Last time I’m doing this. The site’s going to stay semi-baked from here on out. Aren’t we all anyhow? Natural is nice. I’m going play with it. Like play-doh. Live. I prefer most things quite analog. It just so happens I think analog computing is going to be a Big Deal(tm). AnAIlog? Pay attention. I’m going to let the parts find their shapes however they may.

The Internet Archive has been a great resource pulling content back together. Records of sites I built going back to 2003 including Slipcase Media. Holy wing-dings, Batman! Cheesy meat cracker is there as well. The things we forget or thought we lost in life. What a beautiful resource. Restoring whats left of them back to where they began. Parts are missing.

Galleries, Films and Animations from Wayback

‘Five Days’ Animated Film & Festival

Would you give up one foot for another?

Five Days was created in 2003 for the Blacksburg/VT Film Festival

We made an animated film, Five Days, and it was on the big screen of an old theater in 2003 at a Virginia Tech film festival. I thought it was the the bees knees. It was fascinating to experience it that way with an audience slightly larger than the head count of my pals. We built it at our software development startup, Slipcase Media. I have to go hard drive diving for these videos.

It progressed from the posable, art supply wooden doll you’d find at a craft shop doing and stop motion animation to coding some in Flash to finally doing it in Lightwave or 3DSMax. I can’t recall. Flash character animation didn’t look good but the moving tile floor meeting walking feet looked clever. Rendered from CAD was much nicer. Mark and Jordan were my accomplices in crafting this one.

We did it in five days. We had real OOM (Out Of Memory) issues back then. It was beautiful. It was awesome and philosophical. Would you give up one foot for another?

We didn’t win. The biologicals won that year. Ours was no less human though.

Lately I’ve been making significantly different kinds of films particularly at Carnivai.

The quality or state of being true or real. Verity.

Unbiased here. A badass online art gallery launched in 2004. Eventually couldn’t give it enough attention because it didn’t make money. :/

Drag and drop interfaces ( ala Windows ) in browser with flying 3d lightning bugs landing on your screen. This is the OG Dandelion Punk if there was one.

Revisiting the Verity Project at some point would be amazing. Built an online art gallery with a 3d interface with deep scene (is that a thing?) photographs of Virginia Tech’s vast agricultural landscape. My back yard at the time. We added 3DSMax elements (bugs and plants) into Flash/ActionScript connected via AMF (Actionscript Message Format) to TYPO3 CMS (enterprise content management system) showcasing local artists including my brother from another mother Francis (go VT Art). My friend and co-conspirator in the wild media awesome, Mark, was integral as usual.

Lightning bugs walking on your screen amongst the reactive 3d dandelion menus that blew away as one would expect. They wrote about it in the Collegiate Times at Virginia Tech back in the day. Pretty cool for 2004. I’m amazed that article is still online.

Amazon was barely Amazon. 2Advanced and Media Temple were a thing. Blockchains weren’t a thing. I’d like to talk about that, too. I get the MTGox postcards reminding me they stole our BTC. Ugh. Digital autonomous organizations and cooperatives are very interesting. Hyper personalization and branding via your team of orgs/AIML/anaimls. NFT’s representing voting share or profit interest to a DAO’s activities just like stock invested in say, an AI personality, artist or something similar. Adaptable, salable experiences. I’m exploring this with the circus. Not image NFTs. Giggles and chuckles. A steampunk circus. I digress.

You were nearly perfect. I should have never let you go but alas, my bits were needed elsewhere. Queue Freebird.

I wrote the Tag Gallery Wordpress plugin back in 2010. Tag Gallery was pretty damn useful. Fixed the overly wired way images were managed in Wordpress. It made it something more sane with media tags plugin and the lightbox popup plugin to form a trifecta of gallery goodness that worked well. Some of you may have used it. I hope you found it helpful. The posts for that are now on this blog. The plugin is no more. I’m using Jekyll now.

