The Mighty Afro » Media

Look Who’s Talking

DS2 — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 03:54:10 +0000

Remember the movie Look Who’s Talking, about the babies with John Travolta? One of the reason why I liked it is because they don’t make the babies’ mouths move; so, it was more like just vocalizing their thoughts. Nowadays, commercials with talking babies (e.g. E-Trade) or animals often have their mouths moving to match the words. If it looked natural, I wouldn’t mind…but it doesn’t…so I do. That being said, I feel the same way about animal videos too. I’d much rather have them “thinking out loud” rather than trying to computer-animate their jaws to look like humans. Kind of like this:

The Hollow Face Illusion

DS2 — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 07:08:49 +0000

I’ve always been a fan of optical illusions, but didn’t know they all had official names. Like this one for example. If you’ve been to Disneyland in the last 30 years you’ve seen this illusion in the Haunted Mansion!

Epic Green Screen Magic

DS2 — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 02:00:48 +0000

By now, I think we all know that just because a person on a TV show is standing on top of a mountain or in front of a humongous space ship doesn’t make it true. Most movie go-ers know that “movie magic” makes things possible. But do we know how they did it exactly? Where is the blue screen? Is it only the actor and a giant green wall behind them? This video can help give you a better picture of what goes on during shooting:

What really amazes me too is the confidence of the production team. There are basically saying, “Just stand right there and pretend you are walking on the moon — I’ll make it look like you are.”

The Real World: Farmville Edition

DS2 — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 07:20:37 +0000

There are tons and tons of free and cutesy games on Facebook. Some are not fun at all *cough*Fishville*cough* and most of them can never be beaten. I, as a gamer, am not used to that at all. Even on-going RPGs (e.g., WoW) at least have end-game content so you have something to strive for. So, for these Facebook time-wasters games, you have to make up your own goals. For Farmville, my goal was to have a Black character running a plantation — complete with a hedge maze!

Along the way, Farmville has special animals that you can collect from that yield fun items. For example, you collect chocolate milk from the brown cow and you collect ice cubes from the penguin. Fun, right? One day, a baby elephant was available. I got one and placed him in the middle of my beautiful maze. Then, just as I was living in my fantasy world with my Black man running his plantation, I was snapped back to reality and quite shocked when I went to collect from the Baby Elephant.

Man alive! This game is too real for me!

Ever wanted to find out what happens when games stop being polite and start getting real?

Are HP Computers Racist?

DS2 — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 01:01:13 +0000

This funny little video brought up some interesting comments on YouTube about why HP face-recognition software didn’t work on this dark-skinned fellow named Desi. One of the comments theorized that the software was poor because it was outsourced to India. But, if the software was made (and most likely tested) in India, wouldn’t the software be awesome at recognizing dark-skinned people?

Favorite snippet: “As soon as my Black-ness enters the frame…”