El Capitan OS and After Effects network issue.

Do not upgrade yet to El Capitan OS if you use After Effects a lot. When working on networked files it slows to an unworkable speed.

I’ve been on it for a while, but have only just noticed this as I’ve only been working in Maya recently and that is fine.

It appears to be a major issue involving smb sharing and whatnot. There’s some people discussing it here.

I’m just downloading an upgrade for AE now so will keep you informed.

links bundle 19-04-2016

All text being snippets from the link:

  • 30 Poets You Should Be Reading
  • Comic Tragics/Emma Talbot
    I have a bunch of work in a show called Comic Tragics at the Art Gallery of Western Australia at the moment. The Guardian just did a nice little piece about it, showing a few pages by Ron Rege (who also did an amazing wall-drawing for the show), Gabrielle Bell, Dash Shaw and others, including one Emma Talbot, who I had not heard of before the invitation to the show. There are a number of reasons why I wish I could have made it out to see the show – not least because I’ve just never been to Australia – but I’m sorry not to be seeing Talbot’s work in person. It looks pretty much unlike anything else – super strange and beautiful, sweet and creepy… and heartbreaking. She does really nice things with panels, something I’ve been thinking about a fair amount lately, and with facelessness, which is also a thing I can relate to, especially in dealing with similar themes. Surprised I hadn’t come across her work before, maybe because she’s in the gallery world, rather than the book world. Hopefully that will change.
  • “Each Bite Is Edging Me Towards Climax” – Read a Bawdy New Comic from Gina Wynbrandt
  • Autodesk Buys Arnold . – fxguide
    Autodesk has bought Arnold and Solid Angle based in Madrid, Spain and in London, UK. The deal was first struck in December of last year, and finalized in February. The plan is for Solid Angle to be a standalone provider, in much the same way Autodesk has done with Shotgun. Solid Angle is now fully owned by Autodesk but sits apart in so far as the brand Solid Angle remains, as does the sales channels and the staff.
  • An Art-World Prankster Goes Digital – The New York Times
    The American cartoonist Robert Crumb’s first U.K. solo exhibition in over a decade opens to the public in London on Friday — and features pictures from the latest volume of his “Art and Beauty” magazine series, which has previously seen Crumb faithfully reproduce imagery of women taken from mass media or life studies. Now, he adds cellphone street photos and his fans’ selfies to his wellsprings of inspiration.
  • RBS pulls back fossil fuel investments as green deals grow | Environment | The Guardian
    Royal Bank of Scotland has reduced its global lending to oil and gas companies and doubled its green energy loans in the UK to £1bn a year, according to new figures released to the Guardian.
  • Watch Dancing Bodies Merge and Multiply
    Dance is mesmerizing enough all by itself, but the short film Chimera, directed by Steven Briand and choreographedby Cathy Ematchoua, makes the art form all the more eye-catching by cutting together multiple performers, creating the effect of one seamlessly merging and multiplying body. The film takes its name from the Chimera of Greek mythology, a fire-breathing creature with the heads of both a lion and a goat and with a snake for a tail. The film perfectly captures the multi-body chimeric effect, minus the, you know, terrifying bit. Watch the dancers weave poetry in motion below.
  • Marvellous monochrome drawings from Miguel Angel Valdivia
    Using heavy black backgrounds and considered line-work, Miguel Angel Valdivia’s work is smart in its execution and brave in its layouts. Within a single image Miguel often uses multiple frames, which come together to create a disorientating but clear narrative. As well as working as an illustrator, Mexico-born Miguel is also a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art. When he’s not dong either of those things, he’s at the helm of beautiful drawing zine Le Petit Neant, which is soon to launch its third issue.
  • Today in NYC: Storyscapes Interactive and VR Showcase
    It’s a fairly safe bet to say that animation in a few decades will be a different experience than the current one of passively viewing content on a screen. But you don’t need to wait decades to get a taste of that future. The Storyscapes showcase at the Tribeca Film Festival is currently presenting 10 virtual reality and interactive installations that hint at this not-so-distant future.
  • The secret rules of the internet | The Verge
    Julie Mora-Blanco remembers the day, in the summer of 2006, when the reality of her new job sunk in. A recent grad of California State University, Chico, Mora-Blanco had majored in art, minored in women’s studies, and spent much of her free time making sculptures from found objects and blown-glass. Struggling to make rent and working a post-production job at Current TV, she’d jumped at the chance to work at an internet startup called YouTube. Maybe, she figured, she could pull in enough money to pursue her lifelong dream: to become a hair stylist.
  • Molly Crabapple Explains How You Can Be an Artist and an Activist
    …that people should be free to operate outside of the way they’ve been branded, the idea that branding as an act imposes unnecessary, damaging boundaries…
