bestof/animations

This is an old attempt to gather the most interesting bits of kirk.is in an easy-to-browse format.

If you like kirk.is mostly for the quotes and links, it might not be the "best of" per se, but overall these pages represent a big part of my creative output so far in the 21st century. The "best of" parts are shown in their natural habitat, often accompanied by the typical quotes and links and asides.

I've divided the work into various categories, and tried to sort each page into roughly descending order of "interestingness". Sometimes there's a particularly chosen closing entry.

groove is in lady miss kier

(2 comments)
2006.12.31


Lady Miss Kier in Groove is in the Heart

I spent a few too many hours making these, but it was fun, and "productive" in its way. Mostly I wanted to point out the slinky little move on the right... it's not quite the same without the slide whistle, but you get the general idea...

UPDATE: check the comments -- a while later Lady Miss Kier asked permission for using these! After I said yes of course she said
thanks - I just had my friend Heather add it to my myspace page! I love what you did with... ME ! and thanks for your sweet words!!! I'm going to add it to my other site also- thanks again- kier


small gif cinema

2001.08.02
bob s.
and i
kirk
head
robotech
bodyslam
quickcam->gif,
shot in 1997

megamo and megakirk

2001.04.30
Wow. Put in a marathon session on blender ii yesterday. I wanted to get it so people could submit new poems using the new system before the end of the month. There's still a lot of development work I have to put it in to make the front page picks and new digest, but over all I'm happy with where I managed to get it.


Link of the Moment
When I was in high school, MegaMan was one of my favorite game series. The MegaMan Matrix is a great worship site for this group of games (after a while it became known for a long series of not-too-innovative sequels.) Part of the appeal was that every time your character defeated the 'boss' of one of the boards, he got that boss's weapon. But more than that, I think I liked the character design, these tightly drawn and animated characters of a bio-cyber- future. You can see what I mean on the BubbleMan stage page (from MegaMan 2, arguably the best in the series.) It had a 'sea' theme, and all those creatures fought against you. (Not shown are the tiny tiny (yet explosive) microfrogs "Kero" released from his mouth... I loved those things. Worth hunting down this game ROM and an emulator.
Anyway, I decided to see what Mo and I would look like as Mega Man characters. (An idea blatantly borrowed and enhanced from the top line of seanbaby's hostess page.) I'm pleased with the result.


Factoid of the Moment
Ted Turner is America's largest landowner, with nearly two million acres, or the rough equivalent of the land era of Delaware and Rhode Island combined.
from a recent New Yorker article "The Lost Tycoon"

truth and rent

(2 comments)
2003.10.08
Truisms of the Moment
* Information Wants To Be Free
* Rent Wants To Be Paid
"IronChef"'s sig on Slashdot.
I have another one for today: hot water heaters want you to sit around all day waiting for the plumber or propane guy.


Small Gif Cinema of the Moment

plastasm
--A view inside one of those "plasma ball lights"--I was very happy to pick one up at the Christmas Tree Store for $14...originally I was thinking about calling the minimovie "bad trek fx". As always, you can see more of these things on my small gif cinema page.


Quote, Link, and Ramble of the Moment
You know that everything that you hear from science and from neurology, that you are a beast, just a hairless ape which happens to be a little bit more clever than other apes. At the same time, you don't feel like that. You feel like you're an angel trapped inside this body, constantly craving immortality, craving transcendence trying to escape from this body. And this is the essential human predicament.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
From his astoundingly wonderful series of lectures, Reith Lectures 2003 - The Emerging Mind.

If you have one iota of curiosity of what it means to be a human, of the mind/brain problem, you must read (or listen, they have audio links) these 5 lectures, and preferably the Q+A sessions for each one as well. He spends a lot of time talking about thos fascinating cases of localized brain damage that give us tantalizing hints about how our brains cope with the world (the "Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat" kind of thing), moves on to possible neurological understandings of our appreciation for art, and even touches on the cosmic ramifications of much of it. Admittedly the first 3 lectures are stronger than the final 2, which mostly dive deeper into some previous points. Still, I love his presentation style, which I've seen among a few really smart people who are good at given simplified but not dumbed down explanations of complex ideas. They don't present concepts as God-given facts, but in terms of "here are some observations we've made, and here's what we think it might mean." Richard Feyman reads the same way.

