Tag: video

Wha’s Happenin’?

I know, I’m a lousy blogger.

Wottever.

The bad news:

Cops are on my back about yard maintenance. It got a bit shaggy after several years of ill-health caused mostly by lack of vitamins — caused by lack of money, caused by lack of job, etc. Also, there were various artifacts left by my grandfather, etc. etc.. So now that I’m halfway back on my feet, the city wants to knock me down again.

My extraordinary efforts to clean up have been seen as doing nothing. IMO I didn’t work on the front enough first. Fuck it, enough about that.

The good news:

SilentBob and I are enjoying a perpetually extended honeymoon. With drive space such as I would never have dreamed about back in 2001, I indulge my every whim, and my dear Bobster takes it all in stride. This poor computer now bears the burden of six installed operating systems and one virtual. My curiosity knows no bounds, and I am (almost) fearless.

We are into all sorts of graphics, sound, and video foolings-around.

On top of that mess, a laptop has joined the working crew. BitChunker, an “experienced” IBM Thinkpad, only has three OSes; Windows XP, Backtrack, and Slax. Bitsy’s job is info support for making house-calls, and wireless testing. The hard drive is a little weenie, no room for a lot of fun.

Oh, you thought this blog was supposed to be about writing and artsy stuff?

Well…I’m nine chapters into one novel, four into another, and A Drum Is Empty is suffering One. More. Edit.

Really-truly, the longer you leave work sitting, the more you see that can be trimmed and modified.

Another ongoing distraction is the Firebird Project. A friend who has been wanting to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Stravinsky’s Firebird ballet suite has roped me in. We are planning a presentation and discussion that will include a video of the ballet, a Powerpoint about the ballet and the legend, and a video using my music with fire photos and fractals. Part of the idea is to contrast the beginning of modern music with music and art of the computer age. Epic, daunting, but nearly two months to go yet.

fire demon

Miscellaneous:

I’m on a roll in Twitter. Clumps of followers. It’s not The Ahts, it’s the techness. And teh lolz. Only a third or so of recent new followers have been @-holes. I shitlist the @-holes, of course.

Hmm, I wonder what sort of spam this post will attract 🙂

A high, lonesome sound

Nearly seven years ago I was writing my last epic fan-fic novel, Borrowed Time. Hashmark Pin, the world’s smallest hacker (though very tall for a Borrower) travels from northern California to Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, in search of love and a purpose in life. He finds it all.

I was also re-obsessed with music, having discovered the world of tracking. While Hash was stranded in Topeka, unable to move on for most of a year, I attempted to create a short tone poem that would evoke a sad longing, with images of trains passing by in the night. The piece, called Kansas Nights, turned out well, IMO.

Last night I put together a video using that bit of computer-generated music and a montage of railroad photos and fractals. It’s not too bad, though I would like to have found some better images. I could, but it would be easier to write another 187,000-word novel than get pernission to use dozens of photos that are not in the public domain.

So here it is:

Borrowed Time is no longer available on the web because of a character (who shouldn’t have been in it) whom I do not want exposed in his original incarnation. Fan-fic about Borrowers is a dubious commodity as well. Wottever.

Composed in MODPlug Tracker with original computer-gernerated sounds, Kansas Nights is perhaps not everyone’s cuppa. It depends on what you come expecting. Let the sound flow through your head with the images, let it be what it is. After all these years, I still like it.

My MP3 page

We’re not in canvas any more

Still obsessed with video. I’ve collected enough software to sink the hd of my first computer several times over. SilentBob bears it all uncomplainingly. Edit, convert, edit, save; my bitty movies are piling up. The duds get deleted — I DO sometimes get rid of useless things. Sometimes.

brickgeek3

The third edit of Brick Geek, an opportunistic documentary starring a bricklaying friend, is my best work so far. Though far from a masterpiece, it has some good moments. I worked hard to get the timing right. A lot of work for a mite short of four minutes of final product :).

I would upload it, but the star is out of town and I don’t want to be rude. Meanwhile, a nice, if sloppy, flower and music vid is up on Youtube: A Walk in the Garden. You can’t smell the roses. 🙁

Update on an earlier post — I see by my site log that I’m not the only one who had a problem with MSE’s mpminisigstub.exe (and Comodo firewall). I still don’t know why the unpleasantness ended, which program gave in first. Doesn’t matter much. I fired MSE a couple of weeks ago because it did the unforgivable again. It rudely and peremptorily snatched harmless files away from me, with no hope of recovery unless I have them on a backup CD. Nothing does that to me and gets away with it.

I still recommend it for know-nothing users; it will protect them from even the stuffed tigers, so no harm is done. I just isn’t suitable for ornery old granny-hackers who refuse to run as admin.