Ellard

A toilet belonging to Beatles legend John Lennon sold at auction in Liverpool on Saturday for 9,500 pounds ($16,400) – nearly 10 times its guide price, organisers said.

How may we best position art in the dynamic forces of creative genius and social construct?

Lennon used the porcelain lavatory, which is painted with blue flowers and a blue border at the rim and at the base, when he lived at Tittenhurst Park in Berkshire, south-east England, from 1969 to 1972.

To organise the artist’s catalog retrospectively by period – for example a blue period, could be seen as imposing the latter as a principle of the former. This politic places the many over the one and yet the one must sit at the origin of the work.

The loo was removed when the house was being refurbished, and Lennon suggested the builder, John Hancock, take it home and “put some flowers in it”. Instead, the builder carefully stored it in a garden shed, where it remained for 40 years until he died, and his son-in-law put it up for sale.

Is the curator an adjunct to the creative birth? No, rather an alchemist that finds gold in the bottom of the vessel.

At the auction at the 33rd annual Beatles Convention in Liverpool, the toilet was expected to fetch about 1,000 pounds. “It is unbelievable,” said auction organiser Stephen Bailey after it sold for almost 10 times that.

We risk the intangible qualities of art when we provide a metric of quality: price, longevity, scale – this numbering is antithetical to the moment of creation – the shaping of the forms that can only later be proffered up to be blessed by the curator

“We had bids coming in from all over the place but it went to a private overseas buyer.”

Art is truly the international language.

The USA version of ShowbagHD has bogged down into trench warfare as the main programme refuses to be encoded. I’ve spent every spare moment this week (hah) loading the AVI into some encoder or other, changing settings and waiting 8 hours for the results. It’s not as bad as sending Super-8 film off to be developed but it’s damn reminiscent.

Here’s the story:

The original clip is 720p25. That is, PAL frame rate. I placed that into Adobe Media Encoder, cranked it up to 50fps and let ‘er rip. Success – but the quality was poor until I made it take 2 passes. The first pass warns the encoder about rough patches and means that very difficult sections are still decently handled. Build the BD and wacko.

OK, so now for NTSC land. Time stretch the video to 59.94fps. Load that into AME, let ‘er rip. End result – as before, quality could be better. Switch to 2 pass, and Encore doesn’t accept it as a useable file. Arse. So I let Encore do the transcode directly. Fails – the file lacks ‘SEI timing’. I try a different encoder. Fails. You need to multiply each stage of this by 8 hours to feel the annoyance. Yes, after a while I started to do little sections and the results are in – 2 pass means fail if you are using a converted NTSC source.

But if I take my 2-pass file and mux it with open source software it plays as a BD just fine and it looks great. There’s just NO WAY to have Encore accept it as a real source. No Encore means no menus and so on.

Help from the Adobe forum was – the error is probably a confusion between a progressive and an interlaced frame. That is, somewhere in the standards conversion it’s (something like) creating a single field and Encore can’t figure out the field dominance. But there’s no way to find that one 60th of a second in 60 minutes of video – 216,000 images. I also can’t really trust this explanation because I’m using all kinds of test footage now with the same outcome.

The writer has advised me – use MPEG-2 instead. OK, so I just did a minute of 2-pass M2v and it works. I am going to have to crank the bit rate up much higher, and that means dropping some of the other stuff on the disc… maybe just one thing. Oh shit, hang on a second I didn’t test something

… OK it does build. Phew!

Choices: (a) make it 24 fps. Looks nice but songs are slow. I don’t like. (b) Single pass M4V. No, it craps out when it hits some sections. (c) Go with 50fps. Would love to do that but I doubt it would work. (d) Buy some other software. Sure the University would love that after I hounded them for this. (e) Do what the guy says. I’ll do what the guy says.

I’m hating this.

I am also particularly pissed off about the federal election. No need for analysis as every journalist has already had a twit and a wipe over it. But I had to see John fucking Howard again. I had 10 years of that prick and I thought it had been dumped down a well and the well cemented over. Anyone who had a hand in bringing John Howard back to political life is a criminal. Christ wasn’t over TEN YEARS of John Howard enough? And I saw him on the street the other day it was just horrible. Enough.

Labor, for fucks sake get yourselves together. It wasn’t a wipe out, but how did you go from most popular prime minister to feather duster in one year? Get your Bolshie back on. Look at the Greens, totally useless but adorable. Get some of that action. Sure, Rudd was a wind up toy, but you could have taught him how to speak English as well as his native Mandarin. You didn’t have to put him in hospital. No, get Latham and put him in a sack, add some bricks, sort it out. Now get Julia off the women’s mags, and get her a crow bar. She’s a fighting woman not a damn pillow.