  • Owen Jones meets Yanis Varoufakis | ‘Europe is staring into the abyss’
  • Bosch’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ Becomes an Animated Computer Simulation
    Medieval artist Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, a vision of paradise lost, is known for being a work of proto-surrealism that has inspired the work of many creative talents like Salvador Dali, William S. Burroughs, and Terry Gilliam. It’s a work that is also highly remixable, as Carla Gannis proved with her emoji-fied rework The Garden of Emoji Delights. Now the painting’s right panel—depicting a hallucinatory hell—undergoes a digital reconstruction as a 3D animation in Hell.exe.
  • Mini Kuš! Comics #38–41
    The latest quartet of Kuš! minicomics (pronounced “koosh!”) offers up yet another excellent sampling of the many and varied comics dished out by this Latvian art-comics publisher. For production value and design, the mini Kuš! series represents the pinnacle of what the minicomic art form can achieve. Of note: it wasn’t until several days after I’d first read them that I realized that all four comics were by women (the mini-Kuš! quartet of issues 30-33 were also all-female creations). Despite this year’s Angouleme debacle, it has become increasingly clear, at least in more enlightened comics circles, that excellent work transcends gender (and sexism). The comics in this quartet, by four different creators from four different countries, encompass a variety of styles and tones, from colorful whimsy to somber realism, with settings in the past, present and future. Whatever their subject matter or stylistic approaches, these little books are further testament to the enduring appeal of the elusive-yet-accessible Kuš! art-comics aesthetic.
  • Lost Wright Brothers’ ‘Flying Machine’ Patent Resurfaces
  • More than 200 ideas for your next podcast — Medium
    Everyone has a podcast. Every business wants a podcast. Why? They’re cheap to make, they create community and brand affinity and a loyal subscription base. But the podcast space is still the Wild West. Companies are scrambling to corner the market, an audience, a vertical strategy. What will work? What won’t? We don’t know either, but decided to help y’all out — some of these ideas are serious, some are not. We hope all of them spark your imagination. If you decide to make any of these, let us know. Or invite us on as guests.
  • Kelsey Garrity Riley
    I am an illustrator living and working in Brooklyn, New York. I grew up in Germany and Belgium before moving to the US to pursue my love of art at the Savannah College of Art and Design where I graduated from in 2010.
  • NANOGrav Animation of Gravitational Waves
    Credit: B. Saxton and A. Angelich (NRAO/AUI/NSF); David W. Hogg, Michael R. Blanton, and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Collaboration NANOGrav Animation of Gravitational Waves NRAO Outreach
  • Film director Peter Greenaway calls for ‘image-based cinema’ | Film | The Guardian
    “This is probably a very unpopular thing to say,but all film writers should be shot.”
  • Charles Dickens, Star Wars, and the genre of serialization
    In a new video, Even Puschak talks about the rise of the serialization genre, from Dickens to Flash Gordon to General Hospital to Star Wars. Now that our entertainment is increasingly serialized, he argues that audiences have a unique opportunity to shape what we watch. (Case in point: the increased importance of non-white and non-male characters in The Force Awakens and Rogue One.)
  • “Get a job in Animation…” 12 Top Tips | Skwigly Animation Magazine
    “Get a job in Animation…” Sure, sounds easy, but with plenty of competition for roles and the ability to study any time, any place with the growth of online courses, do you have what it takes to truly stand out?
  • Want to help Louis CK out of debt? Four great reasons to watch Horace and Pete | Television
    Louis CK is broke. Horace and Pete – his self-financed TV show distributed with minimum fanfare on his own website – has not done the numbers he expected.
  • Virus trading cards, animated and 3D-printable
  • Oculus Demos VR Selfie Sticks and 360 Photo Spheres
  • This is Facebook’s gorgeous, open-source 360-degree video camera
  • The free speech delusion
    Oscar Wilde, who knew a few things about censorship, once wrote that he could “tolerate everything except intolerance”. Today, the rhetoric of free speech is being abused in order to shut down dissent and facilitate bigotry. On behalf of everyone with liberal tendencies, I’d like to know why and how we’ve allowed this to happen.
  • Hands Off [A.I.] Short film by Moritz Reichartz
  • April < Conner Willumson
  • Apple patents new augmented reality technology
  • #339: Storytelling in VR: Ambiguity and Implication in 1st Person Narratives | Voices of VR Podcast
    Rob Morgan is the writer of The Assembly, and he spoke last year at GDC about narrative design in VR and the importance of accurate body language in NPCs to maintain a sense of presence. He returned to GDC this year to talk about some of his lessons that VR can learn from writing stories in AR. He has a lot of interesting insights about how to use ambiguity and implication to drive narratives within a first-person story to allow a user to have a more immersive and personalized experience.

