The Glass Character

Sunday, June 5, 2016

An exploration of the paranormal

I pared these down. No, really. There were about fifteen of them originally. I just couldn't stop.

This creepy little ad for Sugar Crisp (now called, I think, Golden Crisp) predates Sugar Bear and his cool, Dean Martinesque "can't get enough of that Sugar Crisp" ditty.

There are three bears, of course. And you don't want to know these bears. They come swarming into your living room and cover your TV screen. They look like Ewoks, or, worse, something from the TV-movie version of Communion (remember Christopher Walken's dance?) or Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

My gifs have been slow and jerky lately. These are shorter ones, so I hope they do better. For some reason the animation in this just begged to be giffed. It's the creepiness of those bears with their jerky puppetry and cold, sociopathic eyes.

The reactions of little Janie and Johnny are almost as squick-inducing as the jerky ministrations of the Sugar Crisp Bears. Note the segue here: girl eats cereal; bear figure with pitcher appears for a nanosection in the right side of the frame, looking - if you pay attention - incredibly artificial; then the bear and the pitcher and Little Janie's bowl are shown in a different shot, so that they never all have to appear together. This saves having to combine live action with animation. The continuity here sucks. It took me a long time to figure out that this is supposed to be the same bowl/bear.

Bear talking. Creepy. Its fur seems to creep and crawl, indicating that it has fleas, or perhaps has been moved around by somebody's greasy fingers as they take each picture and string them together.

It's that jittering, that nervous, diddery thing that makes them so unsettling. They almost seem to be on the wrong speed. That, and the big staring eyes.

"Faster, kids. . . eat FASTER!" That weird sparkly thing is a big chunk of sugar with paranormal powers which bends these children to the bear's evil will. These ads often bragged about how you could (and should) eat Sugar Crisp "like candy". This seems horrible until you realize that Sugar Crisp probably had a fraction of the sugar content of Lucky Charms or Obese-berry or whatever-the-hell they have today.

Like I said. I boiled these down. I could have gone on forever. This is the sort of animation where you can repeat one frame. I don't know if this was stop motion or what, but it's motion that I wish would stop.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Amazon Author Page update

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Ryan IS The Taekwondo Kid (purple belt division)!

The Taekwondo Kid: the colour purple!

The Taekwondo Kid: purple belt moves!

Friday, June 3, 2016

Here comes your ghost again

Well I'll be damned
Here comes your ghost again

But that's not unusual

It's just that the moon is full

And you happened to call

And here I sit
Hand on the telephone
Hearing a voice I'd known
A couple of light years ago
Heading straight for a fall

As I remember your eyes
Were bluer than robin's eggs
My poetry was lousy you said
Where are you calling from?
A booth in the midwest

Ten years ago

I bought you some cufflinks

You brought me something

We both know what memories can bring

They bring diamonds and rust

Well you burst on the scene

Already a legend

The unwashed phenomenon

The original vagabond

You strayed into my arms

And there you stayed

Temporarily lost at sea

The Madonna was yours for free

Yes the girl on the half-shell Would keep you

unharmed

Now I see you standing

With brown leaves falling around
And snow in your hair
Now you're smiling out the window
Of that crummy hotel
Over Washington Square

Our breath comes out white clouds
Mingles and hangs in the air
Speaking strictly for me
We both could have died then and there

Now you're telling me You're not nostalgic Then give me

another word for it You who are so good with words And at keeping things

vague

Because I need some of that vagueness now

It's all come back too clearly yes I loved you dearly

And if you're offering me diamonds and rust

I've already paid

I was shadowboxing earlier in the day

I was shadow-boxing earlier in the day
I figured I was ready for Cassius Clay
I said “Fee, fie, fo, fum, Cassius Clay, here I come
26, 27, 28, 29, I’m gonna make your face look just like mine
Five, four, three, two, one, Cassius Clay you’d better run
99, 100, 101, 102, your ma won’t even recognize you
14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, gonna knock him clean right out of his spleen”

Smoking lady

Thursday, June 2, 2016

Muybridge animation: more late-night madness

Worked on these, and worked on them, oh boy. To give you an idea of what I started with, here are the original images:

These had to be individually cropped apart, made exactly the same size, worked on to enhance to definition, then put through my gif program in correct order. Did it take a long time? Was it fiddly and difficult? What's good about all this is how completely absorbing it is. Donald Trump and climate change and jihad don't scare me any more than a package of Hostess Twinkies.

Is that good? I'm still trying to figure that out.

I'm crazy, right? Why am I doing this so late at night?

Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Pure magic: gifs from Piper Spit

I love making gifs, in full knowledge that they don't always run so well. They can be slow or jerky for the first thirty seconds or so when you open a post, but normally they resolve - or at least, they do for me. For you, they may not be jerky at all, I hope.

