I could not resist this, even though I really should have spent the last hour doing something productive. But I read Mike Caulfield’s post on True of EdTech As Well, where he latches on to a criticism of the TED technocratic approach to world problems, and this quote from a quote just cried out to […]

This has to stop, but not tonight. I missed the fun of the afternoon shit talking and gif smacking today. With some positive feedback on the last batch, I set out again to see what I could do with GIMP as a tool.

For these next two I went for very original material, stuff you cannot get on the internet- some of the videos from the Storybox as my intended purpose was to keep the raw material on the pirate box but allow remixes to float out on the open web.

This first one was a barbershop pole spotted maybe in British Columbia- I had some shaky hand held video, but found at least one short segment where there was little jarring for one spin:

BUt there was still jiggle. So I made a selection of just the moving pole part, and deleted everything else from 6 of the 7 frames. What I cannot figure in GIMP is how to make a deleted selection transparent; mine got filled with white. I solved the problem by making a copy of the lowest frame, which was a full image. I then used the same selection to fill the same area with white.

I then made a duplicate of this frame and moved it below each of my single frames, set the mode of the layer to “darken”, and merged each layer down. This I ended up with frames where all the movement was within that bit I had saved fro each layer.

This next one was form video I took in Central Park, New York. I heard form afar the loud banging of drums, and came across a protest of people at the boathouse who were protesting the management- their goal was to convince tourists not to go inside, and they were pretty darned successful I recorded some of the audio and spoke a little to the protestors, but I loved most the intensity of these drummers banging on plastic jugs and the metal rails of the barriers. The sound is just exported from the original video clip.

I’ve been a month in Fredericksburg, living just around the corner from locations of major Civil War battles 150 years ago. On Friday, I took a stroll down Sunken Road, a place where the Confederate Forces held a commanding position on a hill, and some 15,000 Union soldiers died trying to charge it.

That’s war, what is it good for?

This wall, likely reconstructed (?) is part of the original wall that existed here, when ti was the major road to Richmond.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Tonight I came across a stunning set of 48 photos in The Atlantic, part of their series commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, in this piece, showing photos of the locations. What’s remarkable, is that the war coincided around the time when photography started to be viable, and this was the first war (I am guessing) documented so much in pictures that brought the news to the eyes.

What stood out is the sharpness of the detail, so much, especially in large format, how realistic the people looked. Of course they look realistic, they were there.

Photo number 28 stood out because it was taken along this same road I had walked Friday, Sunken Road, although I was looking down the wall towards where this photographer was standing:

The caption from the Atlantic:

Confederate dead lie among rifles and other gear, behind a stone wall at the foot of Marye’s Heights near Fredericksburg, Virginia on May 3, 1863. Union forces penetrated the Confederate lines at this point, during the Second Battle of Fredericksburg. (Mathew Brady/NARA) #

This second battle is not the one I read about on the signs along the road. Apparently a year after the 1862 battle where the Union got slaughtered here, the Confederate troops went west on other campaigns, leaving a thinner number of troops along this road.

(I am on thin ground of knowledge here, I am not a historian, just picking up pieces along the way).

So what to do with this bit of synchronicity?

Make an animated GIF!

I wanted to see what could do to blend these, even though they are from completely different positions along the road.

What I did ended up a large file (about 2 Mb), so I am placing it below the fold.