I’m very excited by the glassblowing workshop I’m taking – I’m having a blast mixing colours into glowing hot glass and then twisting and squashing and blowing it into all kinds of amazing forms. The colour of blown glass is amazing – it’s so rich and saturated and has a brilliant quality that shimmers when the light hits it.

Stumbled on this amazing interactive interpretation of Van Gogh’s Starry Night and I’m totally blown away.

In hindsight, this piece is an obvious logical extension of the original painting. Van Gogh’s style calls out for this kind of treatment – it’s so full of energy and dynamism and spiralling brushwork. I wonder how something like this could be extended to his more demure work, or how other styles of paintings might express themselves.

Pointillist pieces presented as boiling, churning clouds of swarming dots? Impressionistic paint daubs oozing around umbrella-holding women and ballerinas? Dadaist art that crashes your computer and sets your battery on fire?

I should just rename my blog to “Jason Talks About Games Louis Dozois Makes” but he’s come up with another one, this time building a game in a weekend that subsequently won Ottawa Game Jam’s “Best Concept” category. Better yet – it’s free! You can download and print the Aion tiles and instructions from their Game Jam page and play it yourself!

I got a chance to play it a few times at lunch and thought it was a lot of fun! The idea is you put down tiles “domino-style” and try to build loops, competing against your opponent to finish them. It’s easy to pick up, plays fast (about 20 minutes), it’s cleverly strategic, and well balanced. I think young kids would have an easy time of this one, but adults will enjoy the brain-bending situations and risky strategies that come from trying to out-think your opponent’s next move.

You can play with paper pieces, but Louis’ set is printed on stickers and then stuck to fancy wooden tiles. Clever monkeys could do the same thing with some foam-core or cardboard and have a nice set of their own.

Snapped a picture looking out over the experimental farm through this morning’s rolling fog. Those are trees and a little shed. No horizon line, though – just white meeting white.

Despite the the cake and cards celebrating my birthday, I don’t think the implications of being 35 really sunk in until I got on the treadmill last night to practice for the Winterman run and had to update my age. I know it’s just used for target heart rate calculations, but it was a bit of a slap in the face to know the machine’s grading me on a downward curve.

To spite the treadmill for making assumptions about how fit people my age should be, I ran a little faster and further than normal, fueled by leftover cupcakes.

I was at the hardware store again last week and needed a couple of things from their loose hardware area. Two bolts, four washers, four nuts. It was like 24 cents worth of hardware that I needed to make a pair of handy clamps.

I bring the bag to the checkout and the lady looks at the numbers I drew on the bag – 2 of xxxx, 4 of yyyy, and 4 of zzzz.

Even though I tagged the bag, I guess they make the cash people double-triple-quadruple check everything.  She spent a while scrutinizing the bag from the outside, flipped it and recounted from the other side, stuck her hand in and felt around, scrutinized again… Finally she pulls everything out, lays it down on the counter, sorts them into groups, compares against the bag list again, considers for a while, and ONLY THEN, finally like forever minutes later, types it in.

Pop Quiz: Can you count to 10?

I’d have to be just about the worst, most desperate shoplifter ever to sneak a washer past a cashier -in- the bag I presented to her. They cost literally pennies and must be the cheapest single items in the store.  Imagine the paperwork if they inventory their washers and come up one short!

As I was playing with them at home, I saw that there are teeny-tiny numbers printed along the edges of all the hardware – maybe she was actually trying to read every individual nut to verify? I don’t know what she gets paid per hour, but there’s probably some economic benefit to actually trusting the customers.

Incidentally, the clamps work great. If you’re ever looking for a bolt that fits your camera tripod mount, it’s a UNC 1/4-20. With a washer and a nut you can lock your camera down to just about anything.

I went back to life drawing after a bit of a hiatus and had a really good night – I even exceeded my expectations a bit and managed to not horribly embarrass myself with my final drawings. The guy posing (Jarl) was a real pro – he was doing crazy dynamic poses using a chain hanging from the ceiling, and he was super ripped so he was easy to draw. Sitting still for 20 minutes is challenging – doing the crazy stuff he was doing was pretty tough. Kudos to him!

Yesterday was kindof a disaster for buses – we were getting sleet and freezing rain, so inevitably they were running really late and/or were too full to pick us up when they came. Finally a 176 stopped for a gang of us on Merivale, and we packed in like sardines, only two blocks later to get rear-ended by a car (who drove off). Official bus policy is that everyone has to get off and wait for the next bus.

Forget that – I’d already been outside for an hour and a half and I couldn’t stand around anymore. I decided to walk.  It wasn’t that bad, really, except that I had a bag full of dinner and was looking forward to getting home. I was facing away from the rain the entire way, it was pretty warm out and I’d dressed properly. But my coat was getting stiffer as I walked – when I get home I saw why. My coat and bag had literally frozen solid all along the backside.

I read a while back about Reaction-Diffusion algorithms and always wanted to try them – really neat organic patterns (like leopard spots and fish stripes) can be modeled using a surprisingly simple set of rules. This works kindof like the “game of life” algorithm – you throw down a bunch of noise, and the pixels move around following simple rules (they basically “diffuse” outwards). But in this algorithm, each cell also produces an inhibitor, which forces the pixels to clump up, producing all kinds of neat-o organic patterns.

It’s a really elegant algorithm that in a simple way mirrors what’s happening with things like pigmentation and growth formation in living systems – I thought this particular set of rules looked kindof like brain coral. It’s fun to look for patterns in the shapes – it’s like looking at clouds, except after a while your eyes hurt!

(Brain Coral from the USGS Archive)

I was talking in an earlier post about my slide photography rig – I’ve been messing with different techniques for capturing the slides since then and coming up with some ideas. I had an interesting brainstorm on the weekend which turned into a failure for unexpected reasons, and I thought I’d share.

After rummaging through the basement and a trip out to the hardware store, I managed to build a rudimentary fluorescent lightbox that works pretty well (successes are boring – more about that later). After all that effort, I suddenly realized what an idiot I’d been: I had been staring all along at readily available lightboxes all over my house – backlit lcd monitors!

It seemed almost too easy: Open up a blank white document, sit the slide on the bevel of my laptop screen, and snap a digital picture!

But something unexpected happened – the slide is so small that when I got a macro shot of the picture, I could see the pixels of my lcd! They’re not visible to the naked eye, but when you’re stretching an inch of film out to 3000 pixels wide, and doing a relatively long exposure through a piece of opaque film, the brightness difference between the pixels and the troughs becomes really vivid.

So it wasn’t so stupid of me to build my own lightbox after all! There’s a couple of easy ways to get around the pixels showing up if I was really dedicated to using a laptop screen as my light source:

1) Put a diffusing material, like some white plexiglass, over the screen. I’m basically doing this with my “real” lightbox already. This should smooth out the pixels underneath into a uniformly white area.

2) Easier: Bring the slide forward off the screen and shoot with a wide open lens so the pixels blur in the background depth of field

3) Harder: Open up the monitor, peel all the LCD layers off and just shoot slides against the solid self-illuminated background layer. (If I had a broken LCD kicking around someplace I might consider this)