While at my little cousin's birthday party the other day, we were presented with an opportunity to play Karaoki Revolution for Playstation or some similar name. The user wore a headset and selected a character, name, and outfit and got on the virtual stage on screen. Then you sang-a-long with the tune and a motion captured crowd, which cheered you on or got mad depending on the machine's judgement.



Terry sang "Billy Jean" and I sang "Girl's Just Want To Have Fun." The machine picked them for us. My cousin, her husband, my brother, Terry and I sang three rounds in a competition and the machine validated our performance.

The whole time I was thinking about how weird it is that we found this activity to be totally normal yet I cannot imagine the situation with the machine. I can't imagine sitting around taking turns singing and voting on who is better at it. By the way Christina is the best, by far. She is a karaoke diva.

QUESTIONS:
So what about the machine makes the activity so normal and accepted? Is this the situaion for many other activities? Does the addition of a machine make it seem somehow logical and thus acceptable? Is it perhaps that we are slowly being conditioned to accept the machine as source of authority? Have we been convinced by Sony/Konami that its more fun with a machine, so that we can buy their products? Does anyone have any ideas about this?

Z-Brush is the collest program I have ever used. It is a hybrid painting/3D modeling package that allows you to bring in obj geometry and turn it into a deformable mesh brush. Kind of like the mesh burhses from Maya PFX but with the contorl of Adobe Photoshop. Once the Mesh is in Z-Brush you can use varios tools to deform it and then export the geometery back into .obj or render it. For this case I exporte dthe geometry to an .obj file. Opened it in C4D, reduced the triangles by about 86%, put the remaining geometry into a hyperNURBS object and rendered using some shadowed lighting and the bhondoniNut Cheen shader.

I added some bones and some soft Ik and was able to re-pose the geometry to look like two object walking or one object stalking the other.

This nerve is the first nerve for Chris Outlaw's Brain VR project. I thought I would post both the poly verison and the render for the two groups of people that would care (real-timers vs renderers). I will making some more and then reducing the geomtery. Currently it is 405 polygons.

Its kind of hard to imagine them without seeing them in his project. So we will have to see. The project involves the viewer being present in the brain of a riot police man during a protest march. You watch through his eyes and then judge, using the facts and feelings you are presented with. When speaking with him on the way to the Trinh Minh-Ha screening yesterday,, he said it was an experiemnt of mixing documentary and VR.

I hope he likes the nerve. I have a feeling it would look nice if it had a pulsing light texture.

Here are the rendered verisons of the masks and their geometry for the VR project that I am modeling for. som eof you might have already seen them on the DMA 390 site but I thought I would add them here for the record.

Since these models were created Josphine had me change t hem a bit - they look more like China Dolls now but I like them like this so for now you can see this version.

This is going to be underdeveloped but I will finish it at some point later today when I have time. I have thought about it for a while but only have five minutes before I leave for school.

The lower to middle middle class download music. Belonging to that income range, many of the people I know download music of the internet with some sort of P2P program like Kazaa or ?.

It is noteworthy that it puts them in a specific class I believe, directly in the middle of the class spectrum. They are the people that are wealthy enough to have a sohpisticated computer system and broadband internet connection but not so wealthy that buying retail priced CDs in mass quantity is no problem. It seems that the upward limit of the music downloading scheme are probably people in the upper middle and wealthy classes. At that point you are able to just buy CDs without monetary impact, so downloading music might not be worth the time.

I spent the evening with Jesse in Second Life working on scripting. I need to get some nice scripts completed for my independent study with Josephine. Right now I am working on a virtual pulsing dicoball that when clciked on, offers to sell the user a disco braclet. Then if the user is wearing the bracelet, when you click on the ball it makes you dance.

Who know how it will go, but I think it could be the start of a sucessful disco business. I will post some pictures later tonight.

As a youth (I am now 27), I used to be a world traveler. During my 17-23 year old years, I went to school in

Rockhill, South Carolina(1 Year) Winthrop, the school, is really beautiful, unlike Canisius which has beautiful pictures in the catalog and is really 3/4 of the year under snow, Winthrop is always nice. I chose this chair from the main building's porch because as a crazy 18 year old, me and my friend Amy ran naked across campus and took pictures sitting on these chairs. Those pictures have been censored, but the chair gives you a feel for the craziness of that day.


Flagstaff, Arizona(1.5 Years)
One of the most visually pleasing cities in the world. there is so much natural beauty abound, that is is almost inspirational.


Jena Germany (1 year)
Not so beautiful, bu thte Christmas market is pretty with all the lights. It's nice than buffalo at Any time.


Flensburg, Germany (1 Year)
Definately a cute city on the ocean. I loved living there.

