A Serling Vision of Faith

Posted on January 2, 2013 by Reverend

Rod_Serling_photo_portrait_1959I was catching up on my RSS feeds last night when I came across this gem from Rod Serling via John Kenneth Muir—who is one hell of a b-culture blogger.

I think the destiny of all men is not to sit in the rubble of their own making but to reach out for an ultimate perfection which is to be had. At the moment, it is a dream. But as of the moment we clasp hands with our neighbor, we build the first span to bridge the gap between the young and the old. At this hour, it’s a wish. But we have it within our power to make it a reality. If you want to prove that God is not dead, first prove that man is alive.
– Rod Serling, December 3, 1968.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Sterling since the brilliant GNA Garcia suggested we run the Summer version of ds106 as a series of Twilight Zone episodes, an idea I am really excited about for a variety of reasons. I’ve be re-watching the videos of his writing seminar at Ithaca and reading as much as I can of the Twilight Zone Companion. I have a much longer blog post about my ideas of producing a class in this fashion, but let me end this particular post by saying Serling is the perfect conduit for such a manifestation of ds106 not just because The Twilight Zone was brilliantly bizarre, avant garde, low-budget, and popular (all of which it was), but because Serling had a vision of faith in humanity that we seem to have increasingly lost in the cannibalistic narratives of our cultural decline. Serling is not only relevant at this moment, he is desparately needed!

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Great Train Robbery GIF

Posted on January 2, 2013 by Reverend

Here’s an old gold gif, 1903 old, taken from Edwin Porter’s The Great Train Robbery.

TheGreatTrainRobbery

It is easy to see how this image inspired a similar shot in Gun Crazy, which you can see as a GIF below.

gun_crazy_annie2

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Yie Ar Kung-Fu GIFs

Posted on December 31, 2012 by Reverend

This series of GIFs is in honor of the 1985 classic arcade game Yie Ar Kung-Fu.  I’ve already written about my love for this game on the bava, so I’ll save you my usual flood of verbiage.

yie_ar_kung-fuBuchoStarNunchaPoleFeedleChainClubFanSwordTonfunBlues

For the record, this series of GIFs took me way too long. Each animated fighter is its own GIF, and my strategy was to beat each and every character in the game and then steal his or her image as a GIF (a double beat down). That plan went well until I got to Tonfun, then it went to hell. I kept getting beat up by Tonfun, so in the interest of time and family relations I found this video of a perfect game and got the animated likeness of the Blues GIF there. Nothing like starting the New Year with a cheat!

One last thing, you may notice that each of these characters animations are the same as they are in the “Hot Fighting History Next Opponent” cut scene for each of them. Still stuck on the animated GIF cut scenes idea for class arcade games.

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Some Classic Arcade GIFs

Posted on December 28, 2012 by Reverend

Here are a few cutscenes from some classic arcade games. I could do classic video game GIFs all day. Given that, I imagine there are many more of these to come, in the meantime can you name all five without cheating by looking at the file names? I think there might be one (maybe two) that could hang folks up—I’ll try and dig up some harder ones for all the Ben Rimeses out there 🙂

pacman_cutscene1

Ghosts and Goblins

rushnattack

Jungle Hunt

Karate Champ

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Golden Eagle Grabs Nintendo 3DS

Posted on December 26, 2012 by Reverend

The above video went viral last week, turns out it was an created by a group of Canadian students at Centre NAD for a class. The object was to design a viral video, 37 million views later they won. I discovered this via YouTube and traced back through the over 42,000 comments that it was, in fact, a student project—-I was totally fooled on first look. This video was brilliantly done, with truly convincing details like the low-fi everyman-in-the-park filming, and being sure not to overplay the animated eagle and falling baby. The way in which the bar of entry for shaping reality these days is ever-lowered with the insanely powerful tools we have at our fingertips is mind bending. The seamless fabrication of reality is both inspiring and deeply disconcerting.

After coming off the implications of the above video, my daughter Tess was playing with the AR (Augmented Reality) Game Cards that came with Miles’ Nintendo 3DS. I was truly blown away to find my kitchen table become a field of combat for an attacking dragon. The experimentation they’re doing with some basic Augmented Reality in a handheld gaming device like the 3DS is crazy. I’m just beginning to realize that the future arrived a while ago, but I missed it because I was sure it was supposed to look like a Ridley Scott film. We’re in one of those moments wherein technology is fundamentally challenging the landscape of our reality in simultaneously amazing and scary ways. Much like the advent of the car or plane, our cultural sense of space and time are being altered, with technology like 3D animation and augmented reality we further erode any monolithic idea of truth as well. I think we’re entering a moment in which the once ostensibly stark distinction between the virtual and the real can be blurred routinely by just about anyone with a computer. For me it reamins a strange oscillation between exhilaration and cultural vertigo.

