I wrote a very long essay yesterday, but did not post it because I lacked a picture. I also didn't do much of worth yesterday. My 22nd birthday is 2 hours away, so I'll post this VIDEO! It's 11 seconds. Download the low quality version [513.1 kB] or the high quality version [1.5 MB] As usual, you need the DivX Codec to view these videos. I could encode these into XviD if I wanted to, but I didn't, so there you go. People complained about the previous movie that it was far too short such that they could not even watch it. If your player has a loop button, use it. If it doesn't you're stuck with an 11 second video this time. 11 seconds is not extremely short. You follow Jav, you look at the building, you see EG1, you see the logo. If it were 5 minutes long with the same content, I'm certain viewers would complain about it lacking plot, character depth, and interest. Also, the file would be more than a few MB and you don't want that.

Also, I mean, whole anime episodes are only 30 minutes or 1 hour. If I made a 30 minute demo of AS3D Anime Director, I would charge frigging 1/8 * $25 for it. DVDs are expensive. The cheapest ones are about $25. Each DVD has 6-8 episodes. That means for a 30 minute episode, an otaku pays $3.25. $3.75 is what I pay for a DVD rental which I find to be a decent price for ~3 hours of good anime content. But then think about this: a Manga (half the size of a telephone book) costs $3.50. And then this: a graphic novel costs $9.00. It contains 5 issues from a single story. So let's imagine I'm a poor otaku (no need to imagine, really). If I want the most good stuff for the money, what do I get? Well, obviously graphic novels are cheapest. However, they lack audio. So I rent DVDs and buy graphic novels. But there's a problem with graphic novels also: they're more expensive per page than a manga. So when I'm looking for a bunch of cheap yet good manga, I get a manga. So I end up not owning many DVDs. This is not the end of the world. In fact, I buy a few of the best DVDs when I know that the price is worth it. The first two DVDs of the Captain Tylor were a good choice (even though the last DVD is the best of the series, it isn't much of a laugh without the rest of the series). So what is left? Well, what about when I like the music of an anime? FLCL is a great anime and one of my very favorite soundtracks. So I rent the DVD and I buy the soundtrack for (ack!) $20. So this cd thing is not very cheap, eh? No, but for Ruroni Kenshin, FLCL, and Trigun I make an exception. What form of anime am I leaving out? Anime Cons! I went to Sakura Con (Seattle) and was happy to see a bunch of very new, very interesting animes. For $30, I watched a dozen of fresh off the boat anime. That beats the cheap of the rentals, no? So you see, anime is an art of the cheap. And if you're *really* cheap, you'll write your own manga and anime. And you'll charge people to watch it so that you can buy more DVDs, manga, and a plane ticket to Japan. ^_^

I was planning on a big long essay, but I decided I don't want to take responsibility for it yet. Essays are a big responsibility. Rants are not so much. I can rant day and night and if someone calls me on it, I'll either give my opinion, correct myself, or back it up. But writing an essay requires a person to think, work, write. Maybe I'll post it another day without revision, but I'm certainly not going to release it tonight.

Tonight, I worked on a few things that are a lot like bookkeeping. The first was to compress all the png files that were over 100 kB. I had taken them off of Keenspace because I didn't want to cause a bandwidth problem for readers or the server. But many of them are huge for a good reason. There are two or three that are just spectacular. I have links to them here:
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My favorites are colored green. I hope you like them also. You can switch to the jpeg version to compare by clicking the circular button labeled 'lo' to the left. I found some interesting things that I'd like to share in this exercise. The first is that compression is based on very primitive predictability. My 3d rendering was predicted by a very sophisticated predictability. In it's original format, 3D can be compressed far more than png. Of course, no one has the facilities to render this image, so I'm stuck with png. So if I want to take a 611 kB png and turn it into a 56.1 kB png, what do I do? In the case of 163, I spent a lot of time turning the background into blocks of color. The original had a very random texture for the walls. The walls are the least important part of the scene and could be flat white for all I care. But I can't just do that. So what I did was:
1) Cut out the characters and the stairs.
2) Blur a copy of the image with a radius of 15 ten times until objects cannot be recognized.
3) Cut the colors down to 4 or 8 so that everything is funky.
4) Paste the characters back in.
5) Make the final picture 8-bit.
This system I used for three or four pictures. Why? Because it takes background stuff that is very detailed and makes it not detailed at all. I can't do the same to the foreground stuff because then I wouldn't have a decent picture. In fact, I like the cel-shading of the background better. *shrug*

