Cityscape montage

A montage of Blingees (back when Blingees were half-decent) that I put together into one long gif. This was done with a single photograph of a street scene. No sound, sorry!

Have yourself a Harold little Christmas!

Let's add some Christmas bling!

Radha Krishna

Very strange winter Blingee

I did not make this truly amazing Blingee-style animation, but I'm glad somebody did. 

Victorian Blingee Girls

Imagine my surprise and delight when I discovered I could make compilations of my Blingee pictures. For some reason, old black and white photos bling up particularly well, with the blingee part providing a colorful animated background. Photos of Victorian women are an ideal subject for this, as no effort is made to make them look "natural". In all of them, women strike a pose and hold it. I think this was a holdover from the days when photography demanded a full minute or two of complete stillness (with those awful contraptions holding the body and head rigidly in place). 

Even when the technology improved, somehow the same rules applied. These are portraits, not photos, insects trapped in amber, or - in this case - Blingee! I'm sad to say this program no longer works, or is so crappy that I've had to replace it with an inferior one called PicMix. PicMix has literally thousands of stamps and backgrounds, but it's all in French, so finding what you want is nearly impossible. It's not true that a wider selection increases your options. It's the opposite. What you want is buried in so much useless crap that finding good stuff is nearly impossible. Thus,YouTube, and the internet in general. It has been flooded with dreck, so I'm finding searches are ever longer and more frustrating. But here are my efforts from the Golden Age of Blingee.

Midnight bling

Bentley's Christmas

Bentley is a Christmas kind of guy. Just tonight I caught him skulking around under the Christmas tree. When I tried to take a picture of him, he lunged at me, but it was a friendly lunge.

The gangsta look suits Bentley just fine. 

Scary Christmas!

Bentley roasting by an open fire.

Is. . .is there a cat in there somewhere?

A Christmas cuddle.

Bentley has brought me so much joy!

@-would

Love walked in

For my friend (while he waits and hopes)

Bling bling - hello??

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Santa Dave

Hey listen. My dearest friend, David, has been in the hospital for a LONG LONG time with every ailment you can imagine, greatly affecting his mobility. And yet, with few exceptions, he has been remarkably cheerful through it all. I think this should be celebrated, and what better way than with a Blingee. The top one is a pose in his fairly-Brother-Dave-ish hospital gown. The second one, made last year, is too good NOT to repeat.

Special Bonus Bling!

Night sky in 14 takes

I must be a frustrated animator, for every once in a while I am taken over by the urge to make something move.

I found a set of old photos of San Francisco, and wondered what I could do with them. This one seemed to have the least potential because it was relatively plain, but I thought I'd give it a go.

I ended up tinkering with it all evening. It turned out to be a very good subject because most of it was background or foreground. The building, figures and car were the filling in the sandwich and remained consistent while everything else changed. Black and white always works best for these gif-related experiments because figures stand out in a strange kind of 3D.

These started out fairly conservatively, then I got bored and started experimenting more with the foreground. Some of the animations wrapped around nicely. Some didn't come out as I designed them, at all. This is a primitive program, it's a Blingee, for God's sake, so it isn't supposed to be very sophisticated.

As I went on, these became stranger, then gloomier and more dystopian, and, finally, apocalyptic. As I finished this set, it struck midnight and I heard the most heart-chilling sound outside the window. It was pitch-black out there and raining hard. I heard a weird, trilling, screaming sound like something out of a horror-movie, a dozen different cold-blooded voices in an unhuman choir that isn't tame and doesn't belong in a city. I recognized it as the pack of coyotes that lurk and slink around singly during the day, then congregate at night to send up an unearthly squealing moan. This is why people still insist on believing in ghosts and demons and the supernatural. Weirdness surrounds us; it's just on the other side of the curtain.