Category: the interwebs

Ye Olde Bouncygif

I am blessed with a terrible memory, which allows me to get fresh enjoyment from my own work after enough time passes. So it was especially fun to come across a Facebook post in an unfamiliar language with a gif of my animation from 2004:

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By some miracle, the original .fla files were on one of my main disk drives, so I reformatted one for today’s preferred 16:9 aspect ratio, and voila:

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Maybe I’ll find some way to use it in a new project, and render it as 4K video. It was originally part of a short I was going to do about depression, because in 2004 I was very depressed. Instead I made Sita Sings the Blues, which was probably  more therapeutic. But I sure like this walk cycle.

The original 640 x 480 gif is here, uploaded by some anonymous archivist.

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GNU & Improved GIFs

PromisedLand2460

Big ups to my friend Barry Israelewitz, who wrote a shell script for ffmpeg (based on this article shared in this comment by Paul Wise) and taught me how to use Terminal on my mac to make much better animated gifs than Flash exports directly. Currently it’s significantly more work than just exporting .gif from Flash, because I have to instead export a PNG sequence, import the frames to Quicktime 7, and export as a new .mov to use as an input file for making the gif. This may be streamlined a little bit in the future, but for now at least I can make higher quality gifs if I need to.

Below are close-up details of single frames. “Before” is here, “after” is above.

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Here’s a smaller-sized (because fewer frames) animated gif for side-by-side before-and-after comparison:

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before
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after

Much better, no? Plus using Terminal is METAL.

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Reddit IAmA today, 2-4pm EST

DeathKillCycleAMAProof? Here’s your proof.

Head on over here between 2 and 4pm EST today, Friday February 27.

UPDATE: Reddit is not allowing me to post. On my own IAMA. Granted, this IAMA was set up by someone else, who said he had duly submitted my handle (Nina_Paley, created a week ago) to the mods. But it didn’t work. I was on the calendar, but I can’t respond to questions. I am not happy about this but mods aren’t responding, so I give up. You can AMA on Twitter instead.

UPDATE 2: after half an hour the problem was corrected, and I went back and answered questions.

 

 

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Dvorak Diary #2: Offline

On a recent trip to Trivandrum, India, I decided to try learning to touch-type in Dvorak (after decades of hunt-and-peck in QWERTY). Here I share some excerpts of my “Dvorak Diary”.

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Tuesday, December Thirtieth, Two thousand fourteen….

I have been kinda ‘offline’ since returning. The last legs of my flights were awful, and I still haven’t recovered, though at this point it’s probably jetlag more than exhaustion that has me failing to connect to ‘my’ world and identity. I haven’t felt connected online, and am concerned about how I let Facebook information just wash over me with no real engagement on my part. It’s a hell of a lot of information to just suck through me like a stream. I surely have more than enough information rattling around in my head already. Maybe it’s time to let it settle, to digest it and let it adjust to the habitat of my mind and maybe make something of itself instead of just washing through like a tsunami. I feel less satisfied being an information node than a full human animal. Jetlag reminds me I am an animal, and no amount of information can heal my exhausted body. I recently read that staring into screens is terrible for sleep – I read that staring into a screen, ha ha – so last night I didn’t check email or read Facebook.

Is Facebook the television of today? It’s not broadcast, and it can be useful sometimes, but I become very passive with it, especially at night when I turn to it in my insomnia.

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