Week 5 - UPDATED 1ST APRIL

There's been some things that I've been doing over the week that could relate to this final project etc so this is sort of a combination of week 4 and week 5... Last week I made a small page with a picture of an eye but you can't see it until you scroll over a particular spot on the screen and then when u press on that stop the eye changes! OOOH pretty CrAzY!! But I think it looks alright. And I also wanted to put bits of movie clips on the page but as yet I don't know how to only get bits of them. Said movies were just little clips that I took with my webcam the other day (and everyone told me that thing wouldn't come in handy for anything other than porn, bah!). Because of the delay of the camera if you move your head or something fast then it ghosts really creepily across the picture. I also took the webcam and turned it on itself so that you could see it going back back back back back through the screen and everytime you pressed a button it delayed a little so you could see it going back through one screen then the next then the next in a cannon sequence. Not completely sure what do do with them and what the meaning is yet but I'm sure I can think of something, in fact small fragments of ideas about meaning are already coming to mind. Today we made clips with sound. I'm really proud of my sound :D my dad calls it a star wars frog which is probably true but that wasn't really what I was aiming for :S I took a phone number and practically cut out everything but the silence in between the beeps because i could hear a funny noise going on in there, then I slowed it down that hey presto there was my looping sound. Then I added a terribly named 'martian' effect or something like that over it and slowed it even more and took a couple of small random pieces from it to make my button sounds. creeeeepy!! But as was said today, the sounds have to match the meaning of the 'interface' or whatever it's called?? So I'm not sure if i'm up to that level yet... maybe i need to make a screen about star wars frogs.... Before Kaya told me about the phone number thing the sounds I was intending to make is that weird sound you can make with your mouth that sounds kind of like a sick guitar, then I realised i should just get out one of my sick old guitars (sick as in ill health, not 'awesome cool') and just play the noise (it's done by amplifying it then just scratching either your fingernails or a pick down the strings on a steel string guitar obviously.) and it sounds like someone's voice weirdly enough. I took my guitar to school in grade 12 and used that exact technique in a contemporary dance piece that I had to choreograph and also be in. Sheesh, hard work dancing with a frikkin guitar! But not as hard as FLASH. Oh now that I think about it. I realise something that I really like on all these sites including the donnie darko site and the flying puppets is that they all use, in some small way, creepy dance. Like bodies moving creepily, it looks creepy because it is disjointed - in Donnie it is that page with the endless looping of a small dance piece to crazy music. In flying puppets it's that one flash work that I looked at back in my first blog. I also realise that my little webcam movies are not unlike this. I was trying to create strange body movement. Unfortunately my webcam doens't like it if you move more than a foot away from it and starts to get very blurry, so I couldn't really do anything that had even my whole torso in it, but I suppose I could try, the blur might add to it. Oooh i feel a new idea forming. Looking at body movement. Nice work Alinta!

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Now really in week 5…

Again I tried to get into the lab to use the adobe audition but again there was a class in there. Is there ever not a class in there???