The second silly thing I did today was to try to free up my hard disk space. After three hours of deleting stuff that I don't need, I only have 5 GB free. This isn't cool because I need at least fifteen about a month from now. Of course, it's quite impossible to free up 15 GB on a 40 GB drive. My plan to free up space goes like this: burn 2 CDs of Anime Music Videos, organize music (oggs) to be burned to cds, organize dev directory, attempt to eradicate useless files. Burning 2 CDs of AMVs worked. But I won't free up the 1.3 GB that I burned to CD because I regularly watch my AMVs. I'll free that space in a month from now when I actually need it. I didn't burn my oggs to CDs because I listen to them regularly and I didn't want to waste time doing exactly what I did for the AMVs. I organized my dev directory, but that didn't free up any space. It will save me time since it is my main directory and it used to take about 5 seconds to list the 77 directories. Now it's instant. The next thing I did was try to delete stuff. That didn't work. I ended up spending a lot of time on things that aren't extremely important. I spent ten minutes decompressing a 50 MB imp file with all of my Robat stuff in it. If you don't know what imp is, it was the format for WinImp which was a freeware WinZip clone. Imp compressed better than Zip by ~ 10%, so I used it back in the day. Lesson of the day: don't use formats that go out of date. Thankfully, there's a buggy program called unimp that took care of my files. It's funny that Imp still compresses better than gzip. It doesn't compress as well as bzip2 or rar, but for a freeware product back in the day, it kicked some hineys. Anyways, I deleted a very little bit of stuff. I deleted 60 MB of windows demos from 2001. I zipped a bunch of bmps. The thing is that I have 1.7 GB of stuff that I created way back when I was working on JF that now I don't use. I've totally shifted gears since then. So it makes sense that I should delete them or store them on CD-ROM. But I just can't. I'll put them on CD-ROM one day when I have time, but I'll never intentionally delete them. Why not? Do I have some mixed up dream that it will be useful to me or other people? How could it possibly help anyone? Really, I have cut my ties to the old stuff. I'm using the new Jav model and the DA model for everyone else. But what if I ever /need/ it?! Yah, packratism is like the plague. It seems like I keep absolutely everything, but isn't it funny how when I need something, I've either destroyed it or can't find it in the mess. I mean, there are some good things about being a packrat, like being able to reminise about days gone by. I can just read those old JFs and think of all the wonderful things I have done and am continually doing.

Irony is when the actual use is not the expected. It is ironic if the firefighter station burns down. It is ironic if a police chief commits a violent crime. It is ironic if a cpu fan catches fire from running too fast. Just because something is unlikely doesn't make it ironic. It's unlikely that you will be hit by a meteor, but it wouldn't be ironic if it did. If you had bought a million dollars of earthquake insurance in the middle of San Andreas Fault and got hit by a meteor, that would be ironic because you would expect that you would get hit by an earthquake and in actuality, the opposite happened. Probability does enter into irony. A person expect things that are probable to happen, but not things that are improbable. However, one could expect that something improbable would happen and instead something very probable would happen. What does this mean? Anything? It means that irony is a normal occurance and that it is based on the world of the mind interacting with the physical world. How does a mind interact with the physical world? Since a mind can only exist as information and a process in a physical world, it must interact with the physical world with an interface. This is an interesting problem in AI and similar topics.

But I won't get into that tonight. What I did want to show with that picture is the irony of Microsoft Word being used to write a Slackware 8 guide. This guide is not very easy to find, so maybe it isn't official. Maybe my copy of this was obtained by a hacker. You never really know. But it's irony in it's purest form. It's like a music artist downloading mp3s off Kazaa. Oh wait, they do. That completes the example: Something that happens, but should not. It's f'n ironic.