And the second just to say I need to find another way of talking. This one doesn't work. The comments will be off so that the thing doesn't load up with spam, but the content will remain.
October 2011 Archives
Two real quick back to back posts. The first about PressPausePlay.
If you get a chance to watch, please do. Don't just let it run in the background while you do email. Pay attention. Thoughts will be provoked. If Cole runs it at the Carnegie Cinema, go see it. If they run it in conjunction with the tailgate, see it there, too. Rather than add to the noise with my opinions, here are a few quotes that I was able to take away:
"…a young Hitchcock, a young Scorcese, they wouldn't make it in this business. Slap up their early stuff on facebook, on youtube, it would get lost- it would get lost in the ocean of garbage."-Andrew Keen, author. "People said, well how do you make any money doing that? and I said well first of all I wasn't trying to make money, I was trying to make a point. And I did make a point. Ideas that spread, win. …The lesson is, 'this changes everything. The industry is dead.' "
-Seth Godin, author, entrepreneur. "The old production systems brought certain value to the process... because these means were so expensive, very few artists could be brought through them."
-David Weinberger, author, technologist. "Used to be, you didn't become an artist to be rich, you became an artist because you had an idea to share, because you had an emotion to share, and that's where we're heading again. We're gonna see more people do more art in more ways than ever before."
-Seth Godin, author, entrepreneur. "Now I can make these tracks in my bedroom as if I'd spent a whole month in an expensive studio; I can just be doing it here. but it's changed everything; that now becomes irrelevant. Now that we can all do that, it's moved things along."
-Bill Drummond, artist, producer. "We may be on the verge of a new Dark Age in cultural terms."
-Andrew Keen, author. "They come to the school having made a lot of movies themselves where they did everything- they directed, they shot, they edited, they may have written the music, they may have acted in it. So they could keep their vision up in here- and not have to explain it, not have to describe it in lots of ways to collaborate. At the core of what we teach is how to understand what your story is to the degree... so you can describe that to other people so you can help them to join in in your story telling."
-Norman Hollyn, professor, USC. "Art and culture potentially might succumb to that same principle, where, if everybody is a musician, and everybody's making mediocre music, eventually, the world is just covered with mediocrity. And people start to become comfortable with mediocrity."
-Moby, not the whale. "Our students need to be comfortable with the pace at which things change. We can't teach today's technology because in five years that will be gone. We need to be able to teach them How to Tell Effective Stories, Using Images, and to be comfortable with how the technology is changing every single year."
-Norman Hollyn, professor, USC. " I think that in 20 or 30 or 50 years we're going to look back at now with a wistful nostalgia… …the way we look back at Vaudeville, the way we look back at any sort of antiquated outdated technology, is, like, it was clunky, it was naive, and it had its own charm, but we've moved on."
-Moby, not the whale.
These posters went up recently. Lynda actually supplied them for our use. The production uses a very heavy gloss stock with crisp printing that's beyond anything we could do. It's as eye catching as a poster should be, succinct, and Lynda's branding is spot on. If I saw it from across a room in a university setting, I'd snap a photo (or jot the url down…) if I needed a tutor in Math 21. Or Physics. Or Chemistry. Or ESL. It wouldn't dawn on me that the url would open the doors to learning all the other cool stuff that I want and Lynda has.
A librarian for a logo? CliffsNotes study guide colors?
Guess I should quit complaining; I've done far worse. The folks at Lynda Dot Com (just how are we going to say that?) did provide the posters for us, and they are very nicely designed. And regardless of the posters, the service is excellent, the coming improvements very welcome. Thank you, ITS Training Group for arranging these opportunities for me.
"Accessibility" was part of AD54. It's nothing new. Any discussion is an evasion to buy time. Any class is a get out of work free session. Stop it. If it's new to you, if the techniques are foreign or beyond your ability, you have no damned business putting Penn State information on the web. You're fired.
fer cryin' out loud.
