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So I spent my first day of unemployment making art. (Or is it "art"? But maybe I shouldn't count this as unemployment, since Patriot's Day is a day off for so many companies in this state.) A few weeks ago on Ebay I bought an Etch A Sketch Animator, a toy I had in middle school. Today I spent a few too many hours laboriously copying in a ten-frame excerpt from a previous small gif cinema piece, "bob s. and i" and putting into this device.

For those not in the know, an Animator is a bit like a traditional Etch A Sketch in control scheme, but you can make up to 12 frames of 40x30 on-or-off pixels, and play them back in a sequence of up to 96 frames. By a happy coincidence, 40x30 was the size I had selected for the small gif cinema pieces when I converted them to GIF from a larger QuickCam format.

I've always loved obsolete video technology. I think I got a special kick out of trying to push photo realistic concepts through...a similar concept to what I did for pixeltime way back when. Alas, my lack of hardware hacking skills prevents me from repeating what this guy did, but I'm still pleased with the results.