I started thinking how sick it would be if something like Phylo game had AR Cards? The possibilities there are, indeed, wild—it occurred to me tonight at my kitchen table that immersive and contextualized augmented reality environments for exploration is not on the horizon—it’s pretty much here. So crazy. I guess 3D television is finally starting to make some sense to me 🙂 Now where is my totem?

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5 Years Later

Posted on December 22, 2012 by Reverend

dz_walken_headband_opt2

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Animate 2600: Video Pinball

Posted on December 22, 2012 by Reverend

pinball 01

1058921383-00There might be some pinball purists out there who will want to burn me at the stake for this heresy, but give me Atari 2600’s Video Pinball over a “real” pinball machine anytime. That whole face-to-face argument for pinball is a symptom of corrupt unions and nostalgia for a livable wage 🙂 The 2600 version was a port from the 1978 dedicated console, and it remains one of my all-time favorite Atari 2600 games.

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We’re Doing the Basic Science for Everyone

Posted on December 22, 2012 by Reverend

Hulk: Basic Science from Jim Groom on Vimeo.

Ang Lee’s 2003 Hulk has been much maligned, and not without some basis. But of the two film Hulk’s that have come since (namely Ed Norton and Mark Ruffalo), neither have been part of anywhere near as good a film. That said, they all still aspire to the TV series—but for me Ang Lee’s comes closest. Sure it takes itself too seriously, and Banner’s father (when played by Nick Nolte) gets ridiculous quick, but of all three Hulks, Eric Bana’s has stuck with me most. What’s more, I’ve come back to the above scene in particular again and again in posts, conversations, and presentations. It’s the scene wherein the slimy military contractor Glenn Talbot gets shot down by Bruce Banner when offering to buy his research. It’s his simple response that gets me every time: “We’re doing the basics science for everyone.” For me, that’s the simple ideal that should guide all publicly funded research conducted at universities. The seemingly lost ideal that certain knowledge should represent a basic contribution to the common welfare of humanity. All very simplified and melodramatic in this scene, but maybe that’s why I love it so much.

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Animate 2600: Haunted House

Posted on December 21, 2012 by Reverend

haunted_house

Hauntedhouse_atariI always knew Haunted House was a classic Atari 2600 game, what I didn’t know is that it inspired a whole new genre of survival horror video games! From the Wikipedia article:

Haunted House is an Atari 2600 video game, first released in 1982, in which the player (represented by a pair of eyes) must navigate the haunted mansion of the late Zachary Graves to recover the three pieces of an urn. The game was one of the first home video games to feature scrolling graphics and a multi-level playing field, and has been identified as one of the earliest examples of the survival horror genre by a GameSpy article.

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8-bit Noir

Posted on December 21, 2012 by Reverend

My kids and I have been playing a fair bit of Atari 2600 games lately using the Stella emulator, which works for Mac, PC and Linux—what platform doesn’t love Atari 2600? When playing the 1980 classic Night Driver I was struck by how much that game reminds me of all those film noir inspired scenes that feature the darkest night lit only by a feeble set of headlights. My first thought was “that’s some 8-bit noir, right there,” and my next thought was “that would make a pretty seamless GIF.”

night driver 1

Now compare this with a similar GIF I made from Robert Siodomak’s The Killers a few months back as the Hardboiled class was just getting started.

Opening scene of Robert Siodomak’s The Killers

It would be fun to try and find and piece together all the scenes with a shot like this throughout film history. I bet there would be a ton.

Anyway, the idea of animated a scene from an Atari 2600 game is now an animated GIF assignment over at ds106 called Animate 2600, give it a shot if you have the 8-bit grit to do it.

Also, a quick note on how I did this. I have all the 2600 roms for Stella locally, so downloaded a trial version of Screenflow to capture a few seconds of the gameplay and then exported the video. The trial version of  Screenflow adds a watermark to any exports, so I made the Stella window as small as possible and moved it to the upper left-hand corner of my screen. I still caught a bit of the “D” from the “Demo” watermark, but luckily I was able to airbrush it out in GIMP. It is a few extra steps which can be annoying, but Atari 2600 games are pretty ripe for the GIFing.

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