Just a random idea I had at some point. Don’t know enough about the technology to know how one would go about it, but …

So “Magic Eye” pictures (a.k.a. autostereograms) are those 3D images that you have to stare at a book to get. A few folks can see the images really quickly, some can only see them after staring awhile, and apparently there are quite a few who are never able to see the things.

It’s kind of an interesting effect though if you can get it to work: Hiding information in the background noise in such a way that when you are able to interpret it you can trick each eye into interpreting it differently.

I think one of the things that makes it tough to pick out the 3D image is that there are no obvious visual cues. It seems to me that in a lot of cases with normal vision the human brain is picking out the edges of things, or contrasts and gradations of solid colors that define shape. But those things are absent in autostereograms, so it’s tougher to pick them out.

It occurred to me though that what would happen if you ran together a string of similar autosterograms to produce an animation? The consistency of the 3D image against a changing background might make it easier to spot the image than with a non-animated version.

Voila! I’ve just invented 3D animation without special glasses!

Well, not quite. Apparently someone else already thought of it.

I don’t know if the image portrayed on wikipedia is exactly the best example though. ‘Twer it me, I probably would’ve made the background as a more randomized image (like basic static), rather than a sweeping colored pattern which seems to distract from the 3D image.

Aside from the wikipedia article though I’m having trouble tracking down other good examples of animated autostereograms. Seems to me there should be some small creative sector devoted to them though: Cartoons maybe. Or segments of horror film where a random background (foliage or TV static for instance), kind of becomes 3D and leaps out at the viewer. Or possibly some sort of video game.

I also wonder if there might be ways to color the 3D objects, or have the background pattern be somehow meaningful in the context of the 3D scene it’s self, rather than just the standard splatter painting effect.

Have you seen this man?

This ball-and-chain wielding, knife-spraying thug in a horned helmet is the protagonist of the Black Tiger arcade game.

This game stuck in my imagination for years, along with Gauntlet (and some unidentified game mentioned later) in defining what a sword and sorcery videogame should include. It has always been an icon of nostalgia for me. I think the only thing necessary to make this picture complete would be Benjamin Bird (the local arcade god) carrying a tube full of quarters on a lanyard.

My hat is off the guys at Everyvideogame.com who helped track down the title based on my sketchy description. Imagine my surprise and delight to find it available free online!

Playing it again (now with unlimited quarters to fuel my sorry gaming skills) Black Tiger still lives up to my expectations. Gameplay is a treat, the graphics are nice (though some of the upper levels seem to have glitches), the backdrops are evocative, there hidden treasures to plunder, and sweet looking weapon upgrades to purchase.

But I think most of all I love the monsters. There are a pretty wide selection, but a couple I’ve always loved include:

Betentacled, poisonous, chomping mandrakes that spiral up out of the ground at you.

And hulking, flame-spewing, cycloptic mummies.

At this point there’s only one other beloved arcade game of yore I’ve never been able to track down. Anyone able to find a game fitting this description would certainly earn my gratitude:

IIRC the character was a little guy with a sword. I think each level would begin with the hero falling down a shaft into a dungeon. At different points in the dungeon you could climb up using ropes. There are only three things I can remember about the monsters:

• One type of the standard wandering monsters resembled a disembodied eyeball, cut of steak, or paramecium which would bounce down the corridor toward you.
• I think there were several bosses that were dragons.
• Some of the bosses (or maybe not bosses, just opponents to be overcome?) consisted of swarms of something. Like I seem to recall one where you entered a room you couldn’t climb out of and there was a magician who would send a swarm of flying brooms or pixies or magic wands or something to attack you. But maybe I’m not remembering this accurately.

I try to avoid reposting every bit of random crap I find on the internet here. But given previous interest in the topic this seemed something folks herebouts might want to know about:

Apparently a M.U.L.E. remake is under way. In addition to an online version it seems there may be even iPhone version as well.

More here.

Sorry in advance if this is old news.

So Adrienne and a friend were watching Hairspray the musical recently and I ended up watching most of it with them. For those who’ve not seen the movie yet I’m not spoiling anything by mentioning that at the very beginning the protagonist belts out a song called Good Morning Baltimore in which she soliloquizes the city while marveling at it’s assorted vermin, bums and deviants.

This got me pondering a serious question which seems to have been overlooked by accredited historians and other limbs of what might be called “The Establishment”. I know ya’ll are from Salisbury, but my hope was this might be an issue that some of you folks from the Maryland Krew might be help shed some light on. My question is this:

What evidence can you provide to support the theory that after his death the body of Lord Baltimore was not in fact buried as is commonly thought, but was instead brought to his eponymous city where it is maintained in a tank of formalin and rare earth salts and kept animate through a combination of geomancy (ie. Look at the map of Baltimore for crying out loud! Druid Hill Lake ring a bell? I defy any right thinking person to look at this map and tell me those highways don’t correspond to major ley lines.), ritual magic, and increasingly with an array of modern biomedical devices fed via thick snaking cables and tubes implanted in his back and abdomen; and that he stands at the head of a “shadow government”, controlling the state of Maryland, and indirectly much of our country’s national policy, through a set of political agents working in the Maryland Chamber of Commerce?

And if I might add a corollary question to this, it would be: Which Lord Baltimore is really running things? Are we only dealing with a Cecilius Calvert here? Or is he in turn actually the puppet of the good old original Baltimore, the real power behind the throne: George Calvert, who wanted the land not for the originally stated purpose of giving good Catholics a refuge from the wrath of British tyranny, but instead as a base from which to pursue his own existential domination, first over North America and thence the world?