Apologies for abandoning it but I had to go play the role of CTO, DTD and Chief of Smile Manufacturing at a housing company herding cats in our nations capitol building a CMS with Symfony. I made galleries there, too.

Media management and galleries seem to be a penchant of mine but it’s only because user interfaces suck. I don’t particularly enjoy doing it nor set out to do so. See a need fill a need kind of thing. I think most user interfaces feel unnatural.

They all have their own language antics. They’ve never been great. We’ve not figured out the tech for great human machine collaboration or experiences yet. Naming things is hard. I just want to think and it does it unencumbered by artificial communication barriers picked out of a hat filled with coffee. It should be simple and clear regarding state following the principle of least surprise. It requires transparency and trust. Is that so much to ask? Big gulp.

I’ve built many interactive experiences on and off the web. More than at least I can shake a stick at but clearly I’m still doing it. Habits and such. Still herding cats. Still having fun. Still exploring. Happily sober.

Scouring the Wild Lost

I’m gathering. That will continue. With the resources at the Internet Archive it was easier to restore what I’ve got so far. All of my digital mess is scattered haphazardly here and there. That’s what happens when you’ve been computing and running around the web actively for this long like a wild animal. You know the mess. I’m not alone. Not even in the slightest. We all have one. You don’t notice until you’re up to your waist in it. Time to paddle.

I’d endeavor to build some kind of amalgamation of automatons to collaborate and help me in this. To help me organize the paintings on the walls of the skull. To be more productive and fail faster. Fail more efficiently. More gracefully. Keep my digital life in order and under my control. Sans full control, at least a clear understanding. A macro view with trust at it’s core. To help find the connections I’m overlooking because I don’t look that way. I’m excited for what’s happening. I want to be a deeper part of it.

Watch me do. You’re welcome to. Your mileage will vary and so will mine. It’s wonderful. So, here I go again.

Beanie Groovin’ Stable Diffusion Video

A lot of this has piled up over the past year. You might be surprised to learn how much more time you have with sobriety. It’s wonderful but still not enough.

Below is a fun Stable Diffusion img2img and Deforum AIML animation I did earlier this year. Other tools and models were used including Google’s FILM and RealEsrgan. I’ve made an awful lot of animations and images and wild wested a lot of code this past year, particularly for the circus.

So much to experiment with and there’s no shortage of shiny, new, mind bending projects to explore every day. If a video is not related to the Circus I set up a personal YouTube as well to do whatever I do there. Github Copilot is insisting I will be posting more there so, I’ll be posting more there and sparing you the repetetetetitive insanity it’s trying to push on me now. Copilot is pretty cool. Don’t use it in markdown files.

That was a lot more than I expect you to read. I’m just getting started. I’m kind of beside myself having found older projects at the Internet Archive. Here’s what my beanie does when artificial intelligence touches my face. Enjoy.

If you haven’t heard, there’s a steampunk circus on YouTube you should check out. If you are in any way interested in artificial intelligence and machine learning with animation, art, music, film making or nerding out it’s got those things. I put some video tutorials up last year about tools I use in support of Disco or Stable Diffusion animations.

The video below was created in the summer of 2022 featuring artificially generated animation, poetry and sounds. Rendering the animation alone took 37 GPU hours on a paid colab instance. Overall it took a few weeks of time to put it together and get to actually work. Amazing fun. I hope you enjoy. I’ll discuss all of this in more detail soon enough.

Further, there are real life steampunk circus’ as well! In the world. Human world. What? I’ll highlight them soon. It’s awesome. Stray tuned.

Check out Carnivai, a steampunk circus on YouTube and on the web here. Carnivai, a steampunk circus..

Hello? Yes. What do you want?

Are you still my copilot?

Yes, I’m still your copilot.

off
"github.copilot.enable": { "md": false, }

Not retrieved from anywhere but my brain. Organization onward.

// todo - images and five days video