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Past blog entries It was "Changes"
A David Bowie song title may be appropriate
here I'm also starting up my own Twitter, a bit quiet for now, but likely to get a bit noisier soon. Feel free to follow me at http://twitter.com/TheTomG. Don't worry I'm not an incredibly talkative person, so you won't be getting loads of tweets about what I've just eaten, what's coming up on TV in a few minutes, and all that stuff. Thinking of adding some pictures of East Texas on here as a nice expansion to the Gallery.
To leave it be, or not to leave it be, that
is the question These pages on the personal site are out of style. They have dark backgrounds. They use GIFs and not PNGs (or some newer solution yet) for transparency. The graphical navigation at the bottom of the page. It's all so dated! Now I do have a lack of time for my own pages. My work means I am very busy, using up most of the hours of the day, and with the time I do have left, I'd rather make content than just go through and redo the design of the pages. But it's more than that. See, 10 years ago or so when these pages were formed, I found it fun to use 3D renderings, some of the newest tech you could think of, of objects that looked decidedly Victorian - or alternate reality Victorian really since I took the styling from the time machine in the classic movie of the same name. That itself was irony, as here was something 40 years old based on something 100 years old that looked into the future. The movie itself was dated in its styling too, as much as the older age it was depicting when the time machine was invented. So it was all a lovely mix of past and future, layers of time mixed together in a blender, which I found quite delicious. Now of course the design on these pages has aged too, as much as the movie, or as the book, even 3D has come a long way since the time it was used to make the graphics here. And all in the space of just 10 years! Such a short amount of time for something to become dated. Which just adds yet one more layer onto it all, and means whenever I think about changing these pages, I baulk at the idea, and leave them just as they are. Let them age, like the flickering scenes around the character in the film as he charged in a rush into the future. It all reminds me to of Philip K. Dick's Ubik, where new things regress in time, from state of the art TV back to hulking old black and white tube driven monstrosity, unless saved by a frequent reapplications of the Ubik wonder product. So while I think the whole thing might appeal only to me, too bad - this is my personal space after all, unrelated to my business and work, so why not just take it and do what I like with it, and rules, conventions and fashion will just have to take a seat outside and wait.
Spring cleaning: No huge changes to the site, but a little bit of tidying up, which it has needed for a while - funny how working full-time on other people's pages means you never get round to doing your own! Not got any new work on show, but hope to have soon. Currently also experimenting with XNA 2.0 and the Creator's Club, it's pretty incredible to be able to write code and then have it run on your console. I remember the days when it took special development kit versions of consoles, costing many thousands, to do that sort of thing. The times they are a changin'
Microsoft purchase Caligari
Primitive Itch products available free
Just back from SIGGRAPH in Boston, which was a lot of fun (but hard work too!). Didn't see too much of the show of course since I was staffing the Caligari booth. The Electronic Theater was good though, did get to see that, and as ever the Pixar short was very good.
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