I went to a lecture in Palmer's Lipcon not long ago. When I came out, I was going to post something, but although I was right outside Palmer, I couldn't get a wifi connection. I know there are likely a lot of reasons for this, and even more reasons why I can walk across campus and not be able to count on a connection. But I don't see any of them as excuses. The fact that a University town isn't blanketed by broadband wifi is, I guess, forgivable. The fact that a University campus isn't, is not.
At the end of the day, ITS is a utility company. As mobile takes off, we deliver many first impressions. The phone call system to dial a number and get information on different landmarks is really cute in a retro kind of way. If you were a visiting family, had trouble getting a connection, and instead were offered cell phone numbers to dial, how would it affect your decisions? I'm new to wifi, not an iPad power user, so maybe I'm missing something that's obvious, but if I'm missing it, they may be too.
Books. I've got a huge list of them that I need to read, like, immediately. Currently, I'm reading Middlemarch. It's one of the great books, and I'd first started a digital version set in html by Jerry Maddox then loaded a copy as an epub on the iPad. It's wonderful. I'd be willing to just finish that over the next few weeks but the National Book Awards are due, and Patti Smith's reflections last year (the non-fiction winner) on her life with Robert Mapplethorpe was so good that I read through the contenders for this year's awards looking for a gem. The loving relationships of the Karl Marxes and the Marie Curies hold a good bit of fascination, but The Swerve: How the World Became Modern looked so good I ordered it from Amazon with my next click. Then too I have thoughtful recommendations from colleagues. Recommendations are thrilling regardless of the quality of the book- you get to spend time reading as if you're actually sharing with someone you know as you read. Very special for a sour old lone wolf like myself. So I have a series of books on tap that I'm looking forward to get lost in; a series about beekeepers that touches on Sherlock Holmes' England.
That's more than enough. But I follow the Van Gogh Gallery and caught the buzz around the new Van Gogh biography. That one should really be next. Then Walter Isaacson released his bio. It's less expensive than the Van Gogh book, but I don't look forward to the pictures quite as much. I bought Isaacson's book, of course; it's available as an ePub, and I'd suggest that reading it anywhere but on an iPad would do the subject a certain disservice. So it's now in my iBook's library with quite a few others. That's a lot of reading. And anxious as I am to see Rosamond and Dr. Lydgate refine their relationship at a dinner being held at Bulstrode's, when I got home I launched Steve Jobs.
I wish I had a cool magazine to display. You know; something really sexy with turny pages… Maybe next year. Meanwhile, I just heard that in November, Adobe will release Adobe Digital Publishing Single Edition. I guess more small publishers like me are staying away than Adobe hoped. In November, for a cost of $395 per app, we'll be able to go through this mess and get a "one off" magazine app: not updateable on a monthly basis, but useful as a single edition interactive book. That might finally be useful, though it will continue to be inaccessible.
I don't get it. Really. This stuff is worse than PDF, far worse than Flash, and can't come anywhere near the usability of good HTML and CSS. It's just hard to sell stuff written in html.
Idiots. I support Adobe in some many things, but these magazines? Sorry Adobe, but they make me think you suck. Actually, I could just recommend my colleagues by-pass Adobe completely for this and look at Quark. They have solutions too, but if you look, it's just as convoluted as Adobe and gets you the same sort of inaccessible packet.
Temple Grandin was just on campus. My introduction to her work was the book Thinking in Pictures. I loved it, as I'd been trying without success to describe the process for over thirty years. It's frustrating when learned people tell you you're wrong because something you know to be accurate is, in their minds, impossible. I always called it thinking in pictures as Grandin does, but really, it's more like movies. Small, complex packets of understanding. Call it an alignment of stars, but a colleague had given me a collection of old National Geographics and I just read Virginia Morell's story called Minds of Their Own (March, 08) . Then yesterday, I watched the pbs story A Murder of Crows online. All three instances addressing the same thing.
