No Talking Tuesday # 125

I made a mistake this week. Frigg on me.

I began a new morning ritual where I eat a comically small slice of hot pie, with a bit of neurotically prepared coffee (Ethiopian single source beans (yirgacheffe, Sidamo, Harrar), lightly roasted, crushed by hand with my mortar and pestle, and brewed with my Italian stove top percolator), paired with a sliced orange and water. The meal always ends with a little piano improvisation before I finally get off my duff to go to work. Most importantly I read a childrens book from my library each morning over this nerdy little breakfast. I've been collecting antique childrens books for the last year or so. Books from the good old days, when childrens books were often scary and dealt explicitly with death and greed etc. Sadly my poser consumer whore-ness quickly became evident as I never set aside time to actually read through them, but thanks to my new morning ritual, I'm already through half. It was Tuesday when I read Fly by Night by Randall Jarrell, illustrated by Maurice Sendak. My no talking defenses weren't up yet as I was alone in the dining room reading. But when I finished reading the first two pages, I was so struck by the strength of the writing I accidentally said out loud: "Wow." I vented my frustration and self loathing on a dramatically angry piano improvisation before leaving for work. My idiocy notwithstanding, the writing was fantastic and of course Sendak's illustrations are on point as they always are. Here was the passage that prompted my mistake:

If you turn right at the last stoplight on New Garden Road and go north for a mile and a half, you come to a lake on a farm. Beyond, at the edge of the forest, there is a house with a window seat and a big willow-the house is covered with ivy, and the ivy is full of sparrows' nests. If you walk along the edge of the yard, outside the hedge, a big red chow walks along by you on the inside, barking and wagging his tail. Sometimes there is a cat on the porch, a striped gray one.
A little boy lives there-sometimes you see him sitting in a tree house in the willow. He sits in it so much that the sparrows are used to him, and light just out of reach in the branches. When he takes the cat up with him, though, they sit in the ivy and scold; the cat never stays long.
The boy plays on the lawn with the dog and cat or in the forest with the dog-there aren't any children for him to play with. In the middle of the afternoon he goes and stands by the mailbox, so that the mailman can hand the mail to him instead of putting it in the box. But sometimes he stays in his tree house and waves, and the mailman waves back from his car. Sometimes the mailman hears him calling, "Here Reddy! Here Reddy!" to the dog. The cat's name is Flour, the boy's name is David.
At night David can fly.
In the daytime he can't. In the daytime he doesn't even remember that he can.



The List:


heart smart burrito
with rice please
-regular
black, whole wheat


well this is just an outline of every point i could conceivably touch on
my guess is that this mostly overlaps with the choc mool paper?

should i maybe focus on point three?

so should the whole paper sort of be a case study of that piece

i could do either, but all the points you hit are all in the process used for the frieze, so there wouldn't be much need to go outside

well i have a serpent head i did from scratch for that example

well if we touch on that stuff at all we should probably do it briefly as you say
though if you want to get into the workflow of working with the archeological examples
the ball court, frieze, etc. could take a while to wrangle that stuff, step through it, talk about all the factors etc.

i don't really care, i think the uv point is small potatoes to the other stuff

no when you apply a displacement map on uprezed uv'd low rez base, some parts would wig out and have spikes etc.

well you could just say work from big changes to small, and separate them out so you can make choices about specific things like surface texture, seperate from stuff like how to sculpt the missing area to fit in with the pattern etc.

not with photos on site, but texture photos

right, the bullet was in reference to painting texture by hand vs. using photo projects and layering etc. but as another point we can talk about using actual photos of the object like i'm sure jun did with the choc mool

well for me the main thing i learned and grew from artistically from this category, was how archeologists don't think about visual explanations of things, and how exploring that can uncover new points of view, and on a more artistic level, how to build a high rez sclulpt in mudbox with a flexible workflow etc.

