The Message Column

New Things

I buy books on line and sometimes at the thirft store to read when I'm in the mood. So I learn some new things and it's a bit overwhelming at times.

I was trying to learn how to pronounce a foreign language and watched some videos of that. And then, reading the comments, I saw accusations that the person didn't speak the correct prononciations of the dialect it was purported to be. Sources seem broken at times.

The sources might seem broken. I can read a narrative from History and find things that I never knew. I never know what, in a book, is going to strike me as worth knowing. Or when I watch walk throughs of museums, it's maybe a bit like being there. I linger near a piece of art and try to not be too much of a fan boy to it. I used to enjoy being at the Museum of Fine Arts, down near the college. They have an impressionist room. If I look I bet I could find some 18 year old photos of some of it. I used to enjoy taking a lot of pictures. Now I don't get down to the museum. But I virtual tour museums and buildings online by watching videos. I enjoy it, sometimes.

But just as with anything, there is , in deed, a season for it. I find it much more pleasing in the mornings to do the museum tour videos. In the morning I am well rested and thus more receptive to scenes and views presented in the floods of images that these on-line videos present to the viewers. I like to pause and inspect and rewind, etc, the images presented. I have more energy in the mornings, so maybe that's why I think that is the best time to watch that kind of video. Though, sometimes, if it's late, I'll go to a favorite one and watch it deleriously. It's a useful way to review the content. So I guess my point: I tend to watch them in the mornings, but I do sometimes watch them at other times of day.

All of this annecdotal history is annecdotal, and it allows me to pass some times in reflection. But if I get the story wrong, then do I, as well, echo 'fake history'? I say 'we can do better, as a society, this History is available. It ought to be better known. So, I buy books, on line, and read through them. I try to stick to my favorite topics, and it's about architecture and ancient societies. I have been studying about Ancient Rome for almost 2 years now, starting because I was interested in learning the dimensions of a building so that I could model it with PyGraph. Well, it's gone a long way since then.

Blender 3.1, Geometry nodes

A while back I had said 'OK, let me model stuff in Blender' and I wrote about it at my other page, below perhaps depending on how you access this particular content. But the thing is about Blender is that there are 'issues' of usability that come from not knowning how to use the product. A model can get very large very quickly. They throttle, for example, the array element, at 1000. So how do I know this? Well, I've always been one to add a zero and see how far I can take it.

How big can we make this thing? I ask the question. And then I say "I experiment to find this out, but I'm not really going to be able to use things at that size, because it's on the cusp of being useable, and any bigger and the system just grinds to a halt." So I had done some things with 'bricks' to try and model a real wall, and I didn't have a lot of success with it mostly because I didn't take too much time after hitting a wall with things crawling to a halt. So the issues stopped me from continuing. And then when the newer version of things, this thing called 'geometry nodes' came out I said "let me dive right into this and I'll review it all and see what I can do with it." I dove right in. I took a lot of notes. I wrote a bunch of content, still needing to be edited for presentation. Let me just give you the short and skinny: the results from Geometry Nodes in Blender 3.0, and even in the 2.9xx versions, are leaps and bounds better than the results using array attributes. The node counts are much much lower for the saved product. One is able to make much larger ordered presentation of nodes, as laid out, and the \'grind to a halt\' feature is easy to spot and work around. (mute node on move)

If you've used Blender and hit those limits when the system performs very very slowly, hopefully you have the skill to profile what you did to see what is wrong with your models, and your node collections. In many cases if one is experiencing what seems to be a lock up it's not the Blender, at all. But the use of it. It's like trying to drive a car when you don't know how to use it correctly. Blender lets you do stuff that your system can't handle. I should say it lets you 'try' to do stuff. If you 'throw more memory at it' maybe you can make bigger things. But the Geometry nodes reworks things. I recommend finding blender videos, and for me a key one was one title

"The ARRAY MODIFIER Is DEAD To Me! EASY ARRAYS With GEOMETRY NODES! 1D 2D 3D"
at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMaQZf2ja2c
by 
Luminous Labs

I am in no way affiliated with Luminous Labs

Blender is at a cusp, and the product is about to become far far more useful for doing large content worlding. (worlding: using a video game like environment to build a virtual environment for either educational, or recreational purposes).

