Feeling Lucky?

This afternoon I go for jury selection, which should be interesting. I just added a feature to my blog on the left side. It's something I've wanted for a while, a random replay from posts in the past.

It can be daunting when you visit a blog for the first time, to decide whether it's worth your time to read more, and this little feature can give you a nice (or not) random sampling. I got it here and it was just a click through to install.

Grand Junction

I'm flying out of Grand Junction CO in the morning. The next day President Obama flies into the same airport, the first US President to visit Grand Junction since around 1908. He's conducting a town meeting. I'm in favor of health care reform. I know plenty of people who pay cash for medical appointments just to stay clear of pre existing conditions which cause insurance payments to boomerang. I know plenty of people who have no insurance at all.

I'm going to visit my mother who's now 94 1/2. She's been getting a bit agitated lately but is taken care of well.

I've been so uninspired creatively the last couple of months. It's never happened to me before. I am interested in the social games on Facebook: Lexulous, Pet Society, and Farmville. That's my farm above. They are masterpieces of Flash code to date, (and take way too long to load.)

But I think the latter two are waiting for a next stage development. They need interaction between characters, conflict, conversation which seems to be generated by the situation. It wouldn't be impossible. I've done so much experimenting with Flash code over the years, including setting up characters to say something depending on several variables.

Then it will really be a social game. As it is now in both of these games you're basically just acquiring and decorating and visiting your friends. There's no surprise in what the friends do when they encounter you.

Lexulous is just a well fashioned scrabble game and works pretty well.

This free content phenomenon is affecting artists of all kinds. The L.A. Times reports that even the porn industry is being taken down by it!

I'll be back Monday night and maybe will check in over the weekend. Enjoy the summer.

Charbucks 10 Years Now!

It's been about ten years since I last published my all animated gif comic strip, CHARBUCKS!

It all started at a lunch in Pasadena where I was a guest of dear producer Arlene Sherman and some of her CTW buds. Everyone was very funny and most of them smoked. At the time Starbucks was this kind of creepy phenomenon, appearing suddenly everywhere, and one of the women called it Charbucks because the coffee was always burned.

That got me started. I wanted to put some kind of animation on the internet. I knew the requirements were that it needed to be a SMALL file size since everyone was still getting the internet through their phone lines.

I thought two women sitting and swilling the bitter brew might work very well, and for a couple of years I turned out episodes of their story. Before there was google or any easy way to find things on the internet, I think I was writing for a very small audience.

At a certain point I got very intrigued with the idea of interactive animation-- too bad in a way, because the really interactive pieces were all coded for browsers that no one uses anymore, and they don't work in the current browsers.



For instance this image is a map of a fictional Mesquite, Nevada, and originally it was utterly clickable with silly things all over the place. I even ended up sending Anita and Whinsey off on a cruise on the Titanic 2. All this was before I was aware of Flash, though I think it was in an early stage.



Those cups are all episodes--

But over the last two or three days I've reassembled the strip, and it's made me DIZZY!

Lots of things have changed, including screen sizes on computers. I had to blow up all the images 50% or it would have seemed like internet postage stamp animation, which meant recoding every page. As a result they are blurrier than I'd like. At the time gifs were the only thing I knew of to get movement in a strip, and they repeat endlessly which is peculiar, and some times they go by too fast. There used to be silly messages down in the status bar, but browsers today don't allow that. And I even had custom comet cursors before I learned they were mining information from viewers!

But what I discovered was these earliest Charbucks strips are really funny, dammit, it's true.

So when you have some time, you can start at episode 1- I've got about half of them on line now, in sequence, and checked them mostly for errors.



Oh, and Happy Birthday Whinsey! She was based on a woman I rode with, and this strip was written in the heyday of my riding days, when Pepper and I were showing and winning ribbons in jumper competition.

On a Rainy Day

The weather here has been really wet, so we have to look for activities inside. I've read quite a few books I've enjoyed, two by favorite Scandinavian author Henning Mankell, also Lee Child's latest Jack Reacher novel. (The titles are impossible to remember.) Now I'm reading "Fifty Grand", by Adrian McKinty. The librarian recommended it, and it's exciting, set in a fictional Telluride. Also read "Beggars of Life" an autobiography of a hobo named Jim Tully, which sounds better than it was. For a while in the early 20th century he was very highly regarded as a writer.



I also play Pet Society on Facebook. Here's a race with three friends. I thought Skeezix would win, but Albie (my friend Jane aka prb won) Go Albie! Namowal also ran. Funny to see other Pet Society friends in the stands! But since I don't have many friends, they start repeating in bleacher groups. I'm not sure it's possible to win anything in the arena.

