Move to Palinola.com

Wordpress has been installed.

From now on, if you want me I'll be at Palinola.com/weblog/.

I haven't been very active here, have I?

No big loss, I suppose, since nobody is reading this (Google Analytics tells me as much).

Anyways. With the Portfolio Module starting now I've gone back to drawing plans for my site, and to transplant all the stuff here to go there.

Good luck with that.

Thank you.


A long and complicated string of SID-sounds follow.

Dark Magenta

Should be finished and up on www.darkmagenta.net by Wednesday.

Finally!

Concept & Development

Achievement unlocked!

Today we had the presentation to our potential investors, and I have to say that it went quite well! They said that our presentation was very good and that we had good answers to the questions we got. In the end they said that our concept was interesting, but that they weren't ready to invest any money just jet - however, with some change of focus and attaching a notable artist to our idea their decision would change. Jocke was grinning when we left the room, declaring it the best possible outcome and I'm inclined to agree with him.

Sure, it would have been awesome to know that we had an excellent idea and that we could choose to go with it if we wanted to, but we are at Hyper to learn and in many ways, failing is better for that purpose. The reason I think this "no, but yes" answer was the best is that it is both a success and a failiure - we unlocked the 100% learning achievement. As I always declare a few times in a module, it's all about a group choosing between two paths - either people do what they're good at, and the result is excellent but nobody learns anything, or everybody picks an area they want to learn something in and the whole group learns even though progress will be slower and the end result might not be 100% perfect. In this project I feel this group chose the second path and that we all learned a lot (despite the occasional panic attacks from looming deadlines).

Achievement Unlocked: Maximal learning in the module Concept & Development.

EDIT: I just realized I haven't described our actual concept, so I'll see if I can upload our High Concept Document (concise description) and Business Plan (Crunch) to Palinola.com asap.

The trigger is you

In celebration of a colour

The german telecom company T-Mobile is sueing other companies on the digital market for using the colour Magenta. In a possibly futile attempt to oppose them, or at least to give them a digital finger, I have made some alterations to the style of my weblog (as you should have noted).

Read more at: http://www.stijlfigurant.nl/magenta/

Sunday bloody sunday.

Temporalia!

I haven't written in a while, and I suppose there have been some occurrences worth filling you in on.

First of all, Experience Technology has been concluded. This is a video with Jesper demonstrating our strange cube from beyond.

Strange sound box
Uploaded by jesperlindborg

The exhibition went well, despite some minor technical difficulties I believe the day was a success. A lot of people seemed genuinely impressed and interested in our strange device, even if a few were confounded by the overall lack of usefulness of our otherwise spectacular device.

In other news, our third Project Module - Concept & Development - has started. The idea is for us to come up with a business idea and then pitch it to a board of potential financiers. The first week was spent getting to know the group (Jocke, Tilde, Rebecca and Peter) and coming up with 50 business ideas (which was our first assignment). A lot of brainstorming was done, and the picking of our Top-5 ideas was done during a group dinner at Rebecca's place.

This week started with picking the idea we're going to develop, and we will now start doing research on how to make business on it.

In other news: Shortly after writing the last post, I purchased Valve's "The Orange Box" through Steam, mostly to get my hands on Portal and Team Fortress 2, but also found that in addition to those two and the well-marketed Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Valve had chosen to include the original Half-Life 2 and HL2: Episode 1! Thus I and Jocke have spent the last few days thinking up conspiracy theories around Aperture Science and playing through Half-Life 2 with its Episodes.

To my fellow classmates and other Hyper Island-people who might read this and find themselves to be Valve fans - I have started a group on the Steam Community called Aperture Hypernautical.


I'm still alive...

Hard at work

This is me (What is this!? A picture of me on my own weblog? An outrage, that's what this is!), working on some electronics stuff for our Experience Technology project (the real one, not the warm-up one). See more here: http://wearehyper.ath.cx/group4/wordpress/

Machinae Supremacy Video

Yay! MaSu finally got the video for Through the Looking Glass done!



What's interesting is that fact that this was made by a bunch of students... like us :D


I'd walk a thousand miles just to see for myself.

Your personal SMS-buddy

We presented the work we did during the Experience Tech "Warm-up week" today. Our cute little ape is a tamagochi-like creature that feeds off the text messages and phone calls you make from your phone, growing big and happy as you do what you do every day.



Kudos to Jesper for his crazy awesome 3D-work and Nico for his help with the package design. I almost feel a bit overshadowed, having only done the other graphical elements of the package... nah, I'm just kidding - it's awesome to be a part of this cute little creation. Björn was almost convinced that we actually had a real package done that we had taken photos of...

Experience Technology, Mid-First week report

I've got a cold again.

My group has revised the ideas we had this Tuesday (when we got a task to come up with a cool new concept, based on the word "Fur", the concept "Heavy" and the technology "SMS") and put me in charge of working out a package design for our product as well as plan our presentation on Tuesday. I can't complain about the work I've been given in absentia (I refer to the first line in the post), and now when I've seen what Nico and Jesper were working on today I feel like I have a lot more ideas to work with.

I can't spoil what we're planning, but it's a quite cute thing, our product.