Do I have to tell you everything?

As it is there’s the distinct chance our next prime minister is a man unsure whether someone is his son without a DNA test.

What a damn epic.

You’re looking at 120 dollars worth of Blu Ray discs. Man, these things are expensive. Two spindles of 25 cost 240 bucks and then they delivered them to the wrong address. But that’s par for this project – it’s fought me every step of the way. I suspect that’s a very good sign.

Look at this:

The disc is held by a double sided foam square, which is holding the sleeve closed. The sleeve is card held by the photo media guides. I printed off about 20 or so before I got the look I wanted. I had only used a mock up until tonight, the theory seems to be working. Throwing the compact around, it seems to be holding. Until I mail it, I won’t know for sure. There’s balloons and metal confetti inside!

Now here’s the numbering system!

52 playing cards which mark 52 original Showbags! You can’t see the design on the back of the card but it’s … rather unique. You’ll know you have an original copy once you see it. If we go past 52 copies then I’ll make something similar.

OK so here’s some bad news.

The first batch will be Australian/European PAL. I am sorry but tests show that there is still a big difference between PAL and NTSC playback even on HD systems. I cannot be sure that USA televisions will work with the videos as they are. But I will make sure that some of the first 52 WILL BE NTSC format. As soon as possible these will be available.

If you intend to run the disc on a computer drive, then you can use the PAL version anywhere. Computers don’t care. Televisions do. If you are in the USA and choose the PAL version I will double check that you understand. The American NTSC version will run at 24 frames per second. This means that the HD video will be 4 percent SLOWER than real time, with the sound pitch corrected. Running the HD video slower is cleaner than converting to 29.97 fps. The standard definition clips will be at 29.97. I am trying the main video at 59.97fps.

I will soon mail have mailed off a free copy to a lucky person. When I do that the Post Office will be able to tell me how much this is going to cost. IT IS HEAVY, and although I swear that I will sell it for damn near cost, the postage will likely be is expensive. So as soon as I have the postage I will make these available for order. PAL is now shipping.

Right now I am drinking champagne sent to me by Government House, well deserved, and frankly making up for a rather horrible week or so.

Tonight is garbage night. MY NIGHT.

Space Capsule calling Planet Earth! Retired Astronaut Vincent Grant reporting for duty! Nope, wasn’t sucked into a space vortex and no Klingons round Uranus. My damn daughter gone and put me in a home, the thanks you get for fifty odd years of washing nappies. When she was small I used to take the kids riding in the Studebaker down to the tip, and I’d say ‘Now Millie, you stop biting your mother or I am going to leave you here on this tip.’ Sure enough the girl would quiet down fast but damn her when she said she was going to leave me on the tip she’s gone and done it. The Grants were always big on revenge.

Bunch of crotchety old fools in here let me tell you. I said where do I get the Internet I got writing lessons I got to keep up. Mrs Doodlewhatsit was all, ‘you got TV and you got bingo what you need Internet for that’s for kids’. The only time I get online is pizza night and that’s got be shared with Alfred Stott and his dumb ass Facebook.

So we will now learn how to write a real ghost story. You will want to do this to scare your wretched ungrateful children into line or to have something to do when you’re 3 days into lunar orbit and run out of drinking songs. Note this SUBTLE ART of DEFLECTION. You basically have to say everything backwards to the way you want the audience to take it. By making yourself sound like a complete idiot you will have everyone convinced. GHOST STORY JUJITSU! I will give you the MASTER STEPS.

STEP ONE: Always start by saying of course you don’t believe in ghosts and hauntings and all that shoot. Because the more you say you don’t believe in it the more they will believe everything you say. “Of course ghosts are a load of crap” immediately gets the response ‘Yeah? Maybe they ain’t!’ The audience wants to argue and this is the first thing they latch on to.

STEP TWO: Now you have to throw in some Essence Of Humble Times. This was back when you were ‘ a poor student living on noodles’. Or you ‘were stuck without a job living with your crazy religious parents’ or ‘had this job in a dingy office’. Never ever place the story when you were running the local Wells Fargo and sniffing coke off a hooker’s tits. People are suckers for hard luck stories and somehow being a bum makes you more attuned to the spirit realm. Or maybe rich people don’t get haunted, I wouldn’t know.