Two lectures have a big focus on synesthaesia, where some people have their brain crosswired so that unrelated concepts trigger each other; most strikingly, number shapes that trigger colors so strongly that the person afflicted can much more easily pick out a shape made of just those numbers out of a field of roughly similar looking numbers, because they stand out in color. (Here's a Scientific American article on the phenomenon.) I think I have just a touch of this, or something similar: some letters are likely to trigger certain numbers, and vice versa, usually tied in with phonetics. For example, I have an early drawing I made (I think of myself) that spells my name "KI4K"--R's are tied with 4's. And I once saw a poster for the movie The Fifth Elment that said "IT MU5T BE FOUND", with the S replaced with the similar looking number five. I spent a few seconds wonder why "MUFT" it be found, because for me, 5's are tightly linked to F's, not S's.

new yorkers do not wear white

2002.10.21
Link of the Moment
A blog entry with tips for visitors to NYC. Dang, but I miss my mom's apartment there. On the other hand maybe I'm just as happy she wasn't there during the tragedy.


Quote of the Moment
As a girl who has been on the flip side of [the men vs women in IT] ratio, I can tell you it's not much better for us. As we liked to say when I was in school: 'The odds are good, but the goods are odd.'.
Jeandre quoting someone on Slashdot

Small Gif Cinema of the Moment

wharf
--A tiny movie of the view outside my shared office space. Thanks to Ranjit who helped me put the fullsize 2 days-and-nights version into RealMedia format. The chair in the first part and the white and blue lights at night are reflections on the glass.

2019 UPDATE: here is the video:

I often think about the breathing-like appearance of it. I was fortunate to get a day with such nice clouds.

the print shop robot returns!

(8 comments)
2005.10.08
Animated Clipart of the Moment
When I was in elementary school, there was a kind of nifty program called "Print Shop" for Apple II and maybe C=64...for a long time in the 1980s you could see its distinctive one-sheet signs and longer banners around at schools and small stores.

It came with a supply of clipart...I remember there were two robots, a kind of corny clunky one, and this one, which I was a bit infatuated with:

It was pretty cool by early-80s standards...I put out a call on AtariAge.com, and a guy was able to dig up the old files for me. It also came with some newer clipart files, including this one with cute little tanks, and then some spaceship imagery, and of course "I must obey the inscrutable exhortations of my soul" which in this case involved turning them into little animated GIFs:

and


These can both be tiled as follows:











(Of course, these aren't terribly original even by my own standards; if you like these check out these brilliant tiling microcosms of kinetic mayhem or my own Alien Bill Horde and/or the Etch-A-Sketch Wing of Small Gif Cinema.)

"the helicopter on the computer screen has to be spinning- otherwise it just wouldn't work"

(12 comments)
2006.10.19
This evening I'm heading out on a last-minute business trip...I'm taking the Acela to Delaware. I've heard people speaking highly of travel by train, and I haven't taken one since this one terrible red-eye with Dylan back in the day, like in the late-80s, so I'm looking forward to it over all.


Cars of the Moment
I was gratified to see my car (albeit in a different color) as the big front-and-center image on Slate.com yeserday with the teaser My Teeny-Tiny Supercheap New Car. The article explains that the "low-end" for cars ain't as low as it used to be in the bad old Yugo days, even accounting for inflation, but still.

The Scion xA does well (though I think his concerns about the after-market-mod branding is a little unfounded)

the scion xA

the honda fit
but the champion is the Honda Fit... the Fit wasn't around when I was in the market, and the xA is going away, so they'll only be competing for a few seasons. It seems like the Fit does some things better (especially in having reconfigurable seats, and in my mom's minivan I saw how terrific Stow-and-Go seating can be) but design-wise I think it's not as good as the Scion. Hmm, trying to analyze that, I think the wheels look a bit too small on the Fit, and I'm not crazy about how the windows taper in the back. The Scion actually has rather pronounced bulges for the wheel well (is that what it's called?) and a good use of black trim around the rear side windows that give it a sturdier chunky look.

(It's funny how foreshortening affects cars like this. I have a short and stumpy automobile but from the side, it seems kind of long...)

I barely understand why there's a "midsize" market... small cars just make so much more sense to me, and they've really gotten good over the past few decades. Cheaper to buy, cheaper to run, quick off the line, park like a dream, and hatchbacks carry more than their fairshare of stuff. I think my xA is fine for the highways, like the guy at Slate says. And my Scion has more headroom than a lot of much larger cars I've been in... but I guess I've always just liked small cars, like Veronika's Renault Twingo when we visited her in Germany. (Heh... though Smart is coming to the USA soon... I'm not sure if that would be ok on the highways or not, but if I ever get more money than I know what to do with, I'd consider their convertible as a kind of toy car to have around on summer days in the city...)

skycoaster

2001.09.11

unsupermen
Sunday Peterman and I went to Six Flags New England. After riding Superman Ride of Steel we went over and tried the Skycoaster. Oddly enough, it had much more of a 'soar like superman' effect than the ride that bears his name. It's very elegant in design: a single arch, at the top of which is attached a cable, almost long enough to touch the ground. The other end of the cable is attached to you. You (and a friend, or two friends, all wearing these long apron/skydiver things) are then hoisted to the peak of the nearby tower, about as high as the peak of the arch. You're way up there. Then you pull the ripcord, and come soaring back to earth. In effect, it's a cross between bungee jumping and a playground swingset.

