Things that go BOOM

My apologies for missing last week, I've been busy working on class assignments and helping to organize a club that I helped to start up last Spring, the F.P.S. League.

We provide a place where people who want to play first person shooter games (Halo series, Call of Duty series, Left 4 Dead, and so on) can do so in a more social environment instead of being cooped up in your room.

In any case, a couple of games that I'm looking forward to:
-Halo 3: ODST - Other members of the club have copies of the game, but I have yet to play it.
-Left for Dead 2 - Part of the campaign is set in Savannah GA, where I attend school, so it'll be interesting to see how accurate the level design is.
-Starcraft 2
-Bioshock 2

TED

My apologies for the missed transmission last week, I was busy packing and moving back below the Mason-Dixon line for college.

This week I bring you TED.com, an amazing site full of fascinating and inspirational videos. If you haven't heard of it before, take a moment to go check out the site, I'll wait.

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Ok, now back to the other part of today's cerebral offering; a selection of my favorite videos thus far, although I still have many videos to still watch.

Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity

Aimee Mullins and her 12 pairs of legs

Adam Savage's obsessions

Tim Brown on creativity and play

Larry Lessig on laws that choke creativity

Emily Levine's theory of everything

Scott McCloud on comics

Enjoy these videos and please explore the rest of the site.

Be inspired.

Pass it on.

Welcome to District 9

I know it's not exactly the best of start on my "consistent Monday updates", but I bring good news to make up for it, a review of District 9.

If you're not familiar with the movie, the basic premise is this:

An alien mother ship comes to Earth and stops over Johannesburg, South Africa. After a few months the Authorities decide to go up and cut their way into the ship, making first contact with an extraterrestrial species. Instead of bright lights and an advanced species to learn from, what they find are emaciated, malnourished creatures living in squalor. In a humanitarian effort, a temporary housing camp to tend to the aliens' medical needs. What starts as a temporary site becomes a permanent militarized encampment/slum housing the Prawns, as the aliens come to be called. All of this takes place 20 years before the movie begins.

Not wanting to spoil anything for those who have yet to see the movie, that's as much as I'll say for now.

The visual effects and the CGI were top notch, with a couple of spots that I felt were a little off in terms of the quality of rendering.

What was done with the cinematography was rather interesting, with the first half or so of the movie done as though it were a documentary. There were a few times when it got a tad confusing as to whether it was still running as though it were a documentary or if it had gotten to the "invisible cameraman" that constitutes the 4th wall in cinema. A few times it seemed as though they tossed in a camera effect or technique just for the hell of it, but all in all the camera work was well done.

The designs of the prawns and their technology were well done and I will certainly be on the look out for the "Art of District 9", seriously want to see the conceptual art for this one.

The story was well written as far as I've seen, not that I'm really one to analyze it. The CGI and the designs were just too awesome for me to really spot any major flaws.

For those of you who found this "tl,dr", I'll bottom line this for you:

Go see District 9.

The Brain of Tomorrow

Hello once again dear readers and fellow Netnaughts. This week I've got the future of digital interfaces to share with you.

While reading the Open Source Sex blog by Violet Blue, I came across this post (the blog's NSFW but well worth reading if you're interested in sex and related issues) in my RSS inbox. What caught my eye, besides the rather nice picture, was the bit about the NeuroSky.

Basically the NeuroSky is a device that allows you to translate analog brainwaves into a digital signal. For the moment it looks like the headset is used mostly to determine concentration/relaxation levels, so no surfing the internet like in the Matrix or William Gibson's cyberpunk books... yet.

That being said, it's an interesting step in neuro interfacing with computers, because most devices that came before this have worked off of electronic stimolation to facial/head muscles in addition to brainwaves, like this one.

The big thing that you have to keep in mind is that muscle electical signals are much easier to read than brainwaves, so being able to focus down to the waves specifically is actually really cool.

The Neurosky is currently on sale and comes with a game to help people learn to use the device as well as some other programs that take brain activity and use a visualizer as a really cool bio-feedback system.

At the moment the programs are just around to show the possibilities of the device. There's nothing out yet that really takes advantage of the interface capabilites, but Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, had an intertesting idea up on his blog :

" [...] Imagine an online multiplayer game where you control an avatar that is a wizard in this imaginary world. So far, that sort of thing exists. Now imagine that when you encounter an enemy wizard, you do battle, Harry Potter style, with an assortment of spells. So far, I imagine this already exists too. (I'm not a gamer.)

The new part involves integrating voice recognition and the Neurosky headset with the game play. Imagine that you speak the name of your chosen spell, and the game recognizes it and raises the magic wand of your avatar. But to actually apply the spell, you have to concentrate, and the Neurosky headset picks up that brain wave and translates it into the power of your spell.

Imagine that the available spells in this online world are an elaborate form of paper-rocks-scissors, meaning that every spell has a spell it can best and one that can best it. And even those results would depend on how effectively you concentrated to empower your spell. So a weak spell with good concentration could beat a powerful spell poorly done.

And perhaps you can escape from a spell through relaxation, becoming like a vapor to avoid chains, for example. The headset would pick up relaxation brain waves too.

I probably just pissed off some game developer who is working on this exact idea in a top secret lab somewhere. Sorry."
(full post at dilbert.com/blog)

Imagine playing World of Warcraft and being able to cast spells woth your mind, or heck, eventually being able to use a neural interface to be able to interact with the environment. No keyboard or mouse required!

Personally I would love to see what would happen if you could use a neural interface with an art program like Photoshop or the like.

It'll be interesting to see what comes down the line from this, both in terms of software useing the interface, and more advacned hardware that'll evolve from the NeuroSky and similar brain-to-computer interfaces.

Lack of updates

I haven't been posting for a while because I a) have been working my butt off (Quite literally. I think I've almost dropped a pant size) and b) because I stink at regularly updating this sort of thing.

In other news I now have a LiveStream site:
Little Black Sketchbook. I'll try to post times that I'm going to be broadcasting.

That's all for now.

Stones in the Mutha-F***ing Kidney

That's right all, I've been introduced to the closest thing a man can experience to child-birth.

Damn thing came outta nowhere and I felt like I was being stabbed with a HUGE knife from the inside. Took forever for the ER to get me checked in, but once I got inside they set me up with an IV and some meds, forget what. One was an anti-inflammatory, the other was a pain killer. DEAR GOD it was bliss... Now I know why people abuse pain killers.

So long story short it's apparently a 4mm stone from what i understand. @_@

Still waiting for it to pass I think, but I'm feeling a lot better than I was before, partially because of the pills that they gave me I think...

In other news, taking a class at the County College, College Algebra. Taking it to get it out of the way so that i can take a class more pertinent to my Major when i get back to school. Also thinking that i need to set up a place for my art. dA's fine, but they don't allow depictions of sex, and FA's all fine and dandy, but I've been moving away from Anthro art lately, and i want someplace where i can have a single collective archive of my stuff. which makes me think that i really need to sort through my Art folder at some point. i dunno, try to do that at some point soon, maybe tomorrow.

Summer Begins

well, classes are over for the time being, I'm back In NJ, the wonderful state of farm-lands and petro-chemical refineries. working on making a list of things to do art-wise over the summer, painting, sculpting, drawing, etc. Going to be working on interacting anatomy and poses, and got some sketches that I owe people.

that's about it for now.