Open Hatch

Archive for the ‘Art’ Category

I’ve been slowly working on a project to produce a version of the Book of Mormon which integrates modern grammar with textual corrections discovered in Royal Skousen’s Critical Text Project.

Royal Skousen has spent decades researching the original and earliest sources (and for that matter, eventually all major printed editions) of the Book of Mormon, and he has discovered thousands of errors and alterations transmitted through various editions from the original manuscripts to subsequent editions. None of these errors or alterations change the meaning of the text substantially, but there are numerous cases where relatively small meanings didn’t come through. One example is the final verse of the book, where the original manuscript, it has been discovered, read “..pleading bar of the great Jehovah”, but the first printed edition (and all subsequent editions) mistook this as “..pleasing bar of the great Jehovah”. (Incidentally, I’ve always found that mistaken word a bit jarring and puzzling – now I’ve learned why. That’s not how it was intended to read!)

My main reason for this is that for some time I’ve wanted to orate a “podcast” of the Book of Mormon, as I really don’t prefer any of the existing audio versions of this book; so while I’m doing that, why not do it with a text truer to the original manuscript?

Initially I even contacted Dr. Skousen himself, seeking permission. He seemed open to it, but deferred to Yale Press, forwarding my request there. Yale Press denied permission on the basis that they would want to authorize and organize such an effort through an established publisher. (I predict they never do.)

Nevertheless remaining curious, I got my own copy of The Earliest Text from Deseret Book. I was both very pleased and disappointed. The disappointment stems from decisions necessary to remain true to forming a “critical text”. This means a text reproducing the original manuscripts as faithfully as possible – right down to some of the weirder grammar – such as “if there be fault, it be the mistake of men” in the original title page – which, incidentally, I think is a perfect mistake. These grammar errors may be inherent to Joseph Smith’s dictation when he (early on) had little education in language. I don’t mean to marginalize The Earliest Text. Being strictly true to the original text doubtless has very worthwhile academic and historical application. But for the layman and everyday readers, it doesn’t. Joseph Smith himself made considerable grammatical and other emendations to the text for the third edition (dozens of times, he scratched out the very redundant phrase “and it came to pass”), and apostles and prophets who followed him down through the decades made numerous grammatical corrections, none of which alter the meaning of the text, all of which make it clearer and easier to read.

What pleases me in The Earliest Text is the plain layout, the spare devotion to only canonical text (none of the extensive introductions, cross-references, chapter introductions etc.), the preservation of initial section breaks as denoted by Joseph Smith, and Skousen’s very clear reworking of the punctuation from scratch. (The original manuscripts were, with very little exception, un-punctuated, continuous blocks of text. All periods, commas, semicolons etc. were added by the original type-setter.)

It dawned on me these facts (of my pleasure and disappointment) produce an opportunity.

The Earliest Text edition may arguably be under copyright as the first printing of all combined discoveries about the earliest text, plus Skousen’s completely reworked punctuation. What it does not have is the grammatical emendations of later editions – which are all in the public domain. Very little has been altered since Orson Pratt’s grammar emendations and versification of the text early last century.

I can combine the two without violating anyone’s copyright.

My edition will integrate these of Skousen’s findings: 1.) Correction of all errors that alter meaning, such as “pleasing” to “pleading”, 2.) All language that supports the original text’s self-consistency, such as the identified “Hebraisms” – for example, so many conjoining clauses prefixed with the word “and” 3.) All grammatical emendations subsequent to the original publishing which clarify meaning, and 4.) Perhaps even some of my own grammatical corrections. For example, where Lehi says “..behold, I have obtained a land of promise, in the which things I do rejoice”. If this isn’t evidently originating in any language phenomenon inherent to the text before translation, why not simply reduce this to “in which I rejoice”? No change in meaning, and plenty of improvement in clear grammar.

Unfortunately, producing a new edition of the text is an involved undertaking. But modern technologies are speeding it up vastly (such as Optical Character Recognition grabbing me a full 1921 text, from a scan of an edition of that year downloadable from archive.org).

I have a full text; I’m working out OCR scanning errors. I’m aiming for a layout akin to the first edition, but maintaining verse numbers unobtrusively.

Hours ago I accidentally ran into the work of a font designer who created a font intent on reproducing a style of typeface in wide use in the 1800’s through early 1900’s, but which was subsequently almost entirely abandoned. I’ve incorporated this font into a page layout and title page design first draft; I’m very pleased with it. Here is a link to a pdf export: 1921-bookofmormon00smituoft-editcopy3-title-pages-design1

This entry would probably best be at a new blog devoted to the project; but I’ll have a section here devoted to it as well; so maybe I’ll just copy relevant stuff to.. whatever.. new blog.

