GIMP — GNU image manipulation program

Posted on October 27, 2014 by Caroluna

Horsetail Nebula has expanded from being a “Minecraft World Creation” blog: now it’s covering a broader range of topics. I have some posts on The Amazingly Weird World that’s Out There Already (Astronomy, Cosmology), examples of inspiring art that show Different Worlds, and discussions of software. Here’s a software discussion.

The software that I am learning about right now is called GIMP, which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Software. Some people think it is approaching the level of a replacement for Photoshop. It is free, and open source. “Free” you probably understand already, though I always have trouble understanding why people would offer complex software for free (how can it be as good as the expensive versions)? That’s a topic for another post. “Open source” means that if you know what you’re doing, you can get right into the guts of the program and create your own extra tools, called “plug-ins”. You can then make these plug-ins available to other people. GIMP has plug-ins that add extra tools to your tool kit. You don’t have to worry about them right off the bat, but might find them useful later.

I bought a how-to book about GIMP called Grokking the GIMP

…which has clear explanations and excellent pictures, but unfortunately was published in 2000. I like learning software step-by-step and have been looking for more recent tutorials. I found a website called Lynda.com which offers a series of lessons. I checked out some of the free lessons and was impressed with the professionalism of the tutor, the clarity, and the level of detail. I decided it would be worthwhile to pay the $25 and sign up for a month’s subscription. One advantage of this approach is that since I have paid the money and only have a month to use the materials, I have to get down to business and LEARN it (instead of putting the book on my shelf and saying “this looks like a great book!”.

I’ve done up to chapter 2.2 already and so far GIMP looks a lot like my beloved Corel Painter Essentials 4. But already I’ve seen some new variations of tools that I suppose I could have done in Painter Essentials, but it would have taken many steps.

Wish me luck on this educational adventure, and I’ll let you know at the end of the month if the subscription to Lynda.com was worth the money!

the blog of Astro Bob

Posted on October 22, 2014 by Caroluna

I just found an astronomy-related blog that I am checking out. “Astro Bob” is posting beautiful pictures, interesting videos, and giving very clear explanations of complex topics!

Here is an illustration that I found there. It’s fascinating to me that physics can make predictions about what happened just instants after the Big Bang. It has to do with atoms congealing out of a quarky quantum soup — of course it’s going to happen quickly. Then after we have atoms, gravity goes to work, and things move a lot slower.

Click to see larger version, though it’s still not life-sized ;)
Illustration found here on Astro Bob’s blog.

APOD, the Astronomy Picture of the Day

Posted on October 21, 2014 by Caroluna

Hello again! I have been away for a while due to installing tile in our aviary. I sure wish that the process was as easy as it is in Minecraft!

I want to get back to posting on a daily basis, but for a while these posts will have to be brief.

Here is today’s brief post.

Have you heard of APOD? …the Astronomy Picture of the Day. A friend of mine named Denny posted the APOD picture on a music forum I belonged to, and it is the main reason I became interested in astronomy! Denny has since passed away, but his tradition is carried on here

http://cnfpoli.informe.com/the-denny-ray-memorial-space-news-thread-dt1272-15.html

The nice thing about this “memorial thread” is that you can see the daily APODs one right after the other.

Some information about the official APOD site:

Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) is originated, written, coordinated, and edited since 1995 by Robert Nemiroff and Jerry Bonnell. The APOD archive contains the largest collection of annotated astronomical images on the internet….In real life, Bob and Jerry are two professional astronomers who spend most of their time researching the universe. Bob is a professor at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Michigan, USA, while Jerry is a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland USA….APOD is proud to acknowledge that it received several accolades during its short existence, including a Scientific American 2001 Sci/Tech Web award.

Take a brief fly-by on the Denny Memorial APOD thread, or visit the actual APOD site where there is a paragraph of information with each photo.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130811.html

Some success with MC Edit!

