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I just finished Schrodinger's Cat and already did the Illuminati Trilogy a couple of weeks ago.  I was wondering what those two books from the reading list are like as in funny, metaphysical, mind bending, etc.

I read the reviews on Amazon but they are not really all that enlightening.  I'd like to get some input from people here as to what the books are about/like.

<<Envisions cow chip armor>>

Hell the pioneers of the midwestern US made houses held together with it why not armor.

Theme Songs for a Televangelist?

Hmm I'd say Money Talks by AC/DC

...and a silk smoking jacket.

but that's too many clues right there. ok one more, when hagbard is explaining it to george, and he quotes dante's paradise.

You wouldn't happen to remember the quote or what rough page it was on in RAW's book would ya?  Was the quote labeled in the book as being from Dante or was it just soemthing Hagberd said that you recognized from Dante?  I've only read Dante's work once and that was WAY back in high school so I'm pretty fuzzy on it.

Calander, Calender  

I prefer the eskimo spelling thank you very much!

I was basically trying to see if I had missed another inside joke by taking the section too literally.  I enjoyed the book, like Flatland/Sphereland and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it was a good mental stretch in a non-normal direction.  I did do several google searches while reading it because I knew I was missing some humor and satire but wasn't sure how since alot of the references were before my time.

Well I always got the impression that the driving point behind all of the book's jokes, half truths, full truths and no truths was:

You are free to think for yourself so why don't you?

I found this article RAW wrote about calandars that is somewhat a sequel to the bit about calanders in the appendix.

Calander

I've thought about picking up Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy since reading the Illuminatus! book felt like I remember college afternoons feeling like, hazy and insightful with lots of time to think

I just finished reading the book and was thinking about the section in the appendix where they mention you will understand about all you need to about mysticism if you understand the passage about Hagbard abdicating.  Here is the section of the text:

..."As for the rest of you - who can tell me, without uttering a word, the fallacy of the Illuminati?"

A young girl - she was no more than fifteen, George guessed, and the youngest member of the crew; he had heard she was a runaway from a fabulously rich Italian family in Rom - slowly raised her hand and clenched her fist.

Hagbard turned on her furiously. "How many times must I tell you people: no faking! You got that out of some cheap book on Zen that neither the author or you understood a damned word of. I hate to be dictatorial, but phony mysticism is the one thing Discordianism can't survive. You're on sh*twork, in the kitchen, for a week, you wise-ass brat."

The girl remained immobile, in the same position, fist raised, and only slowly did George read the slight smile that curled her mouth. Then he started to smile himself.

I'm curious what people think they mean by that.

My first thoughts were that she was showing that the fallacy of the illuminati is that all control and authority is an illusion unless the submissive remain submissive.

I also wondered if making a fist was somehow supposed to be the sound of one hand clapping mentioned elsewhere in the book.

My only other thought was that it was a play on words instead of fallacy they meant phallic since according to their thoughts all magical or mystical symbols refer to one of a "few" special kinds of human sacrifice, i.e. penetrative sex.  They mention several examples like Cupid shooting an arrow in a pulsing heart, the sacred heart, etc.

I'm just curious what other people who read the book thought.

I thought about slapping on the logo but I was in a hurry when I did it.  I tried to model the apple from memory and apparently I don't remember what apples look like exactly,   The hand model is actually a model included with Poser so I can't take any credit for modeling it.

The most I've done for computer games is designing levels for Quake 3, Urban Terror and Unreal Tournament.  It is big time work since in FPS the entire "set" has to be tight and allow proper movement unlike these renderings which use alot of illusion to make things look more "complete" then they really are.  For instance in the 2nd image the room beyond the door and the other through the window are really only a single 10' wall section and a single 10'x10' floor section since that is all you can see from the finished camera angle.

I don't sweat the whole pro vs amateur thing.  For me its just a way to blow off steam and have something to show for it when I'm done.  I'm a tad old to be thinking of a new profession and I've find doing what you like for money often ruins the experience over time.

The Offering



I was playing with reflections and thought what is better than a golden apple.


Sanctuary Denied



This one reminds me of the images we used to play "1000 words" story games on some RPG boards.  Each person would post a few sentences to further the "story" behind the picture.  Kind of like collective storytelling except with a visual reference.

