Sedition. Full Stop.

“Trump has forfeited the public trust. For that reason, he cannot remain the commander in chief. He has shown himself to be mentally unstable, and for that reason he cannot remain in charge of an apocalyptically huge nuclear arsenal. He has demonstrated a clearly criminal approach to the Constitution, and for that reason he cannot be allowed to hold high office for the next two weeks in the run-up to the transition of power. He is, in short, a clear and present danger to the constitutional order, to the country, and to the world. Congress will fail in its duties if, after confirming Biden’s election win, it doesn’t continue on, in quick order, to forcibly remove Donald J. Trump, traitor, from the White House.”

“The top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer called for President Donald Trump’s removal Thursday a day after a mob spurred by the president overran the Capitol as lawmakers tallied President-elect Joe Biden’s presidential win.

“The quickest and most effective way - it can be done today - to remove this president from office would be for the Vice President to immediately invoke the 25th amendment,” he continued. “If the Vice President and the Cabinet refuse to stand up, Congress should reconvene to impeach the president.”"

“Members of the House Judiciary Committee have announced articles of impeachment for President Donald Trump, alleging he will “remain a threat to national security, democracy and the Constitution” if he is allowed to remain in office for two more weeks.

The announcement comes after Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the majority leader, said in a statement that the president should be “immediately” removed from office, either by the 25th amendment or articles of impeachment.

Reps. David Cicilline (D-RI), Ted Lieu (D-CA) and Jamie Raskin (D-MD) have authored the articles, according to two individuals familiar with the matter.

Cicilline and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) later tweeted the articles. “[S]o proud of everyone co-leading this effort with us,” Omar wrote. “We need to move quickly to remove this President from office.”

"And my god, if these insurrectionists were Muslim, they would have been sniped from the top of buildings," Scarborough continued. "So I wanna know from the Capitol Hill police, what is it? Is it just white people?

"Or is it Donald Trump supporters? Why do you scream at people walking across the street three blocks away from the Capitol?" he added, referring to when BLM protesters were hit with tear gas and rubber bullets to clear the way for President Donald Trump's infamous June photo-op in front of St. John's Church.

Scarborough then turned his rant up a notch with some profanity on-air.

"Why are you not as bad asses around the Capitol, but then Trump supporters come in, and you open the f---ing doors for 'em!" Scarborough said.

One of the show's panelists was heard muttering "Oh my god" when Scarborough dropped the F-bomb on live TV.

"You opened the doors for 'em!" Scarborough went on. "And let them breach the people's house. What is wrong with you?"

Learning Caravaggio Lighting Techniques

This is pretty cool to watch. A CG artist and a Director of Photography do a zoom call and go through lighting a scene in Caravaggio’s style. It’s in C4d and Corona, but it translates to pretty much anything. It’s interesting how the DP calls out real world lights and flags and where to put them. It’s not anything crazy new, but the discussion and the iterations they have going on is what I found the most interesting.

They do a series on them as well. Rembrandt and Hopper so far.

More Album Artwork

The band that I did the Shatter Bust artwork for liked that one so much they asked for something for a Single. So I blew up a disco ball, as one does.

Houdini Abstract Study

Messing around with the “Connect Adjacent Pieces” SOP in Houdini.

Yeah, pretty much sums it up.

Yup.

Everyone agrees: the year 2020 could not have been worse. So, we decided to give it the send-off it deserves. Instead of giving corporate gifts this year, we...

Revisiting some album artwork

A band I did some album artwork awhile back asked me to rework it recently so I took a project that was originally in C4d using the default render engine into Houdini and Redshift. Quite happy with the results. Did a proper glass shatter sim instead of just a Voronoi fracture as well. Here are the Houdini results with the C4d being last.

A little hope shiing in this dark void?

“Facebook hit with massive antitrust lawsuit from 46 states”

“A huge collection of states filed an antitrust lawsuit Wednesday accusing Facebook of suppressing its competition through monopolistic business practices. Forty-eight attorneys general across 46 states, the territory of Guam and the District of Columbia are behind the lawsuit, with only South Dakota, South Carolina, Alabama and Georgia declining to join.

The lawsuit, which looks at Facebook’s actions throughout the company’s history, alleges that the company bought competitors “illegally” and in a “predatory manner” in order to grow and preserve its market power. The suit cites Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp as prominent examples.”

Oh man, this would be so awesome.

Hot Keys, Notes and More! Oh My!

Crazy resource here for all sorts of hotkeys, tips, tips for Houdini, Capture One, Photoshop and more. Easily searchable and pretty awesome for my day to day work. Hopefully, you find it useful as well.