Did you see the pbs show? There's close-up footage of an untrained crow assessing a set of circumstances, then pulling up a string to retrieve a short stick that enabled it to reach a longer stick that was behind bars. The longer stick was then used to reach into a long glass tube to retrieve a piece of meat. Interesting problem solving. Even given a certain amount of anthropomorphizing, you could see the bird looking from object to object, thinking, planning, reasoning. That's it! I think like a crow!
The geographic article has more examples, more species, and with every one a collection of arguments that traditional behaviorists use to say how impossible it all is. Thinking in words, in a linear fashion, they can't project how it could be any other way. The pictures in their brains are far too general to ever be the basis of complex thought. I can see how language helps communicate to a group, but I can also say that it isn't necessary for an individual, and may actually slow the process. If a picture is worth a thousand words, I "talk" to myself really really fast. But stick with me here…
Who has been developing computers? What would happen if computers could think like crows, too? Why is linear logic so prized, when an all encompassing nonlinear process may give results that, well, don't need so damned many iterations? Now, don't get me wrong here; I have a lot of respect for the technology mantra of iterate, iterate, iterate. I just think the crow would only do it once.
So, a quick question to the programmers. Were you ever in the shower, or driving the car, or just walking along the street when a solution to a problem that you've been trying hard to solve just "pops" into your conscious mind? Know what happened? Your reasoning brain was waiting for you to shut up. Think about it. Oh wait- never mind. You'll get it later.
It looks pretty tiny here, but the original is the 7200 pixel wide stage set for the last iStudy cartoon. It was an experiment that worked somewhat: It gave the strip some visual continuity, I think. And helped create a sense of place.
When Adobe ran their Digital Publishing Prerelease program back in January, I signed up. Over the next months, I was excited, I was enthusiastic, and I was completely in the dark. I'd love to be in a Photoshop prerelease; I'd learn a lot and I could provide Adobe with usable feedback. With Digital Publishing, the best I could do for Adobe was tell them how cryptic everything was.
They didn't fix that part. At least for me. I downloaded the folio producer tools when they became available. A .FOLIO file is the format of a digital magazine before it's blessed by Adobe and turned in to a rights managed, use tracked, downloadable sealed collection of swipeable JPGs. I downloaded the Adobe Content Viewer, too; it lets you view folio files before they're blessed. My idea being that I could avoid the entire enterprise account deal that keeps you beholden to Adobe (or Apple, or Amazon) and produce the folio files locally and distribute them freely to anyone (students?) who has the Adobe Content Viewer or Adobe Content Viewer iPad App. But I can't get there.
Maybe the confusion around sales and distribution accounts has me jaded enough that I can't work clearly. Maybe the fact that a stack of JPGs with lovely pixel based text as their image content isn't machine readable and isn't accessible keeps me from focusing like it really makes a difference. But I follow the steps and wind up with nothing. My first few attempts with a portion of the lawbook text wouldn't upload to Adobe. (Yes- upload to Adobe. You don't make a .FOLIO file with InDesign; even that is generated by Adobe online.) The wheels just spun. After a week, one finally uploaded.
The exact file that wouldn't upload the day before, went. But I can't get a folio. I get a URL that I can distribute, but no folio for colleagues either. I get just what you see in the images I've embedded here. They don't even combine into one unit viewable at the site. I have viewed sample folios, and they rotate between vertical and horizontal with a keyboard command. I don't know the secret yet. I've got my eye out for a bag of monkey bones.
Adobe has all the chips right now, but I'll stick with it. There are few other options. Melcher Media and Push Pop Press are doing their own work. Push Pop Press did look like it was going to release their own system of creating magazine apps, or at least create another temple to rival Adobe's—but Push Pop Press has been acquired by facebook and they have "no plans to continue publishing new titles or building out our publishing platform that was in private beta."
wacom has released several models of tablets combining pen and multitouch input, all part of their bamboo line
I've been waiting for this: multi-touch on a wacom tablet makes good sense. I've used a tablet for years and find looking at a near vertical monitor surface while working on a horizontal tablet surface close to ideal for eye-hand coordination and the ability to be completely immersed in the work.
