Count Blah

Does anybody know if there was a version of Dracula before the "Count Blah" in Greg The Bunny, who said "Blah, blah, blah"?

Apple fanbois disgruntled

What happens to Mac fanatics when the brand bums them out?, article.

I was just talking to my friend Laurie yesterday. Amidst camera talk and such, we spoke of Apple, since we both have been enthusiastic Mac users for 20 years or so.
But while we both like the iPad that all dat, we were also both sort of depressed over the way the Macintosh is going.

I said that I'm stuck with a three-year old OS (Snow Leopard, because I can't find good replacements for some of the software I use a lot. This is the first time this has happened ever, normally an Apple OS upgrade was smooth as an apple.

And Laurie said he has a new MacBook Pro and an iMac, and while he loves the machines themselves, he really doesn't like the newest OS, Mountain Lion. It's not pleasant to use, he says. Apple has not improved it recently for professional/enthusiast users, au contraire, they have pushed it in the direction of the iPhone look and feel, presumably in order to lure in the hordes of iPhone users to the Mac system. Basically they dumbed it down.

And the tower model, Mac Pro, which I use, has barely been upgraded or changed at all in several years. Apple is promising one this year, but I'm not holding my breath for something great. Not when the last update to the iMac made it so thin (who asked for that?) that it has to use pro laptop parts, which are slower and more expensive.

And now that Microsoft has jumped the shark in exactly the same fashion (making the interface more like a portable interface, thus confusing a lot of matters), even throwing in the towel and jumping to Windows does not seem promising at all, if it ever did.

I did not see this coming, it's so depressing. Tim Cook repeats Jobs' mantra that they are not in it to make money, but to make great products. I really hope that this includes enough pride they they will continue trying to make a great desktop computer, the product which put them on the map in the first place.

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On top of that, Apple's mind-state of nanny-state now extend to deleting emails containing certain racy phrases. 

Captcha off

From emails I get, I suspect I'm losing many comments from readers, because Blogger's Word Verification ("CAPTCHA") system is so damn unreadable.
So I've tried again now to turn it off, see how things go, how many spam comments I'll get this time.

Now you can comment without this problem.

Why hasn't Google fixed this yet?? There are other systems which are not unreadable, and everybody complains about these.

Any ideas for how to get around it?

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update:
Thanks to TCG for giving a link to Google forums (the closest thing to actual contact. I'm always amazed that big companies get away with not having *any* customer support or contact. They should be required to have it, legally.)
Lookkit:

Hotel Transylvania Monster Party

Watch out for the baby werewolf (about 1:10) who kicks her wild brothers off the dancing platform so she can enjoy the music and her subtle dancing alone. I love her dancing, they might have put in a few more seconds of that.



I gotta tell you people, Hotel Transylvania (UK link) rocks.
I saw the lame-ish cover and the smooth, cartoonish characters, and I didn't expect too much, but it's totally over the hill-arious. It's funny, has great characters, and wonderful sceneries.
Even the end titles are special, they commissioned scenery paintings from some excellent painter. Dark and subtle stuff. I wish they'd had that long sequence in the Extras, without the text.

Lizzie Mary Cullen

Lizzie Mary Cullen.

 

Now we create humanoids

This is almost two years old, so they may be further now. On the other hand, from what I read in the book Physics of the Future, ASIMO is not as advanced as it seems in demos. Everything is carefully scripted, and it can't actually perceive its surroundings, unless they are specially marked. It also does not think or generate its own speech, it just plays recordings.
But the movements are better than anything I've seen.

Now we create humans

Astonishingly real Audrey Hepburn shills chocolate in new commercial, article.
(The video may be viewable only in UK, but this article has more pictures.)

Well, I would never have guessed that this was a CGI human. They have done it. Virtual actors will come. I was wondering when it would happen. (Of course making a whole movie is another thing.) They did start with an actress, but in the end they had to make a fully digital Audrey. Impressive result.

I wonder if they had to pay her estate and get their agreement to use her likeness? I mean such legendary beauty is worth a *lot* of money! (Such beauty is like a force of nature.)

Another thing is that I would personally debate the ethics of using dead celebrities in advertising. They can't tell you if they would have agreed or not, and they don't get their slice of the cake. It is parasitical.

