Creators Syndicate -- A new cartoon every hour

At Creators,com (aka Creators Syndicate) you can find a variety of cartoons and comic strips. The cartoon page has an ever-changing assortment of material. I found the cartoons by clicking on the "Content" link on the landing page.  The site bills itself as "a syndicate of talent" and features political opinion pieces, as well as advice and lifestyle.  While the content is intended for syndication by newspapers and other publishers, viewers can read it and comment.

Under editorial cartoons I found this one by Steve Sack:

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And under comic strips there was this one by John L. Hart:

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There is a page where you can find samples of  games, such as Sudoku, crossword puzzles, word finds, and so one.  This link downloads a Charles Preston crossword.

For your added enjoyment here's a sample of Steve Sack's sculpture, titled "Sleeping with the Fishies." He says about his sculpture --

My sculptures are made of paper mache. Not many artists over the age of nine work in paper mache. Which may explain my place in the art world.

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Steve's work is A#1 in my view.

-- Marge

Post 2012 election humor (revised)

It ended 3 days ago and I still can't believe it's over.  The 2012 election, that is.  No more emails pleading for mo' money; no more negative ads on TV.  The news is still just as negative though, guess that will never change.

Here are some cartoons to help you wind down from one of the ugliest elections I've ever seen.

Chan Lowe at Tribune Content Agency:

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David Hitch at the Missoulian:

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Does Mr. America look like the Mad Hatter to you? -- M

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David Hitch at Worcester Telegram and Gazette:

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Tim Eagan at Cagle Post:

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And a beaut of a cartoon from Tim Eagan's site that brings to mind the creative process:

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It's O.K. to sigh a sigh of relief -- it's over.  BTW, looks like Hillary is campaigning already.

-- Marge

Neverwas: part real, part imaginary

Neverwas is a movie that was produced, filmed and completed but not released to theaters (you can find it on DVD).  It's one of the best movies I've ever seen and reminds me somewhat of "The Secret Garden."  Almost halfway into the movie I thought it was mostly about mental illness and there would be a psychological turnabout.  Not so.  The movie ended well and the ending was believable, but by then you liked the characters enough not to care about believability anyway.

This is a movie for people who are open to the unexplainable elements in life and can suspend judgment long enough to appreciate what they're seeing.  The cinematography with light playing around the actors is by Michael Grady and is luscious.  The acting is excellent.  The music is by Phillip Glass.  But mostly the story and its telling take the day -- the film is written and directed by Joshua Michael Stern (I cannot find a bio of him!).

Here is a quote from a review I found at Amazon by Grady Harp:

NEVERWAS, a little miracle of a movie written and directed by Joshua Michael Stern, is an allegory, a fairytale, a dissection of the impact of mental illness on parents and children, and story of compassion, believing, and blossoming of character that was created with a sterling ensemble of actors in 2005, failed to find a niche in theatrical distribution, and went straight to DVD - becoming one of those limited release films that is very elusive even in the megavideo stores. The reasons for this relative anonymity are not clear, but film lovers will do well searching out this little gem: the rewards are immediate gratification and long lasting satisfaction....

 And here is the trailer:

As for me, I'm still working on the 3rd video in Virtual World Tours.  This time we'll be visiting Second Life.

-- Marge

Sim-on-a-stick, part 3: meeting people and exploring in OSGrid

In today's video I'm exploring OSGrid.

OSGrid is one of the virtual worlds powered by OpenSimulator, aka OpenSim.  OpenSim's front page states

OpenSimulator is an open source multi-platform, multi-user 3D application server. It can be used to create a virtual environment (or world) which can be accessed through a variety of clients, on multiple protocols. OpenSimulator allows virtual world developers to customize their worlds using the technologies they feel work best - we've designed the framework to be easily extensible. OpenSimulator is written in C#, running both on Windows over the .NET Framework and on Unix-like machines over the Mono framework. The source code is released under a BSD License, a commercially friendly license to embed OpenSimulator in products. If you want to know about our development history, see History.

OpenSim's history page traces its origin to Second Life(tm) releasing their client to open source in January 2007.  (Second Life has their own open source portal.)  Now there are a number of individuals and companies that run OpenSim.  You can find a grid list at OpenSim's site, where a number of public sites are listed.  Not listed are private grids, usually behind corporate firewalls, that can be used for conferencing, training, and so on.

Advantages of downloading, installing and setting up an OpenSim are having your own land free of  payments to another landowner, complete control over the content, and the ability to back up the world and your work.

When I was considering setting up my own world, I identified three important factors:  a processor fast enough and powerful enough to render the world, a secure database for storing and accessing assets, and enough bandwidth to maintain a reasonable frame rate.  (If you would like to add to my list, feel free to submit a comment.)  It seems to me one of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) setups would work great (but may be pricey).

Because I was unable to upload the video ("Virtual World Tours: OSGrid") to Blogger, you'll have to view it on YouTube.

It always surprises me how creative work knows no deadlines -- it's simply done when it's done.  This video has flaws, but it was time to move on.

-- Marge