From the frenzied mind and hands of bandmate and engine-of-creativity Hiram comes a stop-motion film about heartbreak, nude beaches, and tiny plastic dinosaurs.
He did a really good job with it. It’s not a recording I had any hand in creating, but he borrowed my tripod so technically I helped.
The song is from a new Harvey Girls album of stuff Hiram and Melissa had been working on for a while. The album is called Nutate, and some folks are doing some remixes of songs from it, too.
I’ve just finished up the initial version of a new project:
Garkov — Garfield + Markov chains.
It’s a probability driven strip generator that builds Markov tables from transcripts of existing strips and then synthesizes and renders novel text as a new strip. The results are sometimes pretty apt and sometimes deeply weird, and I’m pretty happy with it so far.
Examples: Speak – The suspense – Crazy about you
Right now it’s working from about 500 transcribed strips — just a fraction of the 10,000 that have been published by Jim Davis over the last thirty years — and is using nine different background strips. Both of those numbers will likely grow as I have the chance to do more transcribing and strip-preperation.
In principle, this can be applied just as well to other comic strips. In practice, the code should make it reasonably easy to do so as well, so I hope to at least test another strip sometime in the not too distant future.
[Update 6/9/08 - response to Garkov has been pretty great, enough so that I ended rewriting the db code underneath it on Saturday after a bunch of traffic crushed the will out of my original rinky-dink Perl DBM solution.
Also, I update the link up there to actually go to the site. Sheesh. Sorry about that.]
New project: blogging, with my wife, every single episode of The X-Files, start to finish.
Check it out: Mulder’s Big Adventure.
Recaps and commentary and obsessive thematic observations. Because, let’s be honest, you like the X-Files. Or perhaps you dislike the X-Files. The point is you’ve seen the X-Files, and you have an opinion about it, and it’s time to relive some of those unspecified positive or negative feelings.
Plus we have these cute little icons. Seriously, go there now.
Polyorama is back on its feet. Check it out!
It was a year and a half ago that I launched the original project. Then…time passed. A Dreamhost security disaster left a few thousand accounts compromised, including mine, and as a result the perl that made the site work was blasted away. I wasn’t making dutiful backups at the time, and so everything was just gone.
And it stayed that way for a while. I took some time over the last few days to recreate a streamlined, easier-to-expand setup for the site, and added a new-to-the-site polyorama from the awesome (and project-inspiring) John Ralston: Fourmiorama, a subterranean antscape.
Back when the project was new, I sketched out a dozen thumbnail ideas for my own polyorama sets, but never executed any of them except for a very simple pixel-art concept – I blanched, essentially, at the work required to put together a dozen really solid, consistent cards. I think I need to get over that and just make a set happen.
I’ve just launched a new experiment: Big Big Question.
It’s a question-and-answer site, with a specific focus on big, talky, bull-session questions; exactly the sort of thing that’s often, for practical administrative reasons, a poor fit for the otherwise excellent Ask Metafilter.
Very much still in the leg-stretching, finding-one’s-feet state; there’s been a lot of support and site-functionality feedback from metafilter users, and I’ve got a lot of ideas in queue already to improve and extend the overall site experience.
So, hey, come check it out: bigbigquestion.com
Having trouble coming up with a blues name? Enjoy combining US Presidents, fruit, and horrific maladies? Okay, then, check out my new Blues Name Generator.
It’s the blues name generatoriest!
The new baby: Metafiltr
It’s full (or, well, not yet full at all, because it’s brand new) of silliness related directly to (and you should probably click this next link if you’ve never been there) Metafilter.com, the site I’ve spent way too much time at over the years and am, as of lately, helping moderate.
Silly flash apps ftw!
It’s done. I made an album. And I think it’s pretty good. I’ll make a nice page for it sometime soon, but for now, here’s the tracks in order, and zip and tar files for easy grabbing.
The whole thing in a gzipped tarball (OS X, Linux) and zip archive (Windows).
So there’s this thing called the RPM Challenge, which is basically this: hey, jackass, write and record a brand new album in February.
This is the second year, RPM ’07—and I’m in. I’m doing it. Though the site is a bit of a mess (they’re trying to bootstrap a fully functioning community site, which is a rough business), you can sort of see what I’m up to over there at my profile page. I’ll probably keep more up-to-date over here, but, hey.
I found out about RPM because of Miko, who did it last year and from whose ’06 album came her meficomp track, Rattlesnake. She’s on the fence about this year, but about a dozen other metafilter folks have signed up so far, so I’m hoping this will be a grand metafilterian mess of creativity. I’m jazzed!
Please go take a peek at my latest project:
I’m going to be updating daily (maybe more? We’ll see how much drawing I do and how much time I have), with a new sketch and whatever comes to mind when I get to posting it. I was always one of those Kids Who Could Draw, but unlike my sister I never really threw my back into it. Now that I’ve got a tablet, I’m going to try to draw every day, even just a little, and see what happens.