Missing Image ;(

During that time I traveled to so many cities, some of which I will list here in no particular order. These are only the cities/towns I stayed in, not just drove through, and can remember quickly. There are links for the cities where I attended school:

Toronto, Vancouver, Niagara Falls, Montreal, Quebec City, Moyi, Hope, Nelson, Edminton, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, Richmond, Washington DC, Pittsburg, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Albany, Syracuse, Rochester, Ithaca, Myrtle Beach, Rock Hill Columbia, Charlotte, Charleston, Savanah, Atlanta, Athens(GA), Tampa, Phoenix, Tuscon, Prescott, Flagstaff , Sante Fe, Denver, El Paso, Juarez, Huimas, Las Vegas, Reno, Portland, Seatle, New York City, Sacramento, Yuma, Redding, Eureka, , San Francisco, San Diego, Sioux Falls (Canistota), Barstow, Jena , Dresden, Flensburg , Husum , Strasbourg, Leipzig, Neu Muenster, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Eckenfoerde, Kassle, Konstanz, Freiburg, Berlin, Koeln, Dusseldorf, Lubeck, Kiel, Dortmond, Munich, Stuttgart, Lugano, Luino, Basil, Geneva, Copenhagen, Paris, Nice, Genoa, Rome, Milan, Robagano, Treviso, Venice, Florence, Barcelona, Madrid, Amsterdam, Gibralter, Fez, Marakesh, Valencia, and London.

Growing up in Kenmore, I had the idea that by travelling around the world, I could be exposed to other ideas that I thought I was missing in Kenmore and needed to properly develop into an adult. I think I was right. Especially during the German Years. I was hungry for other experiences. Or trying to subconsciously escape living near the former Linde plant [inlink]userName=paul,blogID=397[/inlink]
(hahaha.)

Anyways, then I started getting hooked on computer communication and my world shrunk. I remember my first experience with the internet was in South carolina. I just kind of figured that the internet and Netscape were the same thing. I rememeber using pine for my email, and being really excited when I figured out how to look stuff up for the exchange program in Germany. I found that the school I was going to had a site. That didn't mean they had good internet access. When I got there, I found one computer lab that had very sparse hours. Crazy now, thats probably why I got so much done during those years. By the time I got back to New York and then moved to Arizona I was ready to get my very own computer, so in 2000 I took out my first loan and bought my iBook. Let it RIP, matthew watered it with the plants in 2003, and its days came to a close.

The iBook was my very first personal Computer after the Commodore 64 I had as a child and the very first computer I owned with a modem. I still traveled but brought the computer with me. Then as time went on I began to purchase
more and more communication devices and my world traveling came to a halt in 2002. Now I have 3 computers and a cell phone that can go on the web and I almost never leave my neighborhood. It seems that as my computer communication methods expanded, my world traveler days came to a close. I am really kind of sad about this.

I can still talk to people from everywhere and get ideas from them at least, I guess that was my the most important part of travelling to me. It was also about getting to know who I was without the restaint of my friends and family who knew who I was.

My biggest worry is that it all goes the other way. People from really isolated places aroun the world can tap into American superPopCulture and download it into their worlds, as well. This sucks for everyone in a way, soon there will be no reason for anyone to travel.

My greatest problem is that in all of the cities I saw, especially the American ones, it was kind of the same. Especially out west, while each city had its own little flare, most of them had a corner that included a target, office depot, home depot/lowes, dollar store plaza. Each one also had a super walmart, even the Canadian ones. No kidding, I even saw a Walmart in former communist Jena, Thuringen, a small city in the old East Germany. What the hell is going on with that? So now I have decided that I can just live here in Buffalo and visit electronically.

The only cities that were truly mind boggling were Fez and Marakesh. They seemed like they left development about the time Mohammed walked the Earth.

I hope to organize this journal entry and its meaning later, but I figured if I did not write it I would never get that far and its been bothering me.

--update
I realize that other things have changed iin my life that brought me to this static place. I am just saying the computer helped a lot.

In response to Julie,
We are having a big camping party at Aleghany on the 20th. So if you can have it another day it would be great. On the other hand feel free to come on the camping trip. We have a bunch of cabins at Aleghany and there will be skiing involved!

Everyone is chippin in $25 each for the cabbins. Email me if you have questions.

I had another thought about competition today. Anything that involves numbers and counting can be converted into competitive action. So for example, croche can be a competitive art in that one artist can outstich another in terms of number of rows.

What does it take to make a truly non-competitive activity? Can there be non-competitive activities that rae still considerted fun? Any ideas?

If you don't understand this it doesn't make a difference. If you do , it might be important. Someone sent me this information, and hoenstly I can't say I know its true but its something to think about.

Major Overnet warning!!!!

Some apparently leaked information has come to our attention and if it’s true, using Overnet could put you in jail!

Allegedly the maker of edonkey who goes by the name Swampy was busted by the Fed’s a couple of months ago. As a part of a plea bargain to keep himself out of jail he agreed to let them have full access rights to his web site. Swampy did NOT create Overnet the Fed’s did however by appending Swampy’s name to it and distributing it via his web site meant it would be trusted through out the community. They used Microsoft’s .net software on purpose because it easily and secretly allows them to track users based on IP and Mac addresses via a special proxy server, It logs what their sharing and what their downloading each time they connect to Overnet. This information is also passed on to otherlaw enforcement agencies world wide.Overnet is NOT server less as it claims; the GUI just hides them along with many hidden features like the proxy server connection. They only want you to see what they want you to see.

Bottom line is if you already use or have used Overnet they already know who you are where you are and what you have done. Could be only a matter of time before they come a knocking!

P.S. Also the forum moderators at the edonkey web site have been replaced by Fed posers so be careful what you post their.