FiTC: Notes on Joshua Davis session

John Winkelman

(Notes from Flash in the Can conference)

Making Flash components (Actionscript 1) to create generative/controlled chaos art.

Components are encapsulations of code which allow a more user-friendly way of updating things on the stage, so non-nerds can basically have powerful rendering and animation tools available without having to learn a lot of code, or rely on snarky developers.

How to print the output of a Flash movie:
MAC — save PDF as PostScript

EXPORT FLASH SCREENSHOT AS .EPS

-instructions here:
http://diary.joshuadavis.com/2006/05/29/bmw-estoril-portugal/
instructions about 75% down the page
-no gradients
-no alpha transparencies
-no bitmapdata
Saves (from Firefox) to C:Program FilesMozilla Firefox with no file extension
Add “.eps” file extension to file, then open in Illustrator, or something

  • does not seem to work for bitmap-type files, like that matters for vector art.

OR, just download the PC postscript drivers from Adobe (I haven’t tried this one)

JD says “word” a lot. Also, “rockin'”

3 frame Movieclip as button without using actionscript
1. make MC
2. label three frames “_up”, “_over”, “_down”.
3. MovieClip automatically responds to mouse action as if it were created as a button. No ActionScript needed.

Example of springs and damping for “bounce” effect

Useful tool: http://colorstripping.joshuadavis.com/
-generates string color palette from a .gif

EXPORT VIDEO OF ACTIONSCRIPT ANIMATION FROM FLASH

-DIRECTOR
-import desired Flash movie (.swf)
-add .swf to director timeline
-property inspector: END FRAME: 600 (for 20seconds at 30fps)

File-export->all frames->quicktime movie format->

Basically takes a bunch of screenshots of the desktop then compiles them into a Quicktime movie.

Go to Eric Natzke talk — dynamic animation dude.

-be sure to replace Flash 6 plugin (inside of Director) with Flash 8 plugin for good stuff. Search on MM site for appropriate download/plugin

FOR PRINTING: Make sure hairlines are larger than .25. .25 is often too fine to be printed—

Flash 9 can, in theory, do all of this without all of the hoops to jump through

Ideas come from getting out in the world — NOT looking at the stuff other people do or staring at a computer.
Take photos, find patterns, trace with WACOM.

Using drawings in conjunction with Actionscript. Don’t go all Actionscript because it loses that warm, hand-drawn feel.

“I am successful because I make stuff for ME, not because I make stuff for YOU. You hire me for MY stuff, not YOUR stuff”

VERY inspiring speaker.

Experiment all the time, save all of your experiments. You never know when something, years from now, will be useful.

Flash in the Can, Part 1: Outwitting Fate

John Winkelman

Awoke at 3:00am from a restless three hours to get a jump on the day. Left Grand Rapids around 3:30 in rental car (a Mazda) made necessary by the sudden death of my Saturn (stabbed in the back with an SUV). Hit the highway out of town and headed East.

First part of the trip was uneventful. Saw many interesting things, such as tail-lights, head-lights and…pavement. Passed within a few miles of the Ryan Lee ancestral home. Learned many interesting things about Ryan. Drank coffee concentrate to stay awake.

I-69 turned into I-94, and I-94 turned into 401 as we crossed the border. Passed USA-side toll gate with no difficulty. Bridge over the border was beautiful, with a false dawn turning the eastern horizon a opalescent gray. Stopped to present bona-fides at Canadian bridge.

Canadian gate was guarded by something much like a Marine, complete with buzz-cut, piercing blue eyes, and a bullet-proof vest. Proof of American citizenship was demanded. We each handed over our Michigan drivers’ licenses. Dialogue follows:

Guard: I need to see proof of American Citizenship.
Me: Like what?
Guard: Birth Certificate or Passport
Me: Here’s my passport.
Ryan: Here’s my social security card.
Guard: That does me no good.
Ryan: That’s all I have.
Guard: Where are you going?
Me: Toronto.
Guard: Why?
Me: Conference for work.
Guard: For how long?
Me: Until Tuesday.
Guard: Pretty long for a conference. What kind of conference?
Me: Web development.
Guard: What’s that?
Ryan: You ever look at the internet and see animations and —
Guard No! Do you have any alcohol or firearms?
Me: No —
Guard: Dead bodies in the trunk or weapons of Mass Destruction.
Me. Um… no.
Guard: Where did you say you were going?
Me Toron —
Guard: For what?
Ryan: A conf —
Guard: WHO ARE YOU REALLY?????
Me: …
Guard: I need to see proof of American Citizenship.
Ryan: But —
Guard: I can order you to turn around and not come back until you have proof.
Me: b-b-b-but—
Ryan: Why—?
Guard: All right. Go ahead. If I see you again, I’ll kill you.
Me. Thank you sir.

