So I opened this can of worms, ya know? I turned on The Dinosaur today. The Dinosaur is my first PC, it served soulvasq and The Fake Thing and Ideamen in it’s infancy. It has soooo many goodies on it, much of which has yet to be transferred to another drive. So every now and again, I need to dig into it to find some obscure old thing that we need, and I tend to stumble upon many distractions while I’m in there. Today was no exception. Only this time, because I can, I decided to share some of it with you.
The goal was of course to scrape the lyrics out of it. That didn’t take very long. All of the lyrics are up now, and here they are!
The rest of the process took a lot longer. Whoa! Look in there! Dood, it’s the source and translation to the Latin bit in Quares! No way! I’ve been meaning to post that for years but never knew where it was… What is that? Whoa! We were intelligent and eloquent back then, what happened to us? We’re so stupid now! Is that seriously the letter we wrote to Rotten Ron before we signed on to Rotten? Keep looking, this is interesting. We lost a whole chunk of history when myspace basically shut down, we had ALL of our shows posted there. No waaaaay! I made a copy! Of all of our shows from 2007 to 2010! Nice! I might have to share that with Mark. Reviews? There’s a folder called ‘reviews’. Heh, one file in there. Neet, it’s reviews of Progress.
Oh god no… not the flyers. See, back in the day when we had apparently a lot of time on our hands, we used to make a unique flyer for EVERY show. There are a LOT of flyers. And failed working files. And things that I still want to reignite and make stuff with. Like POV-Ray. POV-Ray is a 3D rendering program (note I didn’t say ‘modelling’) that is just fantastically awesome and powerful. But old. Really old. But it was so robust that people just kept developing it, and it is still used to this day to render (not model) high end productions. I used it to model. And render. It has a purely code-based interface (no fancy GUI for actually seeing what you’re building, all you see is code), and that made it… erm… fun. For me. I like a challenge. So I coded for hours and then clicked “Run” only to encounter syntax errors and placement issues and… Oh it was fun. Here’s a couple flyers we made when I was cutting my teeth:
Fun. All of the Interesting Times art was created in POV-Ray. I developed it intentionally to animate it and use it later to… umm… use. We got this far.
I’m happy with how that came out. I’m also going a wee long on this post. Just to keep babbling, an interesting factoid… the frame at roughly 1:31 in that video took 6 days to render. One frame. 6 Days. Hope you dig this little stroll down memory lane with us. We’ll probably do this again.