well every time we deferred to a archeologist for answers like with the serpent column, and decapitation freeze, they usually hadn't considered it, but some clues would begin to emerge for me after making subtle connections after looking at tons of reference and working

also things like what color to paint missing parts i was filling in based on what i abstractly observed to be tendencies based on the way other parts of the image and similar images in the reference were colored etc. like how blue was used in small patches, and green for feathers etc. there wasn't really a existing index of that kind of stuff but it sort of emerged in my head after working on it and holding myself visually accountable for a while which obviously isn't normal to do as a researcher



well no matter which way you cut it it seems like this paper is going to be a pretty large undertaking, so should we make sure first that we have the time budget for it?

well this one will be hard to get a estimate, i have to re install mudbox and go through old files, and version saves, and there will likely be lots of hiccups along the way like jun just said behind me, it could get done in a week, but i wouldn't be surprised if it kind of snow balls into something kind of huge, so i just want to make sure if it does that it does the least damage, if that means prioritizing it to be done later, or whatever

well and eventually i think we should do a fry render or something of the frieze since we've never seen it presented as realistically as the data was preserved to allow

yea i'm game.


so is there now a drive

no i thought it might be worth doing a comprehensive cross polinization of my philosophy for these papers, but i think it will eat up too much time,

i remember jun was compiling all the maya skies stuff on to one drive? is there now a directory of all the old files i can begin hunting through for all these pieces?

so i can navigate to it through tomonoura?

well they work for the stuff being pointed out in that paper, i can point out the same stuff in the same way, but it would probably be better to just have the images suite the writing, probably be easier to deal with in the long run, also make the images less mish mashy with a clean whitish shader in mudbox and consistent viewpoint etc.


oh and i sussed out the indesign template, spreads thing, and that's all good now, i have all my pages in one document with master templates for cover and pages.

though i should say since we have elements that will always need to be modified for the content (which is really easy) the automatic functions aren't especially helpful, but at least having all the pages in one file etc. will stream line things, well kind of

also if it's not worth everyone coming to speed on that, i can just take everyone's notepads and images and just do it

No Talking Tuesday # 124



The List:


$30 on 5

No Talking Tuesday # 123


The List:



so here i have
the cover page
in order of
audacity

that mocked up
example isn't
ideal


i would
probably vote
for the minimal
audacity

but if we can
find a
tasteful mayan
decoration that
could work, and
the animals in
the circle
thing could be
mayan figures
creatures etc.

so lighter
value at edges


so these two
pages represent
mock ups for
normal content
pages in pdf,
like you did
but clearly in
a more
pretentious
antiquated way,
and the third
thing is a
mockup of the
cover page for
a sample
document, done
in a few
different ways,
basically in
escalating
degrees of
audacity

so the idea was
(this is a very
rough example)
to have a old
style
dictionary
style
illustration of
an animal for
each document.
but after
looking at this
i think instead
of going with
this default
victorian feel
which is
completely not
relevant we
should use a
mayan skew of
the same idea,
with ornate
trimming that's
mayan and the
illustration of
mayan figures

i'ts adobes
page layout
program, like
what
illustrator is
to vector
shapes,
indesign is to
page layout, i
have a easy to
install evil
version for us
all

i didn't really
do much with
that, i did a
quick mock up
but since you
we're dealing
with it i
figured i would
focus on layout
and cover page
stuff, but i'll
show you what i
did real quick.
i just assumed
each document
would have a
cover page, so
i just thought
it would be
nice to have a
design for it

personally i'm
sort of partial
to your design.
i think it's
more sensible and
straightforward

i'm going
through
publications
looking for
stuff to scan,
but i'm not
sure how
relevant that
would be for
you, you
finished
sussing out the
server thing?


the body font
is beembo, (the
only serrif
font that
Kubrick approved
of)

i'm having all
sorts of
brainstorms
since i started
scanning in
these images,
so i can
definitely do
another version
with juns info
once that's
ready or before

Songs In Sleep


I just moved into a large house in north Berkeley.
Many of the rooms were vacant and I had the choice between several.
I ended up choosing the one with an apple tree growing in through the window
with a view of impossibly tall trees and completly soaked in silence.
(perfect quite is something I've always wanted but haven't had in a place I've lived until now)

I passed on a larger room for this one,
hoping it would pay off with whimsical inspiration in my art and writing.
And of course as soon as I moved in,
my new place inspired these few lines of verse .

