Wow… this makes my stomach turn but I cannot believe how true it is, this guy is a genius.Why Paris Hilton mattersIt’s incredible, hilarious, but incredible how right on this is. This should be cause for a great deal of thinking. I never imagined that something so superficial and worthless could be such a good model for success.(Via Digg)
So, I’m not really a big anime fan or that much of a video editor
but this blew my mind. I can only imagine how many hours this took to complete.
If you’re completely confused, let me explain. This guy noticed that Japanese cartoons or ‘anime’ tends to have a lot of running scenes and decided to do something with it. He spend hours combing over cartoons, isolating scenes and editing down shots to combine them fluidly and create one project. He wasn’t content with just cutting scenes together. He went into the video and used a process called rotoscoping to isolate individual characters from their shots and lay them out in other ones.
Think Roger Rabbit, Lord of the Rings and Forrest Gump.
Painstaking and time consuming to say the least. Excellent work by this Istiv guy, best of luck to him.
(Via Boing Boing)
…I’ve watch the clocks go ’round.
Walked myself through some days
that have put me where I am.
In another time, In another place
all things might have been in place
But for now I’m finding myself up here standing on a rooftop screaming.
Hey world are you listening… listening to me?
I’m here and I’m hurting to begin again.
It’s another time, it’s another place.
We are making more old days.
But for now I’m finding myself out and standing on my doorstep screaming.
Hey world are you listening… listening to me?
I’m here and I’m hurting to begin again.
Hey world I’m ready to listen… and learn something new.
I’m here and I’m willing to get myself through.
-Hot Water Music “Rooftops”
I wasn’t going to do this but Zeldman’s post stirred up a lot in me.
Has it really been five years? I really don’t know what to do… it still seems so unbelievable. I feel like I have spent the last 5 years living in a bad dream just waiting to wake up. I still sorta lie to myself about things. I let the media corrupt me and my memories of what happened that day. I feel cheap and used. Until recently I had almost completely forgotten parts of it. As if they were blocked out of my memory.
The endless smoke. The smell of burning and ash. The jumpers. The smoldering holes that were once buildings. How they didn’t stop burning for weeks.
A few weeks back I went upstate with Christine and her family and found papers from 9/12. I looked though them and every article was in somehow related to the towers. It was like everything else in the world just froze. Like someone put the rest of history on pause for a moment. I had forgotten that baseball went on hiatus, or how long it was before planes were flying again. And how weird it was to hear fighter jets overhead rather than the commercial planes that you were so used to you barely even noticed them anymore.
I was living in Brooklyn at the time, attending the Pratt Institute. I remember everything like it was yesterday. My roommate Dan and I were on our way to class when the guys across the hall from us yelled, stopping us from getting on the elevator.
“Some idiot flew a plane into one of the Twin Towers.”
We ran into his room where his roommate was videotaping it from his window. Although it disgusts me to admit now, honestly… at the time…. we laughed. We laughed recounting the famous story of the plane that hit the state building back in the 40’s. Thinking this to be the same: a very public accident of small scale.
What you have to realize is that we had no idea of scale, we figured it was some private plane and honestly didn’t even think about size or injury. It seemed impossible that anything could even damage the towers, so we didn’t even think anything of it. The longer we stood there, the more smoke I saw, the more serious it felt. But we also figured we were late for class, so we’d better get a move on.
When I got to class most of my classmates hadn’t even heard about it. About 10 minutes in someone comes running into our room and yells:
“A plane just flew and hit both Trade Towers!”
Half of our class went running into the other room to go look out from their window. Once again: the issue of scale. You never really realized how big those things were until a plane flew into them. It seemed reasonable to many to believe that they were close enough together that one plane’s wingspan could hit both towers. As I looked from the window and watched the North and South towers billowing out black smoke it hit me. I was the first one to say it aloud:
“The one tower was already smoking when I left my room this morning, the second one just happened. This is no accident, someone planned this.”
It just seemed inconceivable at the time to everyone in the room and honestly I forget sometimes how carefree we all were before that day. The teacher rushed us back to our respective room where we continued class for a bit. Time passed and he called for a break. I started walking to the on campus cafeteria and attempted to phone my parents back home… strangely I couldn’t get a signal out at first.
“Turn off your phone asshole! Other people need to use the networks.”