I’ve been trying to get CorelDraw X3 working on a PC to edit .svg files for a project (wow, the svg format is cool). For some reason, it’s arguing with this PC, although it works fine on another (much slower) of mine. Every time I go to the file open menu it brings up a crash report dialog box. I can cancel the dialog and the program continues running fine – after it appears 3 more (total 4) times.

I love this application, but what in the world is with this? I finally tried the obvious, duh approach to finding a solution: google it. I quickly found a page with a proposed fix (from a user with a serious chip on his shoulder).

..You must launch regedit (ALT+R or START->RUN and type regedit and press enter) and go to:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\comdlg32]

and change NoFileMru from 0×00000001 to 0×00000000

Registry hacking? Oh, brother. However, it worked. Problem solved. Application running normally again.

Since that person’s post saved me grief, I’m paying it forward. You can do the preceding registry hack much faster by using a .reg file. Download the following text (.txt) file, rename the extension to .reg, then double-click it. If Windows doesn’t report successfully importing the information into the registry, try right-clicking the file and then clicking “merge”. These instructions are for a Windows XP account with Administrator rights; Vista users may need to disable User Account Control or run it as an Administrator or whatever.

Registry Fix file (.txt to rename as .reg)

(Here is a link to view that in high definition.)

I’ve thought it might be cool to combine animations from the Electric Sheep screen saver with sounds roughly correlating to the images – by way of a reverse spectrogram. A spectrogram is a visual representation of the frequency components of something (for example, a sound), so a reverse spectrogram takes an image and breaks it into component frequencies.

The name of one program that does this for sounds (and it can do it from any image) is Coagula, which I used to make representative sounds for this video in 5 second intervals using stills from this short video to showcase the idea. I then combined these all in a Nonlinear Editor (for video) and rendered the results out to this.

The synthetic sounds Cougula makes generally sound scary, screechy, and creepy – especially with source images like this I like it.

These children were born too long ago; it is time to release them.

I’ve created a set of Windows batch scripts that retrieve (over the internet) and cross-breed Electric Sheep genomes, which I’ll show results for here. There are two galleries – scroll further down for the second.  The batches retrieve the sheep genomes (or instructions for creating these images) either by checking against saved image names or at pure random via the random.org number service.

The first gallery is of the parent genomes, and the second is of their children, nearly 500 of them, which survive many thousands of aborted children. They are interbred by both hand-picked and randomly picked genomes.  Many of these are rendered at a very high resolution of 2560 x 1960! Altogether, rendering these took a Pentium III machine working non-stop for about a week.

It is my intent to add these into the mix of my mass-customization product picker; I need to work out credit and payment sharing with generation 242+ sourced images. Images that say .242 in them are not free to reuse; everything else is. Note the links to show any showcased image in full, huge-resolution size

Here are the parents:

And here are the children:

This can alternately be watched in High Definition @ the YouTube site via this link.

A silly rhythmic clip. Game developed by NinjaBee. The critters’ voices in this game are my voice acting, and I did other sound and particle effects work.

I am downloading so many gigabytes of abstract art animations from where someone has uploaded their repository of Electric Sheep movie files (I’m in contact with this person; I’ll be uploading the ones I have for him – and for you! – to access). As I do this, the download eventually runs into an error: out of hard drive space.

Yoink!

I’ll need to move what I’ve downloaded to an external hard drive to free up space. So I connect the drive and start doing this. The computer hangs (several high octane applications open, music playing, and many high octane data transfers will do this – if your computer is a few years old). No usual attempts to unfreeze it succeed. Finally it occurs to me it’s the data transfer that is probably the real holdup; I’ve seen this setup unfreeze before if I simply disconnect the external drive to interrupt it. I disconnect it, and the instant I do so, everything else on my computer is freed up, including my music player, which proceeds to the next song in my queue, which it happens is not a song, but a video game sound effect, and this sound effect besides:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

How appropriate.

If you have not enjoyed this happenstance, you may take reprieve in the idea that it is possible you may not be a nerd. And/or that you have never played (or fully understood, as it becomes any human beings’ divine duty to understand) EARTHBOUND, the classic among classic Super Nintendo video games from which this sound effect comes, at a moment at which a very important something (someone), a bee, dies. Like.. like.. like a failed data transfer. Oh, the poetry.

