If It Doesn't Come Naturally, Leave It

Here's today's video:

And here's the, er, description (can't spell):

The history of the Nerdfighters sign, so far as i can tell, is that it's descended from "Live Long And Prosper" in Star Trek, which is the Vulcan greeting.  This in itself has a prehistory in the actor who played Spock, Leonard Nimoy, inventing the sign from something he glimpsed in a Jewish ceremony where the rabbi held his hand up in that shape.  The shape of the hand itself represents the Hebrew letter shin, short for El Shaddai, the God of High Places, itself descended from the Ugaritic Shaddai, again a god of high places.  Whereas there's clearly no need for religion or its lack to mix with the Nerdfighter ideals of being awesome and reducing suck levels, the science fiction ideal of utopia in space is reminiscent of a similar projection by religion of utopia into high places or Heaven.  Therefore, the whole idea behind Nerdfighteria is entirely consistent with the ideals represented by El Shaddai, provided we drop the patriarchal judgmental side of what is sometimes associated with religion and spirituality.

I'm not trying to assimilate anything to anything else here, just point out the essential goodness and unity of the two attitudes at their best.

It did come naturally to me, as it happens, although i worry a little that my YouTube videos could become a little incestuous, which reminds me of my attitude to counselling, where it often became a session about the session, meaning that i would adopt a persona for the session whose problems would presumably disappear with it, i.e. at the moment the session ended.  I have major issues with counselling, but won't go into them here.

Just in case anyone's still reading this, i came across a blogger the other day whose entries are a little like a cross between mine and Liz's.  Her blog is here:

http://trudymorgancole.wordpress.com/

Her YT channel:

http://www.youtube.com/user/Hypergraffiti

While i'm at it, i should mention Liz's blog in case anyone reading this isn't aware of it:

http://lizardyoga.wordpress.com/

Anyway, so i did a video on the Nerdfighter sign, which i then didn't edit enough because the audio is now recorded separately from the video, and astonishingly, the wave form displayed on the audio is not in step with where it appears on the video in Windows Movie Maker!  This raises the issue of whether the bad worker always blames his tools.  I am currently finding Windows Movie Maker a pain in the neck, and am aware that it is from the dreaded Microsoft stable, so it wouldn't be surprising if it really is bad rather than it just being me.  I will probably break out AVLinux in the near future, though it has sadly apparently now been retired.  Another link for you:

http://www.bandshed.net/AVLinux.html

One thing i've been messing about with recently is audio editing, with Audacity, which can be downloaded for Windows here:

http://audacity.googlecode.com/files/audacity-win-2.0.2.exe

Right, enough with the incessant linking!

The sound on the above video is edited using Audacity.  Unfortunately, removing the hiss may have degraded the quality, although it is probably at least a bit louder.  I worked on the animation project quite a bit today too and have now completed the soundtrack to my satisfaction, though i may add breathing sounds and a heartbeat to it.  I've also gone through it, worked out some approximate timings, and started on a few frames.  Here's one of them:

It's not finished and it's just occurred to me it's the wrong colour - it needs to be blue.  It's something like the penultimate frame.  Totting up the total number of frames, it's a two gross, six dozen and five seconds, meaning a maximum of a zagier, eight gross, three dozen and four frames at eight frames a second.  However, i'm doing them as cels (actually layers in the Gimp), there are many repeatable frames and there's even some live action, so it's not so bad as it sounds.  For instance, much of it consists of breathing movements and static scenes.

In other news, connected to Nerdfighteria, i have, remarkably, borrowed John Green's 'The Fault In Our Stars' from the library and am about to start reading it, having returned 'The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob de Zoet' after reading only a few pages.  This is not an adverse comment on David Mitchell as an observation about my poor attention span.

That's it for today then.  It's Theintrostealer's sixteenth birthday today and i'd like him to present a guest vlog.  If not, i'm not sure what will happen tomorrow as it's quite busy.

Oh, and the herbalism seems to be getting going again after the Winterval.