Thursday, December 13, 2007

Mosaics Were the First Pixels

I recently reported on my seeming inability to make a halfway-decent building using the program Google SketchUp, and I just wanted to share the fact that I have, in fact, just succeeded in virtually sculpting a moderately admirable edifice. It’s not nearly as nice as I’d like, but - unlike in the crummy real world, where when I erect a shoddy building it usually collapses and kills dozens in a fiery imbroglio that is quite tedious to cover up - I can always go back and improve it later. It’s a pretty accurate (as far as the basic proportions go) model of the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna, and I finally buckled down this afternoon and slapped textures on all the surfaces. I’d originally planned to make a much more realistic simulation, with textures on every surface taken from high-resolution photographs, but I ended up copying some and reusing them in a slapdash and haphazard manner because otherwise the thing was clearly never going to get done. All the major mosaics on the inside, however, are properly placed and pretty sharp-looking.

Here’s what the thing looks like on the outside.
Here’s what my model looks like on the outside.
Here’s a view of the inside.Here’s a view from inside my model.
Not bad, huh? Of course, the vaulted ceilings of the real building don’t have “GREATBUILDINGS.COM” watermarked on them every three feet, but as I said above, this was a rush job just to get the thing textured before I fell into the unique and irrevocable despair which we all know is so disastrously common to thwarted master virtual architects. Now, with at least some progress to show for myself, I feel like a virtual weight has been lifted from my shoulders.

The reason I chose to finish this lil building this week, by the way, is that it seemed like a Christmas-y sort of activity, kind of like decorating a tree only far, far dorkier. My other seasonal activities so far have been to try to read Bede’s Ecclesiastical History in Old English and a recent obsession with keeping tabs on the gradual construction of the Christmas market in Dachau via a webcam. The charming village, that is, not the nearby concentration camp. You think your job’s tough? Just be glad you’re not head of the Dachau Tourist Board.

Sunday, December 02, 2007

Back To the Future

Futurama’s back! I can finally emerge from the Angry Dome.

After several years spent sitting out in the cold like the late, lamented Seymour, we now have a new DVD. It’s not quite as flawlessly comic or surreally original as many of my favorite episodes (the DVD in question is essentially a full-length movie, and the switch from fresh 20-minute TV show to resuscitated zombie movie seems to have hurt the comedy timing and originality a little), but how many shows could be shockingly resurrected two years after being cancelled and still rock?

The four-year run of this show was as good as The Simpsons during any of its peak years, if with nerdier and blacker comedy, and any continuing incarnation of it, even as straight-to-DVD movies, is something about which to rejoice. It’s like if there were suddenly a brand-new Monty Python film or Hitchhiker’s Guide book. I hope it makes several thousand times as much money as that similarly-resurrected-but-colossally-less-good show The Family Guy.

WHOOooooooooo! WHOOOOOOOOoooooooo! Whoooooooo.


What smells like freaking porpoise hork?