Fake Blog

This is my brief narrative that is due today for the first part of project four. It's meant to read like somebody else's blog entry in the not too distant future (what's a score here and there, right?).

October 26th, 2022

Howdy Readers,

So today’s the day. After weeks of media hype we’ve finally reached the 20th anniversary of the strange plague that the pundits at the time dubbed “the people who grinned themselves to death”. For those of you who have been living under a rock lately (or who are just too young to remember) I’ll provide a quick recap:

On October 23rd 2012 two local hopitals here in San Jose reported one case each brought in through the E.R. of a strange sort of catatonia. The victims were largely nonresponsive, they would not speak, showed no signs of understanding when spoken to, and would only change position when physically moved, and most disturbingly, their faces were frozen in huge, happy grins. Doctors at each hospital were stumped, but not yet alarmed, as there was no reason to believe they were looking at anything than an isolated case of mental breakdown of some sort. The following day brought no new cases and nothing more was thought about it until the morning of the 25th when 14 more cases were brought into ERs around the city by frightened family members and the medical professionals began to realize that they were looking a new sort of epidemic. The number a victims rose steadily as the day progressed, maxing out emergency services capability to care for them. The CDC was called in to help contain the situation, although by this time reports were coming in of similar occurances in other places around the country. The true horror of the situation however didn’t hit until twenty years ago today, when San Jose awoke to discover that 40% of its population had become what would soon be known as “grinners”. The unaffected few could wander the streets passing crowds of people who had just stopped going about their business whereever they happened to be and were just standing there grinnning manically at nothing. They were completely nonresponsive, they could be posed like dolls, they were breathing, their hearts were pumping, but nothing else was happening. They would not eat or drink unless fed by I.V. in the overloaded hospitals and it wasn’t long before people began to die.

At the time no one knew what was going on--it was sudden and terrifiying and a complete mystery. It would be five weeks before doctors and scientists were able to discover the cause anf the cure, and when the knowledge was given to the public the riots began. The grinners had been infected with happy bugs--the cyborg product of a secret military project meant to be used to incapacitate enemy soldiers and populations for easier conquest. The tiny little bugs were partially mechanical--tiny nanorobots married to living insect tissue in the lab. The insects, controlled by HI-MEMS technolgy, outwardly appear no diffent than your average gadfly but when they bite they leave the host infected with microscopic cyborg parasites that make their way to the victims brain, attaching themselves to the the hypothalamus where they release their chemical load directly into the pleasure center of the brain, leaving the victim tractible and helpless. Learning that it was our own goverment that had, albiet accidentally, set this horror on its citizens was the last straw and the violence that followed was almost as devatating to the population as the infestation itself.

Nearly everyone lost people they loved in that month twenty years ago, and nobody who lived through the experience can ever look at a grinning face in quite the same way.

There are programs and memorials throughout the nation tonight, and I’m planning to attend the vigil being held at City Hall to remember the dead.

The End.

That's how it stands at the moment--I may well feel compelled to fuss with it some more as the project moves along as I've never been very good at leaving well enough alone....

--The Wombat

Still more research....

......which must be getting quite dull to read about if you're not the doing it. Sorry. I found another place that I had been compiling notes over the weekend. The Stickies program seems to work just like little scraps of paper--I put them everywhere all over the desktop and then can't read the damn things anyway. Ah well.

Here--I'll post a link to something visually interesting to combat the boredom. I'm not sure that these are actually useful, but they were fun to look at:

http://cyanatrendland.com/2009/03/03/cyborg-bugs/

Here's another cyborg bug as government project link (HI-MEMS seems to be the official keyword--should be helpful for both more research and sounding official when I start the actual writeup):

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2008/03/for-years-now-p/

Brain pleasure center stuff, some more useful than others:

http://health.howstuffworks.com/brain-during-orgasm2.htm

http://www.indiana.edu/~engs/rbook/drug.html

http://www.geocities.com/hhugs2001/roleofhyp.htm

Plus, ideas cont.:

I think the cyborg bug parasite would have to go through stages--the bug itself flies, stings humans to leave it's "eggs" behind, those hatch and move to the hypothalamus perhaps, stimulating the brains mood centers as they grow (what do they get in returns--anything? they are man made so I guess it's not a requirement, they could just be weapon-like...), then do they leave the host somehow? Collect information?

