Hooray! My second novel, Freaks of Nurture, is now available on Amazon! Head on over and read the first few chapters for free!

Freaks of Nurture is a fast, funny story with an engaging cast of characters who do their best in weird but comic circumstances.

Dr. Susan Seligman has grown her little walk-in psychotherapy clinic in Seattle into a prospering business. But just as her most important funding sponsor is carrying out a site visit, many of her clients report that someone is reading their minds. When some of her own staff wrap the clinic rooms in tinfoil, things unravel quickly.

Meanwhile, in the building behind the clinic, three brilliant but oddball college students are working in secret to find the source of consciousness. They’ve concocted a mad scientist’s wet dream of a machine to enable them to look into another person’s head. Of course, they don’t know that every test of their gadget is beaming right into the clinic next door, affecting everyone there and causing havoc.

Freaks of Nurture tells the funny story of these two groups of people, both earnest but weird, independently struggling with the mysteries of romance, consciousness, power, and accidental pharmacology.

I recently self-published my first novel, Home Security, on Amazon for reading with Kindle. A few days ago I self-published my second book, Freaks of Nurture. And I’m now editing my third book, Bait, for publication soon.

This would have been impossible without the wonderful program Vellum. The rest of this post is a love letter to Vellum.

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I’m thrilled to announce that my first novel, Home Security, is now available on Amazon! Woohoo!

Home Security is a funny, fast-moving book with a cast of characters pursuing oversized dreams.

Dr. Nora is a radio therapist who seems to specialize in awful advice. But some people find her brilliant, and they have made her show popular. Unfortunately for Nora, one of her fans is a weasly little con man named Torrelious Fulture, who owes millions to the mob. His problem is that they want their money now, and he hasn’t got it. He’s got his eye on one big score that would save him, but the mark isn’t biting. So Fulture has sent his hit man to kidnap Nora and bring her to a house in the woods, where he imagines she will counsel him one-on-one and help him close his deal.

Jenny Jetrowski is a nice person with dreams of serious journalism. A tight job market has made her Nora’s assistant producer, but after two weeks she needs to move up to something better, like shoveling elephant poop. But before she can give notice, Nora gets been kidnapped, and Jenny must take over for her boss on the air (good), and organize her rescue (bad).

Meanwhile, Chet Weinhard has found himself at the Seattle airport with nothing but a gym bag and a check from his parents, who have just flown away to an unknown destination with a shadowy television evangelist.

With the help of neighbors and friends, Jenny and Chet design their own elaborate, high-stakes con to bring in Fulture and rescue Dr. Nora.

This funny story is populated with colorful characters and a sense that, no matter how bad things seem, they can always get more ridiculous.

And you can download it now!

Pixar provides a wonderful program for viewing and manipulating images. The name of the program is a contraction of “image tool.” It’s named it. Seriously. The pronoun.

There’s a certain beauty to this name, because it’s one of the worst possible names you could give a program. It would be hopeless to try to search for information on this program online. Every sentence involving it comes up has to be carefully parsed to determine if you’re talking about it. As happened right there. Twice.

And of course, the Abbot and Costello routines write themselves.

A: So the next step it to open it.
C: Done.
A: So you have it open?
C: Yes, it’s open.
A: Just to be sure, what’s open?
C: it.
A: it?
C: Yes, it.
A: What’s open?
C: it!
A: Suppose I work in the cubicle next to you. I want to help you with your rendering.
C: That’s great, it’s always nice to have colleagues.
A: So I come over to see what’s on your screen, and what do I see?
C: it.
A: It’s what?
C: It’s it!
A: That’s what I’m asking ya!
C: That’s what I’m telling ya!
etc.

Pixar has made their RenderMan product free for non-commercial use! Huzzah! This is great news for anyone who likes to mess around with shaders and shapes.

If you’re not using Maya or Kantana, then you need to run RenderMan from the command line. Which is fine, but I found that there were a few hoops I had to jump through to get it turn on my Mac running OS X 10 (Yosemite). Here’s what I did.

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If Star Trek was written by the guy who wrote the book I’m reading now:

“Hello again for the ten-thousandth time, Mr. Data.”
“Hello Captain Picard. Welcome back to the bridge of the Enterprise, the ship you are the captain of.”
“Indeed I am. And you are my trusted science officer, even though you are a robot.”
“But I am a robot that strives to understand people.”
“As we have discussed so many times, Mr. Data. Please point the ship towards danger.”
“Of course, Captain. I am bound to follow your orders, as I am a member of Star Fleet, a military-like organization with a strict chain of command.”
“As am I, Mister Data. But you would follow my orders anyway, as we have a bond of mutual respect.”
“Forged in many close calls in which we have come to each other’s assistance.”
“True. And though we carry weapons on this ship, we are a peaceful organization.”
“Of course we are, sir.”

Everyone knows about using alpha to create composite images. But what does alpha really mean? Is it how much of a pixel is covered by a fragment? Is it the opacity of the color in that pixel? Is it some combination of these things, or maybe even something else?

The graphics literature is very fluid on this question, interpreting alpha pretty much in whatever way is most convenient on a moment-to-moment basis. In this technical note, we look closely at alpha and the compositing process using the over operator, and come to a clear understanding of what alpha represents.

I keep telling my students to use parentheses all the time. I even tell them to parenthesize something like 2+(3*4), even though we know that multiplication has precedence over addition, because it’s a good habit to always be crystal-clear to humans and computers alike.

Sometimes I feel silly for being so dogmatic about this. But I just spent an hour debugging, because (a&0xFF<<24) did not put my alpha value into the top 8 bits of an int. It should have been ((a&0xFF)<<24). Now I feel good again about telling people to use lots of parentheses!

Animated gifs can be big. A 300-frame animation at 500-by-500 pixels can easily run 25 megabytes (MB) or more.

25 MB doesn’t sound like much these days, but there are still a lot of services out there for whom that’s too big. For example, Tumblr has a 10 MB limit. In order to get my animations down to Tumblr size, I’ve relied on two blunt tools: making each frame smaller (and thus losing detail), and making fewer frames (causing shorter or choppier animation).

Recently, though, I discovered something that surprised me: gif compression depends very much on the directional qualities of your image (unlike, say, JPEG). After the break, some data I’ve collected and some advice. Continue reading →

Here’s an animation I made using the new AUMultiField masking call. This is an animated gif that I drew and saved one frame at a time.

I first drew a big white circle on a black background, and saved that in an AUField. That was my mask.

To draw each frame, I first drew the checkerboard full-screen and saved it in an AUField (I could have also drawn it into an offscreen PGraphics buffer). Then I cleared the screen to white, drew the outer circle, then the checkerboard with the mask, so it didn’t clobber my existing background and circle, and then finally drew the red dot on top.