Silenced reigned for the next few miles. The eastern sky slowly turned blue.

A word about the stretch of 401/402/whatever between the Michigan border and the ‘burbs of Toronto: Nothing there

7:00am: We are below a quarter tank. Time to think about refueling. Take the first exit with a “petrol” sign. Find the gas station. Closed. Hit the highway again. Find another exit promising “petrol”. Find, I kid you not, an “Esso” station with old-style, static-electricity generating metal pumps. Closed. Hit the road again. Realize that we haven’t seen a living human being since crossing the border. Suspect zombie activity. Hit yet another exit. Find yet another gas station closed. Notice that the highway is kind of a pink, fleshy color. Voice hypothesis that the highway is made out of zombies. Realize I am working on three hours of sleep in the last 48 and no food in the last 12.

7:45am: Heading into a glowing ball of fire the apparent size of a prize-winning pumpkin. Ryan has been pushing the car for the last several miles. We see a sign for London and make jokes about a wrong turn. Find (finally!) a working gas station and real live humans! We re-fill the car and warn them of encroaching horde of zombies. When asked what they look like, we reply that we didn’t actually see them, so they must be Ninja zombies.

Back on the road. Hit the outskirts of human civilization. Make the mistake of not placing blind faith in Google Maps and end up back in zombie territory. Retrace our steps and rediscover civilization. Enter Toronto. Again fall from grace with Google maps and find ourselves in a Grand Rapids-esque endless loop of one-way streets. Increase speed to build up centrifugal force necessary to fling us in the right direction. Finally find the Hilton. Find a spot in the bottom of the parking garage, among the rats and albino alligators. Head to exit. Door is locked. Walk up ramp. Find another exit. Door is locked. Walk up another level. Find another exit. Open.

At this point the fates relented and the day achieved a semblance of normality. We were about an hour and a half late, so upon throwing stuff in our hotel rooms we headed for our respective seminars.

Notes on the conference itself will come later.

A Small Piece of Night

John Winkelman

A few weeks ago Cynthia and I went for a long walk through Seidman Park, a beautiful bunch of trails which cover a gamut of terrain, from marsh to ravine, to field and forest. Around the south end of the park we noticed that some trees had several odd-looking objects hanging from the branches. Curiosity drove me to pull one off and bring it home:

070419_promethia_moth_0

I suspected that it was a cocoon of some kind, and a few minutes of browsing the internet confirmed that it was the cocoon of a Promethea Moth (Callosamia promethea). I left it on a table in my house for a few weeks, then this afternoon, upon returning home from a truly whacky day, I discovered that it had hatched.

070419_promethia_moth_1

It was still shaky and soft and moving slowly, pumping its wings up to full size and letting the tissues dry and firm up. This made it quite easy to photograph.

070419_promethia_moth_2

I left it alone and went out. Upon returning a few hours later I saw that it seemed to be ready to be let out, so I took it to my back yard and set it on a low branch.

070419_promethia_moth_3

About an hour later I looked outside just in time to see a small piece of midnight flutter past a streetlight on its way to places unknown.

The saturniid moths, never all that common, are becoming increasingly rare due, in no small part, to light pollution. During mating season they orient themselves by the light of the moon, and with so many bright man-made lights out in the world, the moths get confused as to where they should fly, and so miss one another. When your entire adult life lasts a week, getting stood up for a date is a deeply tragic affair.

Farewell, My Friend

John Winkelman

I just returned home from the memorial for Jeff Boughner.

I first met Jeff when he interviewed me for a job at Schuler Books, back in August of 1993. I was working as a prep cook at the time, and desperate to be in an environment where people actually read books on purpose. Jeff decided I was a good candidate, and in the middle of September he hired me for what turned into a six-and-a-half year stint selling books.

In a surprisingly short amount of time I became the special orders manager, which meant dealing with people who already had a problem: we didn’t carry the book they wanted. Finding books for those people was detailed, drawn-out, and often quite frustrating for everyone involved.

Something you should know about bookstore employees: We take the job because we love books, not because we love people.

