July 17, 2010
A long time ago I described a method of creating realistic anime hair with The GIMP. Today I reproduce that method with a small limit: 30 minutes or less. Most people want hair done in less than 30 minutes. Anime or manga artists want it done in seconds. But once you've done this style once, you'll have good reason to put in a few minutes. Shojo comics and ren-ai games use this realistic style on very rare occasion to portray texture, depth, emotion, or something else. The reason why I find myself using it instead of my normal style of outlining sharp tufts of hair is for dramatic effect, showing people not a green haired mahou tsukai (魔法使い) but a living breathing shaded person. Even if they are fictional I like my characters to have some sort of reality because it improves my ability to tell a story.
Minutes 1-3
Enough with the art, let's get down to the tech. The first thing to do is to draw the shape of the hair with large or medium size brush as seen below. This should only take you a moment because you should know what shape the hair will look. It's important that you draw this on a separate layer and never draw on it because you'll need it later. Trust me.
June 10, 2009
Update July 23, 2009
Digg Diversity is a new project by AltSci Concepts. It uses the Digg API to calculate a more fair score for articles on Digg. Why is this algorithm necessary or preferable? Digg has an algorithm that is based entirely on profit, which is acceptable for a company like Digg. The more diggs that occur, the more profit that Digg makes, which means that they will accept, even encourage their users to game the system. The Digg front page algorithm which promotes articles to the front page with as few as 100 diggs means that a small number of people can control the front page of Digg by simply getting 100 like- minded people to digg their articles (and visa-versa). The company Digg benefits when corrupt users promote the same content repeatedly, but the overall community is diminished (especially those users who wish to see important non-repetitive content). This topic is extremely deep and deserves an essay but definitely not tonight on the night of the beta release of Digg Diversity. Many digg comments, blogs, and even a mashup that is currently offline have been written about this issue, but I hope to write the solution.
Digg Diversity is a entirely javascript mashup using the Digg API to retrieve important information about what data is found on Digg. The first set of results may be rather surprising. You will see a list of results quite similar to the front page of Digg. However, the order is by "divvs" which are a new calculated value based on timing and repetitiveness of the digger. The raw data can be found at the bottom of the page (there is a link that displays the data).
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July 23, 2009
Success is defined by goals achieved and hypothesis confirmed. I have succeeded in many ways in my project Digg Diversity and yet it is not nearly ready for version 1.0. It remains Beta because there are issues that a person cannot overlook. On the other hand, I am able to use it everyday without any important issues stopping me. I suspect that anyone who likes Digg and doesn't like users that abuse Digg's front page can use this as an alternative front page.
One issue that I'd like to address in version 1.0 is to allow a larger set of data to be shown and compared. By multiplying the number of articles shows by 20 and filtering out all those items that will be given a score of zero (or less than 1.0) from the current version, the competition will become quite a lot fiercer for Digg Diversity's front page. Items that would never show up on Digg's front page will show up at the top of some or even all of Digg Diversity's users' list. The main success in Digg Diversity's 1.5 month Beta so far is that it has perfectly followed my hypothesis that is far graver than I even imagined when I wrote a rant against Digg at the initial release of Digg Diversity. In fact, the data that I currently possess is far graver than anyone could possibly know besides Digg or the Cabals that run Digg's front page could guess.
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June 30, 2010
3 weeks ago I promised a screencast and though I totally missed my self-imposed deadline, I feel that the outcome is passable. That's right, it isn't good enough for me to say that it's decent. That's okay though, sometimes you have a lofty plan and it just sucks. The funny thing is that editing the video and audio was not worthwhile because it was easier to re-record than to edit. In fact, I could have easily re-recorded yet another video easier than I re-recorded just the audio. What that says is that editing on Linux is at a point where certain people can get it to work and many people cannot. As a programmer, I see that as an opportunity. Especially with these type of programs that many people pay good money for, programmers can make a quick killing just by spending a weekend writing some code.
Rockband 2 Drum Instrument for Linux
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