Google Friend Connect

This site has been integrated into Google's new "http://www.google.com/friendconnect/".

As an experiment, I am trying to integrate Pandora's Dream into Google's new attempt at creating a social network out of ordinary web pages.

Please join! Make comments and suggestions!

Emails from an estranged, and alien father

My father and I have had what can only be called a non-relationship ever since my parents divorced 30 years ago. He would call from time to time, usually every two years or so, to wish us happy birthday for the missed years, to say he would be visiting my sister and me.

These contacts became fewer and fewer as time passed. (Someday I'll share one reason why -- he was in a Saudi Jail. But that was hard enough for a teenage son to deal with (How can I be mad at my dad when he's being tortured in a Saudi jail? How can I just out of the blue love the man when he has done nothing to earn that love?), that I'll just as soon put off any details on that until some other date.


After a few more years, we suddenly came into contact again, this time while I was studying world religions at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Suddenly things had changed. Like magic, I was now in contact with someone whose intellectual curiosity was very much in tune with mine. My father, as a sometimes-student of religions himself, was asking questions, and providing new ideas, that were very much in line with things I had become interested in as well.

Home - Declare Yourself

Home - Declare Yourself

Go visit this site.

Go watch the video.

All the way through.

Then either go vote, or find someone who hasn't and drag their ass to the closest polling place (look it up on their site, under the video).

I don't care if you vote for the other guy. MAKE SURE PEOPLE VOTE!

Election Status

A thought about presidents « Exquisitetruth’s Weblog

A thought about presidents « Exquisitetruth’s Weblog:

I wonder, does George W Bush relate with the common man because, from his bedroom window, he can see the servant quarters?

Why then, do the rural blue collar workers of the United States gravitate towards these blue blooded children of privilege, while vilifying the members of their own class who have proven to be exceptional men on their own merit?

How can anyone say, with a straight face, that Obama is an elitist, while McCain is for the common man?

Here's a blog worth following. The Exquisite Truth's main writer has some sharp observations. Read this and ask yourself this question. Why is it the so-called "elitists" called democrats are so often not moneyed by birth?

Great article!

Publish Post

FactCheck.org: FactChecking Biden-Palin Debate

Here's another thing that got me steamed last night watching the debates. Thank goodness for FactCheck.org, which, by the way, has happily caught Obama and Biden in their share of misstatements as well.

FactCheck.org: FactChecking Biden-Palin Debate: "Palin: Now, Barack Obama had said that all we're doing in Afghanistan is air-raiding villages and killing civilians. And such a reckless, reckless comment and untrue comment, again, hurts our cause. Obama did say that troops in Afghanistan were killing civilians. Here’s the whole quote, from a campaign stop in New Hampshire: Obama (August 2007): We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there. The Associated Press fact-checked this one, and found that in fact U.S troops were killing more civilians at the time than insurgents: 'As of Aug. 1, the AP count shows that while militants killed 231 civilians in attacks in 2007, Western forces killed 286. Another 20 were killed in crossfire that can’t be attributed to one party.' Afghan President Hamid Karzai had expressed concern about these civilian killings, a concern President Bush said he shared."

Palin, Russia, Invasions and the Alaska Highway

Okay, I've heard this National Guard and Putin's Ugly Head in Alaska bullshit for a long time, and I need to figure out one thing.


Why, in heaven's name, would anyone seriously think Alaska is such a prize that the governor could seriously be considered a "commander-in-chief" protecting the United States from invasion?

I mean, okay, sure we get invaded. Maybe Russians drop off an invasion force off the north slope. Are we assuming that the United States military radar facilities and air resources are not going to be able to catch them? That's not National Guard, under the governor's purview. That's the president's oversight.

But sure, okay, they slip past them, right? Sneak down the icy slopes, with warm parkas and plenty of vodka to keep the chill off.


Now, when they're ready to place their forces to attack the rest of the nation, are we expected to believe that the invading Russkies are going to sneak down the 1500 mile Alaskan Highway that is surrounded by Canadian territory the whole way, fully exposed to satellites and any passing Moose and local Canadians, just to get to Washington and invade the contiguous states of our nation?

How gullible are people, really?

Tighten focus even further?

So here is my quandary now.

I had decided I would focus on one narrow part of my village, a view out of a Chinese restaurant onto a city street in the downtown area of the city.

Now, I'm thinking, that may even still be too big for a first time 3D project.

