I just can’t get enough geek and sci-fi music, so here we go again. This time around it’s Tonight I’m Frakking You from Break Originals (notice the hot Cylon honeys from the series, one in a Princess slave girl outfit from another franchise), Star Trek Girl from Meekakitty, and finally ALL CAP’S song World of Warcraft Ruined My Life.
For 29 years I worked for Zambelli Bros. every 4th of July, my team and I putting on the best fireworks displays we could do for the budgeted explosives/insurance allotment for each town on the east coast we were assigned to entertain. And I will admit that hand loading the mortars and running around with a road flair to set them off was quite exciting, even if they did require computer controlled ignition if you exceeded a given shell size or for certain environments. And I am very proud of my crews safety record; at no point on any display was any member of the audience injured, and all of those of us on the shoot crew retain all of our limbs, eyeballs, etc. There may have been a few non-human damages inflicted, like the loss of the foliage on the 4th hole green at the Congressional Country Club golf course (they TOLD us it was OK to set up the finale racks there, but apparently they didn’t realize that things that exploded to launch themselves into the air would shower down some expended but still burning detritus), or the loss of some trees at the Antietam display in Sharpsburg the year the rain got to the launch charges (the wet launch charges threw them 100 ft. in the air, so the 400 foot blast radius for the larger shells made life a bit more exciting than we were expecting. But we moved all the cars out from under the trees before any of the gas tanks exploded, and it was fun watching the fire departments guy’s eyes bug out while he shouted “Is it SUPPOSED to do that??”).
I want to thank National Geographic for helping me relive that experience by putting together their excellent Naked Science episode, The Secret World of Fireworks. I came in part way through the first airing of the program on Thursday night, and will be re-watching it every time it airs this weekend; I encourage you to do the same. I especially liked that they devoted a noticeable segment of it to a display at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, where I did my very last show in July of 2007. Happy 4th of July!
Again with the Nerdcore music; This time they built a A Bollywood Themed Gamer’s Anthem (their words), and it is just so much fun I had to include it here. Felicia Day and her team have created some of the best TV online with The Guild, you should be watching! The other music is also all about gaming enviro’s, with G33k & G4M3R Girls from Team Unicorn, Roll A D6 from Sir Conner Anderson, and Do You Want To Date My Avatar (again from Felicia Day) in both RL and VR format.
You can make your own online videos, to share whatever drives your enthusiasm with the world, and lots of you have done so. If you want to build your own, I recommend you check out the two videos on the page. They will give you a few good rules of thumb and tell you about some excellent tools to help you succeed, many of which are even free (the software ones, at least; there are very few free video cameras or microphones, although there are a number of cheap but high quality hardware options). Thanks to Epic Fu and The Fine Bros. for some good insight into the process.
This animation from Patrick Boivin is amazing, and is only one of many he has created. He started out as a graphics novelist, but decided it was faster to get his ideas across with moving images. Before long he had turned into a film maker, and the word is a better place because of it. He claims the Woolf Lapin Agency as his home page, and you can learn more about him there.
OKGO has built the best music videos I have seen this year, or last year for that matter. Here is their latest, which involves heavily trained dogs… Not to be confused with the proclamation from the Agnostic Dyslexic: I’m Not Sure There IS A Dog!