Evilzug.com

Feels Lobster, Man

Thomas Mannino — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 02:52:01 +0000

So at Burning Man, some friends of friends gave our camp this Lobster to cuddle. When Matt and I saw it, we kind of lol’d.

Feels Good, Man…

(From this meme)

What Is Burning Man?

Thomas Mannino — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 17:00:55 +0000

I went to Burning Man 2010, and since you can’t really describe what the event is in any sort of simple manner, this post will be devoted to the collection and outline of any and all thoughts I have or have had about the event. In most cases it will be nonlinear and mostly stream-of-consciousness. I am anticipating that I will continue to update it, and I will tweet when I do so!

So the best short answer I can give to “What is Burning Man?” is spending a week with fifty thousand other people, living in a very harsh environment to celebrate humanity.
Burning Man Wiki definition: “The event is described by many participants as an experiment in community, radical self-expression, and radical self-reliance.”
The event physically takes place in a temporary city called Black Rock City, in the middle of a dried up riverbed, referred to as the playa. I will refer to it as a city, because at 45k-50k people, for that week, Black Rock City is the third largest city in Nevada, second only to Las Vegas and Reno.
Here’s the google map of the location.
Here’s an aerial photograph of what the city looks like, as far as layout. The bottom of the ‘ring’ are all the camps – the streets are described as positions on a clock, and each ring is a letter. So, for example, our camp was on the corner of 5:30 and Detroit. When you give directions, you give your ‘time’ and letter/street name. The street letters were named named after major cities because this years theme was “Metropolis.”
As per the above photo, near the center ring at around 6:00, you can see a small circle – that’s ‘center camp’ – a major meeting area.
The dead center of the above photo is where the Man is built.
The Man is a fifty or sixty foot tall structure, with three ‘floors’ on it – you can walk up sets of stairs to stand on each level and look out around the playa. The entire structure is made from wood, and The Man himself is decorated with Neon.
If you were to complete the inner circle the dot at the top of said circle is where the Temple is built.
Each year the Temple is built by a different artist. This year the temple was very organic looking, despite past years temples looking more literal. This year the temple was called the Temple of Flux.
The area ‘past’ the temple is known as ‘deep playa.’
There are art installations out and about in the area in the above picture that isn’t devoted to camps. This includes the deep playa.
I went going with little to no expectations – I was told to keep an open mind, and don’t make any plans because you will end up not following any of them.
We’d been prepping for a few months, getting together with our camp once a week, to plan and prep. Cleaning existing camp inventory, figuring out what we need to buy, etc.
We had camp dues which paid for all of our needs while we were living out there.
The people we had been going with had gone several/many times before – the most experience having gone for nine consecutive years.
The Tuesday before we left, my girlfriend Dasha had a freak accident and kicked a pair of scissors – she hurt her foot badly, cutting a tendon in the process. This slowed down our prep considerably as her mobility was severely limited. As a result we left fairly late. Needless to say the accident affected her mobility – she’d have to be on crutches or wheelchair for at least two weeks. But this wasn’t going to stop us!
The plan was to leave Sunday afternoon to be there for midnight – the trip from Los Angeles is about 10 or so hours nonstop.
There’s a saying, “Safety Third.” There are lots of interactive art pieces, art cars, and other general ‘physical activities’ which you can participate. None of which require any waivers.
It poured rain a few hours after we arrived. As a result, a double rainbow formed. This literally happened. [Video] This was an amazing way to set the feeling for the week. You could hear people yelling “DOUBLE RAINBOW!”, “WHAT DOES IT MEAN!” and what not from the entire city.
Amazing, amazing Images by Christoper Michel.
My body has finally realized it’s back to reality, and now is thinking about coughing up a desert. Also, playa boogers are unending.
Videos of the Man burn, past and recent and also recent.
Videos of the Temple burn, past and recent.
The event makes you appreciate things so much more – having simple sushi for lunch today was so amazing…

I still have a lot to say but I’m realizing quickly how futile trying to explain and document this is…

HELLO!

Thomas Mannino — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 08:18:24 +0000

NEW CONTENT No related posts. No related posts.

