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January 6th, 2008

01:50 am - Inverlacer! I wrote a little program that will read in a graphics file, invert every second line, and write a new file as the output. ( Source (Look Ma! No comments!) ) It depends on a command called convert, which is pretty standard in Linux distributions. I'm not 100% certain this would work on Windows, but if it does it would need ImageMagick to be installed and "rm temp.ppm" would probably have to be changed to "del temp.ppm". (How come the Windows command to remove a directory is rd, following the UNIX pattern of rm to remove a file, but the Windows command to remove a file doesn't follow that pattern? Oh, wait, I'm expecting consistency from Microsoft. My bad.) It's not quite finished, yet. It would be nice if it would write an image file in any format, and not just PPM format. That's easy but I'm lazy. It would also be nice if it deleted the temporary file it uses when it was finished. There's really kind of no excuse for it not doing that, I'm afraid. (Fixed.) It could do a little more error-checking too, so that it doesn't do silly things if the file doesn't exist or whatever. The biggest issue is that it doesn't do what I want. It does a full RGB invert which is kind of ugly, when what I really want to do is convert the RGB value to HSV, invert the V, and then convert the result back to RGB. That can really be quite pretty, but as you can probably figure by looking here, is somewhat non-trivial. Ugh maths. By way of example with my beautiful face, the image on the left is the original, the one in the middle is what this program does, and the one on the right (which took me fucking ages to do in GIMP) is what I want it to eventually do. Tags: coding, geek, graphics

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April 10th, 2007

06:26 pm - Goosey gets a new look! Not so much before and after shots, unfortunately; more in-between and after. You can pretty much spot the difference between the two - a more natural skin-tone, a more natural nose-line, more blue eyes and getting rid of that horrible yellow local light. Actually, although you can't see it so well in the second picture, the inverse radioactivity symbol I use as my avatar's belt-buckle now casts a blue light. Which doesn't make sense since the actual object is still yellow, but hey, this is Second Life, laws of optics be damned! Speaking of optics, these shots were taken with the lovely 'sniper-scope' zoom functionality in the software (which changes the FOV instead of the distance between the camera and the object, as the 'regular' zoom does). That makes for a nice striking image, but doesn't really let you see what this new look entails. What you can see, even from these shots, however, is a certain femininity to the avatar's look. This is a male avatar. I can tell because when I go to edit the av's appearance, I get a radio button for gender, and it's quite firmly set to 'Male'. I don't know why I'm more open to androgyny online than I am in real life, but I can (and will, in a minute) hazard a few guesses. I know what it's not, and that's a deliberate attempt to deceive someone or to misrepresent myself - even when I play Cat in AO, I make no secret of the fact I'm male 'IRL'; though I try not to make a big deal out of it, either. Oh, and it's also not a sexual fetish; I'm simply not interested in cyb0r kthx. What is it, then? Well, any, all, or none of the following:- Simply, in a world where I can choose my own appearance in minute detail, I'm going to be able to pull off an androgynous look better than I can in real life. As a symbolic statement, it's not so much "oooh, look at me, I'm so different" but quite the opposite: being 'of a plural gender', being 'everyman/woman', having the best of both worlds. As Torley (who, incidentally, has male, female, and hard-to-tell avatars) would logically put it, it's "being an AND person, not an OR person". That's something I can definitely identify with. I don't spend all or even most of my time in first-person mode. That is, no-one's going to have to look at my avatar as much as I do, so with that in mind, it might as well be something I find aesthetically pleasant. I find femininity more visually pleasing than masculinity, which might go some way to explaining why I'm straight (or perhaps vice versa). Perhaps the most plausible of all: Sephiroth was pretty feminine, and Sephiroth was cool! There are probably more, but I don't want to labour the point and start sounding like I'm trying to defend it. As far as I'm concerned it's not something that needs defending, and I'd find it difficult to make a contrary opinion worth my time. (Says the guy who even bothers commenting on FSTDT...) I think the idea that using an opposite-sex avatar somewhat sleazy and only ever used as a way for dirty old men to interact with 13-year-old girls is definitely a very narrow view. As long as it isn't used with an intent of deception (and even then, it depends on the intent of the intent of deception ;)) I'm all for it. Anyway, this was supposed to be a picture post and I got carried away, so... more pictures! More FOV fun. LAND OF TEH G14NTS! I own a small amount of land in the Whiskey region. It's permanently snowy there. I love it ^_^ I'm currently working on building a nuclear-bunker-styled thing there, although it's not much of a haven from nuclear fallout, since the signs on the outside indicate a biohazard and 'Danger of Death' inside. Not that the shelter would do any good, after critical exposure to the beeps and beats at Club Reactor. Those were pictures. Hope to be updating more often again. - Goosey Tags: gender, graphics, second life

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