See, I have been a 3D hobbyist for over ten years, and have experimented with Strata 3D and now with Blender, and have even played with Blender specifically for, we're 2008 now? ...for eight years. But I have really done very little actual modeling, because to compensate poorly for my ADD, I have tended to let myself get into a hyper-focus, where I do one thing to insane extremes.

In this case, the insane extreme was to begin with the landform of the city. From my story planning, when I decided to create this mystical village called Noumonde for my many different stories, I knew a great deal how the area was laid out physically. I knew there was a deep lake in the center of this area. I knew the village was mostly on one edge of this lake. I knew the opposite side of the lake had some pretty steep hills.

So I began with a 3D topography of the village, which I created by using Photoshop to build a shades-of-gray picture, with really black areas to define the deepest part of the lake, and with really white areas around the edge to define the peaks of the hills. Apply some gradient patterns, smudge a little, and import it into whatever DXF converter I could find, and voila! I had a huge, high-poly-count surface upon which to build my village!

Which I used on computers that were too slow and with too little RAM to do anything useful with it.

So back to the present. I can play with that landform today pretty easily, but I mostly just use it for reference. My task today is to actually find a good starting project. The theory is that, if I can settle on a few good starter projects, I can internalize the methods of doing 3D scenes and feel confident enough to tackle larger projects.

My ADD, (or if you don't believe that scientists have found neurological evidence for ADD, just call it distractedness or whatever) has always led me to tackle huge projects that never give me anything to latch onto, that are too large for me to do for a first project. And my question is, did I do that again in this project? By deciding against an aerial tour of several streets and focusing on one single scene, I'm finding, with all of the photo studies that I have done, that even this is a very tall order. I have cracks in the sidewalk and in the parking lot. I have paint on the road with chips and discoloration. I have weeds, for God's sake! If I'm going to aim for photo-realistic, I'd better focus on a smaller task......

So maybe that's what I'll do. Technically, by the terms I set for myself on this project, producing a rendered image is not an early objective anyway. I could very well just stick with note-paper and photographs for a year and I'd be okay. But I'm going to include some rendering projects, too, because I need to move from theory to practice, too.

Current status: reading up on and experimenting with how Blender uses external files. I don't want to have ten thousand separate knives!

Project Strategy for ADD

One of the challenges I face with this Noumonde project is -- well, frankly -- me.

This project was begun around 1995, when the immersive game Myst had peaked, and when my company was dabbling in doing 3D design for some of their education software. I'd decided that the many short stories and novels I'd been working on, stories which had all seemingly lost focus for me, were perhaps victims not of a poor writer but of the wrong media. Perhaps, I reasoned, these ideas would come together much more cleanly if the many variations on story I struggle with were all part of the same story, but the "reader" had some influence in changing the story.

(I'll tell you now that I rejected that notion on its face, because I didn't like similar games, like CyberFlix's "Titanic", where you were unaware of many other stories hidden under the surface, simply because you hand't hit a plot line at the right time. But the solutions I came up with, where I would come up with subtle and disturbing ways of showing the audience the alternate possibilities, turning the story increasingly toward the horror genre, are out of the scope of this little essay.)

After a while, the notion I was exploring was clarified and had grown into a beast of its own magnificent proportions.

This.... This, I would come to learn later, is a classic expression of my own ADD. I tend to get lost in the "neat" of my ideas, and soon, the neat is the be-all and end-all, the entire purpose of the project, and I don't have anything left over for the actual work itself.

See, at the time, I didn't know I was ADD. I did wonder, yes, why I was so often told how intelligent I was, and yet had problems finishing college. My wife has since suggested that maybe I wasn't smart at all! (I love my wife!) That perhaps they were just being nice. But more than simply being told I was smart, I felt like I was smart enough. I understood material, I got the notion of physics pretty well -- my mental model fit things pretty accurately. I understood the calculus problems well enough. I just couldn't solve them correctly on a test. Too many missing minus signs, to many mis-written numbers. Too many half-remembered theorems.

Welcome to the village of Noumonde

Aside from my day-to-day work and home responsibilities, I have always had a sort of back-burner project going through my head. I used to think of myself as a writer and a 3D design hobbyist, though I kind of put these hobbies aside in the interest of work and building a home for my wife and our "kids", two dogs, two cats, and a gecko.

But you can't put your most cherished ideas away. They have a tendency of creeping back into your mind every now and again, and so I find myself pondering it again.

I want to make a village. A 3D village, photo-realistic, complete with peanut-butter-covered butter knives in the kitchens, to squashed pennies on train tracks. I want to have a regular postman running his routes, a sales clerk at the hardware store who frequents the bar too often, and a gate that was put on at an angle and has rusted through its springs.

