irrelevancy

If you keep up with this sort of thing, you know that “shock jock” (what a stupid term) Howard Stern recently made the switch from FCC-restricted FM radio over to satellite radio.

First off, I want to say I agree that freedom of speech is being greatly limited by the American government. It is not the FCC’s duty to regulate what goes over the airwaves, nor is it one they deserve. It is a power they have given themselves. Democracy in action, right? That’s what our founding fathers had in mind? A small, vocal minority controlling this nation?

Anyway, America’s complacence aside, why satellite radio? Let’s stop pretending he’s a champion of free speech. He gave up the fight when he left terrestrial radio. Interestingly enough, there’s talk about Sirius executives trying to set some boundaries for Stern. There is fear that congress will decide that government regulation of satellite radio is necessary. Personally, I think they just have it out for him.

Why didn’t Stern take his show to the Internet? Free speech is still relatively safe here (in America, at least, can’t say the same for all countries). He would have a wider audience. Maybe he didn’t like the idea of people pirating the show and getting his dose of free speech for (gasp) free. Maybe there were moral issues. Maybe it was the $700 million he received for signing to Sirius. Just maybe.

I did a search, looking for articles pertaining to the FCC trying to regulate satellite radio, but came upon various articles generally about the move to Sirius. Actually, they weren’t all that varied. Some were just factual articles, but many were people who were offended by Stern. I would liked to have seen some from the other side of the argument, but Stern fans are rarely articulate.

His words don’t offend me. They’re just words. His actions don’t offend me. What offends me is that the show is so horrendously bad. I like talk radio. I particularly like shows with discussions of social concerns. His show bores me to death.

I’m obviously not a fan, but I’ve listened to my fair share. I haven’t heard much in the way of constructive social criticisms. It’s usually just him saying how great a job he would do if he were in a position of power. Not actually any real ideas. They read the headlines from the news (yeah, the same ones you get from reading the morning paper or taking a couple minutes to browse around the Internet). All the guests are celebrities (it’s amazing anyone actually cares about these people). The co-hosts are horrible. They play “drops” in the show (little sound clips), which are either fart noises or sexual sounds, but they are all of poor quality. Other guests include porn stars (zero intelligence), or other young women who don’t mind being degraded for the chance to make a bit of money. I love the aesthetics of a physically beautiful woman, but what does that mean to me, listening to the radio?

When he was on FM radio, the amount of commercials was just ridiculous. I assume he made a good amount of money, but was it just not enough? Hold on, it gets better: on satellite radio, you know, the one you need to pay to listen to, there’s still advertisements.

He’s not a pioneer. He’s not a revolutionary. In the move to satellite, he’s no longer even a footnote in the history of free speech. It’s hard to take him seriously on the subject when he’s limited himself to the numb-skulls willing to pay $13 a month to listen to him.

I find it hard to say what I have to say when I’m typing in this box. I have some stuff written in a word processor, but I’m just too tired to complete a thought. I just wanted to acknowledge the fact that there hasn’t been any activity on this page for a couple weeks.

When I started this, I told myself I wouldn’t post under certain conditions. I want to continue this. I think, you know, I kind of need to. I don’t have many outlets. I don’t take advantage of many outlets.

I have a few days left to work through a metric ton of things that are piling up against me.

Yesterday was my cousin’s last night in town. He, another friend, and I hung out for a bit at a local poolhall. None of us play anywhere near as much as we used to, but we always remember to make it out when we get together.

I took a couple pictures, but apparently, I cannot hold the camera still. To be fair, I turned off the flash and didn’t know when the picture was actually being taken. Plus, both of them would move right as the picture was snapping.

my cousin

another friend

And we had a few beers so that’s probably what it looked like to us anyway.

I tried browsing the Web, looking for an old time photo tutorial. Really, I would just like to see some real old time photographs, but mostly I just found home-brewed tutorials from people who probably don’t see many of these types of photographs either.

I’m responding to this one in particular. I mention it mostly just because I used the same photo (from PhotoSpin.com, used without permission or scruples).

I was obvioulsy not around in the earlier parts of last century, but I would think it was not so common for photographs to be in color prior to 1963 (Polaroid’s instant color film). He also used a Cut-Out filter which makes it look more like a watercolor effect rather than… whatever effect he was trying to accomplish.