--The Wombat

Oops!

I forgot to put these in my last post--I got grossed out by the parasite links and it just slipped my mind....

http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=368

Interesting article with parasite information in general.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17895-freeflying-cyborg-insects-steered-from-a-distance.html

Cyborg bugs!

http://www.pcworld.com/article/125107/an_army_of_cyborg_bugs.html

Military uses of cyborg bugs (and isn't it scary that when I go research the bizzare, outlandish made up idea for a storyline for class I promptly discover that somebody wants to actually try it--don't these people read science fiction? Bad idea!!!!)

There. That was all of the reading I've done so far that I remembered to save the links for.

--The Wombat

Wee Research

I've gone back to my earlier posts as a starting place. I had been researching nanotechnology, especially as it could be applied to medicine, as a possible movie topic but then my group veered off in another direction and I was left with an unused idea. I want to flesh it out here for this project.

My overall idea is a research project gone wrong (probably government or military)in which microscopic nano-cyborg bugs were designed to infiltrate human hosts and release some sort of pleasure-inducing drug/hormone into the brain on command to render the host harmless/docile/tractable/catatonic. They get out of hand (as is wont to happen in this sort of tale), there is an initial mass epidemic of "the people who grinned themselves to death" (and yes, that does come from a Housemartins song--I like British pop from the '80s, what can I say). It was controlled/comtained (how? must work out), and now is a much smaller ongoing problem--people on street corners purposely getting high by infecting themselves with the bugs, accidental infection a common hazard, so on. I need good information on nanotech, drug delivery systems, cyborg (living tissue/machine mixes), parasites that can affect the brain, and a few other weird topics.

Here's some of what I have so far:

Nanotech in medicine/drug delivery:

http://www.technologyreview.com/biztech/19784/

http://www.nsti.org/Nanotech2009/program/medical_biotech.html#TU82.5

Brain Parasites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis

http://eands.caltech.edu/articles/LXVI4/brainworms.html

http://animal.discovery.com/videos/monsters-inside-me-schistosomiasis-aka-snail-fever.html

And just as a side note--research brain parasites is disgusting. Really, really, disgusting. Especially the pictures...ew!!!!!

Right. That's all for now. I'm off to find less stomach turning things to read now.

--The Wombat

Next!

We got our assignment briefing for the next project (the first part anyway--it looks like we'll get more as we go along) and I'm actually quite excited about it. I get to make up stories and build a funny bug thing, play with a soldering iron (I'll most likely burn my hands--I have every other time I've used the damn thing, but somehow that's part of the fun....), and take pictures of it all. What's not to like?

This first bit is the research and early development part of the deal. I want to go back to my early interests in the class and see if I can't work out a nifty way to tie nanotechnology into this. I'm initially thinking microscopic critters that can invade a body, but I need to go do the actual research to help me nail it down a bit.

I'll back soon(ish) with more!

--The Wombat

Final Product

Well, tomorrow is the due date and I think our movie is as done as we can make it. It's posted on youtube for mass viewing (I've sent the link to my brother so he can have fun making fun of me for it--what are siblings for?) here.

The film quality goes down a lot in the posting, but the larger file size version we'll be playing in class tomorrow is much nicer. I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone else has come up with--some of the bits and pieces I saw around the classroom the last few weeks looked pretty neat.

I am looking forward to moving on to the next project--building funny little bugs sounds much more my cup of tea. I like actually manually making things.

--The Wombat

Actual Editing

Editing, Day Two:

Ahhh!!! Time consuming! And complicated. I've spent huge portions of class today trying to get two tiny little things done. I did eventually manage to record and transfer the audio clips we needed (after using three computers, two people--Stella and me--and a thumbdrive and a whole lot of shuffling about) and I figured out how to download a youtube video and import it into iMovie '09 to edit out the part we needed, slow it down, and then export it to feed it to Nick's laptop so it could be spliced into the rest of the movie. Blah.