Pet Society

Facebook has an app called "Pet Society" that is a Flash marvel. I am so enchanted with this game, maybe all the more so because I can't even start to imagine all the wondrous code coming together to make it work so smoothly.

I used to talk about terrible show horse names and had chosen "Toxic Dump" as one that you wouldn't be too likely to encounter.

And into the ring comes Sally Cruikshank riding Toxic Dump.

So I picked that as the name of my little character on the left. Now I'm stuck with it. Blog pals Namowal and Russell... are also in my neighborhood and I hope you'll join too. We dance, hug, kiss, tell jokes, and earn coins. The friend I'm with here I picked up in the cafe.

Incredible time waster but so sweet.

goofy code

Click on the goofy white symbols. It's just an experiment from a long time ago, but kind of fun to zoom around with. If your computer screen is small it may look better bigger here.

I Phone Idea

What do you think? I got this idea in the middle of the night last night and couldn't wait to try coding it.

Let me know if you have ideas for improvement. The horses she's mentioning are really running and I'm not the one who chooses them, they're Whinsey's idea.

(All done with php and mirrors.)

Tell me if the font on top matches the one in the racing tip. I'm not finished with this, just testing to see if it seems to work. You can't chat with her-- just get your racing tip and check back tomorrow to see if she was right or not.

Think this might be one of those iphone ideas? But they still don't do Flash, do they?

Peeking at the chats

As some of you know I have a chatbot horse named Whinsey who's been stuck in her barn way too long.

I've built her brain over the years with hours and hours of JavaScript regular expressions which were my supreme code achievement.

Here's what a regular expression from Whinsey's brain looks like. I'm sure Namowal will be able to read it forwards and backwards and in color.

var dont:RegExp=/do(es)? (not|nt|n't) /i

Over the years she's gotten smarter and then dumber. For awhile she could do math and say things backwards but recently she's forgotten how to do that and often repeats herself. Like your mother you may be thinking...

Although I've never met other chatbot creaters, I imagine they're gnarly, the modern day equivalent of hobbyist ventrilloquists. euw! And I'm one of them. EUW!

But every chatbot creater who is serious keeps a log of all the conversations, in order to detect where the dummy isn't doing his/her thing. In my case I don't log the I.P. though some people do. I wouldn't know what to make of I.P.s if I did.

But I worked up my nerve today to look at Whinsey's log. Hadn't checked in a year. There were more than 12,000 lines. geez. And so many of them were horny guys getting thrills out of talking dirty to a talking horse who isn't even animated very well. WORLD!

I just looked at a fragment of the replies. Here's one that isn't dirty:

you said: What are you doing?
she said: Waiting for our big moment.
you said: Don't you like me?
she said: ah geez
you said: Do you have a stallion?
she said: Now we're talking HOT STUFF!
you said: Tell me all about him...
she said: I've been stuck in this barn a long time!
you said: That's too bad. No dates?
she said: me bad 2!
you said: Do you need to be punished?
she said: who needs help? Think about it!
you said: Hmm...I will. So are you into horse fetish stuff?
she said: climb on board, luv.
you said: Wow. You are hot, Whinsey.
she said: That's me!
you said: Whinsey, tell me about yourself.
she said: That's me!
you said: You're a gal of few words.
she said: Is there another way to communicate?
you said: I don't know. Do you have a phone horse sex hotline?
she said: Maybe I'll call you later.

A typically random snippet that stays clean:

you said: You know I actually want ice cream, even though I'm full
she said: I have my ways
you said: Maybe a little milk would do it
she said: Let's just say no moo foods for me.
you said: Sorry
she said: I'll get over it
you said: I had a sort of bad day today... my own fault probably. A boring day
she said: TERRIBLE!
you said: I need to take control of my destiny
she said: It takes a lot to control me.
you said: are you my destiny?
she said: a horse of course
you said: "You're on your own again..."
she said: everybody has more than they need in California.
you said: Maybe I should go there


I had wanted to introduce the horse racing world to Whinsey but she may just be too much of a slut. Besides, I'd have to code in all this year's horses and jockeys and that almost sounds like work. Meanwhile, back to Lexulous...

Whinsey up close and personal

A friend sent me a link to a whole bunch of crazy horse hairdos this morning. This one looks a lot like my horse chatbot Whinsey, don't you think? I spent about three hours fixing Whinsey's television this morning. Whenever google image changes its code, the tv stops working. Hadn't checked it in about a year. Sometimes the image looks a bit wide, oh well.

