!!!!!DoomScrolling!!!!!

Turns out this is a real thing and just not me losing my shit. But I can say that since last Friday I stopped taking in any news, no devices are allowed in the bedroom, and I am severely limiting my internet time. It’s a harder habit to break then stopping smoking for me. It’s kinda insane. Anyways, here the article.

“So many of us do it: You get into bed, turn off the lights, and look at your phone to check Twitter one more time.

You see that coronavirus infections are up. Maybe your kids can't go back to school. The economy is cratering.

Still, you incessantly scroll though bottomless doom-and-gloom news for hours as you sink into a pool of despair.

This self-destructive behavior has become so common that a new word for it has entered our lexicon: "doomscrolling."

The recent onslaught of dystopian stories related to the coronavirus pandemic, combined with stay-at-home orders, have enabled our penchant for binging on bad news. But the habit is eroding our mental health, experts say.


Abstract study

Was messing around with flip sims and impossible camera settings and came up with this piece that I quite enjoy.

Virtual Happy Hour Round-up.

Good old fashioned break down of some things discussed in our virtual happy hour.

Here is the full video that John Oliver used at the closing of his show. He ends with the last minute or so.

On Saturday May 30th filmmaker and photographer David Jones of David Jones Media felt compelled to go out and serve the community in some way. He decided to ...

Here is something a bit more entertaining. The Queen is Not Amused tumblr page.

Behind the Bastards podcast. The one on Elon Musk is what I listened to first. Joe will probably love this.

FCC approves 100% foreign ownership of US broadcast stations. Why, hello Sputnik News!

Here is the DC Bishop’s response to Trumps stupid photo op.

Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington criticized the manner of President Donald Trump's visit to St. John's Episcopal Church amid...

Here is a cop beating up a cameraman that has Australia wants investigated. Second view from a different angle at 1:25.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has demanded an investigation into the assault of an Australian journalist and cameraman at the hands of US police. 7NEWS U.S. ...

Lastly, a link for Mark. I looked up screen sharing on the PS4 and it’s something we can do now. Never did it, but could be fun to have a beer and try it out one night.

https://www.playstation.com/en-gb/get-help/help-library/apps---features/playstation-apps---features/share-play-on-ps4-and-how-it-works/

Team Deakins

Holy crap, just stumbled onto a podcast done by Roger Freaking Deakins.

Team Deakins podcast is a conversation between acclaimed cinematographer Roger Deakins and his collaborator, James Deakins. We start from a submitted question and end .... who knows where! We are joined on some episodes by friends and colleagues. Matt Wyman, friend and aspiring cinematographer, has been invaluable in working on this podcast series with us and joins in with some really good questions!”

Redshift Matrix study

Just wanted to mess a bit with Redshift in C4d and see how it’s behaving now a days. Used the RS Matrix to clone these out and the viewport was nice and snappy without any issues. Slightly burnt out on Housini ATM. Just kinda fired in general, but I don’t seem to have the brain power to dig into it. So, C4d it was today.

Some reflections on the protests.

May you live in interesting times, I believe the saying goes? Here is a round up of some videos that hopefully will put some of this in perspective for people out there.

Trevor Noah.

Killer Mike in Atlanta.

New Such Luck Video

Such Luck posted a new animation they created. Great stuff!

I do wish they would up their blogging game though….

Russian Espionage and Electromagnetic Fields: The Story of the Theremin

Fun write up on the history of the inventor of the Theremin, Lev Sergeyevich Termen.

“While living in America, the gap between Theremin’s two lives grew more dramatic. While he cavorted in New York with the likes of Albert Einstein, taught the theremin virtuoso Clara Rockmore and entered into a controversial marriage with the African-American prima ballerina Lavinia Williams, his espionage mission continued. This double life wouldn’t last long. The lead-up to World War II made Theremin increasingly nervous that his activities would be discovered, and in September of 1938 he fled the USA without even informing his wife of his planned departure.”