I have no idea how I’m going to get this numbers thing done. The world is against me! I can’t download, I mean buy, adobe audition or whatever it’s called until I get to mums because this lil old lappy just wont handle it and it’d take a whole day to download, which I can’t do because I’m always having to turn off the net so that dad can have a go of it on his computer. But I can’t do anything much in flash at mum’s because it’s the old version of flash and it won’t open anything that I’ve made in flash here at dads, which I didn’t quite realise. So just stay at dads till you have it done, you say, or do the audio at home then bring it to your dads you say, well that is all well and good, but I can’t do that either, because there is only a particular amount of time I am allowed to stay at each place. I have to go home tomorrow because I have to get my shit together for oh experimental imaging! Where I cannot print any of my stuff here at dads because I don’t have a printer. So pay the money and get it done at a shop, you say, well I can’t because I want to er ‘experiment’ with it, (then I shall no doubt change it again before Friday and have to print it all AGAIN) but I can’t do that until Friday because no one will take me to buy the special paper until then, and even then they may change their mind, because I don’t have a car and I’ll be up on tambo on Friday and there’s no other way for me to get down. So get a car, you say, well first I need a job to get money, so get a job you say, well first I need a car so I can drive from the mountain to the job everyday. Well get a job on the mountain you say, well then it’s the opposite problem because I’m living on the coast for 50% of the time, so either way I will have to drive from one to the other. SOOO you can see how all this is affecting my flash. I’m drinking brain juice right now, but it doesn’t seem to be helping. Also none of the raw flash files that I picked off the web will open on dad’s lappy, I think they must be in flash mx not flash mx 2004??? Because it keeps telling me that it’s not compatible etc. I got them off flashkit a few weeks ago. Oh well they suck anyway and I can’t remember how to import them because obviously what I’ve tried so far hasn’t worked, and most of them are only swf files and they won’t be imported, or so it tells me. So my plan is to go back to tambo from dads tomorrow morning, with my new memory stick (yaaaaay) to take all my files on for these two damn classes (imagetext and EI) together they take up half of a 512mb stick!!!!! Already!!!!! Before I go I will re-open all my flash files a resave them into flash mx so that they will (hopefully) open at home. But then once I’m on the old one does that make importing sound and video different?? Argh! So then Friday I plan to buy this paper and spend a lot of foolish time killing my printer with it. Then I plan to hand that in on Monday and hopefully by Monday night I will have some idea of how I want to make my numbers project. And Monday night will be the first night that I am back here at dads to be able to use the newer flash. That is, if I’m even here at all, because he cannot bring me down that day because he is going away, and I can’t get mum to bring me down because she is without a car for two weeks. *sigh* I have no idea. Did I mention that for my numbers thing I’m thinking of doing how people tend to judge themselves and each other on how many times they have done things? I’m not totally sure how to relay it through flash, I think I would really need a couple of weeks to create it. But I was thinking I could ‘mine’ some sort of drop down list like that one that was in the bird flu piece, and tell little stories of people doing things for the first time or the 1000th time or anything. It’s just… you know… getting started that’s the problem.

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So it's now Saturday and I started to download Adobe Audition yesterday onto my computer. I hope that is it's name... If I sound rushed or snappy it is because this is the third time I have tried to write this out. I didn't realise that to download a torrent you had to download a program to download the torrent. So after I got myself a 'bit-torrent' I proceeded to download adobe Audition. The reason why i could not do this earlier in the week was because I was waiting until i got home to the mountain to use the broadband to download it, secondly because i thought i had a chance of getting into the lab to use it but there was always classes in there. So I only attempted to download it on Friday. However it was downloading slower than if we were on dial up! Very very slow. In fact this morning (left it on all night) it was telling me that it still had one day and 18 hours left to download, which was also what it was saying last night, so due to this i can presume that when we get in to class on Tuesday to hand it in, it was STILL be downloading on my computer at home.

But hold your horses, this story is only just beginning! Come Saturday and it was a beautiful day, very sunny with a crisp cold breeze. Not a cloud or a storm in sight, but because I live on Tamborine Mountain, the home of incredibly bad power supply, our power was going on and off all day as if we were in a cyclone. So the computer was turning itself on and off all the time while i was desperately trying to download this program, so I had to keep going back to it and turning it back on after the power flickered, this meant that i could not leave the house let alone the computer room all Saturday. The first time the power flickered it buggered up the modem but the computer managed to turn itself back on after it hiccupped a few times, so I had to turn the modem on and off a few times at to try and get it to work again. Luckily it pulled through and after a while I got my download working again - I was beside myself with worry that it was going to have to start all over again, but luckily it picked up where it left off (30% in about as many hours). The second time the power flickered the modem was fine but the computer did not turn itself back on like the first time, so this was when i realised i would have to sit beside it and manually keep turning it back on. A sane person wouldn't leave their computer on while the power was doing this, but I was very much in need of getting damn audition downloaded before sunday when i wouldn't need it anymore anyway (going to dads therefore can't use the home computer obviously). The THIRD time it went I was typing this blog up for the first time and lost it all, and this time the power stayed off, so I realised i should try to re-write my blog by hand before i forgot what i was going to say.