Confused and completely caught off guard, I looked up at the upperclassmen had just yelled this at me and I didn’t know what to make of it. The phone was useless anyhow so I shut it off. When I got into the cafeteria it was like nothing I had ever seen before. A massive amount of people were crowded around the TVs that were mounted on the ceiling. Someone had changed the channel from the usual corporate marketing bullshit CTN (college television network) and put on the news. I stood there frozen in shock with my peers as we watched the first tower fall. When I managed to regain thought I then rushed myself to my room and put on CNN. Dan had just arrived as well and we sat and watched in astonishment as the second tower fell.
Neither of us knew what to do, we both agreed that we weren’t going back to class. Fuck class. We spent the rest of the day just in a fog sitting there dumbstruck. I remember trying to load up CNN.com and it crawling. Going even to a white page with headlines briefly announcing countries that were wishing their sympathies. Horribly enough Afghanistan was the first to issue a statement of sympathy. It wasn’t for a few days before we would realize the grim irony in that.
The first thing on everyone’s mind was war. And honestly the first nation people thought of was Iraq. It was no secret even back in 2001, BEFORE 9/11 that Bush wanted to invade Iraq. There were still our enemy, the media had conditioned us to think that way so it seemed to make sense that they might would perpetrate such an evil. All I could scrounge up from the news though was something about an unmanned US spy plane being shot down over Iraq that morning. Something I’ve never seen or heard mentioned since.
At some point I made it to the rooftop of my building and snapped the photograph you see above. The door to the roof was normally locked at threat of expulsion, but somehow none of that really mattered anymore.
My biggest regret, the one thing that gets me to this very day is that I was so close and yet, all I did was sit there and watch TV, like everyone else. I should have taken off and gone into the city and found a way to help but I sat there and did nothing like a zombie.
I can’t explain exactly why I’m writing this or what conclusion I am hoping to come to, the fact is I don’t think I have one. I’m writing this just to write it, just to put it out there. I can’t explain what this is better than Zeldman did so I won’t try:
“These mini-essays are not art. They are not reportage, either (but what is?), and may not even be accurate. We were all a bit dazed—although not so dulled as now. The shock and sorrow were fresh. The events of September 11th had not yet been branded, nor turned into tools of partisan rancor, nor made into a mini-series, nor used to justify atrocity.”
So much of our world changed on that day and for once people really came together. Now I look at where we are today and I am concerned that we haven’t learned a thing. In fact we’ve let ourselves and our feelings be used and manipulated in the name of this atrocity to commit others.
Have we learned the right lesson? Have we done the right thing? Is the world a better place today? I hope dearly we can say yes, but my gut seems to tell me otherwise.
Fair enough I guess I’ll work on that. I’ll try to make this brief. I’ve been busy for the past few months, but things seem to be settling down for the moment which is good. Work is good, back to school season is just ending so hopefully things might ease up, that’s about all I can say. I’m hoping for new products soon, but have no clue in truth. I plan to pick up a MacBook Pro whenever they put out a new version. My 12″ Powerbook’s AppleCare has just expired, and while it’s still running and treating me well, it’s time to move to something with a little more power, something that can run Aperture or actually interface with a video iPod. (12″ had USB 1.1)
So I’m back playing Halo 2 again, that game will not die for me I still enjoy it every bit as much as I did when I bought it. Oh that reminds me, I officially, after what… 4 months, have decided that my X-Box 360 was a completely worthwhile purchase. 3 reasons:
Other stuff….
So I’ve been keeping busy, not working on any major design projects at the moment, mostly studying new programs and trying to (re?)teach myself how to draw. That said, I have been working at getting MediaRebellion.com back up and running. I’m not sure what we’re going to use it for but I moved all the content over to Wordpress and as of yesterday two days ago I installed the Beta of phpBB 3 on the site which actually seems to be running REALLY smoothly, it’s leaps and bounds better than any other free message board system I’ve used.
I’m also now hosting / administrating the official message board for The Epoxies. Incase you havn’t checked them out, they are a new wave / punk band from Portland, Oregon that totally rocks, I highly recommend checking them out.
Canon put out a new version of the Rebel… I want it.
Seriously… it’s getting ridiculous how easy the process for photography is getting.