STEP TWO and a BIT: If you do go for the student/hippy/wacko angle you should throw in some weed or booze or whatever kids do these days, Quaaludes? But you always got to say that you didn’t notice any effects. Like ‘I was up to my fifth bowl of Quaaludes but they hadn’t kicked in at all’.

STEP THREE: So the place you’re at has a really bad reputation but you don’t think much of it. Like ‘people said that my front room was where 3000 Indian braves were squashed by a giant alien skull but the rent was pretty cheap so I took it.’ Always make the bad stuff sound real bad and your nonchalance real flippant. Because then they think that you deserve what comes next!

STEP FOUR: Keep it mundane! Whatever you were doing that night has to be really dull. Like slopping out the pig pen or arranging the fork drawer so the forks are all lined up. No one ever has ghosts when they’re disco bumper bowling.

STEP FOUR and a BIT: This is where you need a pardner. Lots of ways to play this – a younger brother works great, some people use the dog but whoever it is they have to be Robin to your Batman. You get to excuse all kinds of stupid moves in convincing the pardner that there’s no such things as ghosts. Fool me once fool you twice or fool me again or whatever young Bush said.

STEP FIVE: Now something’s definitely not right but you are going to shrug it off. Sure, some problem with the aircon makes it below zero which is why the cat is now hoisting itself up the wall backwards speaking Latin and I reckon it’s the wind that is making those cupboard doors slam in Morse code U R  G O I N G  2  D I E. Same old.

STEP SIX: Here’s where your pardner is going to suggest something sensible like let’s get the hell out or don’t you go wading into the dark pit where the screaming is from. Because then you have your excuse to go do exactly that dumb ass thing just to show them up.

STEP SIX and a BIT: Sometimes you can use the little brother wandering off as the excuse. Or sometime you think you hear him calling from down the Hall Of Doom, when really he’s still straightening those forks.

STEP SEVEN: All systems nominal, we have ignition! You can drop in pretty much anything now, although creepy little girls in period clothing has served well for the last couple of centuries and damned if people won’t be seeing creepy little girls on Mars in the year 3000. Apart from that bitch of a daughter of mine I don’t know what it is that makes little girls the worst case scenario for floating upside down in the basement gibbering.

STEP EIGHT: Robin having already got the hell out of Dodge you are right behind him and somehow end up in the Bat car first. Get out of there!

STEP NINE: the next day everything is normal and you look stupid.

So let’s check out this writing system in action!

“Now I don’t believe in ghosts or any of that but something weird happened back when I was out of school one summer back east. I just couldn’t find a vacation job and my parents were giving me the evil eye every breakfast about it. So when I heard they needed somebody to straighten the forks at the local piggery I figured the low pay would be offset by a break from the toxins at home and maybe be enough to buy me some underpants.

There wasn’t too much competition for the position, probably due to rumors that circulated about the place. The farm was supposed to have been built over an old graveyard and pigs would occasionally go missing only to be found picked clean and buried some days later. Joe at school reckoned he’d once seen a hand come out from the muck reach up and reel in a squealing pig, trotter first, but then he also said his dead mother slept with him at night which was a better reason to avoid the guy entirely.

I got the job. One other guy was already working there called Smiley on account of his being a bit simple, an oversized kid but seemingly harmless & not much for conversation. I asked him about the graveyard and he just shrugged it off. He’d do the spoons while I was on the forks, the manager would do the knives during the day. Did I mention this was the night shift?

The night in question was extra muggy and the pigs were making a hell of a racket over something. I’d soon learned that pigs enjoy bacon as much as anyone and there was always a smaller or sicker animal being noisily worn down by the pack. Smiley was in a foul mood and kept bending the spoons. My forks were tangling around each other for no reason and it was taking all my concentration to keep the prongs on the straight and narrow. The racket from outside kept on the up and up until it reached a crescendo of porcine howling and hooting around 3am.

Suddenly the noise from outside went dead quiet. Not a grunt, not a squeel – quiet like a gunshot. Once the shock wore down a little I started to feel curious. Something was going on in the yard and even while real scared I had to know. Grabbing one of the bigger forks I started out to the back door.

‘No! You no go!’, howled Smiley, ‘Under yard bad pigs! Pigs coming!’

Somehow the warning made me more curious to find out what was going down. Plus I figured it was my job to reassure Smiley that everything was going to be just fine.

‘Just fine’, I murmured.