Remodelling a Figure in Photoshop

I think that perhaps the devil in humans' minds is the very deep and ingrained desire to never see anything as it really is, if we possibly can help it.




Update:
Dave said:

My eye is so untrained that the finished product is no better than the original. Someone obviously wants it different, for some reason.

Yes, that is a very interesting point. All these multi-corrections which are now apparently de-rigeur in fashion, seem rather arbitrary to normal people (and apparently I'm normal enough too think so myself).
I use a much wider variety on Domai, I rarely retouch, and yet all the models are generally considered very attractive. And even those I reject, often others will say "what's wrong with her, I just see an attractive young lady".
And the reality of it makes it much more relevant. I look at an actress in FHM, and it looks like a plastic doll.

Superhydrophobic and oleophobic coating

Bert found this. Dang cool! Talk about a practical invention.


(The frame is treated, so all the colored water collects in the middle!)

Nanotechnology: the limits will not be reached anytime soon! Will be exciting to watch things which will come from it. Just for one thing, I believe that it will beat the heck out of traditional production methods one day when it comes to dramatically pushing back the limits for how strong, light-weight, and cheap we can produce things. Not to mention miniaturisation.

The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson (I still think it may be his best book) is a fabulous SF book which in the middle of all the drama explores the possibilities of advanced nanotech manufacturing. If you know of another good one, do speak up.
(Nonfiction too, by the way. I just bought "Physics of the Future", but the reviews are a little bit mixed.)

Darwin re-revisited

I'm still enjoying the feast of extras on the ParaNorman discs... One of the brass says that the wonderful thing about the movie is that it has the message that you don't have to fit in, that sometimes your best qualities are your oddest qualities, maybe the same ones which make you a bit of an outsider.

But I think he may be overlooking that so many books and movies do that! It may even be a majority. Just think back to such a simple character as policeman McCloud from the seventies. He was a cowboy in the big city, and he was a kind of rebel, he always got chewed out by his boss because he was never "playing by the rules". But he got his man. You know the thing, it's everywhere.

I think the really weird and wonderful thing is that in stories, we all celebrate the brave misfits. But in reality, we never do! What is this fantastic, universal double standard? This great blindness?

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Update:
L. Edwards said:

"...the message that you don't have to fit in, that sometimes your best qualities are your oddest qualities, maybe the same ones which make you a bit of an outsider."

That's not a very good lesson to be teaching kids, though. When you're young you have to fit in. As an adult you can be yourself. It sounds like it should be good advice to say "be yourself" but it's not - people who conform have happier - if less interesting - lives. As someone who definitely didn't fit in, but also someone whose quirks didn't lead to fame and fortune (although I woudln't have wanted the fame) I'd trade that for just having been normal.

I think this gets into a very deep area. Very difficult to put hard rules there.
I will do a little to fit in, I never had any weird haircuts for example. But beyond a certain point you just can't change yourself. Not without committing violence to yourself.

And while it's admittedly very difficult to learn, I do believe that it's healthy to work towards not caring too much what others think.

But sure, it's true that it makes for a smoother life if you whittle down a bit of the worst of the edges which poke others too much. If one doesn't try to get along, energy is wasted on conflict which could be used constructively.

Darwin revisited (ParaNorman)

If you were bigger and more stupid, you'd probably be a bully too. It's called 'survival of the thickest'. - ParaNorman

It is very interesting how, with this movie, they have merged CGI and computer production with stop-motion to hitherto undreamed-of levels. For example, with 3D printing making the faces, instead of perhaps 200 different facial expressions possible with usual face-exchange stop-motion, they can now have 200,000 different ones! (Don't ask me how they keep track of 200,000 slightly different puppet faces!)

Also with that technology, they get the same translucency as in real skin, instead of the dead surface of paint or clay. And they can bake in the color in the brand new Color 3D printers, so for example a character can have hundreds of subtle freckles, and they all stay in place through thousands of different facial expressions, which couldn't be done with painted faces, which was why in Coraline for example, the faces had very bland colors.

I really like the designs, the characters as well as the streets and buildings and all. There is not one straight line in the whole movie. Even when they show a web page, it's all crooked!

(I wish I could make my web browser look like this.)

Eolake-South-Park

Some years ago on a web site I made myself as a South Park character.
My pal Dave (Educational Fontware) apparently thought I was too hard on myself and made an alternative one.