The modbook had excellent pen input, but didn't have touch input. It had horizontal work and viewing surfaces, which was tiring over long work sessions, and had an unnatural distance caused by glass thickness between the pen tip and the cursor. This offset was accounted for in software so it was relatively consistent across the surface as viewing angles change, but for me, it kept it from being a totally engaging medium. The Cintiq that I tried, a 21 inch screen version, had the same problems.
The iPad has fair touch input, but I don't like using my finger as a tool in this way. It isn't articulate, visibility is hindered by my own hand, and it's far too easy to change the work space with an inadvertent touch of another finger, thumb, or wrist. Some people have success with it, and granted, there's a novelty to it that's more entertaining than satisfying as a tool. An articulate pen on an iPad would be an improvement, but there aren't enough points on the screen to provide pen point accuracy. I've tried a number of them and so far the best was a sharpened bamboo stick soaked in saltwater. Still not ideal.
What I've thought would be ideal, would be a large tablet that had wacom's excellent pen input with added finger multi-touch controls. The Bamboo Create looks interesting but I don't see it as quite worth it yet. Maybe when wacom expands the technology into the intuous line?
The tablet I use now is a dinosaur- it's an intuos GD 0608u. That's an intuos GD #1. They're up to #4 in their models and the sensitivity in pressure, angle, and location are what has developed. The GD#1, though, is still more advanced than the bamboo line. The accuracy—plotting exactly where the point is— is ± .25mm on my old tablet. It's twice that, ± .5mm, on the Bamboo Create. The coordinate resolution—lines per inch—is 2540 lpi on both. The data rate—the speed in points per second of updates—is 200pps on my intuos and 133 on the Bamboo Create. Pressure levels—1024—is the same on both. An intuos GD#4 leaves my dinosaur grazing in a field, but the Bamboo Create has a pen that still operates at a level less than my ten year old model.
So what does that mean? It would be interesting to see the device. It would no doubt be cool to use one. But I wouldn't be able to justify the expense for something that could quite possibly be a handicap. The videos show someone using the pen, hand resting on the tablet, then just lifting the pen and using two fingers to zoom. No change in modality. Very cool. That answers a lot of my questions. Maybe I'll get one in another year. But how often am I called on to really push my pen, and who would care/notice if I didn't?
I've seen her talks and interviews online, read her books, mentioned her in my blog, but this is the first time I saw her in person. Not any surprises, really. A bit gruff, perhaps; a bit short. But she sees movies in her head. She thinks without a running string of dialog between herself and herself. How refreshing. With her social difficulties being pretty obvious, she claimed a brain will either tend to be more social or tend to be cognitive. How comforting again. What do you do when no one around you thinks in movies? I think it may be worse when they think they understand, and you can tell there's just no way.
There's a battle between that glimmer of hope and a penetrating despondence. I guess in the end, the ramps just get torn out. You either get into a position where you're in complete control… or the ramps just get torn out.
Cleaning up a few lions in the early hours, and I stumbled on this: a student request from years ago. It went on a tee shirt that a group wore to the Michigan (?) game. One view went on the front, the other on the back. I suggested the second view. You can guess which one that was. I'm thinking I'll leave the full size version off of facebook, but sharing a small version here feels okay.
Penn State leadership is allowing me to assign rights to the work I do on Penn State equipment. Far out! I'll be removing Penn State indicia from the illustrations I've done so they don't need to be cleared through Licensing and moving them to facebook and/or flickr.
One of the seemingly cool little things to come out of Adobe Max this year is Photoshop Tutorial Builder. This is a third party plug-in for Photoshop that uses Photoshop's built in scripting capability to generate an html based tutorial just by 'watching' what you do. I haven't tested extensively yet- just enough to say, "Damn! That's pretty slick!" More work will follow.
