stimuli.ca » News

WordPress plugins discontinued (Lightbox-2, Slickr).

Rupert — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 03:07:29 +0000

It has been a long time coming, but today, at last, I can say with absolute certainty that all work on WordPress plugins has stopped for good here at stimuli.ca.

Actually, development stalled years ago on both the plugins, as my 3D graphics career has blossomed, I settled into married life, and now my wife and I have a baby due in May 2011. The thing is, people haven’t necessarily realized that and continue to regularly seek support on this site in the comments or via email, and my heart goes out to them. I wish them to seek out actively developed plugins, and toss my old, broken defunct plugins onto the scrapheap of history.

I sadly don’t have the spare time to work on either plugin. I wrote the plugins for me, years ago, and decided to share them with others, back when the functionality I sought didn’t already exist. Now, however, there are countless plugins that do similar, if not identical, things to my plugins.

All of my code is free and open source, as is the code my plugins depend upon (like Flickr code and the Lightbox javascripts). If anyone wishes to, please feel free to take over the reigns of either plugin. Barring that, and thus barring either plugin being brought up to date and made to work again, everybody please use alternative plugins that actually get updated more than every three years ;)

Lightbox users, I recommend looking into jQuery Lightbox Plugin. The reason is, besides the fact it is actively updated, 99.999% of issues people have had with my plugin is due to javascript conflicts. You will have fewer WordPress/javascript conflicts if you switch to a plugin that uses jQuery javascript libraries. Mixing Prototype and jQuery leads to heartache and busted website for less technical people.

Regardless of which plugins you opt for, just be aware that my wordpress plugins are old, broken, and utterly unsupported, and no longer in development.

Spread the word, and good luck to you and your blog! It’s been a blast.

Latest Test Render of Paris

Rupert — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 09:35:29 +0000

My new reel is looking promising; here I am working on lighting, atmosphere and such. This is not final; I still have lots to add to Paris like street signs, city backdrop in the distance, garbage, vehicles, fog, etc.

Paris lighting: rendered in 30 seconds

I finally have a new machine, that renders approximately 60 times faster to work on than my MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo. This pleases me.

I am also finally updating my portfolio page for the first time since, uh, 2006. I have learned quite a bit since then…

I [heart] Mitchell Baker

Rupert — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 09:00:30 +0000

Mitchell Baker (female) is president of the Mozilla Corporation, which shepherds the creation and evolution of my favorite web browser: Firefox. Firefox is fantastic software, and the world wide web is a much better place for it.

A lengthy interview with her has surfaced on the web. She’s a very eloquent, brainy spokeswoman! She is certainly role model material, and I’m glad the Firefox people do what they do.

Check it out.

Beaten to the Rant

Rupert — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 04:44:41 +0000

Y’know, I was going to write a big, long rant on the state of video games and what I perceive to be the lack of creativity behind them, embellished with my liberal take on violence in video games, until I read this article. The author states it all for me. It mirrors my feelings almost exactly. My only variation from his editorial is that I think games with violence in them are just great, and there don’t even need to be non-violent games… I’m just tired of violence being the central ‘plot’. Violence is not a plot, and if the film industry can make movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or Pi, or Bladerunner, or Lost Highway, or Brazil, or Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, why is it all the games are like even more inane versions of Badboys II, or Independance Day, or Hostel, or Saw III? Mindless, flashy displays of sensational stupidity that appeal only to the lower brain stem of a 14 year old male?
I mean, I realize almost all human entertainment revolves around sex and death, but for that matter, where’s the Showcase-style video games? Where’s the smut? The games involving graphic sex and full frontal nudity?

I recognize the challenge of creating a game that is ‘interacted’ with only by hitting a small handful of buttons (Thank you Nintendo Wii for breaking us out of that!) that involves any kind of subtlety, complexity or nuance, but come on.
When Tron makes your game’s plot look weak and contrived, it’s time for a re-think!

I hope the stagnation of the current game industry creates a backlash of innovation and ingenuity.

An inspiringly beautiful article

Rupert — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 12:00:27 +0000

I’m an avid reader of the New York Times and its global sibling, the International Herald Tribune. I saw the title of an article, “Words, pure and unfiltered”, and had to read it.

The style of writing is lustrous and beautiful, which I’d have to say is pretty rare in the media. The topic of the piece is surprisingly abstract and unusual for the IHT. A refreshing change of pace.
If you have time, read Words, pure and unfiltered at iht.com

Brian Jungen show at the Vancouver Art Gallery: phenomenal

Rupert — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 03:18:35 +0000

Wow. I saw many cool looking ads for the Brian Jungen show at the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) in downtown Vancouver. What little I saw looked pretty sweet. I almost forgot about the show when I saw a short blurb on him and his VAG show on Bravo while channel hopping. Again, the stuff he had made was looking mighty sweet. I decided I had to go, or potentially regret not going forever.
I went down to the VAG today to check it out. Was it as good as I had hoped? Short answer: yes. Long answer: freakin’ awesome. Best $10 I’ve spent in a long time.
I rarely go to art shows as the work being shown generally has little appeal to me. I’m hard to please. But virtually everything at the Brian Jungen exhibit rocked me; it was an astoundingly strong show of work.

My favorite pieces were the life-size whale skeletons made out of sawn white plastic lawn chairs bolted together. Beautiful, massive, mysterious, eye-candy with an implicit, but not too trite, message about what we leave behind when we’re gone. Sad, silent, ivory white behemoths suspended from the ceiling; a reminder of the past.

The other highlight of the show was his West Coast aboriginal masks made from Nike ‘Air Jordan’ shoes stitched together in creative ways. Which sounds daft but actually works; the back, white and red are the traditional colour palette of native art here. These are beautiful, weird, grotesque, majestic… I could go on. Instead, check the photos I took before (and after) a security guard informed me that taking pictures is not allowed.
I will be the first to admit that I’m not a fan of West Coast native art. Living in Vancouver, it’s everywhere; from the tacky sculptures and paintings at airports, hotels and parks to the boxes that smoked salmon comes in, to tasteless T shirts in tourist districts. I cringe when I see Emily Carr paintings (and thusly avoid the top floor of the VAG). I also find art that plays the white-guilting racial card irritatingly clich?. So it was great to see a show that was not “native art” but rather contemporary art that is strong, thought provoking and about as unclich? as any I’ve seen.

You owe it to yourself to check it out.