There was no light in the yard – I guess I’d never been out this way at night. I stumbled softly to where I knew the gate would be, rolling the fork along the wire for sonar. Nothing stirred, no sound. What on earth was making the pigs that quiet? Maybe I could reach in and tap one, see what happened. Right then I heard the front door slam shut. Smiley had exited the scene, at speed. Coward I thought.

Through the gate and tiptoeing gingerly through the yard, I kept sweeping my boot to touch a pig. But the slush kept on further than I seemed to remember – or just deserted? As my eyes adapted I could catch a soft pink glow coming from up ahead, at ground level. What would you do? I went towards it.

It – was a ditch – no, a hole – straight edged – a big hole – light was coming up out of the ground – pink light – a kind of haze and – there were the pigs. Lined up. Lined up in rows. Making…

Stairs.

Damn Alfred Stott wants his Facebook now I’ll have to finish this next time.

For some time there have been things that have pissed me off, yet in denouncing these things I have often failed to translate my personal distrust into a coherent, communicable reason for such curmudgeonly thinking. Although you wouldn’t know it, I’ve been held back by the worry that I’m quite possibly just an old git and no better than the infinite number of stupid people online (there I did it again).

Tonight something twigged. It’s a wonderful moment, possibly like for a UFO believer if a flying saucer were to land in front of the UN building. Bear with me while I flick through some old ideas again – I hope to offer a shareable joy.

Google has released a little application builder for their Android mobile phones. It’s more BASIC than C++ and the ‘professionals’ are already deriding it as the source of more fart pianos. But, I thought to myself, at least people can make their own fart pianos, which is more than I can do on my iPhone. At which point the whole thing that pisses me off went klunk.

You see, I’ve been hanging around the community for GameSalad, which is a game authoring tool for the iPhone. This was the tool my students used in my Intro To Game Design class. The GS community has become a tedious place where all the talk is about how to get on the App Store, how to make money on the App Store, who is selling the most on the App Store blah blah blah – as if it’s a musicians’ forum where everybody talks about stocking shelves all day. The conversation has been defined from above by the way the entire iPhone ecosystem is set up.

(Stop press – latest addition to GameSalad – in-game advertising. OH right, of course – no arrays, no string parsing – let’s have ADVERTS first. Because it’s not about game design it’s about money. Not teaching this tool next year – their capitulation to Jobsism is complete.)

Instead the Google application builder lets the phone owner slap together something only they might want and without it having to be stocked. It’s a Do It Yourself process – something that has been missing for some time – something which was once a given feature of computing.

Not just the BASIC language of old computers but more recent tools like Bill Atkinson’s HyperCard on the 80’s Mac, or 90’s AmigaVision. These tools served one user as well as they served many. They were part of the personal computer revolution – a revolution that is now being dissolved in “clouds” and “spaces” – the smiley face return of mainframes. A centralised marketplace has (by constant reinforcement) become axiomatic in computing and that is what the rabid social science people call ‘a violence’. I kind of like that. ‘A violence’.

Aligned words from Dale Dogherty on the iPad:

… I am just pointing out the lack of really good tools available for amateurs and professionals to use to create new kinds of applications for the iPad. HyperCard was not only used by The Voyager Company; it was used by teachers to create coursework; or students to prepare a report; it was used by individuals to develop novelty applications like recipe databases…

… If the iPad is just another consumer platform for consuming and not creating content, then it will just be another way to watch TV …

Which is exactly what it is supposed to be.

Following the Android page leads to MIT’s Scratch project which I’d looked at before and decided wasn’t suitable for teaching game design. But another look, particularly reading this article (warning PDF) has led to clarity. As the MIT crew explain they are trying to inspire creative programming of the sort that’s been missing since the old home computer days, empowering people and reversing a tendency to passive social networking (“I have X friends, I have X cows”). Justifiably proud of their achievements they may have neglected some other people working on the same problem – e.g. Microsoft’s SmallBASIC which leads up to Visual Studio Express or HyperNext which is a free HyperCard replacement. And GameMaker which has just hit the Macintosh.

All of these initiatives are politically important. You can see what happens when in the case of GameSalad the whole dialogue becomes one of seeking approval from a gatekeeper. It’s like the old idea of ‘broadcast standards’ that kept control of television with the major networks. Of course the majors broadcast rubbish in the way the App Store stocks fart pianos – the idea of ‘broadcast standards’ is not about the worth of the programming but control of the programming. Or use the example of bands and record labels if that’s your concern. Recent malarkey with the terms of use in the App Store simply yanks the chain to cause anxiety, break dissent and remind the community of where the power lies.

