Spec work -- NO NO and.... HELL NO!

Great article about spec work and how bad it really is.

http://www.davidairey.com/a-conversation-about-spec-work/

another good link:

http://www.no-spec.com/

Style degradation and the emergence of evolving context

The other day I was talking with a friend, discussing the importance of context and how we need to understand what we surround ourself with. You see, for the longest time I believed I could watch horrific images, videos and stories, and become stronger by desensitizing myself by overcoming the disgust of it all. All the classic internet underground stuff, from beheadings to perverted acts – sites like stileproject, ogrish and rotten (I know, I know, terrible stuff.) I had also been interested in the idea of “creating reality” where you supplement your life with positive thinking to help manifest your own desires. Intrinsically, I think I’ve always felt that “attraction mechanism” to be a little bullshit, but it has been recently linked to some theories of quantum mechanics, (the observer theory) and I realized that we still pretty infantile in our understanding of reality, so I thought “hey, maybe this IS possible!”  But after a while, I’ve come to the conclusion that surrounding yourself with certain things works, but not as effectively as many of those activists might tout. It can be explained simply by science: the waking memory is a place that records relevant experiences that are later transcribed to the other part of the hemisphere, and then used conceptually. But during that process, some information is lost, so the quality of the data is degraded. It’s sort of like upscaling a raster image – you lose pixels along the way, and the clarity of that image suffers. And the most important part of our ability to memorize experience is our ability to understand the context of that experience. So in that respect I think trying to surround yourself with pain and misery, simply to desensitize yourself and thus make you less vulnerable is a fallacy, because over time there is a degradation of context  and the reasoning behind it begins to blur, leaving you with negative feelings that are hard to grasp.

Well having said all that, you might wonder, how does this relate to ARTISTIC STYLE?! Well, I think the same principle of quality degradation applies – but in this sense it’s actually more of a positive result. I can’t think of any artist that hasn’t gained some foresight without idealizing someone else, or without the help of a mentor. It’s the “standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants” principle, and it has worked time immemorial to help evolve the styles of every profession throughout the ages, just like genes evolve through natural selection. But in the process of this foresight, an artist seeks to copy the style of another artist (and as we know, imitation is the highest form of flattery) but is not able to keep the context and clarity of that experience 100% in their mind. So this, in conjunction with each daily experience, and the individual talents and physiological structure of that person, creates a “degraded” style that is unique to them. 

Testing... freedom of speech

Hi there, this post is sort of a quirky one, I doubt it will cause concern, but I'd like to experiment nonetheless. I heard recently the FDA is banning the posting of customer testimonials for health products and while this seems only to apply to the manufacturer's website, I might as well use it as an opportunity to spout some opinion from my experience with natural remedies. Whether fact or fiction, I think its a good idea to create content about it.

Here are some of the wonderfully useful supplements I take. I would like to note that I RARELY if EVER use ANY prescribed drugs. The occasional ibuprofen is about it for me.

Things I like:

• Echinacea: GREAT for boosting the immune system, especially during the onset of a cold/flu. I take it every day.
• Zinc: Ditto. This is probably the best immunity booster I've read about, easily ousting vitamin c. Zinc is important for Cell production and the immune system.
• Cayenne Pepper: An unknown gem to most people, Cayenne Pepper is great for blood circulation and the heart. In a recent cold bout I found the effects of Cayenne to help combat the cold amazing, but make sure to take this on a full stomach, otherwise you'll get very queezy from the capsaicin. 
• Realfood Organics brand multi-vitamin: If you've pontificated on whats in your multi-vitamin, you'll definitely want to do a bit of due diligence and find out the manufacturing ingredients. After some homework, I found most vitamins (the 6-10$ bottles) to be very poor indeed, some having ingredients that are BAD for you (obviously nothing huge, but why take vitamins when they contain harmful ingredients?) On top of that, they contained the cheapest forms of each respective vitamin, and in very low dosage. Realfood Organics runs me about 23$ a bottle, but it lasts a month and the difference is noticeable. Not only that, they are ORGANIC vitamins, which means the supplement comes from an organic source (i.e. from grown plants rather than what I can only call rocks.) I take 2 a day and they're great. They have two multi-vitamin lines, formulated specifically for men and women.
• Ginko Biloba: Nothing particularly amazing about this one, but I take gingko on a regular basis and I noticed some improvements after I did. I'm very confident I'd find better results if I used a higher quality brand.

Things I Don't like (I hesitate to say hate, if only to keep from sounding like a zealot):

• The FDA
• Merck
• Pfizer
• GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)
• 99% of what the the previous three manufacture

In conclusion, my sort of health manifesto is simply that the U.S. is statistically extremely unhealthy, especially when compared to similarly developed nations. Is it merely coincidence that we have the most overbearing, bureaucratic...dare I say, fascist health policies, dictated by the FDA? I find that their health concerns directly correlate to the benefit of "Big Pharma" and are structured on remedy not prevention -- and in most (read: all) cases they do not cure, only subside. 

Comcast limiting bandwidth usage!

Here's an article from Reuters "Comcast to limit customers' broadband usage"

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Comcast Corp, the largest U.S. cable operator, said on Thursday it will cap customers' Internet usage starting October 1, in a bid to ensure the best service for the vast majority of its subscribers.

