Ask me what I should be reading…

Yesterday, John helped me get the socket to work in ActionScript 3.0, which should make drawing much easier… I say “should” because I have yet to draw circles from within a loop successfully, and because I need to make sure my string sorting algorithm is working properly.  I’m going to do a test by sending it obvious data (i.e. x-val-1, y-val-1, r-val-1, x-val-2, y-val-2, r-val-2, et cetera) and then checking the contents of the string and the sorted arrays.  More work on that to come today.

In other news, I enjoyed the sun yesterday: I biked to 5th St Market for falafel and lamb curry at Casablanca, my favorite eats in town, followed by espresso ice cream at Marche Provisions downstairs; then back to campus for my honors science class, which turned out to be very entertaining (among the topics tangentially discussed were floating cities on Venus and relocation of all Republicans to Mars, to which I replied that was littering and we should send them to a penal colony on Venus; note to all Republicans: peace out, I love you, it was all in good fun, I assure you!).  Then I biked out to VRC to see Sherlock Holmes (with my sneaked-in Wetzel Pretzel and Naked bottle full of water, plus the macaroon from Marche Provisions), which proved to be very entertaining (I love explosions and intrigue, plus ROBERT DOWNEY JUNIOR! oh, dare I hope for a sequel?), and then biked back in the relative dark, ignored dinner until 10 or so, and caught myself up on the Men’s single skating (I still think that Johnny Weir was heinously underscored and should have taken bronze at minimum, if not silver; Plushenko’s jumps were just not there—tilts and wobbles and I don’t know how he managed to land one of them, added to choreography that just wasn’t all that great).  Sigh.  I felt so bad for Takahashi falling on that first jump, but he pulled everything else off spectacularly.

I’m almost done with Forty Thousand in Gehenna, by Cherryh again (finished Cyteen: the Vindication some time earlier this week), which has been brilliant.  Go ahead, ask me what I should be reading…

UPDATE: I resolved the array data sorting issues and got Flash to draw from within the loop (yay! but not quite how it should be drawing… compare the two here).  And Flash is crashing again, a scurrilous action I thwart by reflexively saving before I run the thing.  I’ve put a 5-second delay into Processing (better than the 1-second delay it’s been for a while) and I intend to figure out how to debug with breakpoints in Flash.

UPDATE: Hmm…

Attemping to launch and connect to Player using URL /Users/emilys_old/Desktop/SpecialProbs—John/TECH/!!FlashAS3Socket.swf

[SWF] Users:emilys_old:Desktop:SpecialProbs—John:TECH:!!FlashAS3Socket.swf – 2873 bytes after decompression

SecurityError: Error #2010: Local-with-filesystem SWF files are not permitted to use sockets.

at flash.net::XMLSocket/connect()

at _fla::MainTimeline/frame1()[_fla.MainTimeline::frame1:23]

Cannot display source code at this location.

Well, fine, Debugger!  Be that way!  Guess we’ll have to do this the hard way.

UPDATE: Flash has stopped crashing, and the circles are in their proper positions, but the radii are wrong, and the stage is not clearing appreciably.  I think I should start drawing the squares as child sprites so I can delete them as necessary, but the example code in the AS3 API has errors (Packages cannot be nested), which strikes me as funny even as it annoys me.

Transitions and text (and the Olympics, of course!)

Okay, I did get a lot of work done yesterday, but I didn’t post because I was watching figure skating on NBC’s olympics coverage (wow; some painful falls!).  I also forgot to post a link to the valentine I made a while ago and posted yesterday.  Then I did more work this morning; the progress animation for today will cover both days of work.  I plan to eat dinner early, go to Fencing Club, and then possibly leave a bit early so I can rush through my shower and beg that the TV in the lounge be tuned to channel 3 for the second installment of pairs figure skating!  Yay!  If not, I will watch the clips online…  And speaking of watching things online, I’m on episode 22 of Cowboy Bebop (that’s “Cowboy Funk,” the one with the Teddy Bomber and that annoying dude with the horse whose name happily escapes me).

Transitions: how I go from image to image, or animation to animation.  It varies; I’ve used lots of fades and zooms, and a few animated changes (line four’s eye reflection turns into line five’s silhouette); the animations take more work, but I really like the results, so I hope to do more of those.  Likewise coloring; monochrome gives a nice effect, but the mood of the poem/song fluctuates between dark (minor key, verses) and light (major key, chorus), so I’m using more color for the chorus segments.  See, it all makes sense, Subconscious!  I told you it would!

Text: I’m doing a handwritten style for the personal, intimate feel and flexibility it gives me; I usually do several draft letterings and pick my favorite to use (heh; a typo made that “sue” for a moment).  They writing also reflects the mood to a degree, but the style of the scene/image/animation is a stronger influence.  I’m doing mostly static type, so that the animated type of certain sections stands out more (line five, particularly, as well as forthcoming lines six and eight).  It reads a bit like a picture book at the moment; the type is wavering between being like a static block of text and a fully integrated element of the image.  At this point, I’m not sure where it will go eventually, but I’m excited to find out.

Go USA!  Make me proud! *insert a rare instance of patriotic fervor in yours truly*