There are actually two separate pieces to the plug-in. Tutorial Builder is available as a free download at Adobe Labs. Get the plug-in here. It installs by double-clicking, just lake any plug-in, and then opens from within Photoshop: Window>Extensions>Tutorial Builder. It appears just like any Photoshop palette. The second piece is a script called ScriptingListener. It's already in Photoshop, you just have to make sure it's in the right place to activate it. It's kept in the Photoshop/Scripting/Utilities folder and it just has to be copied (do copy- don't just move) to the Photoshop/Plug-ins/Automate folder. Once there it records everything when Photoshop is running. When you're done making a tutorial, Adobe recommends deleting the instance from the Automate folder (that's why you copied- now you still have it and can use it again.)
Adobe has a little information available on the thing, but it is new and there isn't much there: Some known issues and limitations, which are similar to the limitations of Actions. I had problems locating my tutorials. Tutorial Builder was apparently saving tutorials to my desktop- and it thought my desktop was here: ~/Desktop/TBResults It never showed up. My second tutorial was saved in the same place, and I could see the first tutorial was still there. A bad sign, because now, neither showed up. For my third attempt, I created my own darn folder on the desktop and selected it as the spot to save to. The new path to my Desktop is /Users/MyName/Desktop/MyTutorialFolder There must be some sort of confusion about where a Mac desktop is. The links in the tutorial that are supposed to "Show the step in Photoshop" don't work because it can't locate Photoshop.
But that's all chatter. In frustration, I just did this fast mask on an image that I had laying out. It's pretty pointless, but the tutorial was generated completely by Tutorial Builder. You could theoretically edit the text. Now that I know where the darned things go, I'll do something useful. Meanwhile, I thought someone else may want to play.
Late Edit: This is another attempt- also fairly quick, but with more of a specific purpose. I did go in to the html to link the final image to the movie. In the end, I think it's nifty keen, but Quicktime captures the entire screen and allows narration and captions. Snapz does the same. Dunno. If the "Show me in Photoshop" links back out worked, maybe this would be more useful. Stay tuned.The action in the last panel of the iStudy 10th strip had to be reproduced at such a small size, I wanted to show an earlier, larger image from Brian's run through so you could get to see what they actually can do. The squirrels with the chips were walk ons:
This is the complete strip: fewer characters (not counting squirrels) and slightly shorter dialog.
Last week someone from Hershey found my lion cartoon library via google and asked if I had something like a butler lion. I dug this out, tweaked it and sent it as a possible starting point for what he needed. They can add their own pants.
It did bring back memories. There's something about the character and the world it lives in that feels good to me. I think that what I enjoy most is the back story for each view: here, the formal pleated shirt and black tie, like those I used to see at work every day. The folded kitchen towel with the Hershey Medical logo, like a hotel kitchen rag but from a hospital. The tray, again like the rubberized trays that came and went all night long in a professional kitchen. The athletic shorts? Hey, it's a lion. Be glad it wears pants at all.
For authenticity, the details have to ring true. The lion cartoon always existed in a world touching our own, with much the same impact from physics, chemistry, and history. A Krazy Kat brick thrown here would cause damage requiring medical attention. A Wiley Coyote plummet from a cliff would cause bones to stay broken for months if not death. It's not really a choice- it's the character's world, not mine. I just have insight into it, and draw what I see.
There's story here. I think more than a drawing, what you get with the illustration is the depth of the story that goes with it. Rather than rubbing story details in a viewer's face, I get to place them in a scene to be discovered or not, enjoyed or not, since they aren't officially part of the actual illustration's use. Like being engaged as a speaker, but making sure you wear the tie your daughter gave you. No one knows but you, but somehow, it adds to the quality of the thing.
There's leatherwork on a holster and brand on a pencil. There's stitching on a shirt insignia and a blue and white tie with human paw prints. Of course. And like the squirrels that reoccur in the iStudy toons, a squirrel with a Viking hat as part of the Beowulf Cluster. I'm not sure what to call it. Visual story seems to ring true, but maybe that's because I like hanging out with writers. It's the thousand words that a picture is worth, added phrase by phrase.
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