Sponsored links added to Delicious RSS feeds

If you follow my link feed (I’ll include this post in there too), you may have noticed some adverts coming down that stream.

This is a new development, announced just the other day by the new owners of bookmarking site, Delicious. They will be inserting ads from now on in all their RSS feeds to help pay for overheads.

I’m not keen on unsolicited ads so will be moving it over to Pinboard as soon as I can. No further action required on your part.

I am still in bed with the Englandshire Winter Virus, so please bear with, it might take me a few days to sort it out.

In the meantime look at these amazing animations by the mysterious Volvulent.

“It took just 10 years from scribbling this in prison, as leader of a banned party, for Hitler to achieve power. That happened, primarily, because the German economy collapsed and because no major power was willing to enforce the world “order” established at Versailles in 1919. But it also happened because, by the mid-1930s, a lot of people had begun to hate each other.

Since 1945, every generation in the educated world has been taught “the lessons” of the rise of Nazism. But surveying the world at the start of 2016 it seems as if we have been learning the wrong lessons. The world is awash with hatred. And since around a quarter of its inhabitants have mobile social media accounts we are leaving a very detailed evidential trail about its spread.”

As Mein Kampf returns to Germany, the world is again awash with hatred | Paul Mason

The first great works of digital literature are already being written

“The problem is that people who like science and technology, and people who like storytelling and the arts have typically been placed in different buildings since about the age of 16. We haven’t been taught how to admire each others’ work, to recognise excellence, or even to know that there is excellence in “the other culture”. There’s a kind of sullen arrogance on both sides, with some people in both camps simply denying that the other knows anything worth listening to. There is a kind of “worthy” arts professional who thinks that knowing nothing about games – like saying “I don’t even own a television!” – is a marker of intellectual superiority.”

Naomi Alderman

Against Design

“I recognize the value of building an established discipline, and of crafting a shared set of principles that define game design as a profession. But, I also think that in our efforts to define and legitimize our practice as a professional discipline we sometimes forget the history we inherit, the legacy of games made by communities of players, games made by amateurs, by dilettantes, by mathematicians, mothers, scientists, gym teachers, shepherds, inventors, philosophers, eccentrics and cranks.

And in honor of this tradition I would like to suggest other verbs for us to describe where games come from, alternatives to the overconfident precision of the word “design”. Words like invent, discover, compose, write, find, grow, perform, build, support, identify, copy, re-assemble, excavate and preserve.”

— Game Design Advance › Against Design