You know the first thought in my head when I go to the site of a designer? I wonder if they design websites. Wait, no I don’t. I know they design websites because they are a website designer so why in the world are they telling me they design websites? Better yet, why are they telling me they create beautiful experiences, simple and easy to use websites or helping to make the web a better place? If they are doing those things I would hate to know what the other designers of the world are doing.
In addition to visual effects, I was asked to record myself using a unix terminal doing technologically feasible things. I took extra care in babysitting the elements through to final composite to ensure that the content would not be artistically altered beyond that feasibility. I take representing digital culture in film very seriously in lieu of having grown up in a world of very badly researched user interface greeble. I cringed during the part in Hackers (1995) when a screen saver with extruded “equations” is used to signify that the hacker has reached some sort of neural flow or ambiguous destination. I cringed for Swordfish and Jurassic Park as well. I cheered when Trinity in The Matrix used nmap and ssh (and so did you). Then I cringed again when I saw that inevitably, Hollywood had decided that nmap was the thing to use for all its hacker scenes (see Bourne Ultimatum, Die Hard 4, Girl with Dragon Tattoo, The Listening, 13: Game of Death, Battle Royale, Broken Saints, and on and on). In Tron, the hacker was not supposed to be snooping around on a network; he was supposed to kill a process. So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep. I also ended up using emacs eshell to make the terminal more l33t. The team was delighted to see my emacs performance — splitting the editor into nested panes and running different modes. I was tickled that I got emacs into a block buster movie. I actually do use emacs irl, and although I do not subscribe to alt.religion.emacs, I think that’s all incredibly relevant to the world of Tron.
By the artist that created the effects on Tron Legacy. Awesome. Finally someone that understand the importance of having realistic UIs in movies. Click the image for more.
I had lunch today with a girl who moved to New York to shake things up and do what she always wanted to do.
She’s still figuring it out, but she’s moving foward.
She asked me if I still have goals and I told her I do.
I’m working and doing things I love, but this doesn’t mean I still…
