My wife's been in Africa since Friday and doesn't get back until Saturday. I know it's no big deal (I dunno how you military types DO that....) but it's the first time for us. So I wrote this for fun: 

I know it’s not that big a deal
I know I’m being dumb and lame
I’ll be fine, life goes on
But while she’s gone it’s not the s

Sure, it’s true she’s coming back
She’s doing good, a worthy cost
I’ll be fine, I know my way
But still I feel a little l

My stupid feelings! Fie on you!
I was fine for 20 years!
I’ll BE fine! Calm down, you sap!
No need for sighs, or frowns, or t

It’s 2 AM. This mattress sucks.
The room’s too dark. I hate this sheet.
I’LL BE FINE! .......come home soon.
I don’t like feeling incompl

People that are friends with me on Facebook probably already saw the short version of this story, but here's a clip I made last night, followed by the longer version.

I needed a background of a waving checkered flag to put behind the end slide of the week of racing games I'll be releasing on my channel. With the exception of a few in the $10 range, most were like fifty bucks for thirty seconds of looping footage. This being crazy and me being poor, I decided, "Screw that, I'll make it myself!"

Some regrets were had.

The flag was easy enough to assemble; some nice high resolution checkerboard from Wikipedia tiled in a way to match a flag.

The first animation tutorials I found used fractal noise. I skipped through those and felt they were a bit too esoteric, not the right tool for the job, and the resuts weren't quite what I was looking for.

Then I found a tutorial by Chris Zwar, whose results were what I was looking for, whose methods made sense, and holy hell it's 45 minutes long. I started scrubbing through, and fully half of the tutorial is how he made the flag. Wikipedia, some fabric noise, grunging it up a bit. I'm fine with my plain checkerboard, thank you, how do I make it do the flappy.

When it finally came time to talk about how to use the Wave World plugin, which comes pre-baked into Adobe After Effects CS3 and later, he was scant on the details of how it actually worked. He was better with CC Glass, but that one didn't require nearly as much tweaking.

Then when I was nearly done I decided, "You know what that could use? Depth of field." Add a camera, make it like an f/0.3 aperture or something, then spent a while troubleshooting banding that was showing up even in a 32bit workspace only to realize that it was just fine on the export.

...Then I went and exported it to H.264 and uploaded it to YouTube so I'm sure it's not perfect. But it's there, and free, if you ever need it.

The troubleshooting was fun, but I don't think it's something I'll ever do again; if I'd found it for free I probably would have just gone with that. Still, I like it. Guess that's what matters.

Because I can.

Painting by my niece.

Wait, so who are you? Invid, or Invid's fan?

An author must be his own fan, first and foremost.

Solid work.

1) your work is great! The blades look like they belong in the environment.
2) Their choreography is bad.

I shot some timelapse sequences last week and used them to try my hand at Nuke Studio. I wanted to work a bit on a workflow that would allow me to achieve a film-like result. The result is not perfect, some flickering can still be seen and stabilization could be better on some shots (it was quite windy), but timelapsin' again feels good.

If only I had better lenses.

(also I love Nuke Studio)

Some great shots there Saniss 

All I did was watch it and I'm going to hell.

Well done. And to everyone in America, vote well and good luck. (If you have any questions about moving to Canada, I'll do my best to help. But there's no room in my house. Sorry.)

The North Pole is obviously the top. It is the vantage point from which Santa looks down and judges us all.

We pretty much consider the northernmost part of Canada - the bit within the Arctic Circle - the top. Go far enough north and then it's just a quick jaunt across the Bay to Greenland. It'd be a hop, skip, and a jump to Russia on the other side, too, if it weren't for that pesky Alaska.