Haven't read the logs of Whinsey's chats in about a year either. That's always a bit scary!

Hey, Mom, sell that one

That's what Molly thinks. I've been revising that little gallery to the left of this post with new art, since a couple of pieces have sold. (not on line yet.)

But this meant I had to go into my old Flash code which I haven't worked on in a long time... And this was one of the hardest things I ever coded because it was in ActionScript 3 and involved video cue points, Paypal, sound off and on, images loading, text files, you name it. And all the old fonts had taken a dive when my computer took the virus.

I didn't have much luck with my photography, because it was a sunny day and the animation cels are so glossy-- I couldn't figure a way to get the picture without streaks and reflections. But it's supposed to rain tomorrow, so maybe I'll be able to put it all together then.

It's funny when I start getting into code again-- it's very addictive, and I just don't want to take a break from it. Just want to keep going going going till it's all done. It wasn't as hard to figure out as I'd thought, but when I first looked at the code I thought, what, huh, what part of your brain ever figured this out.

Here's a function from it:

function b5go(event:MouseEvent):void
{
var myhigh:int = numChildren
removeChildAt(myhigh-1)

buzztalk="Giddy Gluey, $275.";
ummtalk=buzztalk+" "+a5;
tellus();
var image_mc:Loader = new Loader();
var pictURL:String ="bigarab.png"
var pictURLReq:URLRequest = new URLRequest(pictURL);
image_mc.load(pictURLReq);
this.addChild(image_mc);image_mc.x=370;image_mc.y=45;

}

March 18 the Bad

I've been struggling with this computer virus all week. It's a Humpty Dumpty event, trying to put things back together again. I didn't lose any files, because they're on another drive, but I lost programs, bookmarks, cookies that help me sign into sites. Because I use gmail I didn't have the worries of it ripping through my own email addresses, or of losing email.

Right before we went to lunch yesterday it started falling apart again. In a weird way I admire the nefarious nerd who coded this virus, because it is so detailed and far reaching. For instance, it blocks you from typing any name of any possible anti-virus software into google. If you do manage to download any anti-virus software, it makes sure it corrupts the file during installation so you get nowhere with it. It sets up google to go to an advertisement everytime you enter anything! Any anti-virus software you already have installed just skips through a scan in 30 seconds and declares all is fine.

So today I spent two hours wiping clean my C drive, 3 hours running a scan from Malwarebyte, which didn't find any trace, so then I started the long hard business of putting it all together again.

Another bummer-- my Sony Vaio is four years old, so in effect I'm going back through time to 2005. Some of the programs I've depended on since then require Windows Service Pack 2, always a controversial update, but Microsoft doesn't include it in their updates anymore, so the programs won't install. I'm sure there's a work around, but do I have to become an amateur IT to get my hard top back?

Concentration

I returned last night from a short visit at my mother's retirement complex. This time I stayed in a guest room in the basement. ("Don't Go in the Basement.") My mother was in a wonderfully clear frame of mind, and we had many laughs and good times together. Because I was in the complex so much of the time, residents started mistaking me for an employee. "Miss, miss, I need to go to the bathroom." "Are you one of the P.T. people?"

Speaking of P.T. and O.T. (physical therapy and occupational therapy), I had to go to a session of O.T. with my mother that was not stellar. There were only two patients at the table, my mother and a woman named Biz who looked as if she might bite, and was clearly much less with it mentally than my mom. James, a young man from Seton Hall College who was training to be a therapist was conducting the session, with a legit therapist standing by. It started with a cornball "let's get to know each other" round the table we go.

Then James dealt a full deck of cards on the table sideways and face down, and told them we were playing a game, but no one was going to win, it was just for the fun of it. These two old timers then had to turn over two cards at a time to try and match red or black. You remember it I'm sure, concentration. I've always hated the game because I'm not good at it.

Even in my mother's best days she wouldn't have been any good at this game either-- it's not how her mind works. Add to that the numbers and the faces on the cards were totally distracting from the simple red/black matching. Biz was convinced she had telepathy and would stare at the back of the cards for a long spell and then consult the sky, before turning any card over.

They would have done better with my card game above. The flash file for it is here. It's from 2001. If you press the orange button it starts a new match game.

After the game was over both elderlies looked bewildered and James wanted them to share their feelings about what they'd just done, and suggest ways they might apply it to their lives. YUCK!