Content-Aware Fill

Thomas Mannino — Mon, 10 May 2010 19:00:04 +0000

This new Content Aware Fill concept that I had heard about weeks ago is so rad. I had, up until this point, thought that it was an April Fools joke, being that the demo video for this came out late the night before April Fools, on some obscure video channel on YouTube. Check out the video here. People even went so far as to make parody videos, in a sense say ‘no, this is not real, look at how stupid you are.’

It’s worth mentioning that all of these were done using content-aware fill, and not the ‘content-aware spot healing brush’ – basically instead of lasso-ing around something you want to remove and letting it remove it for you, you can actually use a brush to paint a black blob onto what you want to remove and it does a pretty awesome job willing in spots. This spot healing concept is not anything new, I guess it just now uses the ’content aware’ algorithm I guess. Either way the spot healing brush would probably work a lot better in some of the below examples.

Witness the awesomeness after this jump, making sure to click on any images for a zoom!

A quick outline of kitty and rider, and poof.

Kitty eet grape. Just select the grape branch and only the grape branch. The face of the kitty got chewed up a bit but the wall would just need some touching up.

This was another simple ‘just circle it’ – a quick outline of the laughing cat, a hotkey, press enter, and this was the result. Again, not perfect but quite amazing for taking less then a second – note the repeating branch on the ground and how well the computer traced the crack in the ground…

For this one, select the eyes and mouth of this handsome creature, to see what the heck it would do. This is some helpful feedback, as you can see through the mouth. This will be particularly useful for people who have clients who ask them to photoshop off hats or clothing off of people in their pictures!

… what do you get when you cross Adobe, Apple, and cats? I love this so much, I think I’ll make it my desktop…

Something like two minutes of work: The small bubbles were brainlessly simple, however it got a bit confused regarding the cracks in the wall. The most time was spent trying to work the cat out of the middle, as you can see it did a pretty awesome job with the horizontal panel, however it added a vertical line there most likely from the right side.

Lastly, see if you can guess what the original to this picture was:

Workit

Thomas Mannino — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 23:58:35 +0000

Music: Daft Punk – Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger [Buy the CD!]

download this file [Right click/save as...]

Other Workit-influenced flash:

Bass Work It!	-	SkullBunny
Best Workit Tribute Ever.	-	pihwlook
Dream a Dream with Zug	-	Tyler Harper
Freeze it!	-	RandomHeroDunndee
Burn it!	-	DragoonFenix15
Mega Man/Daft Punk	-	FatSatan.
Rivercity Alex Dancing	-	Jacob Richert
Work it! Starring Kirby!	-	merkanthony

Thanks to Wheat for putting this list together.

Workit: It’s like seeing Boobs for the first time – Martin

Japanese Cat Commericals

Thomas Mannino — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 18:43:39 +0000

YouTube – Cat commercial.

YouTube – じゃらん　ぷちリゾート篇.

YouTube – じゃらん　女湯篇.

YouTube – じゃらん　温泉卓球篇.

YouTube – にゃらんと旅とも「はじける青春」篇.

AVR

Thomas Mannino — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 04:23:22 +0000

New WoW Addon, lets you draw somewhat in the 3D space… like circles and stuff so you can explain fights. Well, I wanted to make sure I got this out of my system ASAP

Content-Aware Fill Sneak Peek

Thomas Mannino — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 02:40:29 +0000

Dude, I want all that time back from ’shopping all that stuff…

via YouTube - Content-Aware Fill Sneak Peek.

WONDERING CAT FAIL (what has this cat seen?)

Thomas Mannino — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:00:49 +0000

YouTube - WONDERING CAT FAIL (what has this cat seen?).

Really clever light/dark video toy!

Thomas Mannino — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 06:59:45 +0000

This is really snazzyl You can watch this video and flip a switch on the player to change the video from ‘day’ to ‘night’. Really clever. What’s even more clever and rad is that if you have a webcam up, the flash app will tell if the room is light or dark and flip the video’s switch on it’s own! Super fun. LIGHTSWITCH RAVE!

http://www.myearthhour.org/lightsoff/