But along with this self policing governmentality comes a smokescreen of limited and directed dialogue – where arguments are merely about brand allegiance and ‘fanbois’ line up to defend the people that exploit them. A more pathetic version of the way the lower middle class can be whipped up to vote for the controlling upper classes by controlled media.

wonderful great amazing

If you have previously bothered to read this blog you will recognise old themes I have tediously covered many time before. The change is that a coherent protest is starting to form – which therefore promotes a coherent response. And given I am responsible for teaching digital media it is my responsibility to go over this again and again trying to form the most helpful and liberating ideas.

Try to remember how to individuate, to rebel. There are infinite ways – that’s the key – there’s not the correct way. The person that uses FaceBook to coordinate their Friday nights with their real friends should lecture me, who looks at FaceBook like a poisonous snake. For my part I begin to understand why I instinctively took on the teaching of game design. The computer has become a projection, a kind of idol with which we’ve become intertwined. As more and more people have adopted a computer as identity (an avatar, a persona, a mediator) there’s been a push to make it an appliance and therefore an aid to what Foucault termed ‘technology of the self’. This constantly connected, linked to a mainframe, rights managed consuming device serves as a very poor role model – to individuate it to run unique, self serving, (even if badly written) applications is healthy for individuating our minds.

I can sum it up: D.I.Y.
Make software for the self and not the marketplace.

In the way that ‘indie’ was a term introduced to dis-empower independence and ‘alternative’ was adopted by the major labels to market rock, the use of ‘my’ and ‘i’ by the new major broadcasters is an obvious signal of the intention to remove the real ‘I’ and ‘My’ from our creative palette. The only way to regain these is to know the difference and exercise it.

To program, and perhaps to programme to entertain ourselves, not mediated by a marketplace, is effective (and fun) dissent.

Actually my students have a big one that I’m working on. Don’t think too hard about that – think of this: you are making an animation that pulls back from a single image to reveal it is the middle of a larger mosaic of images, 39 by 39 in fact. The screen is 768 pixels tall. So your 768 pixel image will need to be part of something 44,928 by 29,952 pixels in size. That’s like ten Hollywood movies across. And things get interesting at that size.

All the standard image formats die – JPEG, BMP, PSD – forget it. Photoshop starts to use ‘Large Document Format’ or PSB – not understood by other tools. After Effects and Nuke just cry and give up. Most smaller software turns into radioactive dust. TIFF will hold the fort so long as the file is less than 4Gb in size. Yet another reason to congratulate SONY – their Vegas software will load a TIFF that size and even animate it – impressive! But in this case we couldn’t use Vegas because we need a certain motion path.

I generated the mosaic first at quarter size – ‘only’ 22.5K across. After Effects can handle up to 30K. Then I generate the full size image and pass it to command line software called ImageMagick which opens the file line by line and so can deal with the enormous memory strain. This is familiar from the days when Amiga computers would use similar buffering to work on print images in 4Mb of RAM (Art Department Pro was the name I seem to recall).

This can slice the image into 9 tiles of which we only need the middle. The trick is to track out from this middle section until it’s about to leave gaps at the edge of the screen. Then switch over to the lower resolution version which is by this stage indistinguishable.

Slightly tedious work-flow but doable. Has to be done 12 times, so it had better be.

Possible alternative route is to load a TIFF into Photoshop and then write an action to slice the image into percentages. By the time I got through reading the ImageMagick manual I felt that I’d paid my dues and I’ll stick to that script.

It’s interesting to think of how larger images might get with the demand for higher resolution, multiple screens and 3D. The Science Fiction staple ‘holodeck’ would probably require images of this kind. Although probably something made out of vectors, given current work.

THE END of THE BLU RAY IS NIGH

The Blu Ray of ShowbagHD is definitely ready to be sent out for people to try – the plan is to buy in bulk at about 5 dollars a disc and then charge about $12 (the same as a CD) which should cover the roughly $6 postage. I don’t expect to make any profit on this – I’d rather lots of people have it and there’s also a fair bit of sampled visuals on there which seem a bit bad to charge for.

I’ve learned enough from this to start on the album that was once going to be called Co Kla Coma 96 – at least until Kevin Elliot decided to send a cease and desist letter over the CKC name. All of that seems to be worked out now and for the moment it’s going to be a Blu Ray called EXCALIBUR (and no I don’t know why – it’s something from Scientology that Lou Ball came up with. Although it also has to do with Mr Ed, the talking horse which Lou reckons is a ‘psychic point of resonance’. These people have mental problems.)

