Halb Mensch. Halb Ding.
Ouzo, is there a liquid more vile, and yet more appropriate for putting the world on notice: “World, I’m ready to party” (Update: Yes there is, and it’s called Sambucca, and that’s what Garret was being lit on fire with in this shot, or so I’m told). At Bjørn and Chloë‘s wedding, Ouzo (capital O) Sambucca (capital S) was what it came to. Miraculously, my 50mm caught it at just the right moment.
It’s an exciting time to be a Pixar/Lucasfilm nerd, to be sure. Michael Rubin let me know — and posted about—that Loren Carpenter, co-founder of Pixar, put a copy Vol Libre, his 1980 CG fractal mountain short, online for our viewing pleasure. And it’s quite something.
Vol Libre from Loren Carpenter on Vimeo
The audience erupted. The entire hall was off their feet and hollering. They wanted to see it again. “They had never seen anything like it,” recalled Ed Catmull. Loren was beaming.
“There was a strategy in this,” said Loren, “because I new Ed and Alvy were going to be in the front row of the room when I was giving the talk.” Everyone at Siggraph knew about Ed and Alvy and the aggregation at Lucasfilm. They were already rock stars Ed and Alvy walked up to Loren Carpenter after the film and asked if he could start in October.
- Page 77, Droidmaker.
Though it’s only related to Loren Carpenter and not so much Vol Libre, Chapter 2 of Out of Control by Kevin Kelly has a very interesting mass-experiment by Loren Carpenter which is worth reading as well. And incidentally, this coincides with the release of the, as usual, wonderful trailer for Toy Story 1 and 2 in 3D.
Bjørn and Chloë‘s wedding was a truly fantastic day in the arms of friends and friends of friends, regrettable only for lasting a mere single day, not nearly enough under such circumstances.
Now, coming back from the mid-lands, we’ve stopped in London for the weekend, figuring it would be a waste to not lay down our hard-earned cash here, when we passed so close by. As it happens, I’m typing this on my brand-new 13” MacBook Pro, which marked a good ending to a great first day.
I know, I know, it’s starting to look more and more as if Binary Bonsai was reborn as a Star Wars and Droidmaker-reblog site after its hiatus, but if I merely updated the older entries with this information, it wouldn’t propagate, and dammit, when I have something to take credit for I’ll damn well use every excuse in the book to take it!
Then there happened to be an unusual series of events at the end of June, 2009, when a couple interesting Lucas stories were emerging. An old home movie from ILM in 1977. An older interview with young George Lucas from the BBC in 1972. My book gives some context to these items.
On June 30 I got a wild hare and generated a PDF of the entire book. I posted it on my blog and I made two public-ish announcements: I posted it on my Facebook page, and I emailed a note about it to a blogger in Europe who had just written something nice about Droidmaker a few days earlier. So I emailed “Binary Bonsai” – he posted it. And that was it.
The word spread globally in a few moments, and in 24 hours there were around 2,000 downloads of the book. A few weeks later there was another spike of interst, bringing the total downloads to about 13,000. In 14 days, more people have read my book than in the prior 4 years. And I finally feel like my work with this is done. #
Exciting for me, as I’ve been a fan of Droidmaker since it came out. I plowed through it in a few days, which is honestly rather rare for me. I hope to have the chance to meet Michael when we’re in California; a fitting encounter on a trip which is already taking us to see Pixar, Skywalker Ranch and a John Williams concert.
I honestly don’t know how all of this could get much better…
I’m hard pressed to come up with a topic as boring as ‘mail’, but I recently took a drastic step to counter my otherwise inate ability to never react to items passing through my inbox. This isn’t revolutionary as such, but it’s helped me tremendously.
I’ve hence found out that what I’ve been running is in essence a lite-esque version Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero. It’s ‘lite’ because — on purpose — I don’t receive a whole lot of mail on my private mail address, and at work mail volume isn’t really a particular issue. Privately I keep newsletters and mailing lists to an absolute minimum — I mostly end up in flame wars anyway, so… — and I’ve told most social sites to shut the hell up. In short, I make sure that what enters my inbox is important.
I used to leave all incoming mail in my inbox, except for whatever was filtered into various labels for organizational purposes. I left nothing unread, and if something needed following up on, I starred it. Then I’d forget all about the stars and it would get pushed down as more mail came in, and being lazy, I would happily forget about it. Goto 10.
