A bear, that’s what! Yes, folks, Mykle Hansen’s new novel is finally out in print! You can buy a copy online from the publisher–or if you’re in Portland, Oregon, you can swing by Powell’s Books on Thursday, March 20th, to hear a real live bear* read a chapter from the book in Mykle’s own voice! It’s part of a bigger small publishers’ event from 5-10pm. Mykle and friends will go on around 9pm.
*Disclaimer: if real bear is not available, reading may be provided by man in bear suit.
Logged in this evening to find my old Movable Type blog had been hacked by phishers, so instead of doing real work, I spent the night porting this blog to WordPress. It’s pretty slick! Hey, if you’re reading this, try and log in and leave a comment, will ya?
Check out these screenshots of this new game being created by one lone developer, Eskil Steenberg. The idea of an auteur-driven videogame is already pretty inspiring, but the painterly visuals here are especially exciting to a guy like me. I’m not a gamer myself (RSI and gaming don’t mix) but I get a lot of joy out of watching over people’s shoulders. I can’t wait to see how this plays in motion. I’m sure there will be shower-door effects and crawling texture artifacts to contend with, but if he’s clever, he’ll find a way to rise above all that. And this guy seems to be nothing if not very, very clever. Can’t wait!
(via BoingBoing)
I was lucky enough to catch part of the lunar eclipse tonight from outside my office in Redwood City, California. This is a time-lapse video made from a series of photos taken with my DSLR camera. The night was partly cloudy, which made for some interesting effects as the moon whisked past layers of clouds. I stabilized the moon in the center by hand (poorly, I’m afraid, but I ran out of time) using After Effects.
Music, appropriately, by Sun Kil Moon.
What do you call a pocket full of chisel-tip markers? Calligraphic Packing! It’s also the name of a computer graphics research project from the University of Waterloo. My friend Craig Kaplan, a professor there, is a pioneer of “computational calligraphy”, a brand new research area that’s about to grow in some very interesting directions. Craig’s been interested in graffiti for a long time, for a lot of the same reasons I am. We each have our own ways of studying it, and his way is to take it apart, learn what makes it work, and write software that embodies that understanding. This project, led by Craig’s student Jie Xu, is the first step in what I hope will be a long and fruitful quest, as Craig puts it, “to probe the nature of letterforms and legibility”.
Mosaico from Cassidy Curtis on Vimeo.
Timelapse video of Raquel making a mosaic tabletop for an old wrought-iron end table she had kicking around the house. I helped a little with the “tile nipper” tool. Frame rate: one 1.3-second exposure every 5 seconds. Music: “Jongo” by João Pernambuco (aka João Teixeira Guimarães), performed by Baden Powell.
Originally shot and edited in 2007, remastered for HD in 2014.
Nice view, nice people, nice weather. Nice.
Music: The Homeless Wanderer by Tsegue-Maryam Guebrou (available on Ethiopiques, Vol. 21).
High-res H.264 Quicktime version here.
Somebody had to do this, and it might as well be me:
Radiohead album + mouse neurons = mashup goodness!
I’ve been digging this album for a couple of weeks now, and it has left its share of fluorescent traces in my little brain. But the download came without any official cover art, so all the fans were left to make up their own. (There are some really nice ones if you follow that link, although this one‘s my personal fave.) When some Harvard and MIT neuroscientists released a paper about color-coding neurons in transgenic mice, this seemed like the obvious and perfect use of their pictures. Enjoy! (Back cover art after the jump).
Common Letters And Numbers Are Brighter, Study Suggests. Makes perfect sense to me!
I’ve always found it curious that the five highest-scoring Scrabble letters (K, J, Q, X and Z) all happen to be different shades of brown in my synesthetic map of the alphabet. Now there’s a new study by Daniel Smilek et al that suggests that this may be a pretty common phenomenon: “The More Common the Digit, the More Radiant the Color in Grapheme Color Synaesthesia”. How cool! This is the same Smilek who distinguished “projector” from “associator” synaesthetes in 2004.
(thanks to James for the link!)
Bay Area artist Peef did this terrific timelapse video of the entire week of Burning Man 2007 (including Paul Addis’ premature burnination on Monday night!) It almost makes me not feel bad about missing it this year. Almost.
(via the dorkbot-sf mailing list.)
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