Water under the bridge

The Playground Version

A lot of water has passed by since I decided to stop posting. I now live close to the ocean, on the Chesapeake Bay, in fact. Like living outside Washington D.C., I rarely visit the main draw for this area. The first time I walked on the Norfolk beach I thought I would never leave. I did a lot of traveling after that and then came back here. At my age, 73, it’s difficult to think about moving for a lot of reasons. I remind myself I am never satisfied and that the sirens of emergency vehicles don’t sound all day and/or all night. So, I stay where I am. 

Now that Mom is in a parallel universe, I feel a bit untethered. Technically, I’d like to feel totally untethered. While Mom was a rock, she was also a bit of a prison. 

I have no goal for this post. I’m checking my options and attempting to discover if there might be some value in returning to previous activities.

Lunar New Year in Farmville 2

There are a lot of animations in FV2 that go largely unmentioned. The new Lunar New Year lantern stand is an example.

Here's a couple of screen shots of the kick off for the Lunar New Year lantern tasks.

Free lit lanterns bobbing on the river in the night.

The lanterns rise up into the sky and fly away.

Also, every time you make a lantern in the lantern stand and a neighbor "buys" it, they take the lantern to the river where it floats and then flies away.

But wait! There's more! There are other many little animations that no one seems to mention. For example, you can hover over mushroom lamps (if you have them) and they light up. There are a couple of wood fires that light up when you hover over them. As a remnant of an owl task, there is an owl tree with a tiny owl house where the owls peer out when you hover over the tree.

And there are constant special animations to kick off new tasks. A recent reward animation was a sleigh ride with four friends. The entire screen was animated with my farm in the background.

As an old school computer user I am amazed by the work put into this free game to make it fun and attractive. They should win an award.

Floating in Second Life

Here are two screen shots showing the kind of stuff I like in Second Life and mostly what I do there: stuff you can't do in First Life. Here I am (as an avatar) in a floating world simulation. Part of the fun is the duck boat that you ride down a slide. At the end of the slide the boat disappears and your avatar falls underwater.

My avatar (wearing a freebie fish head gifted to me at the site)
powering a traveling, floating contraption. Everything is easy here (see
the destination address in the slot at the top of the screen shot).
Just "sit" and you'll find your avatar doing all sorts of things.

My avatar floating in the sky. This trick takes advantage of
the building technique where one side of an object has a
texture and the other side is transparent.

Why be normal or ordinary, indeed!

If you have a membership, you can go directly to Rafts.

The Best Free Game No One Plays: Hidden Shadows

"Surgeon's Stable" scene from the
"Doctored Death" episode.

Zynga's Hidden Shadows game on Facebook is a hidden picture adventure with everything: beautiful art, crime stories arranged like episodic TV, interstitial graphic novel panels, achievable goals, a moderately increasing difficulty level, intuitive interface, and (most important for me) the capability to play without "neighbors" or a whole bunch of friends.

You also get a good run for your basic supplies of energy and easily earn the materials you need to speed up investigations or make more energy. Not a whole lot of materials, of course. Zynga still wants you to buy stuff and energy. And there are two annoying screens to click through asking you to invite friends. However, there is enough to keep going at a critical juncture or if you just can't wait 12 hours for lab results.

The mild disadvantages are that Badges needed to move forward can take a long time to earn and if you choose to investigate the wrong evidence (when you have a choice of two) you'll find yourself spending a lot of time earning Badges. These take progressively more energy to earn and max out at five per scene. New scenes are opened up from analyzed evidence.

Even though this game has "everything" none of my friends play it. For a short time, in order to win extra stuff for Farmville 2, a couple of friends played it. They got the booty and quit. I can't stop.

The items you search for are varied (although they have a thing for hats) and usually in plain sight. As you level up the items blend in more, are hidden in shadow, and sometimes are only partially shown. If you can't find the item or wonder what a generic word like "bat" means, you can hover over the word and see the image. This distinguishes between the animal and the wooden variety. You also get a hint from seeing the image because you see exactly what the item looks like in the scene. I can tell from the size and angle approximately where in the picture the item is hidden.

Hints are quickly available. In the screen snap above, in the lower left corner is the Hint counting up. In a matter of seconds you have a Hint available. One is all I've ever needed. Hints are available for purchase (of course) and you can make them from the raw materials generated by successful completion of scenes.

Achievable objectives and earnable materials, yet no one plays this game. I have one friend who  plays a couple times a week and that's it. I don't get it. Why would no one enjoy the pleasant passing of time with a pretty, moderately challenging game?

Opening screen. Pretty or what?

