was a Vampire Diaries book.

Not... exactly what I was looking for.

Great Balls of Fire

And I'm not talking about STIs (this time).

It was dusk when the first fireball burst from the Mekong. A glowing pink orb hovered over the chocolaty waters for a split second then accelerated noiselessly skyward, winking out some 100 meters above.

So begins the Time article Behind the Secret of the Naga's Fire.

I am of course talking about Naga Fireballs, a not-fully-explained phenomena that happens every year around October. In fact, here's a video from ONE YEAR AGO TODAY! Show/Hide


So what causes the mysterious lights? ^_^ I wouldn't dream of spoiling it for you.

Motion Portrait

Big deal, right? Just another picture of Phoenix in a wig. Or... is it?

Actually, it's a Motion Portrait.

I uploaded a picture of myself, and it did the rest. Really, a static image just doesn't convey the effect, because on the site I'm looking around, smiling, blinking, etc. It's like the pictures in Harry Potter.



You can change the wig or facial hair and save a snapshot, although the snapshots they generate always put your face back to neutral (meaning, the same as the uploaded photo) instead of whichever way you're looking at the time. Oh well.

Some tips on the photo you upload:

• Straight-on head shot. Don't turn your head even a little. This affects EVERYTHING.
• Close-cropped or tied-down hair, otherwise it will poke out through the wigs/hats.
• No facial hair. It has trouble finding your chin through that forrest.
• No background. It needs to know where your head ends.

You can get a pretty interesting (if a bit creepy) effect. It's not quite as good as real-life (especially when it blinks), but it's getting closer.

The Ascent of Man

The inspiration for Carl Sagans 1980 series, Cosmos, Jacob Bronowskis 1973 series, The Ascent of Man, alludes to and seeks to somewhat challenge the notion of some of Charles Darwins conclusions in The Decent of Man. Over the course of thirteen episodes, Bronowski travelled around the world in order to trace the development of human society through its understanding of science.

Jacob Bronowski was one of a small group of men and women in any age who find all of human knowledge-the arts and sciences, philosophy and psychology-interesting and accessible. He was not confined to a single discipline, but ranged over the entire panorama of human learning. His book and television series, The Ascent of Man, are a superb teaching tool and a remarkable memorial; they are, in a way, an account of how human beings and human brains grew up together. Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden

If you haven't seen this incredible series yet, I highly recommend it. It has been mentioned on Screenwipe several times, and then on Ze Frank's Blog.

Here's a preview: Show/Hide


There's a full playlist at YouTube. Good stuff!

DJ Paige Railstone

Alright, I totally lied about there not being a post today. So sue me.

Before I get to today's actual topic, take a brief listen to this: Show/Hide



Not bad, right? That's DJ Railstone (Paige Railstone). Haven't heard of her? I'm not surprised, almost nobody has, but you can find out a little more on omnictionary.

So now that you're possibly a bit more caught up on Railstone lore, you can watch this and appreciate it: Show/Hide

BTW, the Vlogbrothers are quite interesting. It was a completely random find.

But, I miss Ze.

Alright, TOMORROW there will be no post.

Busey on Business

Wow. Watch this and tell me if it blows your mind. Show/Hide


Business wisdom from Gary Busey, and there's a lot more where that came from.

The videos are to promote Grasshopper, which used to be called GotVMail. What is Grasshopper?

Well, it's a lot like GoogleVoice, except it costs $50 a month instead of being free. That's almost all you need to know, but I will point out one more thing: the site gears itself towards entreprenuers, right? Well, how good are the Grasshopper entreprenuers if they can't change the links from the videos‽ The name changed in MAY.

If this is their level of quality and attention to detail for their OWN business, I don't think I want their help.

Just sayin'.

The Busey videos are entertaining though.