Here’s the details.

The old man had a stroke about a year and a half ago. Because the Australian public health service is fantastic they cleared the blood clot in about 2 hours from the emergency call. No hemiplegia, although he shuffles. He has problems remembering many things, and gets irritable like you would if half your mental life was erased in one day.

My main job is the television. He had a fancy set for 1990 something, a SONY CRT, a DVD recorder and a VHS tape machine. No amount of retraining was going to get him to remember that the DVD was on input one, the tape on input two and so on. Of course this caused anxiety, because what might seem trivial to you is a missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle to somebody who is trying to hold the fragments together. Keep that in mind – half of this is about control and self respect.

First problem – three remote controls. Solution, look for an ‘intelligent’ remote. I found something made by Logitec that seemed to have the right stuff – you told it what gear you owned and it would show a LCD display that had ‘Watch TV’ and ‘Play DVD’ in nice colourful letters. When you try the technology yourself, it makes sense. When you give it to somebody aged 85 you learn just how wrong you are.

For a start the buttons are little slivers next to the LCD screen. He found them after some discussion but they are ergonomic disasters. Logitec has made them identical to the frame around the LCD. What is it with designers who find controls somehow obscene and try to hide them? Oh a button – reminds me of a penis, must hide it. It’s a frigging controller not the Mona Lisa.

But the main disaster is that the remote learned a signal for ‘turn on’, which translates into ‘toggle power on the units’. So if the DVD was already turned on, then ‘turn on’ would turn on the TV and turn off the DVD. Which lead to confusion. That remote now is out of the loop.

Better solution, although a bit of a risk: buy a new TV with a DVD built in. These are not common above the size that goes into hotel rooms – I guess by the time you buy a huge TV you will go Blu Ray anyway. Didn’t have a very good choice of brands – shitty or not so shitty. JB Hifi took a month to source and deliver the not so shitty version.

Generally the problem is now much less. Once I had figured out how to hide most of the channels, it’s a matter of : turn it on, keep pressing the up arrow to change the channel, turn it off. That’s only one page of a picture book I’m creating for him. Some anxiety comes from channel 2, as there’s now channel 2 one, channel 2 two and channel 2 three. Great naming guys – we can spend hours trying to sort out why there’s a channel two two which is not channel twenty two and two three is different to three two and … anyway you get the idea.

But the bloody DVD player is taking three pages of the picture book. You can’t insert a disc until it’s the video source and the list of video sources is DTV, ATV, VGA, HDMI1, HDMI2, HDMI3, DVD, COMPONENT, COMPOSITE 1, COMPOSITE 2. Seriously people… do we need three HDMI inputs on a television set and do they have to go above the built in DVD? OK so we push the INPUT button, and keep pushing it until we get to DVD. That’s probably going to be teachable.

But then the DVD throws up a choice: DVD, MEDIA. The latter means a USB stick and it’s the frigging default. Every time he wants to run a disc it’s going to be DTV, ATV, VGA, HDMI1, HDMI2, HDMI3, DVD … DVD before the damn disc will even insert. Three pages of the picture book just to get to the image of shoving the disc in the slot.

Sure, I could install some kind of media centre thing but right now I would have to demand that it be completely logical and bug free – and you know and I know that there is no such thing. Also, keep in mind that physical discs make more sense to somebody who has grown up with media objects.

The world population gets older, the technology gets more complicated.
I can see a car crash coming on.

Attempts to hide controls are well intentioned but should not be based on aesthetics. Example – the ‘magic mouse’ on the machine I’m using has multiple controls which are hidden in one surface – worse still the monolithic touch pad. Pretty … confusing for the average user. If you have one button, OK, but don’t hide three or more as physical ‘magic meat’. Things that you might hate – step by step ‘wizards’ – bright and colourful buttons with pictures – ‘Are You Sure?’ – these things done right are going to be needed forever.

I guess this is a plea to do these things right, for people who aren’t dweebs, who might have not have the memory or vision they did 20 years younger. I suspect that as the baby boomers age they will, as they have always, drag society to fit their needs. OSX will look a lot more like Microsoft Bob.

I make no apology for showing this image again.

Work on my own Blu Ray is going a lot slower than expected. The tools are less blunt than a year back but you’re still going to have some tough times figuring out just why your precious video looks like cat vomit. Case in point, most of my old assemblies have been done using Sony software, so trying DVD Architect seemed the go. But once you declare a disc to be a certain format in DVDA e.g. 720p50, seems there’s no way to create tracks which are some other size and shape, which is bad news for all my old standard definition videos.

