http://www.grotto11.com/blog/ The Life of Brian: Macs, Tech, Politics, and Randomania en-us btman@grotto11.com Um... wait a minute. Did I really just see a trailer for this a few days ago?Ye gods. I guess I did. http://www.grotto11.com/blog/archive/1219201268.shtml 2008-08-19T20:1:8-08:00 I'd like to see more of this to know just how versatile the technology is in relation to the amount of data input you'd need to make it work right—I mean, the whole point of modeling 3D characters in polygons is so that you can control them in real time via a relatively lightweight stream of "puppeteering" commands, and the more prerendering of detail you load into the model, the less flexible it can be in real-time practice—but this is pretty damn good, for a two-minute rigged demo.Via Chris. http://www.grotto11.com/blog/archive/1219159571.shtml 2008-08-19T8:26:11-08:00 Bellagio, eat your heart out: Damn, but that's cool. http://www.grotto11.com/blog/archive/1219109991.shtml 2008-08-18T18:39:51-08:00 Gruber links to this: Walt Disney Animation Studios' new site. It's like a throwback to the old days of web design, and I mean that in the best possible way.I mean, just look at it. It's like something you could code up in two hours in Pico. View the source—there's only a couple of screens of code, and it's such raw code too. Like from the days before there was CSS and JavaScript APIs and embedded analytics. The whole thing is table-driven, for crying-out-loud—and there's hardly a CSS element ID to be seen. Indeed, hilariously, the only two IDs I see are on two different tables, and they both have the same ID. There's only the barest minimum of JavaScript (looks like it's for image-swapping, which probably could have been done more elegantly and Web 2.0-ily in AJAX or something), and even the stylesheet file is only a few screens long. The page doesn't even have a doctype. It's nice clean code, with proper XHTML markup conventions and all, and there are a couple of nods to AJAX in some of the sub-pages (e.g.... http://www.grotto11.com/blog/archive/1218826384.shtml 2008-08-15T11:53:4-08:00 Yarrgh! This commercial has driven me up the damn wall for years. It took someone at YTMND to give it the proper treatment it merits. A simple capsule.... a simple capsule... a lot of skepticism about a simple capsule... (Fair warning: as with most YTMNDs, Safari ruins the audio sync, so use Firefox.)Via Mark. http://www.grotto11.com/blog/archive/1218807671.shtml 2008-08-15T6:41:11-08:00 Eesh. I haven't seen something this bizarre since that whole "L Intl" business: Imagine, for a moment, that you're in the midst being sued by the roaming herds of rabid lawyers currently roaming the grounds at One Infinite Loop.Now, you've got a choice. You can either do your damnedest to appease the company during their latest litigious spree, or you can just throw caution to the wind and find yet another way to get under the company's notoriously thin skin.Psystar, who's currently being hounded by Apple reps for their series of Mac clones, has apparently opted to the latter route. The company has started to address users' complaints about lack of OS backup by including a copy of Leopard with their systems. What is wrong with these people? Do they think they'll be rescued by Richard Stallman on an unencumbered unicorn? http://www.grotto11.com/blog/archive/1218741390.shtml 2008-08-14T12:16:30-08:00 You want to see something really surreal?Go watch The Dark Knight—preferably twice, because it's so damn dense with plot and intrigue—and then go back and re-watch all the Tim Burton-era Batman movies.It's bizarre. I can hardly imagine why people thought these things were so groundbreaking, except that what they had to compare it to was the campy 60s stuff. I mean, I was never that overwhelmed with the Burton movies—I thought the jet-engined, fire-belching Batmobile was a completely pointless piece of unjustified visual fancy, considering that you never saw it traveling faster than about 15 mph, and the fist-fights were hardly better than you saw in a low-budget TV series, what with the wide shot of the wind-up for a punch, close-up for the actual punch, then wide again to show the guy falling over with no momentum or follow-through—but dammit, they were dark and brooding and serious, or at least they started out that way. They gave rise to the unbearably good Animated Series, after all, and I always ascribed... http://www.grotto11.com/blog/archive/1218723011.shtml 2008-08-14T7:10:11-08:00