Tuesday, 30 Aug 2005

Despite dislike of heights, climbed down rocky cliff area and jumped off 17′ “cliff” into ocean.

Tuesday, 30 Aug 2005

New gutter is finally up.

Tuesday, 30 Aug 2005

New patterns I found in images of a U.S. Penny , a US dollar bill , and some international paper currency.

Tuesday, 30 Aug 2005

I love the patterns that can be created by taking bits and pieces of images and copying, flipping, rotating them. After creating probably thousands of them (a few hundred painstakingly crafted by hand literally cutting pasting, rotating, flipping) it still seems like magic when a tiny scrap of image with some color and lines turns into a gorgeously complex pattern.

Money is much on my mind of late, gnawing worry over not having enough, of bills unpaid, of debts accumulating, you know, the usual. So it’s probably no great surprise that when I finally got my CD drive working on my computer that the first CD of images I fired up to create patterns was a photo CD of money-related images I bought years ago (during the waning ebb of the first wave of CD shovelware when you could buy CDs full of images for $1).

So, here are the first few galleries - a couple of hundred new patterns. I am seeing a direct correlation between the beauty of the patterns and the complexity/contrast of the original image. That’s subjective of course, but I tend to like complex richly detailed patterns. The US Penny has some intersting possibilites, but the results don’t come near the complexity and beauty of the results that I found in the US dollar bill which has enough detail to create some wonderful results - but the most gorgeous patterns are found in international currency. It’s technicolor finery yields some amazingly rich and vibrant patterns.

Note: All these patterns are from 3 images. One of the front and back of a US penny, one of the front and back of a US dollar bill, and one of a pile of international paper bills.

Tuesday, 23 Aug 2005

a couple of days of vacation. hung out and went to the beach at night with the girls, did some housecleaning, finally installed the missing gutters, finished up a Myth project (and created a new game variant I think will be interesting), and went “cliff jumping” with my son.

[Ok so it was only a 17' high cliff (maybe 25'+ due to low tide?) but standing on the edge looking down it looked like a looooong way down. Falling that distance is very frightening and a rush. I only jumped once and didn't go near the 30' cliff, but since I've never liked the combination of edges and heights and I get nervous and uneasy just climbing up a well braced and secure 10 foot ladder, jumping from the cliff edge even once felt like an accomplishment, like a small overcoming of fears].