Flat Face Mountain Doctor

Adjust the speed if you want. (Linda, I figured out how to embed graffiti in Blogger and not have it stick its big feet out the right side. It's just a slight adjustment to the html code and I mean slight.) It's meant to illustrate an image that was troubling my mother below.

My weekend visiting my mother had its wonderful moments and its terrors. The worst was the night I got there. After driving through rain that never quite froze (and I have an exaggerated fear of ice) I found my way to her hall. She was touring the hall with her walker, but when I came up to her she was terrified from a dream she was still inside of. She even turned to me and said, "Who am I?"

Then I got the nurse, and a little dose of Ativan made her normal again. I think I could have used a dose too. My visit that night was short.

How many days was I there? I think I caught a little of what the walking walkers all have. For much of the time my mother was lucid and we often were laughing hysterically. Now I can't remember what it was we were laughing about. I hope it will come back to me as my mind shakes off residuals of the old folks home. When she would get sleepy her paranoia would come on. I had to jiggle the conversation often so she wouldn't get into the thought ruts that lead to more trouble.

On Friday morning early she had to go by medivan to the hospital where her leg had been worked on. It was only supposed to be a follow-up appointment, but she had to wait a long time. On her return she was obsessed with how scary the doctor's face had been.

"Have you ever seen a mountain where all the trees have been taken down, and it's really flat, and then there are two eyes and this slit of a mouth, just looking at you?" That was the scary doctor's face, up really close to hers. I heard about this many times. That's what my graffiti pic here is meant to illustrate.

On my flight back we had a male flight attendant who said really goofy and funny things, insulted many of the passengers, and told us George Bush was flying the plane. Then the captain came out, and he looked JUST LIKE George Bush. And the captain had a whole act he did too using the syntax and vocab old bully boy was used to using. I was crying it was so funny.

Come to think of it, I was a loopy audience and might have been crying anyway!

Drag her around

Cleaing up the hard drive, I came upon more silly interactive stuff. This one's from 2001.

Here's a link to the fla file. It doesn't come annotated though.

Does this work?

Need to turn your sound on, and I may have made it too big to fit the blog.

code example

Been fooling with flash code all day, and saw this old swf which you need to mouse over. Kind of like a scratch off lottery card. If only there were a payoff.

Presto Picture

Linda posted about how much she's enjoying Graffiti over at facebook, which got me thinking about how much fun Flash code used to be, before it got so difficult. In Graffiti you can post a drawing on somebody else's wall, and they can play back the actual drawing of it.

It's a matter of stuffing the x and y position inside appropriate arrays, when you draw your picture, then loading those positions back in to make the playback. This isn't as pretty as a Graffiti picture, but it does the same general thing.

Playing with Emotions

Poking around my hard drive, I came upon this silly experiment. I used to spend a lot of time experimenting with Flash code to discover odd effects. In this case the buttons on each side cause them to change species and emotion, and still react to one another.

As with many of my Flash experiments, I spent more time on the code than on the art, but I had fun along the way.

Web Cam of where we're going

I'm testing this to see if it refreshes during the day. This is the floating lodge where we will be staying next week on our Wild Bear Adventure.

We imagined we'd travel lots after Dinah left for college, (or rather Jon imagined that), but the reality of flying both financially and physically, plus psychololgical abuse at the airport, has made us slow to move. This is our big trip for this year.

A Bit a Beta

I've seen some amazing drawings done by the troopers in the last day or two, and hope to get that gallery up before I leave to visit my mother and help her move to a new room.

The evil and wondrous image above is a screen capture from my beta experiment. Informed sources say that Norman drew it.

I had to try one more experiment before I left the home base. I wanted to see if it would be possible to make a drawing dynamically and then import it into Flash. If that worked out, then you could make dynamic Flash greeting cards, for instance, or strangely personalized Flash movies.

So I put some code together, and took it apart, and rearranged it, and lost most of the day on this. Finally it works in a beta sort of way.

Draw a head in the box below. fill the head in- ie no white space or it will look kind of weird. You'll see. If you want to give it a black line, do that after you've filled it in. Press create head.



Then wait about 30 seconds. Press the button in the second app, sound on (or not).
If you don't want to draw a head, just press the button- you'll see someone's head on the body.




I coded it just for one head, so the next person who tries it will overwrite your little head. If you don't see your head, try refreshing the page, or clearing your cache if you know how to do that. I haven't tested it yet in Blogger. It may work better directly from the html page. It may not work at all.

Still, it's a new step when you can put a dynamic image in a Flash movie, and I'm sure I'll try more of this when I have more time.