Well for landscape creation there is terragen http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/

There is a modeling and rendering studio called art of illusion that runs in Java http://www.artofillusion.org/

This is a directory listing tons of pay/shareware/open source/freeware 3D software of all types, modelers, render engines, vegetation applets, etc.
http://www.3dlinks.com/

If you want to see why I don't call myself an artist check out http://www.cgsociety.org/ The stuff on there exemplifies why I'm a hack compared to real artists

Well Bryce is primarily a natural landscape and lighting studio.  It excels at creating realistic terrain and lighting.  It can handle vegetation reasonably well with its built in tree maker but it nothing compared to Vue when it comes to rendering 1000s of trees.  As for comparing it to Blender they are really two different animals.  

Blender is a jack of all trades that has probably the most difficult interface to learn I've ever run across.  It is very powerful but I just find it too clumsy for most work.  I prefer to use Wings to model in but if I had to buy a model package I'd grab Silo from Nevercenter.  For $109 it has a super smooth and fast interface that works better than any of the more expensive "all in packages" when it comes to making models unless you are into NURBS or something.  POV-ray is really powerful but I find it tedious to set up so I use Bryce to render my stuff in.

The pro level packages all offer cheaper entry level stuff now so that for a few hundred dollars you can get really nice tools.  It really boils down to what  you want to do.  Blender will do everything but finish render so for free software its tough to beat.  However programs like Silo make modeling so easy than its more fun than a chore, which is what modeling in Blender always felt like to me.

[edit]  I forgot to mention that Bryce is only really capable of boolean modeling(add/subbtract/union/intersection) so it really can't be used for modeling unless you are a glutton for punishment.

When I bought Bryce it was at version 5 and was around $70 if I remember correctly.  I would have skipped buying Poser if I had known that DAZ studio is free to download from the DAZ website and does basically the same thing only it has native export to Bryce capability so the object model textures are associated properly on import.  There are some better natural world generation software packages out there like Vue but they are a few hundred dollars so you'd have to be pretty serious about it.

Here is a couple of more from my archive of pics.  The first is an image I used when I was playing WoD (World of Darkness) games like Vampire/Mage .  We used it on a message board game to set the scene and get people in the creepy mood.  I don't like to point out flaws others might not notice but if you look at the rifle I have leaning against the wal inside the barn you'll notice the shadow doesn't tough the end of barrel meaning the model is actually not leaning against the wall but a little bit in front of it against thin air.




The next is one I did for someone to shrink down and use as their avatar.  The idea was to have some funky polyhedral dice on a picnic table.  He wanted the name to look like it was embossed onto the table.  It turned out ok but it still looks unfinished to me when viewed in large format.  As an avatar the lack of other details isn't as obvious.



[Edit] Oh and yes the globe was a purely Bryce 5.5 work.

For the first two images it was strictly a Photoshop image built in layers with a "plastic wrap" applied over a gaussian noise field.  The last one I built the scene within Bryce.  The IMI Desert Eagle is a model from DAZ and the Book, Calipers and Magnifier were models from Runtime DNA.  The eye, pyramid, tiled floor and sky were all done with procedural textures inside of Bryce.  The final image was rendered with Bryce.

The software I use in my doodles includes Photoshop 6.0, Bryce 5.5, Poser 5, DAZ Studio, Blender, Wings 3D and a few organic grass creation tools I found on the internet.  I went out and bought the software a little bit at a time and learned as I went along.  I use Solidworks, a 3D package in the Catia family, professionally to design heavy equipment used in material handling so I was comfortable with 3D design just not from an artistic standpoint.  The stuff I have to do for a living has to line up dimensionally to thousandths of an inch and it is quite a mental departure to deal with abstract 3D like Blender and Wings.  I keep the software on my workstation at my office so when I feel undermotivated I can do something creative to take my mind off of bolts, sheet metal and the like  

Here is another from my collection of wasted time or time well wasted, however you want to look at it.  I need to get around to making myself a fancy dancy avatar to use in here but I haven't had any ideas yet

Take a peek and bear in mind I'm an engineer not an artist



This first one is my attempt at a "textbook" cover like image.  I found it entertaining to listen to the comments when I slipped it onto a few people's machines at lunch.



This is another "texbook" style but with a different slant.  I used the quotes, and I use that word loosely, to resemble the reviewers comments you see plastered all over any book nowadays.



The last one is one I did this morning instead of working.  I find that I need a large amount of motivation to be productive at work so while I waited for my motivation to show up I did this. I was torn between calling it "Interruption" and "The fun of flexible morality".