I got to do my first bit of puppeteering recently in this spot for MoveOn.org. It was a ton of fun for my brain, but a lot less fun for my shoulder and arm, which was stuck up in the air for extended periods into the wee hours that night. This spot was put together in 24 hours, from fabricating the puppets to creating a finished edit and graphics, which is a testament to the enormous talent of the fine artists at Charged. I did the P-Span graphics intro as well; not my worst for some 6:30 AM work!

My arm is inside the gray haired balding guy on the right:

I cannot recommend watching this video highly enough. Seriously. It’s great.

Please watch it.

Sorry for the onslaught of videos, but this one made me laugh.

“Godamnit-!”

Must be watched with audio

h/t Evan

Some of the impacts are just incredible. Thanks Werner Mehl from Kurzzeit.

Unfortunately embedding has been disabled for this video, but I highly recommend all the Juicers here (especially the ones that went to RIT) to give it a watch. It’s Gabe Newell presiding over a focus group with deaf gamers to learn more about sign language and generate feedback as ot how it could be applied to gaming (presumably Half Life 2: Episode 3, as there’s more than a couple of mentions of Alyx and DOG).

From the video’s description:

He [Newell] talks about it briefly in the second clip, so it sounds like maybe an idea that the he or the writers are working on is a deaf character/crush in Alyx’s backstory that influenced her and DOG to learn how to sign as a way of communicating around enemies without speaking. That would be fun to see how that worked into the story, and how the characters would act it out during the game.

I did laugh a bit as someone in the audience of this focus group mentioned how they see gamers when they’re back at RIT.  This could be a very interesting development if it’s fully realized, and I believe Valve should be commended for even making the effort in the first place.

Click here to go to the video.

Might as well enjoy the bandwidth while I have it.

Until a few minutes ago, I never knew that sending a regular old URL to a youtube video in gmail chat would produce anything other than a clickable (is that a word?) link. It shows you a preview in the window and when clicked, actually plays the video right above your chat node.

Well played Google, well played.

Postin this for J-Pants

Now I know how some of yas feel about movie trailers and the like, but I feel like this one is worth a watch.  It doesn’t seem like your typical Aronofsky joint (by which I mean including the use of “experimental” type of camera shots and the like), but it definitely looks interesting.  

Plus, I have a feeling that Mickey Rourke is going to be a front-runner for the Best Actor Oscar for his role in this.

Click on the poster to go right to the Apple Trailers page.

Aww yeah.