Learning how to use the geometry nodes was my project for October and November. I recommend that anyone who has hit those walls in blender, when the nodes are too many, take your old creation and purge all the arrays out of them and replace them with the methods that are outlined by Luminous Labs, and use the tools and devise some of your own methods. The layout of objects is made easier, and many more nodes will be available. There is no limit of 1000 nodes (which one can work around if one needs to).

These efforts, for me, are cyclical. I know when I'm in the season of it. I would 'loose the mood' and forget what I started out doing. IN the caase of the geometry nodes, I took an old 'virutal city' and started replacing the objects with newer, far terser but very similar, objects. This solved the performance issues. But still there is a lot more to do. I was real work, and got tedious, and when I feel it's tedious I tend to move on. So I can't do it every day, and it has to be the 'season' of wanting to do it or being productive with it. I can only get in the mind set of it for so long before I have to break away from my obcession. But this season of it I got so much new content that it's over whelming, and almost unbelievable. And if I keep at it, and as the new releases are made and thing in the architecture are firmed up, there will be a lot more interesting things to do with. Meanwhile there are other skillsets that I can pursue, and issues of layout that are not so simple to perform and have the output be beliable if you're moving around in it. Plus animation is available, and not hard to perform.

But I can't plan to be in the mood to do this stuff. The best I can do is watch the videos like the one I linked and hope it inspires me.

Christmastime!

With Christmas so close, the stores are filled!

Dec 12 7:19PM EST

Praise the Lord!
Praise the Lord
for his unfailing love!
Jambience

Praise the Lord!

  unclog your ears
  what is done is done
  unclog your ears

outside of time
where none of this is even real
he pauses for a while
but since there is no time
no one ever knew how long it was.

  

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  Praise     Praise     Praise
   the        the        the
   Lord       Lord       Lord!
  for    because    
 Easter  He's so awesome! 
  welcome to The Message Column!

      🖐♥♥Love♥♥🖑
      ♥♥🖑Cops🖐♥♥

      

Is it obvious parody or News or both?

 

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🖐♥♥Love♥♥🖑
♥♥🖑Cops🖐♥♥

      

Vote Once
One Vote
here is a fresh link, a new path to some older content:
   

 
  see it all in the real world.
 

In Wicked Need of an Edit

🚛 🎓 🎔 🌀

Political and Media Inanity

Truck-u-later

in this column Truck-u-later steps in deeper . . .

this place is pure kruft!

if every state were only allowed to have as many people as they want to have in a new state, DC, then there would be about 473 states. That would be a lot of new senators. And a lot of new state capitals.

April 8, 2021


Tell us
how
you really feel

a running headline:

Still Trump wins bigly!

the tangled webs of constant decpetion mean, often, in politics . . .

蠱 work on what has been spoiled

sometimes you just need to remove kruft.

Politics never ends but sometimes it's better to remain mute. Mostly when there is nothing needing or wanting to be said.

but that is no one, that has
not hapened to anyone
you made it up.

thankfully true.

We move along. We keep doing for ourselves. We survive. We don't let the world define who and what we are, or how we feel, or what any of this really means.

And if they have bad humor, and will not forgive they will hate you then.

but at least in that
story they leave you 
alone after all of that

They dont' always leave you alone. It seems they still sometimes want to connect to try to draw that cray cray narrative out one more time. And you have to explain that, no, sorry, this is a bit. You caught me while I was writing a character, that's not me. I am using tht as a dialog in a paly that I'm having my character write inside of his narrative, he's writing his own play about a guy writing a play.

It's like he feeds on it, I get bothered that he lets me go on with it.

I speak
but there is no one there.
I know that there is no one there.
I'm not really talking to myself
but I know that I'm not talking to anybody else.

  Praise     Praise     Praise
   the        the        the
   Lord       Lord       Lord
  for his    for his    for his
 unfailing  unfailing  unfailing
   love!      love!      love!



  well, little else now.