Posted on September 29, 2014 by Caroluna

I made a tall, skinny island that to me looks like one of those Chinese mountains

found here — The Zhangjiajie National Forest Park

My mountainous island is called Gloveria, named after a friend of mine who is a mountain climber!

I was able to “capture” it in MC Edit and move a copy of it over to another world. This is great because eventually I want to make an ocean world that has dozens of strange, varied islands.

I finally figured out you don’t have to FLY while selecting objects in MC Edit. Just start anywhere…

Click to make the yellow cursor and blue cursor appear, then “nudge” them

Keep nudging til the island is enclosed — then export it

Then when you are ready, open your destination world in MC Edit, and import the island. Gloveria is now located in an ocean, instead of floating in the Void!

“The Minecraft Parent” — article in the New Yorker

Posted on September 28, 2014 by Caroluna

Thank you to the homeschool organization Baltimore Washington Home Educators for bringing the article to my attention! Here’s an extended quote.

The Minecraft Parent

Minecraft is played by both boys and girls, unusually. Players can join together to build worlds together: airports, castles, cave systems, roller coasters, an accurate replica of Westeros. At its best, the game is not unlike being in the woods with your best friends. Parents also join in. The Internet is full of testimonials of parents playing with their kids, of children reading their first word in Minecraft, and other milestones usually performed in the analog world. This paradise is not entirely without its shadows. There are mods and different versions that introduce weapons and all manner of “Hunger Games” scenarios. You can kill and be killed. In multiplayer mode, I’ve witnessed asinine comments get typed back and forth for hours. But the foundational experience is wholesome—shredded wheat for the mind. [snip]

But Notch should feel good, as the significance of Minecraft, ultimately, is how the game shows us that lively, pleasant virtual worlds can exist alongside our own, and that they are places where we want to spend time, where we learn and socialize. There is no realistic chance of pulling the “full Amish” and living in the past—nor is that a good idea. We need to meet our kids halfway in these worlds, and try to guide them like we do in the real world. The late Robin Williams had this right. In this video, he explains why he named his daughter Zelda after the princess in The Legend of Zelda, and what’s noticeable is how free of angst the whole conversation is. The two laugh together as they recall playing the game together. Who knows how Minecraft will change under Microsoft’s ownership, but it’s a historic game that has shown many of us a middle way to navigate the eternal screens debate.

Note that this video is also a commercial for the new version of the Zelda game — but what I like about it are the interactions between Robin and his daughter. The last couple of minutes is them cracking up together.

Lots of little squares

Posted on September 26, 2014 by Caroluna

I just discovered this while goofing around in Microsoft Paint. If you take a section of a picture

and resize it by the maximum amount (500%) and then the maximum amount again, you get…..

Lots of little squares! This sort of pattern could be the inspiration for a mosaic, a quilt, or something in Minecraft.

There is software that will allow you to do the same thing in a much more complicated way. It’s called Spritecraft. Not only does it break your picture into little squares, it also translates the colors into the Minecraft approximations (using colors of wool, clay, etc). It doesn’t build the object for you, you have to build it yourself using the pattern it gives you.

http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/mapping-and-modding/minecraft-tools/1261370-tool-spritecraft-turn-images-into-minecraft

Here is a Minecraft mosaic of Notch from that link above.

Absent friend

Posted on September 25, 2014 by Caroluna

This is one of those off-topic posts.

The reason I got interested in computer graphics software was because of a friend of mine, with the appropriately cosmic name of Denny Ray. I met Denny on an Irish Traditional Music forum. Chiff and Fipple contains many sub-forums that are related to Irish music in varying degrees, and one sub forum, the “Post-structural Pub”, was particularly miscellaneous. Denny had joined when the forum was still fairly new. Along with his trademark dry humor, Denny also liked to post links to unusual scientific discoveries, TED videos, and odd news in general. And, every single day without fail, he posted a link to the APOD — Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Every time he posted the APOD picture, people in the Poststructural Pub would comment on it. Some of the comments were serious, some were silly, and some were visual puns and jokes.