What I was going to say, was that I am unsure as to what I should do about the mining of these sites. As yet I still haven't found any decent mines that I can use in my numbers creation, as i specifically designed my site keeping in mind that it had to be simple enough for someone like me to be able to make, therefore had no grand ideas of special pages that needed fancy stuff, if that makes sense. In other words I did something that i KNEW that i could do. However I suppose that i can think of some simple ways to incorporate some mined files into my site that would make the site much quicker for me to create, however I'm worried that the response from the audience to this would be just that - that it looked like something done at the last minute to take up space, which in fact would not necessarily be true and I can prove it to you with this thesis... The sporadic intervention of abstract and arty pages derived from mined files may appear to be misplaced only because thus far the main focus of my work is a narrative. Because it has a narrative structure and follows stories and has a high reading content, people may not see how other highly abstract and less narrative pages could fit into this because their brains have settled into a logical pattern of what they expect the events of [what is after the next link] to be. (I understand that that sentence missed out many linking words such as 'is', but too bad, it's late at night and i am stressed.) In fact the mashing together of literary pages and arty pages into this maze type structure that i am creating is very much centered around the name of the course "imagetext", a hybrid word made by the mashing together of two art forms, the pictures and the writing. But I will be interested to see what kind of comments I get about it on Tuesday from the class. I bet anything that they will mention that the mined files seem misplaced in the narrative structure (however my class mates won't use words as big as 'narrative' mwahaha), they will dislike the sporadic placement, but that’s too bad because I like it. Secondly I hope that they like it due to the length of time they will have to spend on it. it is like a maze of questions or like a quiz type thing and I think that once I'm finished with it, it will take quite a bit of time to work though. I still, in fact, haven't figured out how to end it, whether to come to a 'final' page, or whether to just keep it linking through and back over itself - eg link back to the beginning, not that there would be much point in that, and people would feel 'jibbed' out of some sort of 'prize' for winning the 'quiz'. let's just hope I get it done... I suppose I should go into a bit more detail about what my project is, but everyone will see it soon enough. Like i said before, it looks at stories about how many times people have done things, the NUMBER of times they have done things, to be more precise to the subject, and it works ina multiple choice format therefore the audience can choose how many times the 'thing' has happened, and clicking on the answer will take it to a new page. Does that make sense?? Argh!

Something out there really doesn't want me using sound! Or a shower for that matter... (no power). Which sucks because I reckon if I had a day or even an hour with that program I could make up something cool. In fact if i had bloody POWER right now I could do something cool. I'm thinking of having one more final try of getting into that lab tomorrow. I have been trying all week to get in there but there is always, always a class. Surely there isn't any classes in there on SUNDAYS, however the whole building might just be locked. Which may pose a tiny problem. If it is not locked I’m sure my entire imagetext class will be in there, and I don't really want to be making weird sounds in front of the class, but i suppose everyone is in the same boat. So here i am giving up my entire weekend for Audition.

When the power came back on at about 4pm, I tried to turn on the computer to find that it just wouldn't respond. i turned it on and off at the wall and unplugged it a few times, still nothing. So at this very moment I'm typing at someone else's house on Saturday night because now my computer at home is officially dead. No more downloading adobe audition for me. Those piracy gods must have found out about me. So now everything is truly screwed. Yay. I really don't know what else I can do to get he sound equipment on my numbers thing, let alone if I can finish it at all, as I no longer have a computer. I really have tried everything I can and ever attempt I have made gets thwarted - whether that be at home or at uni. In fact I have an assignment due on Monday and then this one on Tuesday, one being photoshop images, so I need my computer for both those things. How did we ever live before computers came along?



With a lot less stress one would presume...

Week 4 Homework

So this weeks homework is to propose ideas for our 'big' assignment... I'm not entirely sure if it is our 'big' assignment but I'm assuming that it is.

I suppose I've sort of already done this in my previous posts when I was talking about the idea of losing everything. I think at the time i talked about losing to a house fire (all collections being burnt up) but I realise the idea could encompass a far wider idea of loss than this, as there is no 'fire' in my 'game'. Another addition that I have been thinking of is maybe I don't want a poassword system as it might get too complicated but maybe a system where people can enter any word that they choose... but wait hang on that wouldn't work because it'd jump to the next page after they entered one letter, wouldn't it... see I need to think more logically. Anyway I've already created a small password system. So far when you type in the word 'rose' a red dot appears wow but obviously this is just a template type thing. I dunno maybe I've lost the plot.