“Though the theremin’s influence continued to grow in the US, it had no effect on the life of its creator, who after his return to the USSR was caught up in Stalin’s purges and sent to a Siberian gulag. Theremin was lucky – unlike the millions who died in these labor camps, he was released after three months, as the Soviet war effort ramped up and the government realized they might actually need some of the scientists they’d banished. So officials rounded up Theremin and others and sent them to a sharashka, a prison where scientists from a variety of fields were forced to invent and research for the Soviet regime.”

Abstract render from photo I took.

Today’s little doodle I call “Drifted”. When I go to the coast I really enjoy taking abstract pictures of all the drift wood on the beach. I took this images and brought it into CG with some interesting results.

Off the Coast

Working more with BG plates today. I’ll call this one, “Off the Coast”. Used a photo I took this past summer.

Background plate study

Kinda had an idea to start doing my abstracts in environments so today I wanted to play with getting BG plates to work with the renders. Not sure if smoke helps or hurts though….

POPnet study

Just a doodle messing with a POPnet in Houdini.

No safe way for singers to rehearse together ...

Wow, this is pretty gnarly….

“On May 5th, an expert panel assembled by the National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS), the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA), Chorus America, the Barbershop Harmony Society, and the Performing Arts Medical Association (PAMA) laid out a sobering vision for the future of public singing in America. The primary goal of the panel, according to NATS Executive Director Dr. Allen Henderson, was "to bring scientists and medical professionals directly to our audience, as those of us who run professional organizations do not have the direct knowledge ourselves of these complex issues."

In a presentation that sent shockwaves through the singing community, Dr. Lucinda Halstead, the president of the Performing Arts Medical Association and the Medical Director of the Department of Otolaryngology at the University of South Carolina, concluded that there is no safe way for singers to rehearse together until there is a COVID-19 vaccine and a 95% effective treatment in place, in her estimates at least 18-24 months away.”

Redshift and removing noise from shallow Depth of Field renders.

Little doodle I did today was to work on getting rid of noise in shallow Depth of Field images in Redshift. Here are my notes from today:

Turn off DoF (Bokeh) and Motion blur.

Start with default Unified Sampling. Unified Sampling are PRIMARY RAYS. All the overrides are Secondary Rays.
Use overrides with AOVs to get clean, diffuse, refractions, reflections GI, SSS, etc...

Test each AOV with buckets in the interactive window till they are noise-free.
AFTER that is clean, turn on any DoF and then dive into Unified Sampling.
Defaults: Min 16
Max is MIN *4
Then start lowering Adaptive Error Threshold.
If still getting fireflys, lower Sample Filtering. If you go too low here it will get dark.
Always use 2x more GI rays than the samples max.

And that’s my new method. Here is the study.

"Flooding the zone with shit."

This is a pretty good write up on where things are headed sadly…

““The plan is to have no plan, to let daily deaths between one and three thousand become a normal thing, and then to create massive confusion about who is responsible— by telling the governors they’re in charge without doing what only the federal government can do, by fighting with the press when it shows up to be briefed, by fixing blame for the virus on China or some other foreign element, and by “flooding the zone with shit,” Steve Bannon’s phrase for overwhelming the system with disinformation, distraction, and denial, which boosts what economists call “search costs” for reliable intelligence.

Stated another way, the plan is to default on public problem solving, and then prevent the public from understanding the consequences of that default. To succeed this will require one of the biggest propaganda and freedom of information fights in U.S. history, the execution of which will, I think, consume the president’s re-election campaign. So much has already been made public that the standard script for a White House cover-up (worse than the crime…) won’t apply. Instead, everything will ride on the manufacture of confusion. The press won’t be able to “expose” the plot because it will all happen in stark daylight. The facts will be known, and simultaneously they will be inconceivable. “"

Knife still life study

Been meaning to do this lighting study for a bit now and I finally decided it was time to put up or shut up, lol! I did not want to clean the knife too much because I want to show the texture there. Many knives have some really cool surfaces and that could really be brought out with this technique. Also, this knife is like 20 years old so it’s earned those scuffs.

Landscape Study

Felt like getting lost in a landscape for a bit instead of messing with the technicalities of Houdini. Spent most of yesterday and this morning working up this fantasy style landscape. D&D hidden grove type thing. Made in Cinema 4d with Redshift render. Started using Redshift proxies on this one but I kinda miss Octane scatter. That is a much better scatter system.