MICRO-RANT ALERT: Pundits and True Believers

Humans are creative geniuses who transform isolated wisps of sensory experience into vivid mental models of the world which are experienced as rock-solid objective reality. Like a homeopathic preparation, by the time the alchemical process of transmutation is complete, there's almost none of the original substance left in the solution of our belief systems. Like jazz musicians who start with a well-known standard, the music we end up performing is almost entirely the product of our creative imaginations, with just a nod to the notes on the original score.

This process is easiest to notice in pundits and true believers who pontificate about controversial issues on our social media streams. They turn their backs on the the vast multi-dimensional web of reality and instead focus on cherry-picked clumps of factoids that they connect in the shape of their pre-existing beliefs. It's an ugly process if you can see behind the veil. Obsessive beliefs fueled by conspiracy theories can twist the psyche into the grotesque unnatural poses of circus contortionists.

The good news is that there's a simple antidote to this toxic plague of self-delusion. If you're more committed to truth than your beliefs, try this simple exercise from the Work of Byron Katie. Take one of your beliefs related to a controversial issue and ask yourself:

• Is it true?
• Can you absolutely know that it's true?
• How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?
• Who would you be without the thought?

Follow up the Turnarounds.

There are supporting materials available through the links provided above. If you give it a try, please let me know how it goes.

A New Pair

I'm no Banksy, but . . .

Why You Should Never Argue With Me

I've done a pretty good job of avoiding virtual drama and flame wars over the course of my life. (With a few notable exceptions. You know who you are.) But in October of 2010 I had a breakthrough that changed my life. I realized that I didn't really care whether I convinced anyone of anything. I might care about the issue. I might care about its outcome. But I don't care about changing any particular person's mind. That freed me to have fun instead of getting mad. To play instead of fight. And to graciously admit when I'm wrong. So if you want a dramatic argument, I warn you that my Dummy-Do martial artform is impervious. 

I'm guessing that those who saw this image yesterday without the accompanying explanation probably interpreted my meaning a little differently. :D

Botgirl's Fortune Cookie Wisdom: A Bad Trade

Fortune Cookie Wisdom Wallpaper

Empty Spaces

Snapshot of my Onion Peel

Thinking through social network sharing is like peeling a digital onion. Here's a glimpse at one little piece of my puzzle. Hope to report back in greater detail within a few days. If not, send the bloodhounds.

InkSeine might make me love Microsoft

InkSeine is nirvana for visually-oriented researchers. The software for Tablet PCs combines inking, searching, gathering and research workflow in a seamless, intuitive and utter-joy-to-use UI. Since this is Lazy Month, I'll leave most of the the show and tell to the creators:

InkSeine integrates four key concepts: it leverages preexisting ink to initiate a search; it provides tight coupling of search queries with application content; it persists search queries as first class objects that can be commingled with ink notes; and it enables a quick and flexible workflow where the user may freely interleave inking, searching, and gathering content. InkSeine offers these capabilities in an interface that is tailored to the unique demands of pen input, and that maintains the primacy of inking above all other tasks. Source

Words don't do it justice. Here's a short video that captures some of the software's brilliance:

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:04b0b97f-7992-4724-a409-d53d51dcba0b&showPlaylist=true&from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="InkSeine from Microsoft Research - The Official Video">Video: InkSeine from Microsoft Research - The Official Video</a>

Finally, here's a screen shot of the first page of an InkSeine document I'm using to gather information and thoughts for a new blog post I'm romancing.

A little glimpse inside my comic creation process

This screenshot from the wee hours of this morning shows some of the tools I'm using to put together the upcoming comic on Night's tale of romantic loss and fulfillment.

The window on the right containing images of Majic at her laptop is from Adobe Bridge. Since I take a lot of shots during a scene, it's really good to have a program that lets me quickly get a good look at each shot. I use Photoshop for image manipulation and Comic Life Magiq for the comic layout.

Comic creation with Second Life is challenging becuase there are visual glitches in most shots. Either a hand is poking into someone's back, fingers look like breadsticks or a limb is bent in an unnatural way. Although I try to set up each shot to avoid the most obvious issues, I've found that it still makes sense to overshoot, and take photos from many angles.

For instance, what seems like a perfectly good image in the first shot, is upon closer inspection marred by a painful looking finger through the palm. The best solution is to find an animation without the problem. Otherwise, either framing or post-production image manipulation can turn this into a usable shot.

That's all I have time for today. I'm putting together a presentation on using Second Life as a platform for visual storytelling and comic creation, so I'll be throwing out some draft items here along the way.

The kiss I longed for was nowhere to be found

Last night, I worked from mid-evening into the wee hours trying to stage a kiss for a particularly important scene. After going through poseballs, love HUDS, friends' poseballs and finally a scripted bed, I couldn't find a single worthy shot.

I have never felt so frustrated and blocked in my creative work by an aspect of Second Life that resisted an easy solution or alternative.

Kisses are hard. Oh, that's a bit of an ambiguous sentence. What I mean to communicate is that compared to typical shots, a realistic and emotionally moving kiss is really, really difficult to capture. Any clumsiness in the angle of the heads, the positions of the arms or hands, the facial expressions, bad body intersections, etc. stand out in ways that can not be easly fixed in post-production. It's possible to luck out with an animation, but I think this will take some custom tweaking.

Any ideas? Maybe I should host an event, inviting people to bring their favorite standing kiss poseballs to the set? In any case, wish me luck.

Botgirl & Night augment immersively for comic collaboration

Night and I met Tuesday evening to discuss the latest draft of our first joint comic collaboration. I uploaded the draft images and threw them on a couple of gallery poster boards. Wow! What an amazing way to work on visual material together. I got my handy Sketch Sky Pens out of inventory (you can see a red circle drawn in the second image) and we had a great, fun session.

I'll return to Avatar identity next time.

Lifestream visualization

Most people use lifestream applications such as Friendfeed and MyBlogLog primarily to log and view current happenings. Another interesting way to use the collected information is to visualize it over time. Here are a few examples and resources:

Dipity (Image below is interactive. Try setting zoom level to "week.")



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Botgirl vs. Human Comic - Waking Dream part 2

Page can be viewed in full resolution here.

Botgirl vs. Human Comic - Waking Dream part 1

Series can be viewed in full resolution here.

Playing with pictures

I've been playing around quite a bit in the current comic series with images captured in Second Life. Over the past few days I've gone in a new direction and here are a couple of initial images. The first is a retouching of a graphic used in a previous comic page. The second is a work clip from an upcoming comic page that will hopefully be out by midweek.

New Botgirl vs. Human comic featuring Dale Innis

The Botgirl vs. Human comic series starts a new chapter today. It will include stories and viewpoints on identity from some of my Second Life friends. This first comic is a collaboration with Dale Innis. The complete series can be viewed in full resolution here.

Botgirl vs. Human Comic in virtual print format from Issuu.com

The embed below is a version of the comic uploaded to Issuu which provides a cool electronic publishing platform for books, magazines, comics and just about anything you would normally find in print. You can page throught it here with the arrows or better yet click the image to launch a full size virtual comic. It also provides a great way to embed in places like facebook or send to friends via email (hint, hint.)

Botgirl vs. Human Comic Part 6

Series can be viewed in full resolution here.

Botgirl vs. Human Comic Part 5

Series can be viewed in full resolution here.

Botgirl vs. Human Comic Part 4

Entire series now hosted here for easier viewing



to be continued...