Here is the final piece
and all the drafts in order:



Songs In Sleep


You found me under an apple tree
set my wing with a twig
and some kitchen twine
eyes clenched, quick shallow breaths
i struggled in your shoe box
until you laid me in your bed
your sugar face, my belly aches
the scattered hands across my dusty face
until you burnt my hazel bones
with the details of your voice
you whispered in sleep:
"All the king's horses, and all the king's men."
then held me with a strength i could hardly believe

when i remember you it's always the same
legs dangling in the water
eyes hidden from the sun
of course we never went swimming
we never did a lot of things
but there you are
wiggling your toes into glassy ripples
looking at me from under noon shadowed eyes
with salty lips and sandy hair
is how i'll forget you
as soon as i can afford to

your name wasn't Abigail
but i pretend it was
you kept a small bird
trained him to sing
you would start, and he would follow
always in key
then you would look over
satisfied and smiling
as if to say:
"See, I told you. You shouldn't have doubted me."
of course i never doubted you

you were the muffled sizzle of rainy streets
the sudden creek of furniture in the dark
the embarrassed snicker
when it's time to be serious
and all the faces i'll never see again

i was explaining myself to a group of friends
when feeling around in my pocket, i found a key
i pulled it out confused, stopping mid sentence
starring at it, i thought of you
and something twisted inside me
i felt sick and excused myself
there is a door somewhere closed to me forever
it doesn't matter that i have the key
it never mattered that i have the key.

No Talking Tuesday # 122



The List:


these look like the same clip i think there
was a misspelling

so i have a batch of clips from monday
that i've been hacking away render wise
since, it's using as the source the clips
that are on my x drive. so since i can't
render in two after effects at once,
ideally i would like to finish out this
batch and then use tonight to render
the clips i worked on today.

i did three batches yesterday, first the
clips i'm rending now from x, second a
bunch of stills that rendered right away,
and third a bunch of hd clips i rendered
over night. oh well i guess i could have,
they were in another after ef, i can also
interrupt it if need be


well the situation there was there were
two clips


well i hope it's resolved


maybe there is no situation, it's just my
spider sense tingled at what appeared to
be a mistake somewhere down the line
either on our end or theirs

one clip being duplicated and named
almost the exact same like a typo


Jun was naughty

saved last nights render as animation
codec compression best, which i'm
assuming doesn't really matter but does
offend my samurai spirit, and should be
known

well i think you should just give them the
footage as we have it now, and let them
be wowed by it, and if after that settles
in you can be like and if that corduroy


effect bugs you we can take it back again
and do it


what kevin and i were talking about was
a vertical banding effect that is pretty
much on all the footage but shows up
most noticeably on footage that is
exposed in a certain way, basically most
of the time the dark background blacks it
out but it is pretty prominent on some
clips, and i found a laborious way to get
rid of it, but only as a test in photoshop, i
made a template

it's only on the hd f
well before when i was writing on
external drives mark gave me i noticed
after effects always created a log file
that had a text log in it i'm assuming, but
i haven't noticed that happening since
i've been writing to the internal hard
drive but maybe it is and i haven't
noticed it


i only noticed after effects creating that
log folder when i wrote to external hard
drive, maybe it's


well i'm rendering the last batch mark
gave me on this machine, and rending
on the other machine across,


well my rendering is done in an hour or
so,


well it's only eight clips, but they seem
pretty long



Bucheron
Goat