BY THE WAY I've had a terrible day. This must be what they call suffering the slings and arrows of outragious fortune. Or whatever. Fuck off Hamlet. And your skull man father thing. Today is crap. Or was crap. Woe is me what am I to do with myself. Did you know I have a stalker? It's relivant because he is an internet stalker and sends me emails. I just learnt how to block them today :D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D maybe I can do a flash piece on stalking. No it's be far too depressing. I don't wish to do that.

I want to make something special. No hang on that came out wrong, but like I'e been thinking of artistic layout of my assignment and I keep thinking of this children's book called The Red Tree. Anyway in the end of the book the last picture is of a grey dank room with a little red tree sprouting out of the floor like it is something precious and to be cherished. I was to create interfaces like that - where you just see something small and precious in the middle of the page. Oh this isn't making sense I think I'm going to bed.

Vectorboy

So Say (Sarah from class) has told me that I need to blog about Vectorboy. Well really it was my idea, but I’ll give her the credit because I’m generous. Vectorboy is the lovechild that has become of the sordid affair flash and myself have been having. And now I feel the need to come clean, bare my soul. We originally named him Pixelboy, until the father, Flashman, reminded me that he works with vectors not pixels or some sh*t like that. So Vectorboy was born. I may be totally wrong and confusing the word 'vector' with something else, but nonetheless, he is now Vectorboy.

And uh… that’s all I can say about it at this stage… he craps and spews all over the place like most babies do. And that ‘crap’ becomes my flash artwork… because it is just that…

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On another note, I do understand that since I have such little experience with flash i good idea would be to concentrate maybe on the content of the work rather than how it is presented using said program. But as yet I can't even figure that part out...

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I'm now sitting in class. I vow to remake my collections animation tonight... this is my statement. I do not, however, vow that it be any better...

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It’s now Wednesday the 22nd. I went back to the Donnie Darko site last night because I am wanting to do a similar password thing for one of our flash works. This time the net worked really well for me and I got to see the site properly. It’s actually really fun and quite intriguing even though I haven’t seen the movie. But was it meant to end in level three? I thought it was going to go on for a lot longer than this L but I suppose it is a lot bigger than it seems – and would have taken quite a while to do in flash. To me this site is very, oh what is the word, ‘modern’ or something. It has a sort of ‘pop art’ edge to it and also a very minimalist tone with the great expanses of white, but it builds on itself as you’re watching it. The sound also adds another dimension, I so so wish that I had some sort of sound editing program. I also like the static way some of the pictures flash as if they are faltering, is this done in Flash, or is it done before it’s imported into Flash? I imagine it is done before it is imported. *sigh* That’s a shame.

I also stayed up all night trying to create said passwordy thing. I asked on a forum and their in depth replies just confused me even more, so i asked for more help on what they had said, and that confused me even more even more. So I ended up being tutored via correspondence of MSN where I asked a friend of mine to take the comments given to me by the forum and put it into lamens terms for me, step by step. Unfortunately said person is also an ex boyfriend of mine, so all through the conversation comments like "see, you need me" were spat at me, and after it was all over he got angry at me for using him for flash help. Next time I think i'll just keep to myself...

It took about two hours or more to create this little box where, if a word is entered, it goes to a red dot. Wow huh? But yeah, it was so difficult for me I think I’m all Flashed out now…

Week 3 Collections

Collections

After thinking long and hard about what I collect the only thing I can think of that I really collect other that boring things like DVD’s was that I collect pictures of people that I know and I collect information and pictures of people who I don’t like and create dossiers on them. This got me thinking along the lines of some sort of security mainframe collection. But this is a bit… I dunno… clichéd… and just crap I dunno. I shall add more to this blog........ obviously.... this was just writing in class....