A while ago I selected everything in my Gmail inbox and archived it. A complete reset of the inbox was needed to start anew, and from that moment on, anything that entered the inbox was either deleted, responded to immediately or left in the inbox. If an item is in the inbox, it’s because I’m not yet done with it, but recon I will be within a day or so. Anything with a longer horizon than that goes into my task list (just out of labs, press SHIFT-T on an open mail to create a task from it), which is hooked into my calendar, and thus under a great deal more control.
Now, when my inbox is empty, I can rest easy, knowing everything is taken care of.
PS: To make this easier for yourself in Gmail, go to the labs tab in settings, and turn on the ‘Send & Archive’ button; this allows you to reply to a mail and automatically archive it when you send it, which speeds up the process.
The distance between the dream and the substance of augmented reality is an infinity of real-world problems. But…
The implications boggle the mind, and while they do, you can read up.
No, this isn’t turning into a Star Wars blog, but there’s some sort of odd nexus going on right now, where unseen footage keeps popping up all over the place at such a rate that it’s hard to keep up.
StarWars.com has previously written about the all-white proto-fett, but today went ahead and posted parts of the 20-minute never-before-seen footage of Ben Burtt, Norman Reynolds and Duwayne Dunham showing off a prototype, all-white, Boba Fett costume. It’s awesome.
PS: Duwayne Dunham isn’t as well-known as Ben Burtt or Norman Reynolds, but it just so happens that I’ve been re-reading Droidmaker, as a sort of research for our roadtrip, and just yesterday, I came across Duwayne on page 82.
View Westcoast Roadtrip ’09 in a larger map
The whole company was sent packing for their annual summer vacation today (as per tradition, a thunderstorm over Copenhagen is welcoming them). I’ll be working throughout most of the next three weeks, with the exception of a short stint to England, for a friend’s wedding, as Rikke and I have finally manned up and gone ahead with our plan for a roadtrip through California (and parts of Arizona).
And the hits just keep on coming. David Berry, credited as an ‘optical print operator’ on IMDB has posted an extraordinary ten-minute home video of ILM in the years 1976 to 1978, with everything from actual behind-the-scenes of effects, models and what not, to the oscars and even some leisure time.
Man I love the internets.
PS: Rubin covered the beginnings (and ehm… everything else about ILM) from page 63 and forward in Droidmaker).
Michael Rubin put up a FAQ on his book Droidmaker, in the wake of it being available for free (What, you’re still not reading it? You have better things to do? Get going you lazy bum!). The most interesting of which is a explanation of the relationship between him and Lucas(film) as he was writing the book; trying to balance journalistic integrity with the wants and needs of both Lucasfilm as well as the myriad of sources needed to make the book come together.
It’s not that I’m embarrassed by my younger self, but… I’d prefer it if my blog continually contained mostly things that feel contemporary to me. Thus, employing government-sanctioned reality distortion field technology, I once again got Brian to do the heavy lifting and build me The Amazing ContemporizerOther names suggested were ‘I was young, I needed the money’, ‘It’s not that I’m embarrassed, but…’ ‘Youthful Folly’ and ‘The Ice Floe’. while I kicked back, drank piña colada’s and cackled at my cat.
The Amazing Contemporizer is a plugin for WordPress which automatically sets posts older than X to private, causing a wave of privacy to flow over your older and perhaps less… refined, past as a blogger.
PS: Backup you blog before using. Seriously. No… Seriously!
Twitter killed a lot of blogs, and I’m beginning to think that it’s killed even more comments. I love Twitter, but I do miss the old days of the blogosphere, back when blogs where as common as opinions (I was traversing my archives earlier; it was like visiting a graveyard, with URLs for headstones). Back when even a half-assed entry would garner comments from near and far, and people would link to each other and the sense of community was in-between people and their writing, rather than in-between 140-character quips.
We were seated far, far away from our friends at the Depeche Mode concert (the sound was atrocious where we were seated, so I can’t honestly say if it was a ‘good’ concert, though it seemed pretty rockin’ down on the ground) this tuesday, and as we idled away, waiting for the old geezers to take the stage, we spent the time messaging each other, trying to get a visual in-amongst the thousands of people, because… Well, there wasn’t a lot else to do.
I’m fascinated with the old idea of the mixtape — or the playlist, in our day and age — as more than merely compilations of same-genre music. Instead of transporting the listener around A, I’ve always preferred mixtapes that moved me from A to B.
It took me somewhere between 4 – 5 months to cobble together this one, which was culled down from about 12 hours of material to about 2.5 hours where it stay for a good while, until I finally took the plunge and made it a nice and lean 84 minutes long. If you’re up for it, I suggest that you don’t skim the track listening too much, don your finestest headphones, and enter… The Night (uuuuhhhhh).