On the other hand if you use Adobe Encore, you can mix up sizes, but MPEG streams made by Vegas will be imported looking like the afore mentioned feline regurgitation. If I had used Première, fine, but I hadn’t, so it’s been a round trip from Vegas to Adobe Media Encoder to Encore. You will be asked many inscrutable questions as you run each – answer wrongly grasshopper and you will be back at the start.

Because I am an old fool who grew up in a period where hard drives were very small and very expensive – I have a tendency to delete temporary files once they’re encoded. Of course you only notice the bad coding 22 minutes into the programme after you just trashed that 100Gb assemble.

Anyway this is what’s on the PS3 after three days

As you can see the idea is to pack as much crap onto one disc as I can fit. Great big fonts for reading across a room. That innocent little OP4 link was a decision made about 3 hours ago that I am already regretting.

The sub menu for the farewell gig. Menus in Encore are made in Photoshop, with a little bit of editing available inside the software. Buttons are formed via some arcane naming of layers which I haven’t quite mastered yet. The buttons are mostly the wrong shape so far and fonts are another puzzle, but keep in mind the ’safe area’ around the edges of the screen – no room to move.

Here’s the main menu for OP which somehow has to organise 65 sub-menus. While I already have a web version of this on sevcom, a BD player like the PS3 won’t see raw WAVs in a folder structure, nor stream them from a web site. They are going to have to be made soundtracks for menus, one for each track, so that the user can navigate. This is going to be really tedious to set up. I did it once before for the Animated Family Doctor and it’s a pest.

I’m targeting the PS3. I think the majority of the audience has these, or one of the cheaper players that have come out in the last few months, with much less audience on BD-ROM drives. We’ve got a variety at work I can try.

A hard decision has been to go with 25 frames a second. Almost everything I have is 25fps, and slowing this to 24fps for the Americans is something I can try once I have a handle on the basics. Thing is, I reckon everyone who owns a BD player is using it with monitor that can handle 25 (actually 50) and seeing the videos in slow motion is not needed. Some beta discs will go out first to try this out, if I’m wrong I’m wrong. We’ll see.

Why Bother?

If I listened to Steve Jobs I’d not bother with the disc and just stream the video online, but listening to Steve Jobs is an invitation to mainstream conformity. 25Gb of material is a lot to store in one container and equals many people’s entire monthly download budget. It’s expensive, but it gets a bit better over the months, and I’ll look  into cheaper AVCHD disc versions as well. But I’m tired of seeing my good work look like complete shit on YouTube. Running the sevcom shop is a losing proposition, still, even if 10 people have this BD at least that’s 10 people that can see the videos looking like they are supposed to look, and hopefully they will pirate it well. In a world where everything seems to be a race to the bottom, we have to keep doing stupidly overwrought things to show that we’re not all businessmen.

A far reaching poll of both the publishers and editors of the Sydney Morning Herald has confirmed that which the paper has reported for some time: constant belligerent press coverage of the Labor prime minister has eroded his popularity.

Said one editor, “It’s hard to fathom how this mealy mouthed lying son of a bitch KRudd has lost his shine over the last few months. Just a short while ago he was extremely popular with the public, who were obviously deluded and needed to be re-educated on a daily basis.”

“As a mother of three beautiful girls I can’t wait for the Labor Party to be put in a gas chamber.”

Many of those that opposed the Emission Trading Scheme are disgusted that the bill was defeated twice in parliament. “We were resolutely opposed to this going ahead”, said one lobbyist on condition of anonymity. “So when the government decided to delay it rather than call an election we were appalled at getting exactly what we wanted. It just shows you can’t trust Bolshies”.

Also causing anger was the stimulus cheque sent out to help individuals make ends meet during the recent financial crisis. “I cannot believe the hide of that man, sending money to help us out”, fumed one citizen. “Just because Australia is in a far better position than most other countries in the world doesn’t mean this government is acting responsibly!”

Australia’s position as one of only three OECD countries to avoid recession last year has led to calls to bring back hanging and the stocks.

Much of the angst started with the failure of environment minister Peter Garrett to personally oversee all the subsidized home insulation provided last year. Tragically some houses burned when householders chose completely dodgy installation services. The opposition spokesperson for the environment said that a conservative government would come round to your house and put in the Pink Batts themselves.