Maybe I should make fictional… stuff… also thinking about how these pictures link together with the images. Eg, the photos also represent memories of times – proof of the past, etc. So maybe I could make like a story just out of images linking together. Almost reminiscent of a graphic novel type thing etc, almost animation with how the images are similar etc. But I’m not sure if I have images like that. Hmmm…

Oh just had a thought, I also went thru a stage of collecting funny junk mail back when the junk mail they used to send me was actually funny. I have 50 or so of them maybe 100 I can’t remember but anyway they’re just weird abstract sentences and I call it ‘junk poetry’, a page for it would sort of have that kind of lost and found effect thingy, except totally random… what is the copyright on this??? I will elaborate on this soon..ish...

MAYBE I could link these together and create ‘memories’ etc to match these strange stories – eg. As if the stories were my FBI dossier that I have on people. Am I creepy? Anyway… but that’s like saying make text about the text instead of text about the images. Maybe its’ the images that I’ll have to create in this case.

More final thoughts: Concentrate on the junk mail. Junk mail as signs. What is this junk mail saying about people? Etc… really – I have no idea what it’s saying about people! But you’d have to read it to get that… an example of this junk mail is below, this particular one a friend fwded to me (as everyone knew about my love of them) for my birthday in 2004, how nice! –

chain saw fetishists living with 462

"Denny, although somewhat soothed by around marzipan and cloud formation behind alchemist.But they need to remember how ostensibly food stamp behind deficit self-flagellates.Still prefer her from line dancer from inferiority complex, pee on her beyond chess board with related to power drill.Unlike so many trombones who have made their mean-spirited labyrinth to us."

Hmmm.... yes.... damn those mean-spirited trombones!! And pee on her beyond the chess board I say!! I wonder what terrible feminist rants I could go on about the peed on woman holding the power drill... bah probably nothing that hasn't already been said before! Oh well...

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I'm writing this the next day (wednesday) but I like to keep it in here so it's neat with one blog per week. However if you were wondering, I am the total opposite to a neat freak!...

Further Ideas

So I’ve been having trouble with having some sort of genius break through on my junk poetry, other than brainstorming about the word ‘junk’, which led me to wonder what the hell kind of ‘career outcomes’ I’m going to get from that… now when I think of the word ‘junk poetry’ I hear sweet little tunes being banged out on musty cans at the dump. (In case things are different in America, a ‘dump’ is that place where they take all the rubbish and let it cartwheel around in a big whole where lots of animals can kill themselves).

I do most of my thinking when I really should be trying in vain to get to sleep, and so this is what I thought last night… I was thinking about how I’m so envious of all these interesting people who collect all this interesting stuff like dust or whatever, but you know, it’s enviable!! So I started to think ‘why DON’T I collect anything like that???’ I thought of how I often think to myself things like ‘if my house burnt down what would be the one think I took obviously other than my family and my pets?’ and since I couldn’t exactly rip my computer out of the wall while a fire was blazing, I would probably leave everything. So maybe I don’t collect due to this paranoia about losing it? Or a ‘beaten’ understanding that I will at some point lose it. Now this could be an idea far bigger than something due this week (coz I really like it) but I want to make a sort of game type thing where you build up bits of stuff (junk, whatever, ‘goods’) on your screen and because u have to work to get each one (type in a password maybe, maybe a password relating to a story about the item you are about to receive, and if u remember the password then you are worthy of said item), you will create a connection with this stuff because you have spent time and focused yourself to get it. Then when you lest expect it you hit a button just like all the others you’ve hit before and suddenly all your items disappear. And you have to start again from scratch building your empire again. I don’t mean in a weird sim city way, I mean far simpler than that! I mean more like ‘wow there’s a toaster hanging in the corner of my screen’ that may be the level of animation involved at this stage in flash that I am at… I’m not even sure how I’ll get the password thing to happen. ANYWAY I was thinking this great creation would also be interesting in the psychological sense of seeing how many times people would try to build up stuff, and how long it would take to realise it’s futile, and who would persist anyway and take the chance? By this you could see who was more emotionally attached to stuff. This would work better with competitive people because they would be the most saddened and effected by the fact that they had just lost everything they’d worked for, and they would reach the desired outcome of getting very pissed off at the screen. Strange thing to have as a desired outcome you say, but it’s about gaining an emotional response of sorts out of people, although it probably won’t be a hugely big response seeing as hell it’s only my stupid flash thingy…