So Peterman and I went, in tandem. (A bit cheaper that way.) He was very struck by the experience: "Skycoaster is as close to religion as I want to get these days." I was slightly less moved, still it was pretty amazing. You have to put in reservations, so after our 5pm ride we signed up for a second ride at 8.

One of the staff there was willing to take pictures and we had him use the movie feature of my digital camera to tape the descent (and ascent, and descent, and...) of Peterman and me. So above is the "small gif cinema" entry of it, (slow on IE, for some unfathomable reason) but what you really should see is the full quicktime video of it... the doppler effect on our screams is rather funny, and by chance it has a perfect musical stinger as well.

oh, canada

2003.06.14
Joke of the Moment
"How do you spell 'Canada'?"
"C - eh? N - eh? D - eh?"
Ed Forster, friend of my Mom's, thought to be original to him! I thought it was a little clever.

Small Gif Cinema of the Moment
two kitchens

mo's
   
brooke's
In England I bought a tiny toy camera, Digi Precision, imported from China, with a cool see-through case. The instructions are pretty unhelpful, I'm thinking about making a webpage for it. It's not a good camera for photos but one redeeming features is the movies it can take...practically ready-made to be shrunk down for small gif cinema.


News of the Moment
I don't know if it was a semi-legitimate attempt to start a tour operator company, but I admire the concept of Mainline Airways, started by a college kid, without offices. Or planes. Or crews, or permits, or much of anything...the pure virtual airline.

something fishy

2001.04.08
To any blender readers here, I am working on getting a Digest out... somehow it's so hard to be productive when you have extra free time!


Exchange of the Moment
ranjit: i scanned some raw fish on my brand new scanner earlier. Gotta start it off with a bang.
kirk: wouldn't that make your later scanee items smell like raw fish?
ranjit: if only there were some way to clean objects!
kirk: this is why you should rely on restaurants for fish
kirk: I extend this philosophy to cooking in general
ranjit: Maybe someday someone will invent a spray for cleaning glass. They should make it blue!
kirk: the power of producing streak free glass pales compared to the olfactory force of the dark side of the fish.
--Kirk and Ranjit on AOL-IM. Screen names changed to protect the innocent.


Slashdot Scavenged Link of the Moment
There was an interesting read posted on slashdot, William Gibson on Japanese and British culture.

yay patriots!

2005.02.07
Hey, the Pats won again! "Dynas-three": 3 wins, each by 3 points. (I find it kind of neat to look at the "kisrael.com coverage" for the 2002 and 2004.)

I guess the thing I really noticed was how badly the Eagles handled the clock in the last half of the last quarter. The Pats aren't perfect but you never see them making that kind of mistake.

Was over at FoSO's house, with their big old high-def video projector mojo working...Evil B and wife were also in attendance, 10 or so people in all. I apologize for all the cussing. I just love cussing during games, it makes it more fun.

Slate proclaims the Pats the lamest dynasty in sports. Well, whatever. The one point I agreed with was the lameness of most of the Pats' post-score or -interception celebrations-- generally just imitating T.O.'s wing flap. It would have been at least a little funny if they made it into the chicken dance instead. As it was, it just said "Yeah, we know we're not as big a star as that guy, but neener-neener, we scored anyway."


Quote of the Moment
Once you accept that most women are evil, that most men are predictable pigs, and that someone is always on a moral crusade, the world's not such a bad place.
"Call Me: The Rise and Fall of Heidi Fleiss".
I used this as the top of the page quote for the February issue of the Blender of Love. Huh, you know what? I totally forgot to call this month's edition the "Valentine Issue" like I usually do...oh well.


Lego Creation of the Moment
--"Untitled" by Johnson Fan. I brought a Lego Advent Calendar (that I had received too late to use 'properly') into work. I had fun making a big assyemtrical edifice, but Johnson did me one better by using pretty much all the remaining pieces in one giant rolling masterpiece.


wet and cool

(9 comments)
2007.12.12
Lovely day today, wet and cool, like early spring.

I've had a feeling as if it is getting brighter earlier, but according to that java toy I made, that's an illusion. Maybe I'm responding to the angle of the light at a certain time or something.

Nice to know that solstice is almost here.


Craft of the Moment


The bottom row is new, the top one is from the other day. Can someone tell me their relationship?


Game of the Moment
Cute gambeboy-looking physics-y game for Windows, Spout. Your little block ship has a thruster of pixels you can turn in any direction, so you not only have to use it to fly upwards, you have to use it to burn the blockage in your path, but without sending yourself back to the floor.


Quote of the Moment
Seek simplicity, and distrust it.