Here's the link for the nifty video download/conversion site--easy as pie!

And our elevator now sings old Scottish ballads. Kinda fun.

--The Wombat

Editing Video Woes

We did more filming before the week was out (and I didn't remember to bring my camera for stills, but as I was crawling around on the floor and stuff, I wouldn't have been able to take pictures anyway), and now it's time to think about editing.

I had started to watch the lynda.com videos for imovie, but then I realized that they were for imovie'06 and the computers in the lab have imovie'09 on them and they don't look at all the same, so videos telling me where to find things in one seem pretty useless for the other. It looks like our class lynda.com membership only lets us watch the particular videos listed for our course so I couldn't get any of the '09 tutorials to play. But Apple's website has a handful of online tutorials--just getting the general idea sort of things, which is just the right speed for me. I also just poked around on Google for any other tutorials and checked those out. This one wasn't bad. There are heaps of them on youtube, most of which seem to be made by wee little boys--it kinda cute. I liked this one and this one. I think I remeber what I watched, and I'll find out tomorrow in class (I've discovered that my computer won't accept any relatively recent version of imovie--its video card is too old? The message that popped up when I tried to install it from my ilife CD said something to that extent).


--The Wombat

Filming!

Well, we filmed today. We had a good, long block of time and we actually got quite a lot done--we did most of the work for three sketches. Filming in a public elevator was a bit trying--for some odd reason other people kept wanting to get in.....go figure. But I think it's going to look good--the fisheye lens (Monday's forgotten equipment) really makes the scene look appropriately weird. We did the ATM shoot next (again--too many darned people!). It took a while to work out the logistics of camera placement, and we ended up doing something a bit different than we originally thought, but it came together and we had fun (we got to spray Stella in the face with a squirt bottle and scramble madly on the ground for cash!). We left campus for the automatic windows shoot and used Nick's (very large--I really had to climb in) truck. We managed not to actually cut my head off (yay!) and discovered that corn syrup blood is very goopy and messy. And people on the street look at you funny when you're hanging out of a truck window making weird noises.

We had been talking about perhaps splicing some footage from some other source of an ATM spitting cash, and I found a clip from the first source I could name (I know it's a common routine--I've seen it lots in movies and TV programs, I just couldn't tell you what most of them were, so that's not much help):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U8U7j23YjI&feature=related

There are a few more shooting get-togethers planned before Monday, I shall try to remember to bring a still camera along for the next one so that I can post visuals....

--The Wombat

More Storyboard (Opening Title, Last sketch-let)

More Storyboard (TV)

More Storyboard (ATM)

More Storyboard (GPS)

Here's the board for the GPS sketch.

Must remember to blog.

Must remember to blog. Must remember to blog.....

Maybe if I type it over and over again, like writing lines in school, it'll stick. This blog reminds me of long division in the third grade--it's not actually all that difficult once I just sit down and make myself do but I have a major mental grudge against the idea of it. That goes for digital art in general for me--I just don't like using computers. I'll have to get past that. Must remember to blog!

Right--that said, we got off to a rocky start with the filming this week. We had a plan, we had props, but come Monday we were short a person, a piece of equipment, an essential prop or two, and a location (being repaired--figures). In other words, we didn't get very much done. Alas. But we're meeting up before class today to get an early start and we have plenty of time blocked out outside of class for the rest of the week and weekend so we should be just fine on time.

We're going to be working on three of the shorter sketches today--elevator, ATM, and car window. I've got a heap of props piled up front of my door to haul off with me--a big clock with hands we can turn, some clean trash, ingredients for fake blood, stuff to clean up after fake blood (which I have a feeling is going to be harder than we think). I'm a bit nervous about the whole thing--filming and acting (and let's not even think about editing quite yet...), but it'll work out.

--The Wombat