Back in February my friend Lindsay and I did a photo shoot in the mall parking garage. She’s a photographer herself but she’s also an aspiring model. This works out well because I consider myself a designer who is an aspiring photographer. So anyway she’s looking to build a modeling portfolio and I’m looking to build a photo one of my own. I also recently acquired a copy of Apple’s Aperture professional photography software and was itching to try it out.
Overall while we had a great time, but when I looked at the shots I was disapointed. We were limited by the cold weather much of the lighting was awkward, and most of the poses left a lot to be desired. (due both the the weather and Lindsay and I’s comfort levels I’m sure). I ended up letting the photos sit for months after the initial shoot.
It was shortly after that time that I discovered my Flickr addiction. And the other day I decided to take another crack at the photos because I wanted to put something up, just for the sake of it. (I paid for a Pro account, I should use it no?) When I really dove in, I was blown away. I can’t say enough how impressed I am, both by the ease of use of the program and the results I achieved. Aperture made it easy to color correct and retouch a lot of what I viewed were unusable photos.
The more I think about it though the more it’s unbelievable to me. Anyone who has even worked with real professional color photography can tell you how much of a pain in the ass the whole process can be. While it’s a lot of fun, you can spend weeks on single images at times. Not only that but it’s expensive. Retouching can be a nightmare and color correction can have you walking back and forth turning nobs trying to get something just right. Don’t even get me started on the cost / hassle of promoting and sharing your work.
Now-a-days you can get a Digital SLR for under a grand that take images at resolutions higher than film grain, print to a high end printer that does too. Using a program like Aperture or Photoshop, and a Flickr account and you can have a whole ‘roll’ edited and corrected in a matter of minutes. From there it’s easy to share share it on the web for everyone to see or subscribe to, so you know people are checking it out.
As a side note; I remember during my senior year at Pratt i did some of my work digitally for my color photo class. I would print my work on my Epson 2200 and hang it next to my other work. The really amazing part is that people in class were unable to tell. That to me sealed the deal, my film camera sits and collects dust these days. Stuff like iPhoto and Flickr’s are the icing on the cake. I can hardly remember what life was like before digital.
Anyway, I present to you without further ado: Lindsay O’Connor
Out of fairness to my lovely modeling friend I will spare you the before and after comparisons. I’d like to assure you though that the quality was not nearly this nice until I took them into Aperture. That’s not a criticism on her, but on my own skills as a photographer. Luckily… I’m still a designer.
Check out the rest of the shots here.
I think Warren Ellis might be a genius. Seriously.
So I’m getting back into this whole blogging thing. And I totally forgot how much of a whore one needs to make themselves to get anywhere at it. The other day I was listening to 24 Cast and they mentioned that they had gotten themselves listed on PodcastAlley.com and it made me think of what I’ve been doing.. reminding me of Technorati, Bloglines and such. I haven’t spent any time signing up for those things with this site yet. I’ll eventually get around to it. If I want this to take off it seems that stuff is key.
I read a lot of sites daily, everything from web comics to tech blogs to politics. It’s not rare to find something interesting on any of these sites but it is rare to find something truely inspiring. Two weeks ago, I was inspired, Apple enthusiast / writer John Grubner of DaringFireball.net took a daring leap into the unknown to do something one can only dream about. He quit his job to make an attempt at bloging for a living. His justification? In short… You should love what you do for a living and do what you love for a living. I can’t express how much I admire that, regardless of if he suceeds or fails.
Maybe some day I’ll have time to be able to blog once a week regularly, after that I’ll start working on full time.
So I haven’t updated in a while… sorry about that, I’ll work on it. Not that anyone really reads this but I do eventually plan to work on things and keep it updated regularly, perhaps even come up with a reason to come here.
So, I purchased an X-Box 360 last week and I’m in love all over again. I haven’t been this addicted to anything since I first found Flickr.
Around this time last year, I was really into Halo 2. I even wrote a few blog entries about it on my old site.
Admittedly I was obsessed… I had just purchase Major League Baseball 2K5 and was getting into that and Tony Hawk’s Underground then my optical drive on my X-Box unceremoniously stopped working. I decided it wasn’t worth investing in a new system and that I’d wait till I could get my hands on a 360.