New single from Kent

Right, might be a bit old news to some, but I heard parts of this song yesterday and then happened to find the video today.

And what a beautiful video it is...



I'll write something about Experience Technology tomorrow (or later today, as it might be). See you then.

Bombing Raid, Anno 40999

While discussing Death From Adobe with Jocke, I came across an image of a Lancaster bomber formation over Hamburg, and was inspired to turn it into something fit for the 41st millennium. I ended up remaking the entire image, just to get things the way I wanted.

I am quite happy with the results:



It depicts part of a formation of Imperial Navy Marauder Destroyer Bombers, shelling a rebel city somewhere in the galaxy.

Hyperblogs

I think that the list is nearing its state of completion... I must say that I'm not actually certain of how many we are in our class, but I believe it's 51 people - which means that I'm only missing three or four of my classmates.

Perhaps it's time to gather blogs from the Stockholm class now?

prying open my third eye

InfoSoc Presentations

So the groups in the class presented their results today. Some very nice presentations, some lesser.

No matter which of the above designations we fit into, I feel quite happy with the outcome of the project, especially my appraised work on the project report (which is available here (if it doesn't access the PDF-file, try refreshing).) Tomorrow we've got evaluation of the entire project module, which will be interesting.

Anyways, not inspired to write anything else right now.

Labyrinth Zone

Information Society

Right. This is a sample from my group's report for the Information Society Module. Being the InDesign junkie I am, I couldn't let an opportunity like this slip away, so I produced a fancy layout to spice up the report.

EDIT Thursday 19:54: The whole report can be downloaded here.

TheClouds

I just made a quick desktop from the graphics from my little animation. Will take requests if there's anyone who wants one in a more amiable resolution.

Motion

Allright, the Motion Week has been concluded with the Individual Motion Task deadline today. I am a bit sad that I was kept from my group's motion presentation on Friday, and I feel I should have been with them since they apparently slaved all through the night to have the film finished for the presentation (while I limped home at around 4am, weakling as I was). Anyways, my personal task of creating 15 seconds of motion was finished before bed yesterday and uploaded to my Facebook profile as well as being the first use of the domain I registered some time ago.

Here's a link to the full-quality version of the animation. Download the latest version of Quicktime, then feel free to laugh at my simple attempts.

The thing I'm most happy with is the sound. I estimate that the total time it took for me to record, edit and enter that stuff into AfterEffects can't have taken me more than five minutes, and that includes finding my headset and configuring that crappy mike to pick anything up.

Anyways, with my motion stuff finished, I can now focus on the Information Society assignment.

and where the ancient kings are buried, new kings will rise and stand

First Post

Allright. First post. Let's see where we stand.

My name is Isak and I am a Digital Media student at Hyper Island in Karlskrona, Sweden. I come from a family of four (including me), with the Default Household setting of a father, mother, me and my sister. I lived with all of them until only a few months ago, when I moved 643.9 km to live in my own one-room apartment in Karlskrona. If you ask me if it's scary or super exciting to live on my own for the first time, I'll probably answer "no, not really". At the moment I have no real preferences. I accept the moving-out as one of our modern rites of passage, and hopefully I can also leave the Frozen Wastes (aka: Scandinavia) and live abroad some day.

For those few who might wonder (or haven't heard me rant about this before): When speaking English, I pronounce my name as "Isaac", and when speaking Swedish I use the Swedish pronounciation. My family name is Ström. "Strom" is acceptable, but "o" is not "ö", no matter how hard you might believe it.

I don't care for the word "blog". I'm beginning to accept it, but that doesn't mean I like it. From now on (until I cave in) I will call this a Weblog. Everybody else's weblogs will also be referred to as weblogs. Neither do I enjoy the term "podcast". It's a sound file on the internet and suddenly it's a "podcast"? No. It doesn't work that way.

Anyways, this weblog is supposed to be about my time at Hyper Island, so perhaps I should talk about that?

I've been here at "Hyper" for exactly one month, so I suppose this post could be called "30 days into it" or something equally descriptive, but no. It won't be called that. The first few weeks were quite relaxed, we had a few introduction days where we got some useful information and presented ourselves to our classmates; then we had the UGL-course, which was a quite intense week of full 12h+ days of talking, doing and analyzing group dynamics and our own function in a group. I'm sure I learned something, and I think it was healthy to have the course so early. To follow up on the UGL we also had two days of Team Building with the whole class. Lots of fun to be had, and even more analyzing of our results.

In contrast, the last two weeks have been intense. We were introduced to the first project module - Information Society - with a lecture from one of the school's founders, Jonathan Briggs. The project aims for us to establish knowledge and understanding of the Digital Media industry, as well as give us an opportunity to begin gathering connections.

At first it felt as if we had a decent amount of time to complete our project in, but then we realized that one whole week would be dedicated to a separate group exercise (Motion Week) and that the deadline for the Information Society is on this Tuesday, meaning that we only had about 7 school days dedicated to working on the project itself. On top of it all I've got a cold and a fever (it's gone down now, so this is not entirely delirious mumblings... yet), and several out-of-school things tugging at my attention...

Ah, well. I'm sure it'll work out, and if it doesn't... at least I'll learn something from it.

10000 days in the fire is long enough.