You may find this useful as the days get warmer. Click the image for a much larger version. Here is the original Photoshop format file for you to mess with, and here’s a .pdf version for easier printing, too.

From here.

The green bacterial looking clusters in the final sequence before it evolves into a blur – that is one of the coolest artistic abstractions I’ve ever seen. But I think the whole sequence is breathtaking.

I’ve been playing through an old favorite of mine, the game EARTHBOUND, with my very young son, reading everything to him (and he likes the game very much). As I’ve been playing I’ve grabbed screen shots of what reminds me why I love the game. This is a gallery of those screen grabs.

What I love about the game:

• It is the story of four children who conquer Giygas, the Cosmic Destroyer.
• Japanese wackiness. As you can see from the gallery, it is full of good-natured, daffy characters.
• It is incredibly musically versatile, prolific, expressive, and in my opinion, beautiful. Here is the track for your home.

  Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

• The ultimate, world-saving weapon in the game is prayer. This is combined with the work of knocking back into their senses anyone or anything that has gone wild or insane (such as a Rowdy Mouse or Insane Cultist). Or, if they are a mortal enemy (such as a lil’ UFO, Spinning Robo, or Starman), destroying them.

WEST OF HOUSE

This screen grab is straight from the source. Well. Loaded in an emulator.

What? You don’t know what this is? Put down the x-box controller and look it up!

Every room and scene in this text adventure painted clear, vivid images in my head.

I will paint them. Starting with this.

After I do other things..

As you know if you’ve been reading this blog, I’m a huge fan of these “Electric Sheep” images and the screensaver.  This morning I’ve started describing it in more detail at my Wiki page.

I’ve figured some basic ways to create my own original “children” Sheep by cross-breeding Sheep that someone else designed.  I’ve rendered them at a resolution to please virtually any computer “wallpaper” collector.  In the following two galleries, the link that says “open full image (click) ” is your friend

The first gallery is of the “parents” whose genes I crossed to create various children.  (Adobe Flash is required to view the galleries.)

The following gallery is of the “children” (original creations!) whom I thought were pretty.  (I killed the others.)  Some of these were found by panning, zooming, and scrolling through their loop animation with Apophysis.  Again the “open full image (click)” link is your friend.

Feel free to use and reuse these for any purpose.  The license is Creative Commons attrib. share-alike – and I request credit given to Richard Alexander Hall in reuse.  If you make derivative works from these, they’re completely yours.

I’d wait until I’ve added these to a page to market them as available for print on a huge poster (+ 2′ x 4′, like this one), but I haven’t the patience.  (I want to redesign that whole pick-a-sheep page as a blog page, anyway).  I’ve created some pretty things, and the world must know about it now!

Based on feedback I got from a post I made to the Electric Sheep user’s forum (here – including from the creator of the screen saver himself!) on the.. electric fleece? – I updated them.  Many ready-to-order examples at my zazzle page.

I’ve unintentionally mislead people to thinking I designed the images in that page (linked from the previous post).  No – others have designed them; they are from an “electric sheep” screensaver.  I’ll update the top of the page to clarify (because it credits the electric sheep way down at the bottom.)

People that submit these images to the render farm which the screensaver coordinates – people use a program called Apophysis to design these “sheep”.  Coincidentally though, I have come on that program and used it independently.  I used it as the basis of the following image, which I worked up further in Painter X.  This is a large thumbnail – click it for the original huge size.

My first Apophysis-related image.

To: President Bush <comments@whitehouse.gov>

Subj: OPPOSED to H.R. 5889 The Orphan Works Act of 2008

Dear President Bush,

I am very alarmed by the so-called “Orphan Works Act” of 2008, which has twice very recently been “hotlined” by Senators and has now passed in the Senate.  It is a basic philosophical reversal of copyright law and could spell economic doom – not an overstatement – to the enterprises of countless artists.  If the bill also passes in the house, I ask you simply to veto the bill.  I suggest that your best source of opposition to the bill may be found in the ample resources and rhetoric of the Illustrators Partnership of America.

Sincerely,

Alex Hall

[My street address]

[My phone number]

I’ve mentioned this electric sheep screen saver. Here’s one mpg from it.

I may find a way to batch convert them and incorporate them into the blog design. That won’t make it impossible for you to read.. Click either “play now” or “play in popup” to see it. If either of those don’t work, click the download link and have a look at it in Windows Media Player.

The screen saver has downloaded a bajillion of these goodies into its cache on my machine. Eye candy. I think this one is morphing between four different “sheep” IDs.