It’s been too muggy to do anything outdoors, so I’ve been playing with Photoshop. The above is a recent image from the botanical garden, modified a bit.
Month: June 2014
Hexagonal vision
I’ve been playing around with a “variable kaleidoscope” photo filter. See if you can guess what the original of the above was a picture of. (The original can be found at my Flickr page.)
Q & A
How can you tell it’s Sunday morning?
Some idiot is mowing the lawn next door at 6:30 a.m.
From the makers of Harpsichord Hero
Another cartoonist to keep an eye on: Gemma Correll.
A few notes
None of this summer’s anime looks likely to break on through my indifference. Yet another Nobunaga story? Momotaro, with fan service? An undead idol? Meh. I have better ways to waste my time. There are a couple I might take a look at anyway — Sailor Moon, to see if it’s any improvement on the original, and Hanayamata, to see the dance — but none of the descriptions has piqued my curiosity in the way that the previews of Shin Sekai Yori and Joshiraku did.
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Who is this unfriendly gentleman? I guarantee you that you’ve heard of him. The answer is here.
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Tricia Spencer and Howard Rains will play a concert that you can listen to live online Thursday evening. I’ve heard Tricia several times at Winfield, and I can certify that she is one hell of a good old-time fiddler.
One more apple
I condensed “Bad Apple” down to two strains in 32 measures, suitable for playing in jam sessions or for dances, which I’m posting in case anyone else might find it useful. It’s in E minor now, a much friendlier key for diatonic instruments than the E-flat minor of the score I worked from. It’s not obligatory to play it as written: fiddle with the rhythm and add a few triplets, and you have a perfectly fine hornpipe. I expect you could tease a strathspey out of it with a bit of ingenuity. For inspiration, see Floating Cloud. (Click to embiggenify, right-click to save to your disc.)
Update: “Bad Apple” as a strathspey and reel can be found here.
Feeling a little Puckish
I found a complete performance of Balanchine‘s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. If you remember the play, you can follow the story pretty well, though Balanchine made many changes in adapting it. Even if you haven’t read Shakespeare, you can enjoy the spectacle, and there’s always the music.
Frederick Ashton also choreographed the play in The Dream. In his version, the transformed Bottom dances on pointe for added grotesquerie.
Digital nostalgia for the analog past
If you have a MIDI keyboard you can plug into your computer and a VST or AU host, here’s a very nice freebie you can play with. It’s based on the Oberheim OB series of synthesizers. It works fine in Logic on my aging Mac laptop. I haven’t had time yet to do more than try some presets, but it sounds very ’80’s to my ear.
Down on the corner
In front of the coffee house yesterday as I returned from another expedition to the botanical garden.
Heirloom apple
How long before “Bad Apple” surpasses “‘Sukiyaki‘” and “Sakura Sakura” as the best-known Japanese melody? And how does Touhou fandom compare with Broniedom? ((There are inevitably Touhou-MLP:FIM crossovers.))
Update: “Bad Apple” on a music box.
And now for something completely different:
Roger, the fiddler above, is the one who mentioned Flying Cloud to me.
A world full of Walters
The results of the Liebster project are in, and there are some interesting data uncovered about these three very different people. The Brickmuppet played trombone; Robbo was nearly run down in a parking lot by Antonin Scalia; Topmaker likes Ian Hunter and Nathaniel Hawthorne. But all three did mention the same name somewhere in their responses.
Prickly pears and whimpers
In the Wikipedia article on Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” I came across this note:
References range from film (Apocalypse Now, Southland Tales, Waking Life) to video games (Fable II, the Halo series, and Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty)[citation needed], to Japanese literature (the novels of Haruki Murakami) and anime (the last episode of Highschool of the Dead), to American television shows (30 Rock, Frasier, The Big Bang Theory, Northern Exposure, Dexter, Mad Men, The X-Files [“Pusher” episode], and Dollhouse [“The Hollow Men” episode]).
What I’ve read about Highschool of the Dead sounds loathsome and I have no intention of ever watching it. But I am curious: does “The Hollow Men” really turn up there?
I can sympathize
By the way, Bill Watterson dropped by for a few minutes.
Reimu goes to Ireland
A friend pointed me toward some Celtic Touhou, performed by Floating Cloud.
Noise and clarity
I’ve been playing around with the demo versions of the Topaz Labs photo filters. So far, the most useful one is “Denoise.” Here’s a before-and-after pair demonstrating the filter’s usefulness on noisy originals. Click on them to see them full-size:
Obviously there’s a fine balance between smoothing grain and preserving detail. Denoise makes a difference in nearly every photo I’ve run through it. It’s rather expensive, though. At $80, it’s twice the price of Neat Image.
Here are some more pictures that I’ve run through various Topaz filters. In most cases, I haven’t done anything in Photoshop except cropping and a bit of healing brush. They have not been resized, so they are mostly quite large. Click on them to see them full-size.