So here I am, I’m back… and I’m addicted all over again. I’ve already upgraded to MLB 2K6 and I’m back on Halo 2 playing tons of maps and playlists that are completely foreign to me.. and I’m loving it.
My addiction though is starting to scare me. I think I have a problem. Since getting back into things I find myself downloading all sorts of X-Box widgets and programs to integrate the features of the system with my Mac.
As far as updating the site this has it’s ups and downs… It’s bad because I’ll have less time to write, good because I’ll have something to write about, and bad because… seriously who wants to read me ranting about xbox? Hmm I’ll have to work on that.
I promise though to work on this more and supply a reason to come here. For starters I plan to bring my old entries over to here and I also plan to integrate the page as much as possible with the other web services I use. You’ll notice on the right you can now find a link to my X-Box Live gamercard and an RSS feed of my latest Halo matches.
I told you I have a problem.
Anyway just posting really to say hello and that I’m not dead. So ‘Hi’
So recently I’ve been listening to a lot of Streetlight Manifesto and the earlier projects of their singer Tomas Kalnoky.
Tomas was the original singer / writer for the uber popular ska act, Catch 22, most notably on their ‘Keasbey Nights’ album which many will argue to be Catch’s best (or only good) album. Well back before Catch, in like 1995 Tomas was in a ‘punk’ band entitled: Gimp.
After Gimp disbanded one song by Tomas on their album, ‘Supernothing,’ was reworked from a slow ‘emo’ esq acoustic song, to a faster more upbeat version that appears on Keasbey Nights. The original really has it’s own merits as a version for being so different and is actually a favorite among many of their fans. Sadly the only copies of this album out on the internet sound like shit as they’ve been taken from tape recordings that it seems were never really good quality to begin with.
Tonight I had a bit of free time and I was playing around with Soundtrack Pro for the first time and decided to throw Supernothing into the program to play with and to see if I could do anything about the quality. I was surprised with the results. I managed to correct the volume problems and remove almost all the tape hiss / noise that was crapping up the song. I’m impressed with Soundtrack and how easy it actually was to do without distorting the audio in the song, and that someone like myself who is virtually tone deaf could manage to do something with it in a matter of minutes.
Anyway I’ll let you be the judge of my work.
You can checkout the original here:
http://skachilles.com/music/gimp/11-Supernothing.mp3
And my cleaned up version:
http://www.subism.com/audio/gimp/supernothing.mp3
The immediate difference is subtle but really evident at loud volumes, through a car stereo or headphones. The original has a strong annoying hiss from the tape and is recorded at a lower volume. Using soundtrack I managed to clean up all the hiss / noise and boost the volume to that of a normal recording which in my opinion makes it vastly more listen-able than before. I’m debating doing more of this type of thing with some other projects, including ‘Rules of the Game’ Catch 22’s pre Keasbey demo that is also only on tape, but I’d like some feedback on how people think this sounds first.
For those interested: the site is back up. Please note, the web address for the forums has changed to http://www.mediarebellion.com/forums/. Using the baloolapalooza.com/forums/ link will cause errors you must now use the mediarebellion.com one only. I figured this was as good a time as any to change the domain settings as we plan to phase out the ‘BaloolaPalooza’ name. Please adjust your bookmarks accordingly. Thanks for your patience.
So I figure I should put this out there for those wondering.
MediaRebellion.com, an entertainment / political commentary site I own that I run with my friend Bear and a few other very talented individuals I am proud to call friends has been on hiatus for a number of months and right now is down. This has lead many to believe that I have closed the site or that I simply don’t care.
The fact of the matter is this:
MR is supplied cheap hosting by 5-Towns hosting and one Mr. Jason Pearsall. Recently Jason’s business has been taking off (deservingly so too), and he had to move servers, somehow in the server switch things on the site have gotten a bit messed up and I have been unable to get them resolved. I apologize to those who regularly use the site’s forums and I hope to have the issue worked out very soon.
As for the hiatus, this site alone should be an indication of things to come, Bear, Sean and I have been in discussion about a few different ideas for MR and while I have no time frame for anything nor is anything set in stone, one thing we all agree on is it’s not going to close, and we all want to do something with it, we’re just not sure what.
If anyone has any questions or anything you know how to contact me, but hopefully this will put the confusion to rest, check back here occasionally for updates I guess.
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