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Week 8
So why this sudden interest in animation and morphing. Well the morphing part started out with an on-line misunderstanding, not the sort relevant to the topic 'Have you ever been misunderstood?' in the Xenophobia conference but a misunderstanding for all that.
Someone wrote to me saying she wanted to morph one person into another and would it be difficult to do this using layers and masks in PaintShopPro? Now instead of thinking "What is she trying to do?" like anyone sensible would, I concentrated on the word morph, which to me meant a mathematical method of creating transitional changes.
I had this definition confirmed when I downloaded the first free morphing programme I came across.
http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/dmc27/
What I should have done was read this tutorial first
http://www.imagesco.com/articles/software/MorphTutorial01.html
That would have concentrated my mind on the uses of morphing and I would have seen (at once, I hope) that layers and masking would philosophically have been more appropriate to the concept my correspondent wanted to express i.e.the persona hidden behind a public face rather than one person becoming another
All this playing about with graphics, it is getting in the way of what I really want to do. ie. get at least one of these novels I am writing into a fit state to send to a publisher. OK,maybe I would rather be writing a visual and text story for DVD because I see things in pictures as much as words but I don't want to do that for the web, not yet.
I admire people who do write for the web, they are pointing the way forward to inspire themselves or others to develop technology so that it will become a great media., but at the moment when you look through a great imaginative work you know you are not seeing it nor hearing it as it is meant to be, not unless your server has cached the files, you have a dedicated line, a powerful processor, great sound and graphics cards, a subwoofer and top of the range speakers. The frustrating thing is the technology actually is almost there but not quite and only a very small proportion of the world's population can afford it. For several years yet even those who have saved up to buy the latest technology will need a new upgrade even before they have their current model up and behaving itself
However when interactive technology does run runs as smoothly and fast as present day television I suspect that the big search engines will start charging huge fees for all registrations and creative amateur Internetters will occupy the same niche as ham radio operators but at least the commercial slots in the beginning will be filled by those amateurs who have demonstrated their skills in the days when the web is still comparatively free. It is the next generation that may find itself more completely at the mercy of commerce.
This does not mean that I see the imminent end of all the advantages of the web.
Commerce needs sites like CommunityWare and GeoCities to provide their databases but at least they give something back by enabling people to make links across the world.
Gaming, including various kinds of MOOs will continue to be popular
The Net will still be useful for research even if the data is more carefully sifted and little gems written by ordinary people will no longer be available.
When mail applications like Outlook Express developing further graphic capabilities, and merge with voice mail E-mail will perhaps become the amateur creative media of the future and the way in which all collaborative work is undertaken.
I guess what I was fumbling my way towards yesterday is that I see the main function of the net as enabling communication and collaboration between people and giving them access to a wide storehouse of knowledge, exposing them to points of view they would not meet otherwise
. I would not grieve greatly if the entertainment element of the web melded into a media contaminated by commerce but would consider it a grave loss if search engines ignored the websites of unknown individuals.
Now there would be a topic for Barbara or Christy's conferences "What have you gained from other people's web sites?"
Nature, and how you define it, was very much the topic of conversation last Sunday on the on-line chat. The pictures above are just for fun and to cheer myself up, not really relevant to the subject of nature
This is my definition, not one a dictionary would approve of perhaps.
"Nature is the universal within which everything else is a subset, but it is possible to mentally enter any subset and look at nature as the external outside that subset."
i.e. if you were a rabbit, nature can be viewed as anything that was not a rabbit or created by a rabbit. Ditto for a human being.
This is a useful definition for me as I believe every living subset of nature has as its prime role the continuation of that subset. It would be arrogant of human beings to consider that they have greater responsibility for the welfare of nature than any other subset. No subset including the human one has 'a right to life', but on the other hand it is not normally beneficial for any subset to disturb the equilibrium of nature outside its own subset.
I.e. if rabbits were able to exterminate all their predators they would have a population explosion and more rabbits would starve to death than would have been eaten by the predators. The only solution would be to submit to voluntary birth control which would require a different view of their own prime role.
Day 57 Thursday 8th March
You should see Dan's journal. He hasn't half learned a lot since he came here. It's sickening though, Here he was starting on a base level (as far as html was concerned ) lower than mine and in only two weeks he has soared so high I can hardly see him.
I have been reading frAme.
Hey, I think I am a nihilist and I never knew it! I should have used the word 'categories' somewhere in last Tuesday's discourse . If, like me, you haven't read any philosophy for forty years there is an on-line dictionary you might find useful.