"The 'sensible' relgious people are really on the side of the fundamentalists, because they believe in supernaturalism. THAT puts me on the other side."
- richard dawkins, wired magazine, july 2007
"i feel like maybe new york is becoming like paris - a classic city. But then what happens is, like in paris, the city just feels like a museum. You don't have a lot of artists and musicians and the people who generate that energy who can [afford] live there anymore."
- brandon holley (ny magazine, 11/07)
In this tutorial, we'll show you how to create these glowing blobular Alien Eggs in Photoshop
01 :: First, create a new file with a good canvas size & large dpi:
02 :: Next, create a new layer, fill it with a dark colour, and name it:
03 :: Then, to give our Alien Eggs a translucent appearance, wherein their cell walls are visible, we need to modify the properties of the Paint Brush Tool:
- Select the Paint Brush Tool
- Open the Brushes module & select Wet Edges
04 :: Any Alien Eggs worth their weight will give off an odd glow. So, with Paint Brush Tool still selected:
- BRUSH SHAPE: Choose a soft round brush (for best immediate results, use a px size at least 1/4 size of canvas)
05 :: Set some other critical Brush properties:
- OPACITY: 100% (default)
- FLOW: 100% (default)
- MODE: Linear Dodge
06 :: Lets see what these settings get us on the black canvas.
- Create a new layer on top of all others.
- Select a vibrant colour; I've found that bright orange gets fantastic results.
- Drop & drag out a few circles of your colour
- Make sure the edges of at least 2 of them overlap a little bit
SUMMARY:
To describe the Photoshop Fu before you, we have blobs of colour that, by themselves, have cell walls and glow.
However, when they overlap, the Linear Dodge + Wet Edges causes the chosen colour to increase.
The more you mouse-down over existing blobs, the more saturated & bright the overlap appears.
The effect is eggs that appear to be connected, as if bubbles in a liquid. Even when the blobs approach each other, their glow overlaps, creating the appearance of 2 seperate eggs with connected membranes.
Try out different colours & note how - without editing the Brush Tool settings above - each colour behaves a bit differently.
For even further Alien Egg effects, create larger eggs shapes, and using darker & different colours, create smaller Alien Embryo shapes within. All the while, play with Brush Opacity: have the larger earlier Alien Eggs have like a 75% Opacity, with the inner/later Alien Eggs having closer to 100%.
Enjoy!
WHEN & HOW WILL DAP SHUFFLE BECOME AWARE?
I sometimes feel my ipod might in some unquantifiable way be aware. The math involved with the coincidence seems skewed. At just south of ten k tracks on perpetual shuffle, I often hear artists come up after having had a conversation about them earlier that day. Sometimes sooner.
I know its lunacy. Hell, its impossibe for a stock 4G ipod to carry that feature. But I also know it floors me sometimes.
Somehow parsing from ambient space either beat recognition & identification, or speech recognition. Then using that data as tags within my music library. Any given music library.
Is that gaming the shuffle?
Would there be a throttle?
The unavoidable pang of regret when a father looks back on the rearing of his son and feels much more could have been done if only the child were less of an individual.
The interests of the mentor subverted by the will of the ward, however unintentional.
There are core values I have planned, and expect to instill in jude. Some of these are values I wish were more surface & documentable in my every day. But all are in my mental agenda for Right & Wrong.
My concern - the WHY in writing this - is that these values will be lost on Jude as he ascends into his own self.
And on the heels of this is the desire to confront my father and at once excuse myself for missing his lessons, as well as request a review (by him) of myself as a man to see which of his lessons stuck... Which if any are visible today.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/seannarae/sets/72157601876555232/
if only they were each worth the 10's of 1000's needed to explain the circumstance, the scenario, the situation underwhich they were snapped.
a big bolt of gratitude to the treehugger massive for allowing me to lose my virginity in such good company. and special thanks to those of you who took care of my body in times of need, or showing me things in terms of mentorship. you know who you are.
its been a long & strange week. its at once both strange and perfectly natural for me to say that i thoroughly miss each of you. i've known some of you for only the truncated calendar week we spent together out there. yet it feels as though i'm writing to my dear roommates from university.
i'm doing a lot of routine actions as if they're for the first time. i feel an overwhelming sense of pride in the accomplishment, after looking at it on a shelf for 10 years. and i'm not even sure i know what it is that i've done.
i understand & respect that some of these words, while familiar to your experience, may sound quaint and perhaps a little bit trite given your feelings about previous years' trajectories in counterpoint to next years direction for the whole construct.
i found myself involuntarily giggling my disbelief & roaring my approval alone in open playa.
i repeatedly wept openly amongst strangers in my daily attempt to digest the temple offerings.
i held silent council with parts of my psyche i'd never before met, and may not hear from again until all these other voices become silenced.
i felt, in some ways, at some times, more mature and more of an aware adult then i ever have before (in stark contrast with the ubiquitous peter pannish reverie)
i listened attentively to the acrid bile of veteran burners performing their obligitory bashing of the institution that continues to define whole quadrants of their adult lives.
i rode an average of 15 miles per day and would argue i didnt experience but half the installations or a tenth of the camps.
and at the risk of waxing rutger hauer, i've seen things you people wouldnt believe.
but then again, you guys, of anyone else, dont have to take my word for any of this.
i love you more than words.
from kevin
cotton:
Godzilla was released in 1998 starring Mathew Broderick. Could this be a
remake (already)?
Whether there is still wind in the sails of the Godzilla franchise is certainly debatable. Audiences love these films despite their predictable endings. We flock to watch monstrosities go to town on large cities - where there is a clear unambiguous villain, but where Man is ultimately to blame.
However, JJ Abrams has a tendency to leapfrog the next level an instead take convention and formula to a place viewers have never been. And once there, his viewers are never quite sure where they are let alone where this thing is going. His craft is one of directing viewer attention inward, plunging them onto incredibly intricate plotlines. We end up distracted away from our normal cinematic instincts towards predictability (of endings) and technique (visual effects).
In doing so, he may just re-invent the almighty monster picture, much the same way he’s re-invented science fiction episodic television.
Lots of people not talking. Only thing people know for sure is that nothing - NOTHING - this big in that town has ever been kept so well under wraps. There are big production shoots uncovered on both coasts confirmed to be JJ Abrams’ doing this film. Across the board, each member if the crew, when asked, mentioned it was a production for a cheese commercial. Nothing makes sense. No clue ties in with any other clue. I’ve stopped monitoring the blogs because of how far-fetched the clue analysis has gotten. Its impossible to suss-out salient points due to this signal-to-noise ratio.
But if you’re interested, I have found SLASHFILM to be about the best repository of creditable rumor, non-news and leaks about the film.
http://www.slashfilm.com/tag/cloverfield/
This show is the lowest form yet. A whole generation of impressionable viewers will be conditioned to think that in order to be a top anything, you must expect & tolerate abuse from those in a position to mentor. Its sick. Its perpetuating a Reign of Assholes. That aggression & abuse is an acceptable means to an end.
And viewers file it as entertainment.
I never thought I’d miss American Idol.