“Over the years, I accumulated a lot of notes in text files. This page parses the TXT files and serves them as HTML. Browser search rocks!!” - Kristian Jungk

Here is one for Redshift in Houdini:

    display redshift material preview in viewport
        add RS Material builder 
            inside add a RS Material and TextureSampler
            connect them to surface
       
        right click on Vopnet -> Parameters and Channels -> Edit...
            add folder
                name it "See Tex"

            add toggle
                name it "Use diffuse"
                click Build-in Tags
                find Use Diffuse Map #

            add file image
                name it "diffuse map"
                click Build-in Tags
                find Texture #

"I want to post my photographs to Instagram, but my ethics are getting in the way."

Interesting Reddit thread here where people are discussing the ethics of using Instagram with all the information that has come to light about Facebook’s data harvesting/manipulation. A good read with a lot of interesting opinions. As I have mentioned here before, I am very anti-social media.

“As I'm sure many of us have been, I have been using my pandemic induced free time to do some intensive organizing and editing of my photography archives.

I now find myself with an ethical dilemma: I want to post my pictures to Instagram, a Facebook CompanyTM

I quit Facebook some 7-8 years ago and Insta some 3-4 years ago due to the many scandals Facebook has been implicated in over the years - from massive data breaches, to major privacy concerns, to anti-trust issues, to willfully illicit use of user data to manipulate elections and public sentiments around the world:

CNET, NBC News, CNBC, NPR / WBUR, Wikipedia Mega List, etc, etc, etc

Sometimes it seems like a silly stand to take / hill to die on-- I am, after all, an infinitesimally small cog in the machine-- but that hasn't stopped my conscience from shouting at me every time I think about giving the 'gram another shot.

What are your thoughts on this? Am I being ridiculous? How ridiculous? How do you navigate the ethical/moral challenges involved with social media platforms?

​I'm curious to see what this community's take is :)”

Is it possible to play music together over the internet?

Here is something my friend Steve sent my way that I have yet to test out, but it looks like it might work? The Windows client is in Beta though which could be troublesome. If I get the time to run some tests, I’ll post the results here. Musicians Together Apart.

The hardest number to hit for most people will be the ping which from the Network Testing page needs to be under 50ms, best if under 30ms. All the other stats seem very doable with most broadband.



Apple M1 new info.

I have been on Windows for a few years here now, but I recently started following the Apple M1 chip info that is coming out and it’s pretty interesting. New update today from Bloomberg talks about a MAc Pro possibly next year.

" Apple’s M1 chip was unveiled in a new entry-level MacBook Pro laptop, a refreshed Mac mini desktop and across the MacBook Air range. The company’s next series of chips, planned for release as early as the spring and later in the fall, are destined to be placed across upgraded versions of the MacBook Pro, both entry-level and high-end iMac desktops, and later a new Mac Pro workstation, the people said."

PureRef. The program you didn't know you needed.

Just a little shout out to this super cool little program called PureRef. It’s just a simple image viewer that lets you get all your reference images in one clean window. You can scale move and shuffle them around however you like. Just a great little thing to have open when working. Here is one that I used for Fall Colors and Simple Sets.

Photo Bashing Ideas

Found a pretty awesome breakdown on doing some photobashing that is really well thought out. Not just the technique, but the ideas behind why to use the technique. Interesting little vid that has me thinking about the full class to be honest.

Houdini hair / fur with Redshift Render Engine

So I spent an insane amount of time last week trying to get hair / fur in Houdini to show up when using Redshift render engine. I was looking at all sorts of tutorials and not one of them mentioned this freaking setting to make it work. You have to toggle the Hair Generation from “Generate Geo in Mantra” to “Use SOP Geo”. BAM, everything works. Took me forever to find it. Hopefully, this saves you the same headache.

A Love Letter to Reel M Inn, Portland’s Most Iconic Dive Bar

We used to live down the street from this place and spent a few nights there. Good times.

“I moved to Portland with a girlfriend of mine, and we got a place on Division. We woke up that first morning and started walking down the street, looking for jobs. We stumbled across the Reel — it was the very last stop, at 10:30 in the morning — ordered a bloody mary, and asked, ‘Do you know anyone hiring?’ The bartender said, ‘We are, I’m leaving, can you start tomorrow? It was insanity, I was just given a key and an alarm code with no instructions — don’t screw up, don’t burn the chicken. To no fault of anyone — that’s just how it works at the Reel. If you can hack it, you can hack it. If you can’t, you leave crying. It’s baptism by fire.” — Carey Bolton”

Houdini Doodles

Just playing around with simple clean sets here a bit. Want to work on bashing out a few sets a day to see what I can come up with.