So, here’s a quick “me, too” tutorial. I didn’t use multiple layers or play with layer modes. Just quick and easy. Just a disclaimer – I’m using the GIMP and not Photoshop. Some tool names and parameters might be slightly different, so I’ll do my best to describe why I’m doing what I’m doing and not just telling you to enter exactly what I have.

1) Open photo. If this one needs any further explanation, hit that big glowing button on the front of your PC and go read a book. I used this one (from the sites listed above):

2) I copied the layer just to preserve the original, so I could just click the visibility back on and see where I started from.

3) Adjust saturation down to -100. It should now look like a plain ol’ black & white photo.

4) Noise – Scatter HSV. Holdness = 1, Hue = 0, Saturation = 0, Value = 10. If you’re using Photoshop, I think you can just use Add Noise. Just make to sure to set it to a Gaussian distribution and make it monochromatic. This is another one you don’t need to go crazy with. I just wanted it to look a little grainy.

5) Gaussian Blur. One pixel for both horizontal and vertical. This softens up the noise and takes away some of the sharpness of clean digital photos.

6) Adjust Contrast. I lowered it to -50 to bring out the noise a little more.

7) Colorize. Hue = 50, Saturation = 30, Lightness = 0. Photos tend to yellow with age, so I added a bit of that here. I didn’t go crazy with it on this one because I figured the picture to be “taken” around the ’50s or so. If you’re going for 1850s, go ahead and bump up the saturation as you see fit.

8) Adjust Levels. Gamma = 1.50. This works well to brighten up the photo. Careful how far down you take the white point. For this photo, anything less than 230 and it really started to lose the detail from the little girl’s dress. I suppose you could raise the black point to make it look more dramatic, but I didn’t think it was necessary for this photo. I raised the gamma because it’s a light-hearted image on a sunny day, so it makes sense to me that it would be a little brighter.

And here’s the result:

Original Image

Old Time Photo Effect

The reason I was browsing around for this effect was to see if there were any ways to improve upon or gain insight for the effect I applied to my Gun screenshot in an earlier post. Here’s what I had going:

Enjoy.

I received this game for Christmas and so far it’s a lot better than I thought it would be.

I’ve never been a huge fan of the Old West. I could probably count the number of Western movies I’ve seen on one hand, with a few fingers left over. I remember playing a PC shareware demo of Redneck Rampage back maybe… 10 years ago? Before that the only Western I played was a game for Commodore 64, but I cannot remember the name.

This one is made by the guys at Neversoft who you may know from the 2,342 Tony Hawk games. Nice to see them moving on to another genre.

I’m only about a third the way into the main story. The story’s been solid so far. There are plenty of side quests and mini-games to keep you busy. There are places in towns that you stop for a Texas Hold ‘Em tournament, although it was disappointing to see other games which were unplayable.

The voice acting is good, featuring some Hollywood talent, but kind of often you’ll hear expanded pauses in dialog. I don’t know if was bad audio mixing or deliberate for the sake of drama, but it slows the pace just a bit.

The controls are smooth for most part. My only complaint is of one of the button commands. Throughout the world you’ll find Wanted posters and most of the time you’ll have the choice of bringing them back dead or alive. Of course you make more money from bringing them in alive, so you have to injure them enough to be able to run up and grab them with White (that’s a button, for all you non-Xboxers). Then you have the choice of White to let him go or X to subdue. I have a tendency to double tap the White button and there were plenty of times I accidently let the bad hombre go, just to have to shoot him in the leg a couple more times and try again.

The graphics are okay. The animations aren’t as polished and there’s the occasional (although tiny) graphical glitch. Personally, I love the landscapes. The game world is open (after a little bit of the story), so I find it fun to just ride around on my horse. If you ever played The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time then you probably had some good times on horseback. Here, you have much more space to explore and I think the level designers did a great job.

The sound is excellent. The music is pretty damn good (relatively, we’re still talking about a Western), but it fits the game perfectly and it’s various throughout what I’ve played. Small glitches here, too. Sometimes you’ll take out a whole group of bad guys and then go to reload your gun and you’ll hear, “Get him while he reloads!” But it becomes obvious that the sound clip only played because of the situation and it wasn’t any AI that knew to say that.

The game is most definitely a shooter, but it has a little bit of RPG elements in that you can upgrade your weapons and stats.

Like I said before, I’m not a huge fan of Western games/movies/whatever, but as far as GTA-esque wild west shooters go, this game is pretty good. The story keeps me pushing on and there are no wildly annoying inconsistencies that make me want to leave the game unfinished. It’s worth at least a rental.