A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

Gruber's right; this demo video for the new iPhone Twitter-posting app Birdhouse is a model of its class, and is required viewing for everyone who might ever need to make a demo video of anything. Even if they hate Twitter.


(Yes, I am likely to drop the $4 on this, since I have been Twittering a lot lately, and feeling like I'm just starting to get the hang of making tweets more clever than the mm-bacon-time-to-wash-my-socks category. Something like this might be useful.)

So the year is half-over. Well, it had to happen eventually. Let's take inventory, pillar-style.

Volity Started ramping up in late March and really went into overdrive two months later when I had a conversation with daerr about how the web client ought to work. I've been working on that by myself since then - about one month, now - which is great, though it's sucked all the life out of one pillar, and made another teeter until I got a better sense of balance over it. I am so obsessed with this that I'm starting to feel doomed at the fact that it's not done yet, and start getting mad when I spend an entire day away from it because I'm instead having fun with my friends or something. We'll see where it is in another month.

Dating classicaljunkie and I have been dating this whole time. This is now officially longer than I've seen anyone else, and things develop and mature in nice ways. Subjectively, though, it doesn't seem like it's been as long as it has; for more than three months she's spent almost every weekday far away on business, in Houston or Toronto or the middle of Louisiana. (But the Volity and work projects consume my focus so wholly, it's not like I sit by the window pining while she's gone...)

Money In April, unsatisfied with the good-intentioned but poorly fitting pseudo-part-time setup I had with ITA, I acted as a truly independent software contractor for the first time and landed a contract with a company who advertised their need on jobs.perl.org. This has turned out to be a very nice fit. While we've had our differences in culture and implementation, this client has proven an excellent and clear communicator. This not only makes tasks easier to accept and accomplish, but it helps us work through our differences as well. It's rather an ideal first self-actuated contract, and I consider myself fortunate. It also pays enough that I decided it was safe to drop the ITA dealie just a couple of weeks ago. So, for me, the money thing is set for now.

Video I was on fire with video projects through April, cutting the best Gameshelf yet and shooting most of another one, but then cooled off as Volity became re-ascendant. The only really recent things I've made is the Youtube version of my Volity lightning talk, as well as Youtube cuts of some Gameshelf reviews, but these barely count. I am self-conscious about having left this pillar unattended for so long but I am so howlingly focused on the Volity web client that I really can't bring myself to spend any time on it right now.

Thanks, all, for the birthday wishes.

Ricky asked me, as he does every year, how it feels to be N. Instead of saying something like "Same as it felt to be N - 1" I said "I think it's gonna be a really good year." And I meant it!

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Ricky's birthday was a few days ago (he's 51 now) and mom got him mandolin lessons, which is a bang-on typical good-intention bad-execution mom-gift. He enjoys playing with his mandolin, though he doesn't actually play music on it, he just mechanically plucks doink-doink-doink through the notes on the page. It pleases him, and for some reason Shadow likes it too; she will often come watch.

Lessons will frustrate him, and I worry that he will confuse and disturb his teacher with bizarre talk borne of this frustration. I doubt he will get past lesson two. (If it were 10 years ago I would further suggest the alternate possibility that he might end up seducing the teacher, if she were female and silly, but he doesn't do that anymore.)

He's also going to fly to visit mom and dad for a bit in Florida and I worry about that, too, making a security risk out of himself by talking weird at people. I console myself to think that people like Ricky must fly around every day and it's not like you hear about flights getting grounded daily because of them. mumble

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I think the solution to the teleprompter thing involves using Final Cut to make a simple QuickTime movie of the text to read as upward-scrolling titles, just as if they were end credits, and then play that on the monitor behind the camera. No page controls needed. Really, I can't think of why that wouldn't work, with just a little practice to get the speed right.

This LJ is now the #1 Google hit for "Textless Material".

And since lediva asked: its purpose is to make localization easier. Exported versions of the show can overlay the clips with titles in any language they like, and then use them to replace the matching slices of video track in the original show.

I learned this via Google before I accidentally broke the internet's ability to learn this via Google. Sorry internet

I stand by my theory that this was at the end of the ep I got from iTunes because that's where it happens to reside in the source media, as a service to foreign studios, and whoever prepared the show for iTunes either forgot, didn't know, or didn't bother to crop it.

The fourth Gameshelf has been available for a while via RSS, but I didn't link to it directly because it wasn't quite done yet. Last night I sunk around three hours into both cleaning it up (it had a bunch of broken transitions) and carving 18 minutes off of it. This puts it below the 30-minute mark, which means I can hand it to SCAT and they can air it at some random time. Yes, this is important, in some abstract psychic way; I used their resources to make the show, and I owe them a product, even if my series has been long since canceled and they couldn't care less about it at this point.

Download here. Show notes here.

A lot of what I cut was pure fat, but there was a good amount of severed muscle squirming on the floor before I was done as well. It almost goes without saying; I don't have video editing experience beyond The Gameshelf but I have done enough text editing to know how every cut into one's own art is a mix of pain and relief.

I hated, for example, cutting out my explaining the show's theme (which I replaced with a new title card at the start of the show), and then slicing out my talking about Carcassonne's meeple-placement restriction rules. Both of these would have been nice to keep, and I would have considered it if I wanted to go shoot additional footage to illustrate my speech. But I didn't, and that left us with several minutes of jmac sitting in his chair babbling and flapping his arms, and that really isn't all that interesting to watch, even for me.

My biggest take-away was the value of limiting illustrations to a single clip. There were many bits in the first, 45-minute cut that had Matt or myself talk about some game feature, and then we'd watch as this happened 2 or 3 times in game play. And these were the first things I ended up slicing out. Multiple clips are good if you specifically want to show how something in the game changes over time, but otherwise it's unnecessary. It happens once in the final cut, during the Carcassonne segment, to show grr_plus1 sneaking a guy into another player's city, and then [clock-wipe] here he is some turns later, reaping the benefits on the scoreboard. The other redundant clips I originally kept because someone cracked a joke or was otherwise entertaining, and it was hard to let go, but onto the floor it all went.

Anyway, I am satisfied with the show now and am done with this episode, unless I have made some truly epic mistakes; please let me know if you find any.