I found this after finding Thomas Lee’s photograph. Lots of movement from the DSLR being carried around, in/out of focus, and deliberate rack focuses give a great raw feel.

Hong Kong Slam Jam with MC Yan from Thomas Lee on Vimeo.

Where would you go?

A Door to Anywhere // 隨意門 from Thomas Lee on Vimeo.

Thomas Lee has an interesting gallery The Olympic Eyes showing security cameras and security watching over the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

For the Olympics, Beijing has installed some 300,000 closed circuit cameras and spent $12-billion on related security. There were reportedly 100,000 policemen on Olympics duty, excluding volunteers and civilian recruits. The watch was a spectacle in itself.

All the security and surveillance upgrades have stayed after the Olympics, and the homeland security boom is spreading to other 660 designated “safe cities” across China. Many human rights groups have pointed out that the technology will be — and has been — directed at protests and dissenters.

From the F-Spot Site:

F-Spot simplifies digital photography by providing intuitive tools to help you share, touch-up, find and organize your images.

This is a little vague, as it doesn’t mention my two favorite features. 1. Displaying a time line of photos (you can skid the bar over to 2001 and check out your photos from then). 2. Packs a useful image tagging system (create tags, select drag photos onto tags, see a photo as the icon for the tag)

Main Window Screenshot:

Fat Features:

1. Photo Time Line - time based view of entire photo collection
2. Image tagging system
3. Export photos to the web (Flickr, Picasa, or static pages)
4. Imports photos directly from digital camera
5. Keeps photos organized (on the hard drive) in folders according to date
6. Intuitive
7. Quick photo edits

Fat Shout-Out:

Its a little past the new year now, however, I needed to get a FatPenguin shout out to my favorite Linux application of 2006: F-Spot personal photo management software. F-Spot may not be driving the web servers of the future or taking %s away from IEs user base, but it is one kick ass piece of photo management bliss.

Tag Editing Screenshot:

Clean interface, intuitive, imports the photos directly from you camera, and quick basic editing functionality.

While I was gaming earlier tonight, wandering around aimlessly in a beautiful artistic world, I decided to make this post. The mental trigger to make this post was a passing thought of how absurd the negative press on gaming has been lately. Everywhere you look the past few years, there are politicians and lawyers jumping on the “games cause kids to kill” train. Regardless of the facts that state that youth crime rates are at an all time low and the studies that show video games help build critical thinking and cause children to think more. They spout biased studies that have no real proof of anything, and sometimes even flat out lies. Instead of accepting the reality that BAD PARENTING levels are at an all time high, and getting worse every day, they ignore this and try to pass laws and regulations. As far as I am concerned, this not only helps nothing at all, but actually gives parents even more room to do less.

I cannot fathom how people do not look at some of these games and see them as breathtaking. There have been many games that could be seen as art, with amazing soundtracks and stunning visuals, such as Shadows of the Colossus. The game I am playing tonight though is like a moving painting, with almost every single frame being worthy of a screen capture. Currently it is only avaliable in Japan, but will be out here soon. Each new area I make it to in the game is more beautiful than the previous, so I wanted to post this video I recorded of just a single tiny area, that by itself could be art. This tiny section is just the corner of a portrait that anti-game peple would never see, because of voilence.

Download AVI File
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I can’t explain this as well as the creators can:

Electric Sheep is a free, open source screen saver run by thousands of people all over the world. It can be installed on any ordinary PC or Mac. When these computers “sleep”, the screen saver comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as “sheep”. The result is a collective “android dream”, an homage to Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

Anyone watching one of these computers may vote for their favorite animations using the keyboard. The more popular sheep live longer and reproduce according to a genetic algorithm with mutation and cross-over. Hence the flock evolves to please its global audience. You can also design your own sheep and submit them to the gene pool.

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I finally set up my own host name through BlueHost yesterday so I could experiment with different things before I try to implement anything here. Check out the first thing I implemented last night. Set up my own Image/message board. It is based on the anonymous model, with no registration required. Was a pain to get it to look how I wanted to, but I got all the framework done and my basic layout complete. :) Just click the image to check it out, and feel free to post an image or message or whatever.

What this also means is we have more bandwidth and space to work with here at Fat Penguin if we ever need it.

I just had to post this video. My brother was over at my house while we were playing DND and had us check this video out. This guy is most certainly the best Ukulele player I have ever heard in my life. Especially near the end, the guy is simply amazing. He does not miss a single beat, and stays on tune the entire time.

This is an interesting concept and proof that open source whatever is gaining momentum. Elephant’s Dream is the first open source movie that I have come across. The website is currently down due to traffic however they have a bland temp page setup. On thier website they have links to download the full short film in various formats, soundtrack, as well as the production files.

The movie is most definately worth checking out. It has a very “Tim Burton” feel to it. In other words it’s strange.

this video of “Russian Climbing” is definately a cool watch.

I don’t really drink martinis much, but I will admit they are the drinks that started my facination with alcohol. Martinis are by far the most elegant drink I can think of. They range in many styles, flavors, and most importantly glasses. Bombay Sapphire, my Gin of choice, hosts an annual competition that encourages the art that lies in the martini glass.

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This anime forced its way onto my list last year. It had came out a few years previous, but I did not get around to watching it until I located the uncut version. I went into this knowing little to nothing about it at all, other than I had heard it is a must watch from a few friends. WHY it is a must watch though I was never told. I was not told what genre it was or even what the story as about. So I went into it with no real expectations, and honestly my hopes were not high since there had been a LARGE amount of bad animes being released. Or animes that I held no interest in at all. For those who do not know, in a period of a year in Japan there is typically 100 new anime series introduced. Sometimes many more, sometimes a couple less. Only a few are actual gems. Most are just the same ole thing with different characters.

Soo number 9: Gantz. The first thing that drew my attention when I put on the first episode of this was the quality of the artwork. It was exceptional. The animations on the characters were smooth, the backgrounds were detailed, and the whole theme and coloring of the anime had a much more realistic tone than most animes I had been seeing lately. It was not bright and colorful at all. The anime started with a run through a subway to what looked to be a high school student. As the anime passed people it showed what they were thinking about other people in the subway, mostly complaints or people worrying about being somewhere quickly.

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A continous piece of zoomable artwork.

Not only is this beautiful and amazing as you are moving through it, you also get the bonus of becoming dizzy and cross eyed after watching it for long enough! Try this out, get it moving at full speed and keep staring at it for a minute or so. Then stop the thing and watch the center of it warp smaller and then larger. It would be really cool to create a screensaver from this.

link

Sooooo… I went to a friends wedding today with Treanna. It was a very nice ceremony, however even at the best ceremony boredom is bound to set in. What to do… hmmm. I’ve got it!!! Digital camera plus plate with decorative butter balls equals a really crappy but highly entertaining stop animation. Enjoy…