It’s the music…

Update: Spoiler Alert! Don’t go any farther unless you want to read my recently hatched, half-brained theories.

Tory, Sam, Chief Tirol, and Tigh are cylons. They hear the music. But I couldn’t find a fifth person that could hear it, even after scrutinizing the re-broadcast. So, here is the important stuff:

Tory is close to the President. Another Hot Cylon… go figure.
Tigh is close to the Admiral. Led the resistance. Had his eye cut out by HIS OWN PEOPLE.
Chief Tirol and Cally have a HYBRID CYLON CHILD. Tyrol was a leader of the resistance as well as:
Sam Anders, who is a… a Pyramid player, and uh… well, a Frackin’ GREAT ONE!

Three key resistance leaders, cylons… WTF mang?

The lack of a 5th leads me to the conclusion that perhaps we have MET the 5th and the fact that she apparently died isn’t going to keep us from catching up with her again. So that old chestnut “Starbuck is a Cylon” may just pan out. Assuming she hasn’t left the show.

Freebie time again. I found the blog, Brass Goggles, again the other night. I have quite a soft spot for all things steam punk, it suits my anachronistic nature. So in that spirit, I went to my library of brushes and found my cogs. I had developed a set of gears for a flash project that is still in development, and several hours of research is still necessary but this is an interim stage, that I would like to share.

In order to use these brushes, just open the file in illustrator and apply brushes to various circles and drawn lines. As illustrators brush engine doesn’t scale all that well, I recommend using trial and error to your settings. Feel free to pull out the pieces and edit them, just please don’t redistribute them without attribution.

Thanks, Mike.

Update: Hey folks, it seems there has been a few issues with how to set up the cogs. This is as much my fault as anyones, as I use my own technique instead of the official Adobe way of creating Brushes. Illustrator can be a bit snarky about bends and turnarounds, and as strange as it sounds, loading brushes backwards solves the problem in some cases. So here are some usage hints:

Start a new doc, creating a new ellipse to begin. I use arbitrary settings so that they can bite me in the ass after several screen caps.

Apply your brush to the ellipse. I choose the first one as I have experimented on it extensively as a proof-of-concept.

It is worth noting at this point that most of your questions start here. So this is where I didn’t provide enough info.

The fix is this: Use the brush options button to open the options dialog. This is where you can exert some power on the applied brush(make sure one is selected!).

Consequently, this dialog will appear:

Notice that it comes pre-scaled at 20% and I have the cursor over “Flip Across.” If the cog looks inside out, this is the setting you need to invert, ie. if it is flipped, unflip it. Notice my teeth are on the outside now.

Next, we need to make this cog solid, in order to use another brush inside it. So I will go ahead and create a .8″ ellipse inside it also.(It doesn’t need to be centered yet, I have intentionally offset it here to illustrate which piece is which.

Note the second is not much smaller, which is also to show how other brushes interact. Now we apply a brush to it, using Pattern Brush 22, which I like. It has a large center section and a bit of a curve to it.

Wow, that is really screwed up, but wait! You know how to fix it. That fun Brush Options dialog! I set mine to 30% initially with Flip Along Unchecked, and Flip Across Checked. Yielding this:

If you are unable to color your brushes, it maybe because of Hue Shift is not the option selected at the bottom.

Now it is up to you to make it nice. I did finally settle on 40% for my scale, and used the align palette to center the two original brushes and the new little white circle that I created. This is the final example:

If you are still having problems recreating the file, the above image is a link to download the source file.

Update no 2:Illustrator 8 Version

Good Luck!

Marine General Peter Pace ( really his name) this week decided to go on the record as being a self-righteous homophobe and decrying Homosexual acts as “immoral.” As a commander of American forces in Iraq, he is “over” what has been described as thousands of Gay and Lesbian troops. This has created a backlash from the gay community and a distancing from the White House, even though the defense of marriage bill is due to rear its ugly head around the time of the democratic primary. Because this has prompted a new discussion about the Clinton “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, I would be remiss if I didn’t cite the most interesting argument about gays in the military.

You see there was this battle over 2,000 years ago, fought by just a handful of Greeks against thousands of Persians at a place called Thermoplyae; There are 2 important things that you need to know about this battle; first, 300 Greeks and 700 Thespians beat down thousands of Persians for days and second, they were gay. Not the Thespians, well…maybe. But definitely the 300 elite Greek troops known as Warrior-lovers. This was pointed out by a history professor in the early 90s and I feel dispells any doubt about the usefulness of alternative life-style troops. If the first part sounds a little familiar, that is because there is currently a movie based on a comic based on it, sort of. 300 the comic was penned in the late 90s by Frank Miller and is a Knobs-at-11 kind of thrill ride that has blood, guts, babes, booty and other accouterments of a straight tour de force. Like the comic, what the movie lacks in subtlety, it makes up for in volume.
In the final twist of the ironic sword, even though there is only a passing homosexy innuendo, it is being discussed in the press as both the most Homoerotic and Homophobic movie ever made, due to the mostly naked men, doing their thing.

I am attempting to suss out a CMS for a site that I am building… I didn’t realize:

http://www.cmsmatrix.org

Damn, how am I supposed to get everything that I want? I am just going to have to wait for 37 signals to build one.

I have been waiting for an important firmware upgrade for my Sony Alpha A100 before really going into a hearty review, and this week…I downloaded and installed it. Here we go.

I am a fan of Sony cameras. I have been since my first major digital camera, the f717. On the Internet, I read that a bunch of pervs were using the camera to try to look through peoples clothes. After seeing the negative press, my curiosity was piqued-a digital camera that sees a wavelength of light we can’t? Holy crap. I read a few books on IR photography and HAD to have the camera. (more…)