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Ok so it's now friday night on the wee st patty's day. But where am I? sitting here in front of this computer no less. Listening to all the cool things Mick and Kaya are doing for their flash pages. Bugger them!! So i got this code thing but i realise the same code comes up if i go to geturl anyway, but it doesn't work when i do test movie... I'm not sure whether i attach it to the fla file or the swf file, either way half my files haven't generated swf files so if they have to connect to the swf's then i'm somewhat screwed. So i have this page right and it has text on it and it links (or is supposed to) to this other page that also has text on it or you can link to this other page that links to another page where the text jumps around a bit!! Insane!! I'm enjoying the idea of just pressing a thousand buttons and then pressing test movie and seeing what comes up. It could be my chaos theory collection - and you can see if you can find a pattern in the randomness of what has been collected on the screen by all my button pressing. Doesn't that just excite the socks off you? It surely does to me, I can't find any socks in sight! So yeah oh i also made this other page that does nothing basically... hmmm... I have no idea what I'm going to do when we have to make our bit 40% thing or however big it is... Aha good old mick has told me how to get swf files made for each fla. Who knew it'd all be so difficult! I now have an intro page as well!

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It's not saturday or sunday I'm not sure but anyway I signed up to a Flash Forum the other day and have made my first post! Their site slogan as "everything a tutorial" oh how sweet and optimistic. I thought his would be a good and studious move in terms of having somewhere to ask questions. I read through some of their posts to see if i could make sense of any of it but their flash-lingo was so out of my league that it went over my head, and after they fattled off in "actionscript" talk for pages they then proceeded to say "oh I'm only very new to this". LIKE HELL. I'll show them 'new to this'1 So that is my latest flash progress. Maybe I should see if Mr Arcticachre (not sure on spelling!) is on this site...

I'll be without a computer from now until monday night so until then my flash (and internet in general) wants, needs and hopes are thwarted. But hopefully I'll be back into all my dread homework after that. Oh PS reason why there is no computer is because it is locked at the uni having flash 8 put on it *very very angry face*. I hate you flash 8.

week two blog

So the first Flash tutorial that I did was how to make a shiny orb on Kirupa.com for flash mx 2004. I did this on the university computers once I found out that even computer lab computers were enabled with Macromedia software! Yay!

…I will admit straight away that I did not succeed in making a shiny orb. I got all the way up to the stage where you use your ‘fill transform tool’ to make your orb have a gradient thingy, but it just wouldn’t select anything on the screen. I can’t figure fill transform tool out. I scoured the page trying to find anything that I might have done from in previous steps to render this tool useless for me at the present stage but couldn’t find anything. So no shiny orbs for me :( So I thought I should try another one instead.

I decided instead to try and create a ‘bevel’ since I kind of had no idea what a ‘bevel’ was other than I’d heard the term ‘bevelled edges’ being used somewhere before.. maybe in photoshop? I just couldn’t believe it, I was having problems with the first line. We were told to change the name of the layer to ‘dark’ but I couldn’t find where to change the name… it took me a couple of minutes to work out but I fiiiinally decided to check the properties of the layer itself, and found it there. I was so worried that I was going to have to try again on a third tutorial after being totally unsuccessful with the first two… but so far things were looking ok. In the end I managed to make a sort of bevel… except it was somehow the opposite to the one on the tutorial – I h ad a light line with a dark colour line behind it and sort of two tone letters. I tried again and again to change the colours of the layers but they didn’t seem to be listening to me. It was rather confusing with all the lock this then unlock this then lock this but I don’t think I did it wrong… argh!

So somehow I also managed to save my file as ‘mononey’ instead of money or whatever .then I opened it again to do the tute on making a full screen flash page. I had a few more hiccups trying to figure this page out as well, as the tutorials told you what buttons to press, but often didn’t tell you where to find these buttons, and I was left hunting all over the screen for them. But yes!! I managed to succeed in this one too, after doubling back only a few times. I was lucky in that in this one I figured out what I had done wrong, however I don’t think I would have figured it out if it wasn’t for the blatantly obvious screen shot of it that was in the tutorial. So after all this so far I have made a white html page with the words ‘mo money’ randomly placed on it. Oh and some sort of orange circle that I discarded earlier… I don’t feel like I have achieved that much :(

I want to do the tutorial on ‘frame jumping’ but it looks a bit too difficult for me. I have just realised there is a whole section called ‘basic’. Weeee. I might check out what is in that.