It became my goal to make Denny laugh. I started making visual spoofs on the APOD pictures, and had so much fun doing it that I bought a graphics tablet and software so that I could make better ones.

Original APOD

Caroluna tries to make Denny laugh

Doing these computer graphics projects became a big part of my daily routine, and a part of my identity.

Later on when I got a job that involved working with MS Publisher, it was much easier to tackle that software because I had already beat my head bloody against the keyboard trying to get Corel Painter to work.

So I have Denny to thank, for my willingness to push through the frustration of learning new software. As I try to learn MC Edit, WorldPainter and Avanti, I say a silent thank you to Denny.

And it has to be a silent thank you, because Denny is no longer with us. He passed away about 2 years ago. I still think of him when I read anything about astronomy, or when I listen to a TED talk, or watch a NOVA program about quantum mechanics. I also think of him whenever I see draft horses, because he and his wife raised Shire horses.

Hello Denny where ever you are, and thank you for the ways you influenced my life.

We miss you.

New header

Posted on September 24, 2014 by Caroluna

I made a new blog header today to reflect some changes. Instead of just saying “a Minecraft blog”, now the tagline is “Minecraft and more”.

The things I enjoy about Minecraft connect with — fantasy art, art software, the world of gaming, girl geekery, science fiction, documentaries about creative people, Volvox, magnetars, ….

Magnetar found here

I’m having a great time collecting material for this blog, and I’ve been learning a lot. Right now I’m so frustrated with MC Edit that I’m ready to start learning Python so I could write a mod for the stupid thing. (Cartesian coordinates!! Really guys, would that be so hard?!)

World in a bubble

Posted on September 24, 2014 by Caroluna

I’m still experimenting with variations on the “Volvox” theme (the crystal balls with green things inside them). What if the green things inside the crystal balls were actual islands? For my first attempt, the island was much too large. When I put the dome around it, the dome was so large that it extended into the “you can’t build below this point” zone.

These experiments with “things inside of domes” have been reminding me of the movie “The Fountain”.

There is a tree (or is it a person?) inside of a dome (or is it a spaceship?)…or was the whole thing a dream? I’m not sure, but it was a beautiful movie — I highly recommend it. Very cosmic.

The special effects of this movie were done in an unusual way. Instead of computer graphics special effects, they used a more organic method — blobs of fluid in petri dishes.

Parks and his son run a home f/x shop based on a device they call the microzoom optical bench. Bristling with digital and film cameras, lenses, and Victorian prisms, their contraption can magnify a microliter of water up to 500,000 times or fill an Imax screen with the period at the end of this sentence. Into water they sprinkle yeast, dyes, solvents, and baby oil, along with other ingredients they decline to divulge… The upshot is that Parks can make a dash of curry powder cascading toward the lens look like an onslaught of flaming meteorites. “When these images are projected on a big screen, you feel like you’re looking at infinity,” he says. “That’s because the same forces at work in the water – gravitational effects, settlement, refractive indices – are happening in outer space.”

article here:
http://nofilmschool.com/2013/05/microscopic-cosmic-organic-vfx-fountain-tree-life

And here is a short film clip where you can see the layers being added.

Back to my own little domes!

These landscapes are real!

Posted on September 22, 2014 by Caroluna

The blog io9 has such cool stuff. This article has a series of unusual landscape photos that (to me!) look like they could be from Minecraft.

http://io9.com/satellite-images-of-agricultural-fields-make-the-earth-1637547151

These crazy circular patterns are because of something called “center pivot irrigation”. From Wiki —

Center-pivot irrigation (sometimes called central pivot irrigation), also called waterwheel and circle irrigation, is a method of crop irrigation in which equipment rotates around a pivot and crops are watered with sprinklers. A circular area centered on the pivot is irrigated, often creating a circular pattern in crops when viewed from above.

If you would like to make your own variation, here is a template for making circles in Minecraft…

http://forums.arresteddevelopmentclan.com/download/file.php?id=523

If you click on the link, you will get a much larger version of this.