One of the slickest Flash applets I've ever seen: Drawing with a mouse, however, still is incredibly difficult.···

Oops: It seems most people who downloaded Type Seven weren't able to watch the demo correctly as the video sequences wouldn't play in most computers. Those sequences have been removed and replaced with Flash sequences. The (I hope) final version of Type Seven is now available at the usual place.···

World War 2.5: Creepy. 'Historic semiotic analysis': that looks like Isaac Asimov's psychohistory to me. Which makes it even creepier. (via Metafilter) ···

Surrealist torture chambers! And as Andrew of the Null Device pointed out, nowdays they'd probably charge for admission and market those as the latest trend in clubbing. ···

Comic fonts and lettering. English Manager take note. (via VM) ···

Went to see 8 Mile. That's right, the Eminem movie. I was curious about it since it was directed by Curtis Hanson, the man behind LA Confidential and the very very excelent Wonderboys. And 8 Mile ain't bad at all. Despite the fact I don't like Eminem at all (and that they diss the Beastie Boys in this film), his character is actually far better than the usual pop star role, and the movie has a good storyline with enough twists and turns. Some of these aren't as fluid and as believeable as those found in Wonderboys, for example, but still not enough to spoil the film. And the rap battles are great. Overall, forget about Eminem: 8 Mile is good in its own right, full of those little nice details Curtis Hanson is so good at.···

Speaking of which, yesterday I went to the Serralves Museum of Modern Art. I wasn't really aware that the new exhibitions had just opened, so the place was filled with pretensious-looking faux famous and people who obviously hadn't a clue about art but were there to 'accidentaly' pass in front of the many XL-1s covering the event. The exhibitions, then. The highlight was British painter Francis Bacon. Once again, the illumination engineers of the museum did a terrific job at transforming each glass covering the canvas in a mirror, so you couldn't even watch the exhibitions without looking at some very nasty reflexions. Even though, I didn't like the paintings at all (or what I could see of them), despite the fact they say Bacon is one of the 20th century greats. Thomas Ruff's was much better, including some great Gulf War-looking green nightshots, blurred images of internet porn and some pseudo-soviet posters, including one about Jacques Chirac's nuclear tests (remember when that was a big problem?). British filmmaker Steve McQueen's (not that one) exhibition was also interesting. As always in Serralves, the real interest is in the sideshows.···

So, that demo. Some people will like it, others won't. Fair enough. Demos are an artform rooted on a time when you could impress people with the technical abilities of a computer. Nowdays, even some of the crappest games beat the best demos in technical terms, so demos must rely in other qualities. Demos are, like video-art or the music video, the graffiti or the cartoon, an artistic genre with its own traditions and language. Type Seven isn't for you if you never heard about Second Reality or Codename Chinadoll, about Orange or TPOLM. It isn't for you if you don't get the obvious references to State of the Art and Megablast. So, if you don't, please don't start telling people that T7 is shite. You just end up looking like the bloke in the museum who thinks cubist paintings could be made by anyone. ···

It's good to be right: The Bloggies is shitty contest with fixed nominations. Not a surprise to us Enlightned Bloggers, but now there's factual evidence. Which is, in a twisted manner, nice. (via The Null Device) ···

We've got demo! I have been playing around with Demopaja and ACID lately, and the end result was Type Seven. I'm not at all interested in scene events though, so it's highly unlikely I will take it to a competition (even if there aren't any rules excluding demos that weren't handcoded). So, Type Seven. It is on a 5.4megs file and requires a reasonable PC (worked fine in my 450MHz Pentium3 with 256megs, a GeForceMX and WinXP — somehow it also requires Windows Media Player present). Go fetch it at We Are Unreasonable People.···

Ah, and don't forget to vote for those pesky Bloggies. One single look at the nominees and you'll know it is all wrong, but hey, like in real life, whoever has better self-promotion skills wins, not necessarily who's best.···

Chinese shops are on the rise here in Porto. They sell all kinds of junk, from ugly Christmas lighs to dodgy Mardi Gras costumes, from psychedelic Buddhas to colourful Madonnas, from disposable umbrellas to horrid Nokia cellphone 'skins'. And cigarette lighters. I mean, September 11 tabletop cigarette lighters. Allow me to rephrase: a cigarette lighter featuring the Twin Towers, an airplane glued to one of the towers, and a giant Bin Laden's head. Ugh. I've seen this on display in a shop near college. A friend of mine entered the shop and asked for a demonstration — flames come out of Bin Laden's head, near the edge of the towers! Is there a limit to how tasteless can a tabletop lighter be? I even done some Googling and found the damn thing. Anyway, I hope the police doesn't raid that shop — one of these days I might be playing artistic director and will need such an item for a villain's office.···

I added this website to the GeoURL database, now you can check out which sites are indeed closer to mine. Of course, the If Then Else you are reading was downloaded from a computer somewhere in Utah, but your humble narrator uploads to it 260 miles west of Madrid.···

Something useful: Most people turn off the Links bar in Internet Explorer, because an instant Microsoft button is as useful as wheels on a submarine. However, the Links bar is useful, because you can delete all those useless MS links and put a few handy bookmarklets in there. Move the following to your Links bar. They're good.
- Instant server root.
- Resize to 800x600. And to 1024x768.
- Red marker.
- Show DIVs.
- List CLASSes.
- List cookies.
- HTML tags explorer.
- Show XY coordinates.
Many of these were obtained via Milov.···

Finally I got myself a new scanner, a relatively cheap Epson 1260 with a 35mm film adapter. It's a good piece of hardware, but it could be better at scanning color slides. Black and white film, though, looks superb, as do objects (yep, I tried scanning my cellphone and the results were impressive). And with a little imagination, I managed to stick some Super8 film in the 35mm adapter. Which was nice.···

Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark: Bloody hell, a ninety-minute take? Anyway, proof-of-concept films usually suck. We'll see.···

HELP: Is there I really should know about filming a movie screen? Since we don't have an expensive film to video converter I was trying to make a DV copy of that Super 8 film I mentioned before just by filming the screen while projecting the movie. Bootleggers do it with 35mm motion pictures, so theoretically it should work. But it doesn't, even when I set maximum exposure and the slowest shutter in the camera. Of course, the film projector does flicker, but I've seen this done. Though, all I manage to get is a dark and flickery image that is nearly impossible to fix digitally, at the least with the tools I have available. So, does anyone have any idea of what am I doing wrong?···

Back to the filmmaking zeitgeist: Here's a tutorial about Star Wars -like holograms. (via 990000)···

The last week has been hellish at least, as tons of work suddently appeared when I went back to college. I must deliver yet another phase of my script by next Tuesday, so I'm working hard on that, and I spent most of this week making adjustments and repairing a Super 8 film we made last year. It's fun to handle actual film instead of bits, but not when working on a tight schedule. And the film splicer was probably the most annoying and unergonomic piece of hardware I have ever used, and the fact that I didn't find film cement and had to use extra-strong glue instead didn't help either. Now I do appreciate Adobe Premiere.···