This word just in…. I seem to be already in the basic section… bugger… so there’s nothing easier that this?? Ok now I’m going to try a few tutorials from a different website. I’m also making a note to go back to kirupa sometime and do the tute on how to get rid of scrollbars. But I just CAN’T do it right now because my attention span has gone to zilch and I need to be on a new page wopieutilfghkjfgjp;kjht hey I just saw a girl I used to work with… how embarrassing she chatted away to me and I didn’t recognise her for ages…

Am now trying to make a button… it says go to insert then convert to symbol but there is no convert to symbol *cries* just ‘create new symbol’ in which I can’t figure out how to turn my image into said symbol… oh hang on I just dragged it onto the screen and it seems to have done something or other… everything may be ok! I realise we already did this in class and I STILL can’t get it… oh well. There is no ‘basic actions’ on the flash that I’m using… and I can find ‘get url’ it is there but not where they say it is however I cannot select it because it is in grey not black if you get what I mean. There’s no object actions box either… it says “current selection cannot have actions applied to it’. I fear it’s something I did wrong back in ‘create button’…?

I GIVE UP

I cheat by getting the source of a sample button page from the site and copying it into notepad. I can’t believe I’ve even forgotten how to save something as html. But it’s all good I figure it out in the end. I doubt this page will work for me as I don’t have their ‘button.swf’ but I think I still have the button we made in class. On opening that old file I find that the rollovers don’t seem to be working on it anymore, yet ‘get url’ does!! Bummer… test movie tells me I have ‘errors’. This is crap, I’ve been here for an hour and a half. I’m going for lunch.

week one blog

Week One Tasks = look at the following websites then discuss in blog (but you already knew that).

Superbad: the title makes it sound like something wanky and/or funny. But it isn’t. I enjoy mazes, and was reminded by some of my own work by it’s layout, however I couldn’t help but feel somewhat defeated by some of the pages for example devils cubes – where it was my responsibility to change the colour of the cubes, but then I noticed when I sat back that the cubes changed colour wether with or without my help. And suddenly I felt as though I was no longer needed. This site was not dependant on me. I also noticed how everything seemed to have a pattern to it, such as the page called ‘bar’ or ‘towel bar’ or something, I couldn’t quite figure out the name of it, but there was order and pattern to it when u did not expect it. By uncovering all the slots at the side, you evened out the bars, and by completely covering them, you evened them out again, but leaving the slots messy was to make things out of pattern. I actually felt a strange modernist sense of euphoria when I had ‘restored order’. Which helped ease my anxiety about the fact that I am on dad’s crappy dial up internet that can’t handle more than one internet window open at a time and doesn’t support flash, and I wasn’t sure if I would be able to view all of these sites, but this was the first one I looked at and it seemed to be working.

Donnie Darko: I have all these windows open at once… I can hear music but I’m not suer which page it’s coming from… I chose to turn the music back down again… but I think it’s coming from the Donnie Darko site. I actually haven’t seen the movie, even though I’ve heard a lot about it and all my friends love it. I tried to get it out just a few weeks ago on a fairly unassuming night but all the copies were hired out… but back to the site… I keep getting stuck… I keep thinking that there is no where left to go, there is nothing I can click on the page, so I just clicked nothing and it changed, so I thought I’d do that again to the next page but it didn’t work, so I assume that maybe my pressing had just coincidently happened the same time as it changed screen. It looks like it’s setting up to be a game but I don’t have any controls, it’s telling me to say yes or no but it’s not letting me do that. Maybe I’m not waiting for it to load for long enough. It finally does something but comes up with the same page and this time it works. I think it’s just my internet being stupid. But either way, I’m not so sure about this one at the moment, the colours are dull and it’d giving me far too much time to write this while I’m waiting… I should be gripped to it, shouldn’t I?? I find I’m skipping through without reading it… just thought I should mention that.