Particularly grating to the public is the suggestion that multinational mining companies be taxed for ’super’ profits during boom periods to help pay medical costs. “Hey, it’s my dream one day to become a multinational mining corporation, and this government is raining on my dream!”, fumed another citizen from the same source as the previous one.

So far the polls show the conservative opposition only slightly more popular than the government. The Sydney Morning Herald predicts that with constant opinion pieces the natural order of things will be restored, as conservative rule was cut ‘dreadfully short’ after only 12 years.

DID YOU MISS ME?

When asked for their views, the publishers at News Ltd. said they were currently “more interested in stringing up that commie nigger in the white house”.

Students of the known world! It is is we, again! Did you miss us? Surely we did miss you and your enquiries! The Faculty of Recall is alive and prospering, although in changed circumstances.

Surely you would know we have a new way of government, with the ascent of His Royal Highness The Blessed Santa XIII, The Good, The Fair, The Wise. How lucky we are to have this paragon of mankind at our helm and you will not hear a disputing voice in all the rafts that remain afloat. Of course HRHTB Santa XIII has no qualm with dissent, but such disorder leads to errors in nature itself and the spontaneous capsizing of those that would speak such madness.

One that spoke in such terms was our previous Dean, who took it upon himself to denounce Our King’s leisurely book burnings. What are a few ancient books when compared to the merriment of our liege? That the Dean ended up with the books is only natural. For a short while we fell disgraced, until our new Dean spoke to the King, reminding him of his lineage running all the way back to the Santas of antiquity. Who else but the Faculty could establish once and for all His Highness as the one true world king? From that day we became the Royal Faculty of Recall, something that UNP Engineering can only sourly admire.

So your loyal correspondent has a task of some importance, tracking down the great kings of the past and ensuring that all reigns lead to Santa XIII.

So what was a king in the pre oops period? It seems there once were many kings, all with quite exotic and magical names. There was King Tubby, who could explode and not be hurt. King Jeans was very strong, King Kong was very tall. The Sofa King could sleep 100 years and the White King seems to have something to do with bathrooms. The modern reader is dazzled by so many and suspects that tales are being told as they often were by the ancients. That’s not to say they are lying – the ancient mind is just an alien world for the modern to explore.

One interesting theory put forward by Prof. Mersh is that each queue had a king at the front. That would make the numbers, but doesn’t explain another story about kings, that they lived in castles that did not move about, and so it is equally likely that a king was someone not in a queue at all. (For ancients a very rare position!) Dr. Robutussin has pointed out that ‘castles’ follow straight lines in the game of chess and suggests this is based on some forgotten fact. For my part I have seen evidence of things called rail tracks, which are straight lines running across the old cities. I will soon be presenting a paper that argues that castles moved along these rail tracks, each controlled by a king and that this is how queues were able to move great distances.

But my main interest of the moment is King Krause, sometimes written Kai Krause, who lived in a castle hidden somewhere in Germany. He became King (the story goes) by inventing certain magical technology.

As with most images of the ancients, we are left puzzled by their position somewhere ‘twixt reality and speculative magic. What to make of this?

Robutussin has argued that kings were able to make animals out of surplus people and there is quite solid support for this in the archaeological record. That would mean they were the suppliers of flying animals to each Santa and had a symbiotic relationship with the ultimate ruler.

Krause alone is credited with (at least) the following incantations:

The Lens Flare bedazzled enemies and caused them disorientation and nausea. This weapon soon multiplied into genocidal proportions and was banned by treaty shortly before the Oops Event.

Drop Shadows seen here surrounding magical orbs. Quite what these symbols mean is curious, but the two seem inextricably bound together. We suspect a kind of code where the king alone may see through the confusing muddle.

Similarly the Page Curl, which fools the viewer to turn over the image and find nothing on the other side.

The Algorithmic Texture is hotly contested. Some have it as a form of camouflage, yet are unable to demonstrate any naturally occurring area where that would be effective. I would concur with Mersh that what we are seeing is a kind of threat exhibited to the enemy – if you do not accept the king, this is a symbol of your fate. Hence the resemblance to diseases and parasites.

More magical orbs. We can fathom no use for these.

Santa XIII is very taken with this information and an expedition will venture south in the winter. We seek a castle somewhere in the land just below our state. From there we hope to find the means to convert some of our crew to animals, and set course by air for Germany. If you are in your final undergraduate year at UNP Recall we are seeking volunteers via the drop box outside the school office.