Notification to complete more scenes to analyze
the evidence you find in a scene.
Badges are earned by completing scenes.

Make Speed-Ups and Energy (but not Badges)
from materials gathered (automatically) in scenes.
As you can see, I have a lot of materials.

Season One - completed.

Season Two - in progress.

Human heart or graphic heart? Prevent errors.
Hover over the word and find out!

pastel tropics

I've started investigating color with concentric circles. Here is today's favorite.

I was into circles briefly during the 70's. Since Bryce is now broken on the iMac, I'm back to basics. Fundamental basics.

Perhaps this could be another nice Make Something 365 project?
(Not linking to Bryce is intentional. No point linking to something broken, is there?)

nasty

Here's a real mess and I don't care.

The Elaine Report: Feb 6, 2013

From Richard III to Beutel-Ei Nr. 1 in 8 steps.

• Reconstructing Richard III's Face So glad they did this! The portraits existent are so flat and characterless. There's a good description of digital facial construction and its limitations.
• Indian women robbed of their uteruses by money grubbing doctors ... and the government does nothing. Many women now convinced they cannot recover from illness without a hysterectomy. 
• New York city negotiating with Air BnB to keep visitors off the street. I was an Air BnB host for about a year. I met some intriguing, kind travelers who appreciated my local expertise. And helped pay my bills.
• Turns out being miles underground is the best way to study dark matter and get real peace and quiet.
• Microscopic nutrients from the Sahara rain on the Amazon. We are all one ecosystem, ya'll! Not a lot of other facts or explanations in this brief article with a Nikon-sponsored video of lovely shots of the Sahara.
• 21 Things You Should Never Buy at a Garage Sale. Full of ooky bugs and germs! Would have been better to tell us what we should buy.
• Internet to be replaced by esoteric time stream. Note the napkin sketch at the end of the article. Doesn't really help. Tumbled it.
• Technology aging backwards? I don't get it. Read about three paragraphs and became overcome by dark matter.
• Seamless beautiful backpack made of wool. The artist named it an Egg Bag. It is sort of egg shaped. Looks more like a Lady Bug to me. Pinned it.

Merry Happy 13th! You lucky ones ...

merry old christmas image ... or not

My 1999 Holiday Image

Adventure in Text Effects

I started off thinking I would make my name into a Hobbit style effect. I did find a nice related font and then segued into steampunk followed by this.

I'll try again another time.

As an aside, this journey also led into wondering how I could make my website more individual. I ended up with three books from the library but not really any closer to making a new design.

Assemblage: Texture Study

Flower 11

Makes a great desktop, particularly if you stretch it. All the texture stands out.

Spirit Boat 11

A boat is a vessel that floats in a medium and yet is not consumed by it. Ergo the cloud.

Spirit Boat - 5

Spirit Boat - 3

Spirit Boat - 1

This is the beginning of a new 365 Make Something project (aka Morning Pages aka daily creative. Take your pick.) The new theme is Spirit Boat, taken from the old Viking idea of the spirits of the dead heading out on boats. Since the Vikings were all about the sea, most of their analogies involved sea-going vessels in one way or another.

I first become entranced with spirit boats in 1992 while researching artistic concepts for a typography class. I saw a photo of a Viking spirit boat sculpture while leafing through a magazine. There were little primitive figures in the boat to show the dead heading out to the spirit world. I was stunned by the concept of activating and manipulating the spiritual realm through the creation of a physical object. Don't ask me why the Egyptians didn't do this for me. They just didn't.

Seeing the boat sculpture, led me to look at just about any container as a mode for transporting spirit. The designed page (and art) had an intention that could be described as a carrier, or boat, and message expressed through color and form. I played around with what I remembered of plastic space seeing that as the expressive form of spirit.

While meditating today, I focused on the spiritual in my work, which has always been there in one way or another. Indeed, my process is based on inspiration which comes from the moment. To explore spiritual aspects more directly, I will be making at least one spirit boat each day. And I mean boat in the most abstract sense as a carrier or container for spirit(s).

Those of you interested in Viking ships, there's a museum in Denmark where you can learn to make and sail Viking ships.

Sketch from my notebook - 11/1992

January 2011

January 2011, a photo by TracyU on Flickr.

This would make a nice 365 Make Something project. Easily doable electronically - which is my primary criterion.

Via Flickr:

Sky 335 - artificial fog

The fog algorithm doesn't make realistic fog. I had to add a cloud plane. Looks more like swamp gas than fog.

Sky 333 - radical

If you hadn't seen the previous two days, would you know this was a sky?

Sky 332 - 331 recolored

Using a set of the Illustrator "Impressionistic" swatches.