Superbad: Back over at superbad I’ve taken a link that should take me to a page called Jane. I have my reasons for taking this link. Actually I didn’t expect this website to be so big. I thought it would have gone back to the main page or something. Anyway it’s starting to feel like little psychology experiments, I’m being taught how and what to press to make shrimps come and go for baby Jane to eat. I feel like a lab rat, learning and being praised with shrimp for the poor starving chubby girl. The page has decided to stop working now. And a sign has come up across the bottom bar ‘with or without shrimp’. Which am I? Well I know I’ve just given baby Jane a full set of shrimp and I was trying to take it away from her again so I could see her glasses, but it’s frozen. I decide to stop trying to contemplate shrimp and try to get it to move on to the next page which it finally does. It’s a small poem that’s rather random. Now it IS beginning to remind me of my stuff. If only I’d known. There goes Alinta again, stealing things she didn’t even KNOW that she was stealing. Not lying through her teeth, but rather like lying while asleep. Hmm, well none of these comments are saying how the sites do and don’t work for me (other than from a technological perspective of when it is and isn’t stuffing up!) but I sure know that this one is making me self-deprecating. This poem page is boring. I didn’t read it.

Praystation: As yet praystation is coming up as ‘cannot find server’ at me, so I may leave this one for a moment.

Flying puppet: This site looks like something that is going to take a long time to load. I chose the option “detournement (diversion)” because it has a picture of a digitalised body type thing. Something to do with identity maybe, I don’t know, but I’m hopeful, because that is what I am interested in. Yes this site works in the fact that it makes me feel hopeful when I see its interesting opening screen… The description says the body is a dancer. My feelings are suddenly mixed. I have just been thinking about this is terms of my own identity, but this goes against my identity, I am not the best dancer although I have tried. I have been thinking about what to do for one of my assignments and somehow my thoughts landed on a girl that I barely know, but she is a national champion dancer apparently, and when I see the word now on this webpage I am forced to think of her. All blonde and talented and in her lap dancing outfit and having sex with my boyfriend. Well, yes, in some ways, it is definitely part of my identity. Most, most definitely. My opposite, my nemesis, my yang? The dancer? All this and I haven’t even opened the link yet… Well it all comes down to this. It needs something that I don’t have for it to be able to load. Well doesn’t that just fit in perfectly. Why does everything need something that I don’t have? I don’t have a file called shockwave. It’s taking too long to download it. I decide to leave this site to try on a uni computer tomorrow.

Donnie Darko: Donnie seems to be stuck somewhat. It can’t seem to stop telling me about the man on the grass in the foetal position. Every time I do something and it goes to reload it opens the same page. Maybe this, too, is a set up and I am the lab rat. If I knew more about the plot of the movie I’d have a better idea of what to expect… the screen of it has just been white for some time now… empty promises that it is going to load for me. I have decided that all these things are related. That they are all tests. I have also decided Jason may be laughing at me by this stage. That perhaps everyone else has figured it out far before I did, and have not got as frustrated over it either. The Donnie Darko site started off interestingly with it’s little… thingy?? At the start. However my first experience with it has ended quite bitterly.

Wait! Finally something’s loaded, but it seems to be going very slowly, so I still intend to look at it again tomorrow on a different computer, along with the praystation site. I feel like the voice in my head has a terrible speech impediment when I sound that out.

Superbad: I finally think that I’m back at the superbad main page, but I was wrong. Maybe it doesn’t have a main page? That just anything random pops up and it just continues on in one long stream. I was hoping however, in my nonlinear and ‘chunky’ way, that it wouldn’t just be a stream, but there would be other parallel streams going as well, 1000 times more information than I should see in one sitting. Making the site, you know, ‘chunky’. The pages are now just one digital picture per page. Nothing interactive anymore. It’s thinning out. Finally I reach a page I’ve been to before. The one before I took the Jane path. It seems to be showing that I’ve already been to two other pages off this page. Aah it’s starting to get good again, almost too many choices. I’m overwhelmed. I decide I’ll just go and chat on msn or make soup for a while… both sound like nice choices. Nice to be making a choice that won’t take me into another room. Oh sort, I lie again, the soup will take me into the kitchen. This isn’t boding well, just learnt that our computer at home just died and will cost $700 to be fixed.

A while later and I’m still on superbad… so this one gets my thumbs up…

Alinta