Comcast said it was setting a monthly data usage threshold of 250 gigabytes per account for all residential high-speed Internet customers, or the equivalent of 50 million e-mails or 124 standard-definition movies.

"If a customer exceeds more than 250 GB and is one of the heaviest data users who consume the most data on our high-speed Internet service, he or she may receive a call from Comcast's Customer Security Assurance (CSA) group to notify them of excessive use," according to the company's updated Frequently Asked Questions on Excessive Use.

Customers who top 250 GB in a month twice in a six-month timeframe could have service terminated for a year.

Comcast said up to 99 percent of its 14 million Internet subscribers would not be affected by the new threshold, which it said would help ensure the quality of Internet delivery is not degraded by a minority of heavy users.

U.S. Internet subscribers are typically not aware of any limit on their Internet usage once they sign up to pay a flat monthly fee to their service provider.

As Web usage has rocketed, driven by the popularity of watching online video, photo-sharing and music downloading services, cable and phone companies have been considering various techniques to limit or manage heavy usage.

But Comcast has come under fire from a variety of sources for its network management techniques.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission investigated complaints by consumer groups that it was blocking peer-to-peer applications like BitTorrent, and earlier this month ordered Comcast to modify its network management.

Comcast has said that by the end of the year it will change its network management practices to ensure all Web traffic is treated essentially the same, but has also been exploring other ways to prevent degradation of its Internet service delivery.

One consumer group said while Comcast's new 250 GB limit was "relatively high," it could eventually ensnare customers as technology progresses.

"If Comcast has oversold their network to the point of creating congestion problems, then well-disclosed caps for Internet use are a better short-term solution than Comcast's current practice of illegally blocking Internet traffic," said S Derek Turner of Free Press, a Washington, D.C.-based consumer advocacy group that filed a complaint about Comcast's network management practices earlier this year.

The Philadelphia-based company is not alone in trying to come up with ways to limit heavy Internet usage.

Time Warner Cable Inc, the second-largest U.S. cable operator, said in January it would run a trial of billing Internet subscribers based on usage rather than a flat fee.

Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas said Comcast was also considering so-called consumption-based billing, but no decisions had been made.

Original article...
http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSN2833325220080829?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=0

Check out MoveOn.org for more.

Tutorial: Increasing clarity and crispness of pixelated photos with photoshop

So I picked this technique up after doing some client work involving small thumbnails that inevitably had to be stretched or were just poor quality.

First, might I say, this kitty is amazingly cute. Like, wow, I think I'm going to have an aneurysm this cat is so cute.

Anyway, back to the tut. Say you want to get decent quality from a poor photo after downsizing it. What I've done here is taken a photo, stretched it, saved it as a jpeg (like 400% it's size) on 1 quality, then resaved it again to cause even more data loss. Why? Just to prove a point.

Here's the initial photo:



Decent clarity eh?

Well let's say you started out with something of quality...


(click for full-size)

Well what many people may usually do is, resize the photo, then sharpen it. But if you sharpen it many times before downscaling, you can increase the clarity without making it look grainy and fragmented. Because you're adding pixels by sharpening, then decreasing pixels by way of Photoshop's bicubic downsampling. This order of operations produces very different results which are actually quite pleasing. Take a look at the last photo:



First slide is the original. 2nd slide is the upscaled lossy version, downscaled again, using no sharpening (strictly Photoshop's bicubic downsampling algorithm.) The 3rd one is the upscaled lossy version, but sharpened 2 times (same settings) and then downscaled. Actually looks a bit crisper than the first! You could get the first crisper, but it would undoubtedly look grainy.

Nifty art

Wee, look at that cool curve effect, created simply by loading a couple albums. I wonder if B12 made their album Time Tourist that way intentionally? IDM and ambient are known for their weird subtleties...

Anyway, that is all.

Lieutenant Dan VS Optimus Prime

I thought marketing couldn't get any more ridiculous, but then I heard the Lieutenant Dan voice-overs for the Army's latest recruitment video. I thought to myself, well, who better than the character for a suicidal alcoholic with no legs to help harness the power of the Army for their latest TV spot? I guess aspirations are all relative, but from where I'm sitting that commercial doesn't quite do it for me. Maybe the Army will get their recruits some of those "magic" metal legs too!

BUT THEN -- I didn't think it could get any sillier. I heard the Optimus Prime voice-over for the Navy. At first I thought, is this real? Am I really hearing? But lo and behold, the transforming Auto-bot (or at least his vocal humanoid counterpart) is certainly the voice responsible.

So is this what it's come down to? Who's got the bigger, more badass voice-over? I think if that's the case, Optimus Prime wins by a long shot, but don't you think that's fucking overkill? I mean, REALLY -- Optimus Prime!? HE'S NOT EVEN FROM THIS PLANET! Does the Navy think they're gonna get their hands on the All Spark? And if you really want to get down to brass tacks, I could have sworn Prime was helping out the Army in the movie? I don't remember OP being such a sellout, and I refuse to believe that's the case. So, damn you Navy, damn you for trying to corrupt my childhood memories!

I must say, I find it somewhat repulsive that many famous actors/actresses have taken the role of corporate cheerleader, but I guess that's to be expected. However, this new trend of military advertising is worrisome, especially when childhood heroes are now pandering to a pandemic that infects the mind of the overly patriotic.

KGB subversion propagandists are so jealous right now.