Author: Jeff Milner

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Rabbit

Rabbit is a creepy remix of old graphics from 1950s illustrations that have been rendered into animation in Adobe After effects. It’s a beautifully creepy story—just in time for Halloween.
Update: PingMag has an interesting interview with director Run Wrake.

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Malcolm Gladwell on Predicting Box Office Hits

Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker piece on predicting box office hits with algorithms relates Hollywood’s efforts to determine the value of a movie when it’s still in script form. The major problem they are facing is that with so many variables it’s hard to tell which elements are helping or hindering box office returns. It seems to boil down to the fact that in the end, “nobody knows anything about anything” or do they? As Gladwell’s works usually are, this one is a tremendously good read.

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This American Life

I recently subscribed to the This American Life podcast and I love it. They just started offering their show as a free podcast this week and I’m so glad they did; consider me hooked.

A quick description of their show for those that have never heard of it:

One of the problems with our show from the start has been that whenever we try to describe it in a sentence or two, it sounds awful. For instance: Each week we choose a theme and put together different kinds of stories on that theme. That doesn’t sound like something we’d want to listen to on the radio, and it’s our show. In the early days of the program, in frustration, we’d sometimes tell public radio program directors that it’s basically just like Car Talk. Except just one guy hosting. And no cars.

It’s easy to say what we’re not. We’re not a news show or a talk show or a call-in show. We’re not really formatted like other radio shows at all.

Instead, we do these stories that are like movies for radio. There are people in dramatic situations where things happen to them.

There are funny moments and emotional moments and—hopefully—moments where the people in the story say interesting, surprising things about it all. It has to be surprising. It has to be fun. There are shows on public radio with no sense of fun or surprise and we hate those shows.

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Is it a Near Miss or a Near Hit When You Almost die?

There was an accident at work last week. No one was hurt, but I was almost seriously injured.

Here’s the situation, some walls were taken out of the change rooms because they are rebuilding everything. At least one wall had heating vents going through it and when they moved the wall out, they left the bricks on top of the vent.

There was a guy grinding some metal bits out of the ground right where I wanted to pile some blocks. If he hadn’t been there, I would have just been piling away happily. Instead I asked him if I could start my pile beside him—if I would be out of his way or if I should just wait until he was done. He said yes so I just walked a few steps away to grab some blocks from the pallet and a couple of guys—I’m not sure who they are, (they call them the tin-bangers), started hammering on the vents, presumably to bring them down. Even though this particular job was supposed to have been done long before the bricklayers got there and certainly it shouldn’t have been done while there were four of us working beneath the vents, I guess they thought it was a good idea to be working on it right then.

All of a sudden about six bricks came falling out of the sky and landed beside the grinding guy on the ground and right where I was about to pile my blocks. It was so close to hitting him, and me, it was just CRAZY.

Some of the bricks hit the new wall that had just been built and knocked one of its blocks right out of the fresh cement onto the ground.

One of the guys stopped pounding when he saw the accident but the other idiot—probably the one that actually caused the bricks to fall, didn’t even stop for a good 30 seconds. Somebody yelled at the grinding guy to get out of the way because there were still more bricks up there and the guy just kept pounding. Did I mention he’s an idiot!?

Anyway, needless to say, I was pretty shocked that I was almost struck down by six bricks that fell from about four meters. That would have left a pretty deep mark.

Some might call it a near miss, but I think a near hit is a more accurate description. I also don’t think anyone reported the incident. “No blood; no foul” I guess. I can’t wait to finish this job.

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This is jeffmilner.com

When I worked in Malaysia for six weeks last year, one of the projects I worked on was creating station ID storyboards for Channel V International. The purpose of these identification “advertisements” is mostly to strengthen their brand by reminding people who is providing the content they are watching.

Many television stations now add watermarks, usually their logo, on the feed at all times so that there is always that reminder of where the channel comes from. It also serves as a protection against others from stealing their content and profiting from their work.

I discovered today that there are websites that harvest posts from my site via XML feeds and place them beside their own advertisements. These sites are called sploggers (spam bloggers). I have no real way of watermarking my posts, so instead I’m just writing this post to say, if you are reading this post from anywhere other than your feed reader or directly from the http://jeffmilner.com website, then you are helping these sites profit by stealing the work of myself and others like me.

But for everyone else, thanks for reading.

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Break on Through

I added a new clip from Break on Through, by The Doors, to my backmasking page for your subliminal viewing pleasure.

As far as I’m aware, I’m the first to have “discovered” this particular clip—though looking in this song was a suggestion by someone who emailed me. Like most of the songs on my backmasking page, I don’t think this is at all intentional, but of course that doesn’t mean we can’t get a good laugh out of it.

I’ve got another one I’m thinking of adding in the next little while, so in the meantime go tell your friends—at long last there is an update.