This project is not new, by any means. I've got map sketches going back almost 10 years. I originally came up with the idea because at work we were doing 3D sets for an interactive Language software product, and Myst and similar games were all the rage at the time. I found Myst and Riven very compelling, and it occurred to me that maybe my writing projects were faltering because I was using the wrong medium. Perhaps it wasn't a novel I was trying to make. Perhaps it was an interactive virtual world!

Well, 10 years later, and I've learned a lot about 3D rendering, 3D programming, and all sorts of other things, but haven't made much progress yet on the actual original project itself.

So I'm going to give it a try again.

I'm buying some notebooks and some small pens.

I'm collecting URLs and books and article on civil engineering, city planning, small towns.

What I' d like to do is divorce the over-arching story I had in mind at first, and just focus on making a real, living, breathing village of about 1,000 or so citizens. Neighborhoods, broken fences, farms, etc.

Along the way, I'll develop a web site that will show it off, and encourage people to submit ideas, photographs, models, etc., to be incorporated into the village.

I'll keep progress on the project updated in these blogs. And now that I have a scanner, I can even begin posting some of the hand-written/-drawn elements I've already begun working on.

Pin-hole Glasses - A Request for a Review

Ever since I first heard about pin-hole cameras, I have always been fascinated by the notion that the role of a lens could be served simply by a pin-hole in a wall or the side of a box.

So I was curious and kind of excited to be asked by the good folks at http://www.pinhole-glasses.com to do an "unbiased review" of their product. That product? Well, if you can't tell from the website name, they're pinhole glasses. That is to say, instead of a lens or such, you have a completely opaque piece of plastic drilled through in a grid pattern with a bunch of holes.

Not exactly pin-sized holes, mind you. At least, if I got poked by pins this large, I'd be drained of my blood pretty quickly. Still, though, these holes are more than outnumbered with black, opaque plastic, and yet, you put them on, you can still see through them. Neat-o!

What are pinhole glasses for? Well, put simply, they're sold as an alternative to prescription glasses under certain conditions. I don't wear glasses, myself, but was assured "they can also be used for most activities where you are stationary (reading, writing, using a computer, watching TV, etc)".

It should be noted that I did not verify any of this with my doctor. I didn't see fit to spend a co-pay for a doctor's visit that was more than the cost of the glasses themselves (at $19.99, I guess the pinhole glasses cost $10 less than my co-pay, but then I still wanted to just buy lunch for that money, right?). So caveat emptor, I cannot say whether these glasses are indeed safe or not, regardless of what they say on their web site.

My own experience? Well, I was impressed with what you could see with these glasses. It's akin to wearing dark shades, since even thought the material is opaque, you do see enough with the holes to make an image.

But on the other hand you cannot go cruising around the town in these things. In their FAQ, they explicitly tell you not to drive in these things. After all, while you can see through the pin-sized holes, you aren't given any favors with your peripheral vision. In a like vein, I'll go out on a limb and suggest you not do any bike riding, either. Last I checked, riding a bike on public streets and sidewalks relied heavily on knowing when a pedestrian or Hum Vee was just in my blind spot. A bad day in anyone's book.

I wore it around the house, then, and once in a while I was daring enough to wear it in public. It got a lot of strange looks. My wife rolled her eyes up at me. And I got a headache.

Sadly, that last part happened most consistently. I finally convinced my friend Ed to try them on. Maybe it was just me, right? Maybe it would look studly on Ed, and I could report how it got him phone numbers from gorgeous ladies, and a spot on the evening news cast.

He got a headache instead. Just like me.

So what's it boil down to? Maybe I just get headaches. They're cheap enough, and unusual enough that they're worth blowing some cash on it.

But I won't be going out dancing in them. :-)

V

BIG-$$ TUNNEL OF KINKY LOVE - New York Post

BIG-$$ TUNNEL OF KINKY LOVE - New York Post

Wow. Now this guy knew how to spend his money! LOL

If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy Would We Be | Arts | guardian.co.uk

If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy Would We Be | Arts | guardian.co.uk: "If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy Would We Be"

Trippy as all, man! The more I read about this, the more fascinated I am.

Of course, I have always been fascinated with art that comments on art itself. (And some day I'll tell you about my friend Adam White who has truly taken art-on-art to a fantastic extreme. Adam, we need a photo montage, but then, that would destroy the whole point!)

To whit, look at the pictures, and read the accompanying article. And if anyone finds an exhibition in US, or better yet a tour that passes through the southeast US, let me know!

V