Animation, Art, and Other Shiny Things
… I’m changing the theme and am trying my best not to break the blog in the process.
The narrowness of the theme I’ve been using for the last couple years makes the video size fairly small and, as the majority of the posts are videos, it is well past time I did something about that.
So don’t be alarmed if you see things get moved or go missing (as long as it’s not the posts that disappear. in that case a good panic is called for), I’m still messing about but hope to have things nailed together by the end of the weekend at the latest.
Gotoku-ji Cemetary watercolor by Mister Kha
The legends surrounding Maneki Neko are many and varied. The bones of the old narratives appear placeable in history, but much that wraps them have their roots in Japanese folklore and tradition. (as well as occasional, simple, voracity)
The legend I prefer takes place during a dark and stormy night at a monastery near Edo, Japan (now Tokyo) in the year 1615.
Gotoku-ji temple was very poor. The monk had barely enough food for himself and a cat he had taken in, Tama, but he made do, tending the monastery and following his path as best he could.
Ii Naotaka
After splitting a particularly meager meal, the monk said to Tama, “Your companionship means much to me, but I can not assure you a good meal. You should not starve with me, but find yourself a home worthy of your company.” The cat, of course, did not reply, but went to sit in a window of the temple as cats are wont to do.
Outside in the rain, Ii Naotaka, second son of Ii Naomasa, hereditary owner of Hikone Castle, was returning from the Battle of Tennōji. With the storm worsening, Ii Naotaka and his men took refuge beneath a tree. Looking around he saw the cat in the monastery window. It’s paw raised, the cat seemed to be beckoning the Daimyo to take shelter in the small temple. As he approached the monastery, lightening stabbed down and split the tree that he had just been standing beside. He surely would have been killed had he remained by the tree.
The urn purported to contain the ashes of Tama (Gotoku-ji Temple)
Welcomed in, Ii Naotaka found the old priest to be wise and kind and devoted to his path and his companion Tama. To repay the cat and priest for saving his life he became Gotoku-ji temple’s patron. When Tama died, the cat was given a place of honor in the temple cemetery, where many important members of the Ii family are also buried, and the first Maneki Neko statue was created in his memory.
Today, Gotoku-ji temple is still open for worship and attracts visitors from all over the world.
But the story of Maneki Neko is far from over. Read more of this post
(with apologies to The Who)
As I mentioned the other day I’ve been wanting to rename this blog (and me, for that matter) for quite a while. Well, I finally got around to figuring it out and making it happen.
Welcome to The Ruffled Crow.
Ruffled Crow - pastels by Mike Beeman. Visit him at http://pastelsbeeman.blogspot.com/
The new name is even more accurate than the previous. “But I digress” has certainly been a good term to describe my writing, it’s also the way I experience the world. Everything is distracting and I tend to wander down odd little paths of thought constantly. This causes a lot of noise in my head and, as a result, can be rather annoying to me, and sometimes others.
“The Ruffled Crow” is a much more specific characterization of me and how I feel most all the time.
A ruffled crow, in my experience, is a particularly uncomfortable bird.
By nature, crows are bright and expressive birds. They are known to be quite inquisitive and if something interests them they will peck and worry at it until they either break it, figure it out, or collect it. (pick any two or all three) A crow has no problem telling you what they think, especially when you annoy them, and just about everything annoys them.
I would imagine that anyone who has been around someone like me would recognize the signs of ADHD in just the short descriptions given above. Back in the 1960’s I was diagnosed as hyperactive and it was assumed I would grow out of it. Now days doctors understand that that is not always the case. I’m currently in the process of getting it dealt with finally (in ways other than ‘self-medication’) and I’ll likely write more about it and the depression that comes along with it in a later post.
So… Welcome, again, to this little corner of the intertubes. While I primarily focus on animation and art, anything that catches my crow-like sensitivities is fair game and I will undoubtedly write at length about it. (fortunately for you it’ll get edited down to near-readability before it’s posted. sometimes…)
I want to be sure to acknowledge, and thank profusely, PurpleEevee909 over at Deviant Art for my avatar. When researching ‘ruffled crow’ I came across the image and it cemented the decision on the name. It is most awesome and perfect.
Please feel free to comment on whatever I post – in fact I’d truly appreciate it if you would as it is one of those little things that make blogging worthwhile.
This weekend you will begins seeing a few subtle changes to this small, darkish corner of the intertubes. Not much of a change, really, just my nickname, the name of the blog, and a direct URL (woot! finally) A few graphics will change too, but nothing jarring, I promise.
Ne’er to worry, the content of the blog won’t be changing at all. (should i be apologizing for that?)
This is actually a long time coming; someone else is using my ‘nym and has the domain locked up, and the blog’s name “But I digress…” is being used by everyone and their goldfish. So in order to be somewhat unique (as unique as one can be on the web) I finally settled on a new blog title and ‘nym and picked up a dedicated domain name to go with it. Hopefully I won’t break anything in the transition.
So, keep an eye out over the weekend. The changes won’t be big and shouldn’t effect browsing the site (for either of you) and previous links to it should be fine.
sacredcalf (for now)
The last installment in the Beyond the Mind’s Eye series.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnVkYmH2Czk
Next series up would be the Odyssey Into the Mind’s Eye, and we will get to it eventually, but not just yet. There’s a lot of excellent animation out there now and I’m getting a bit of a backlog of great stuff in the draft queue that needs to be posted.
You are reading this on a web page so the odds are near certain that you’ve seen a HTTP status page at some time of your browsing life. The dreaded “page not found” uh, page, is HTTP status 404. Basically, a HTTP status is a 3-digit number (depending on the error/info) that a web page ‘replies’ to requests from other web entities, which is often a web browser. There are probably a few hundred of them and we only actually see a few in our normal travels and travails on the intertubes.
It was inevitable that there would come a melding of cats and HTTP status codes. (is there anything a cat doesn’t make better?)
The following error is actually part of the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0)
"Any attempt to brew coffee with a teapot should result in the error code "418 I'm a teapot". The resulting entity body MAY be short and stout."
I can relate:
A common error code in our house
More after the fold
The following are two incredibly important computer animations; the first 3D rendered animation from 1972, and the first fractal generated animation from ca 1979.
In 1972 Ed Catmull (founder of Pixar) and his colleagues created the world’s first 3D rendered movie, an animated version of Ed’s left hand. This is the film that they produced. It includes some “making of” footage (around 1:30) and some other early experiments. Read more at nerdplusart.com/?p=1106.
The first fractal animation. Vol Libre
I made this film in 1979-80 to accompany a SIGGRAPH paper on how to synthesize fractal geometry with a computer. It is the world’s first fractal movie. It utilizes 8-10 different fractal generating algorithms. I used an antialiased version of this software to create the fractal planet in the Genesis Sequence of Star Trek 2, the Wrath of Khan. These frames were computed on a VAX-11/780 at about 20-40 minutes each
Rather than a long-form post today I offer you some thoughts. Six of them actually. Now get in there and exercise some of that fat outta your head.
Click Me For a Random Post
The Ruffled Crow 