I’ve been trying to learn a some Visual Basic within the last couple months. Still pretty far from being a 733T HaXX0R by any stretch of the imagination, but I did manage to create a pretty basic Windows application that may be of use to someone. Read the rest of this entry »

Here follows the sixth and final piece of the Vort Conspiracy saga I wrote back in the day. Unfortunately a bit on the short side compared to the previous pieces. In theory there would have been more, but from my recollection at this point I’d pretty much used up every scene, character, and detail I’d wanted to include when I originally started out writing the thing.

If one was supposing things that might have happened, then I might have thought up some additional details that seemed interesting enough to include eventually, had I thought about it long enough. But other thoughts came first and no related ideas seemed to be beating a path to my door as they had with these first chapters.

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Monkeys.

Everybody loves ‘em, no one can stand ‘em. In some cultures they are associated with of wisdom, acclaimed as blessings of the gods or gods made flesh. In other areas, let’s say your average Starbucks, calling someone a monkey is tantamount to S/H.

Monkeys are many things to many people. Are they cute clingy human analogues or harbingers of terrible disease? Do you see them as maliciously threatening or pleasantly mischievous? It is impossible to tell for the attitudes of a monkey are as mercurial as a breath of air but each emotion as elegantly simple and understandable as those of a young child.

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Then one night, many years later, the Grand Oyabun had another dream. This dream began as the first and the Oyabun passed effortlessly over the great Red Stone walled garden. But after his seventh pass he noticed that one of the small, colored paving stones of the garden upon which he had affixed his sigil, was tied to the back of a great lion which roamed the savanna outside the walls. The Grand Oyabun’s stomach felt a bit uneasy. How could the paving stone have gotten over the Red Stone wall?

Sigil atop stone: Stone atop lion: Lion atop ground: Ground atop Li serpent.

The Grand Oyabun saw the world of his dream in an epiphany for one moment. In this moment he felt the Chook below tilt away from him. In this moment his conscious mind balked. The lion was beyond his grasp. His mind could not open wide enough to comprehend it. He reached out to grasp it, but the lion bounded away from him.

The Grand Oyabun hastened after the lion but the beast fled. Down the writhing back of the great Li serpent the lion raced, but even as the Oyabun felt he might grasp it’s tail, the lion whipped around plunging into the grinning mouth of the Li serpent, and was gone from his sight.

When the Grand Oyabun awoke the dream troubled him for a long time. The longer he sat in reflection upon the portent of the dream, the more it seemed to him that the lion had not been fleeing him, but only hurrying toward it’s destination blind to the pursuit of the dreamer. It was this that troubled him most. The grin of the Li serpent remained with him for days.

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In the seventh year of the dragon since the coming of Chung Hort into Chook (by the Nigi Rigian calendar) the Grand Oyabun of Edo in The Floating Land had a vision, in this vision he saw himself seated in the sky along with the great Li serpent and the Prime minister of The Floating Land and while the Li serpent gazed eternally at the heavens and writhed in that great infinite way it was purported to by the temple priests of Nath, and the Prime Minister seemed to take great interest in his own Buddha-like belly, the Grand Oyabun of Edo (and indeed of all The Floating Land) found his own gaze sweeping out toward the Eastern horizon where a brilliant ruby gleamed in the light of the rising sun.

As he swept closer to the magnificent jewel it grew in size until The Oyabun found himself gliding high above a newly plowed field surrounded by an iridescent wall of Red Stone. And the dimensions of the wall were ten kilometers and ten kilometers and one kilometer, a square. And the width of the wall was .25 kilometer. Neither was there any gate in the wall so that none might enter and none might exit or invade the garden. Except the Oyabun who flew high above.

The Oyabun reached into the bag at his waist and pulling forth a handful of grain began to sew the garden as he passed overhead. And as he threw the last grain into the garden he began to drift away to the east and it seemed he would never see the fruit of his sewing, but even as the garden fell away beyond the western horizon it emerged shining again at the edge of the eastern horizon. And as it came into sight The Oyabun could see that his garden had indeed born fruit in great multitude, fields of rice and millet grew within, orchards of pears, apples, and mangos had sprung up over night. In the lands near by grazed animals of the savannas in numbers beyond count, plump for the taking.

In his dream the Oyabun passed over the garden seven times and tasted the bounty of it’s harvest growing more rich and savory each pass.

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In contrast to the gods (or the artsy gods of Chook at least) who do things in big strides, painting the universe in sweeping strokes; the mortals (or at least the more interesting mortals) of Chook work in ever more intricate and conspiratorial ways. Chung Hort is the prime example of this, a character whose ultimate starkness is like a bold Magnum Marker tag over the Monet-like watercolor canvas of these vague deities. He is the archetypal mortal. The standard by which all beings can be judged mortal or divine in this place, depending on how closely they resemble him (even if they only resemble him in principal).

Assuredly it is known that mortals lived in this place before Chung Hort’s arrival. Chook has always been there, but his entrance into this twilight land gives a sort of definition it could never have had before, even as a floodlight in the forest at night takes away the gray areas making all washed out light and darkest shadow. The shadows cast by Chung are nothing so important as good and evil, for in part Chung may encompass both of these spheres, but his is the grander role of dividing the finite from the sublime.

Into this sunset landscape enter one sunset warrior: Umika Dyson.

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