Over the years, Jeff came to recognize the stormy brow when I came stomping out onto the floor preparing to commit mayhem on the nearest warm body, and he had an uncanny way of defusing the situation just as I was about to let loose on someone: He would look at me, get kind of a Mona Lisa smile on his face, look down at whatever he had been reading, and just say “Oh, John, John, John…” while shaking his head.

Somehow, it worked. He was taking the deep slow breath for me when I couldn’t.

Somewhere around ’96 or ’97 I discovered that writing poetry could be as rewarding as reading it, and this led to participating in a few local poetry readings. The first time I ever stepped on stage in front of a crowd, Jeff was behind me with his guitar providing a soft, blues-ey jazz atmosphere for my nervous stuttering and mumbling. Beside him were Al and Hugo, in a primeval version of Blue Nebula, even before the era when they were the Haje Nebula. Actually, I think those poetry readings might have been where the Haje Nebula got its start.

Blue Nebula’s website is here. Take a second to listen to the music. That’s Jeff on the ethereal guitar.

After I quit the bookstore for greener pa$ture$, I fell out of touch with Jeff a little. He worked the same hours I did, so I would usually only see him on the occasional lunch hour or Friday afternoon. I still tried to keep up with the Blue Nebula performances, but those didn’t allow for a lot of hanging out and catching up.

The last time I saw him perform was at a poetry reading in the middle of last year, where he was accompanying several of the same poets who were on the ticket with me my first time. I managed to say a few words to him during one of the breaks between poets, complimenting him on his playing and just enjoying hearing him talk to the other musicians at the party.

I was on vacation when I heard that Jeff was sick. A few hours later I heard he had died. I made sure to lift a glass for him on Bourbon Street.

There were probably close to 200 people at the memorial service at the church which Jeff had attended for so long. Family, friends, co-workers, compatriots. At one point, near the end of the ceremony, the pastor invited people to share their memories of Jeff. One of his old bandmates from a LONG time ago said “Everyone who ever had the pleasure of performing with Jeff, stand up.” And many people did. That moment, more than any other, demonstrated the breadth of Jeff’s influence on the world around him.

As we were leaving the ceremony, and I was saying goodbye to the old Schuler Books crowd, Christine — another one of the poets — gave me a big hug and said “Didn’t it feel great to be able to stand up and say you performed with Jeff?” and that’s where the tears finally came and my voice broke and thinking about it I can feel it all again.

Yes. It was wonderful.

Thank you, Jeff. You were a bigger part of our lives than anybody realized until tonight.

I will miss you.

59.941428, 30.352650

John Winkelman

In May of 1994 I spent a month in the Hotel Rus, drinking vodka and Georgian wine, taking dozens of photographs, and generally having the time of my life. It was here that I got into the habit of keeping a daily journal, something which I have kept doing, more or less, ever since. I still pull out the photos once in a while to remind myself of what it was like to be 25 in St Petersburg.

First Book Post of 2007

John Winkelman

Well, the past couple of months have been wild ups and downs in the book department. Over the holidays I read the three volumes of the Wild Shore Triptych by Kim Stanley Robinson. Each of the books is a possible future for Orange County, CA — The Wild Shore, which was post-apocalyptic, The Gold Coast, an urban dystopia, and Pacific Edge, an up-and-coming ecological utopia. All of them were good, but the last was probably the best read.

I have also been diving head-long into John Varley, who writes some of the most enjoyable science fiction I have read in a long, long time. Several months back I read his Gaea Trilogy — Titan, Wizard and Demon. Very good. More recently I picked up Red Thunder, which was AMAZING; Mammoth and The Ophiuchi Hotline. The latter two were good, but not great…but still well worth the read.

Robin Hobb’s most recent book Forest Mage, the second in the Soldier;s Son trilogy, came out a few months back. The first in the series took off rather slowly, and didn’t seem to have a specific direction, but this one was well worth the effort. Hobb just keeps getting better at writing fantasy novels.

And finally, one which caught me by surprise, kept me up at night, and left me awe-struck: The Terror, by Dan Simmons.

The Terror is historical fiction mixed with some gothic horror and a light touch of the supernatural. It explores the Franklin Expedition, where 128 men disappeared while looking for the Northwest Passage.

I wish I could find the words to express the wonder of Simmons’ books. If you have read the Hyperion Cantos, or any of Simmons’ horror novels then you have an idea what you may find here. It is not a quick read, being almost 800 pages, but if you do dive into The Terror you will find your time and money very well spent.