I’ve always been fascinated by the view of the moon in the daytime sky. Years ago I began calling this “The Phantom Moon.” It’s one of the inspirations for the film I’m working on.
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The Phantom Moon
The Phantom Moon – view from my bedroom/backyard – June 24, 2024 -
Corona Borealis before
Checking a long overdue item off of my list. I got a photo of the Corona Borealis constellation before T Coronae Borealis goes nova.
Corona Borealis on June 23, 2024 – click to expand T Coronae Borealis should be just below the second star on the left (at about 8 o’clock). It’s circled in red in the diagram below.
Location of T Coronae Borealis (circled in red) Hopefully, once this star goes nova I’ll be able to get a photo before it fades.
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Jenny Nicholson on the Star Wars Hotel
User experience, service design, game mechanics — it’s all in here. This is a fabulous, four hour (yes four hours — totally worth it) breakdown of what went wrong with the Star Wars hotel.
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Playlist for Issue 4
I’m working on finishing up issue 4 of
and, of course, I’m listening to the playlist I created while I’ve been working on it. The thing is though — I’ve been working on it for months so I wanted to post this before I started listening new things. I’ve written about a bunch these songs but I’ll save that for when the zine is out. Yes, Issue 4 is titled “Vision” and that’s a preview of the cover.
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Waking up with an idea
I really like the Freewrite Alpha for getting ideas down without editing. -
Feeling better
Straightened up the office I got some sleep, completed some long overdue things, and cleaned up. It’s amazing how much better that makes me feel.
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My camera is amazing but …
After the Apple Vision Pro came out, I sold my Lumix GH6 and got a Canon R5C with this dual fisheye lens so I could shoot “immersive” (180 degree, 3D) video.
It’s pretty impressive. It shoots 8K at 60fps. The 3D video it produces is 4096 pixels X 4096 pixels per eye. So like 2, 4K movies stacked on top of one another per eye. but it’s not like watching a 4K movie. It’s actually more like watching 1K/1080p movie because those pixels are covering a much larger area.
The immersive videos that Apple’s produced are also not as clear as a 4K movie but they’re a good deal closer.
Then today during Apple’s WWDC announcement they quickly mentioned a collaboration with Blackmagic Design on a professional, immersive video workflow comprised of a new Blackmagic camera, Davinci Reslolve Studio, and Apple Compressor.
There’s no info on their website yet, but they did post about it on Instagram. This thing will have 8160 pixels X 7200 pixels per eye at 90fps. That’s about 4X what you get from the Canon R5C! Wow.
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Making a Website
The other day I said I was setting up this website to get ideas out of my head and make room for new ones. I guess that’s only part of it. The rest of it is to document in the hope that it’s useful or at least interesting to more than just me. I already do this with
but I can’t put everything in there. Smaller, more discreet things can go here. I think this sits adjacent to my journal. This is the conversation I’m having with myself that results in and eventually into artworks (actually I consider one of my artworks). Anyway, there are things that I put in my journal that aren’t ready to be public and there are things that I can put here that never make it into my journal. I think I first started blogging in 2002. I ditched that blog and started over in 2004 when I started video blogging. That lasted until maybe 2009. Somewhere between waning interest, reliance on unmaintained WordPress plugins, and the demise of Blip.tv (video hosting) I called it a day and wiped everything. I became fond of collecting domains and stared things in various places: greymattergravy.com (now hosting another zine I make), x627.com, talkbot.tv, verdi.space, verdi.mov, and zine.party. Meanwhile, I have at least a half-dozen YouTube accounts and various social media accounts that I start and delete. It’s too much and too confusing. And the thing is, I already have a great place for everything — michaelverdi.com (it’s my fucking name). Thank you other Michael Verdi who let the domain expire in 2003. So this weekend I’ve been putting it all together. There’s still lots I want to do but this is in a workable state.
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Couldn’t Sleep
My office is a mess — just like my brain is today. 4:21 a.m.
I’ve been sleeping less the last month or so, going to bed later and later. My brain is just going and going and I have a million things I want to get done. Today I went to bed just before midnight and woke up at four. I guess that’s why I set up this blog — to get those ideas out of my head and make room for some new ones.