Lately I've been able to make some really beautiful ones from our Burnaby Lake visits. I've found a new program - Imgur - well, until IT stops working too, as they all do. Imgur works well and makes some huge gifs, but is very very slow and it's hard to save them. I'm not sure why that is. I use another one called Giphy that takes about thirteen seconds to make a beautiful gif, but it can only be from a short video, and a maximum of ten seconds long. Imgur is more like fifteen. But then, that's not important - is it? All that matters is getting them up here, a few seconds of magic time seen over and over again.

Some people say they hate gifs, and I do too, the two-second ones that are supposed to be funny. They are awful. People with the right equipment can make one-minute ones, but why don't I see them anywhere?

That gorgeous alpha male red-winged blackbird just swooped down on me unbidden, but after he finally left, THIS gorgeous creature came along. Looking it up, I found out it was a female red-winged blackbird, explaining her boldness. It's hard to describe her beauty, as her feathers were shot through with gold.

Now here's a nice little sequence! Though if you watch carefully, the male actually waited until the female flew away. Or so it appears - unless she saw him coming - but that's not likely, because he flew up behind her. May I say once more - I have NEVER fed wild birds, and don't believe in feeding wildlife, but in my old age I have become weak, and there is a dire shortage of magic in my life now that my backyard birds have fled. An excuse, no doubt.

These sandhill cranes are mystical creatures, and they love to hang around the docks, hoping to be fed like all these birds. We usually see a mated pair, but this looks to be a smaller bachelor male (note the red mask). I just keep waiting for the pair to return with a fuzzy crane chick. If that happens, oh God, the gifs, the GIFS!!

POST-IT NOTE: Sometimes I think the gifs have to go through one entire (in this case, 15-second) cycle to run properly. But how do I know? All I know is that they DO run properly eventually, but if they're slow and jerky it takes forever to run through that first cycle. Just keep watching, they'll move. These are some of the nicest gifs I've ever made. Just little packages of magic.

Tuesday, May 31, 2016

A bird in the hand: mystery songbird at Piper Spit

Later identified as a tree swallow, but can't they come up with a more lyrical name than that?! This guy's song was intoxicating. Like all the birds at Piper Spit, he's too tame for his own good, and I know I'm not helping matters with my handfuls of seeds. But what can I say? I'm weak, and short on magic moments in my life. I have NO birds in my back yard all, and barely any squirrels, though last year it was just teeming out there. Don't know why. Even took down the new bird house in case they thought it was a predator (like those plastic owls you see). And our former favourite haunt, the "duck park" at Lafarge Lake, is being bulldozed to make way for a Nazi-like cement amphitheatre (just the name has Third Reich connotations to me - like something from Hitler's proposed monstrous empire, Germania). We may never get that lake back, but now we have this.

Blackbird singing. . . on Piper Spit

I can't describe to you the feeling of having this handsome devil fly right down to me without any prompting. I know I shouldn't be feeding him, but I am. I'm tired of feeling like an evil human being. I need my moments of utter magic, and I find so many of them in this magical place.

Blackbird, fly: magic on Burnaby Lake

I was astounded when this guy flew right down to me. Obviously he has no fear, which is not the best thing for him. But it's the best thing for me. He is magnificent and he knows it!

Cat Licking Vacuum Cleaner

Treat 'em rough and make 'em like it: MEOW!

Monday, May 30, 2016

How do you spell Mississauga?

You know that whatever may be going on in the world, at any moment, I can make a gif out of it.

This was what went on today in a parking lot in Costco. In Mississauga. That's one-Mississauga, two-Mississauga. . . whatever. It's Toronto, a cheap-ass, cut-rate version of Toronto, outlying scar(borough) tissue.

And here. Here are a whole bunch of people punching each other out. One guy knocks a woman over backwards, and that's not nice, no. Pushing a woman over onto cement. You can't hear the screaming here because I don't like posting videos (because I know nobody watches them), but believe me, it's fierce. The main word used is "fuck".

Depressing to think that Canadians used to be known as polite, as self-effacing, as peaceable. I don't see that here. I don't know what they're punching each other out for. The last parking space? The last 500-pack of Cheap-Ass Brand toilet paper? Had this been the States, somebody would be dead by now, because of that inalienable Right to Bear Arms. As it is, people are just screaming and punching each other bloody. Over nothing, really. Nothing they'll even remember tomorrow.

Catfall

NOTE. This is one of my gif animations, though I have to admit the images were sort of there already, borrowed from Google images. I guess you'd call this "fair use", like those ads with the animated raisins Maisie and Jake from the 1950s that show up on YouTube. I'm not quite clever enough to photograph falling cats this way, so I had to photoshop the cat at each pose on identical strips of black. This took a lot of experimentation and wasn't that smooth, due to being constricted to just five frames. Should I try again and make the cats closer together? Not sure it would make a difference. Anyway, here is the kitty falling at three speeds.

Before I dispense with this because it is becoming boring and I want to go to Piper Spit and feed blackbirds (which I never do), here's the cat falling over a shorter distance. This does show off the dramatic twist in the air which cats accomplish over very short distances, but it still isn't very smooth. Still, it's the best one yet.