Comfortable phone

Ladies Home Journal (Oct 1957).

The redirect possibilities are endless

One of the more seemingly harmless though in reality careless acts a parent can do is placing the name of their child on the exterior of their child's clothing. Predators could sometimes use that information to the disadvantage of a child who would believe anyone who knows their name must be a friend of the family or knows them.

While it statistically isn't all that likely that having a name visible on an outer article of clothing will make a child the victim of a crime it becomes ever so slightly more possible that they will. Given their druthers a predator goes for the easier target, something that allows them to separate prey from the herd. For that reason the makers of those stick figure family car window decals advise against identifying the family members by name. I would advise against displaying them at all.

So it was that yesterday while at the mall I witnessed one of those Things That Make You Go Tsk. A barely-supervised child was running up and down the sidewalk, playing, ducking out of sight, wandering further away from the parent by increments and being distracted by things. All in all being a typical kid. She was pretty gregarious and talked up every person that walked by. Not a problem mostly except that on the front of her dress was a piece of tape with her name written on it, apparently a remainder of a class field trip that was not removed before school ended.

When her Billy-esque wanderings brought the child to my side I asked her for her name tag because I had lost mine. Without pausing the youngster stripped the tape off and handed it to me. As she then bounced off to play I wadded up the tape and tossed it into an adjacent trash can. The parent, siting on a bench a few feet away, paused the phone conversation long enough to glare at me with her piggish, dead, hate-filled eyes. "Yeah." I told her. "You probably don't want strangers to know your daughter's name." She then resumed her phone call, annoyed perhaps that a complete meddling stranger was the better parent to her child than she was.

The name tag incident led me to think about how funny/cool it would be to put an ambush QR code on a shirt or on stickers to place around playgrounds. When some weirdo photographs happy children playing on a jungle gym their phone will detect the code in the camera field and immediately lead them to some website like whyareyoutakingpicturesofmykidyoufreak.com, preferably with some self-starting, screaming audio designed to draw attention to the creepy stalker. The destination of the code link is limited only by the imagination of the creator.

QR codes are easy to generate and print out on a variety of media. Don't be surprised if some educationally-themed QR codes start showing up in the wild around some local San Diego playgrounds and parks.

Light a candle rather than curse the darkness

In a previous entry I linked to an example of the Dark Halo, the extinct video artifact caused by the limitations of the equipment of a bygone television age. While the Jimmy Dean video had some good music and was a fine example of the unique lens flare it is this Boing Boing segment showing a candle burning on the old Mr. Wizard television science show that demonstrates the Dark Halo perfectly.

Show it to your kids so they know how bad we actually had it and tell them to stop whining about how their computers are not powerful enough to play Goldeneye when chatting on the Tweeters at the same time.

The Dark Halo

I may be the only one to ever comment on an extinct video artifact; that of the Dark Halo, a unique lens flare common to early television. There were a number of limitations to such new and expensive means of communication and for decades the promising technology was unable to fulfill its full potential as a medium. It was, in spite of its advanced nature, a fairly simple means of communication and it would take years of development and the anticipation of market penetration to work out all the bugs.

Early television worked but it didn't work all that great. Static, ghosts and other problems caused by transmission, reception and the limits of the equipment made television viewing something of a general disappointment. Television wasn't the slick eye-party of modern times. The questionable quality was endured because that was all there was. It was the transmission of the information, not the experience, that made broadcast television worthwhile in the early days.

One of those artifacts of broadcast television of days long gone that surely caused concern among broadcasters was the Dark Halo. I'm sure there is a technical term for it but I don't know what it is. The Dark Halo was a lens flare caused by the inability of the camera or equipment to fully process the image against an overwhelming light source. It was caused by a bright point of light reflecting into the camera. Typically a bright, intense reflection from a ring, piece of metal, glass or sequins on a dress or suit would cause a bright flare on the image. Instead of a bright, white glow and haze the equipment would instead create a momentary darkened halo around a bright center. In modern film craft the bright lens flare is a camera technique used on purpose for effect (Star Trek, CSI, etc.) but in the past it was an annoyance that highlighted the limits of technology.

Via boingboing. Click the photo to experience the caveman days of television for yourself.

In the image/link above a Dark Halo can be seen on the sparkly jacket worn by Buck Owens just above his hand on the guitar neck. For performers like Buck who wore 'nudie suits' and the slinky sequined dresses favored by female stars like Barbara Streisand during their television performances the Dark Halo was a constant and familiar presence for the viewer. It was also nearly restricted to the black and white era. By the time color began to appear in television the image processing difficulties were being overcome for the most part, though on many shows one
can still observe the occasional Dark Halo flare overwhelm the equipment. This is evident from the reflections seen coming from from the jewels on Cinderella's crown in the 1965 broadcast of Rodgers and Hammersteins' Cinderella.

The Dark Halo is also something I look for when a modern show recreates television scenes of the past as I am nerdy that way. These are normally depicted during scene on a camera or monitor as a black and white image that is in the foreground of a set (as in the film That Thing You Do). In those rare instances I have yet to see any show faithfully recreate the darkened lens flare or other video artifacts with the exception of poorly rendered lettering or titles superimposed on the image.

Motion Comics: Animation of the Past, Today!

Does no one remember Clutch Cargo?

Click for a look at what childhood horrors your Dad had to deal with!

I don't see the lure in the "new" Motion Comics. Unless they are viewed on something about the same size as a book I can't be all that interested and that has more to do with my age and how my eyes work than my fear of new technology. But I get why they are being produced. Motion Comics can give the public their movie fix in between animated specials and live action films. It also serves as one of many intermediary steps before publishers finally pull the plug on the long, slow death that is print media.

One of the things I have noticed by observing the younger generation and the media empires that produce content for them is that their entertainment is disposable to them. This is much as it was for both the companies and consumers of decades past before the notion of collectability and preserving the content of the past for use in the future became as widespread as it did starting in the late 1960s. Today more than ever everything is only momentarily cool and amusements are consumed on-the-go and rarely revisited. I think this is why comic book companies cater mostly to the aging, hard core fans that began reading and collecting at the end of the Silver Age.

There is an inevitable evolution to these things. Originally the stepped-down animation style of a motion comic was little more than a digital version of a Power Records album. Given the high cost, slow internet and CPU speeds a character would rarely do more than shift a few degrees in place, giving the illusion of action in the narrative. One of the more understated yet quite effective use of motion effects in still frame cartooning was the use of blinking eyes of the characters in the online For Better or Worse strips. If you were not paying attention it would really creep you out.

As technology improved the expectations of both the creators and the readers increased and currently motion comics are typically made with pretty high production values, the Watchmen motion comic being a good example. Eventually Motion Comics will probably get to the point were the line between full animation and the simplified Syncro Vox-style will be blurred.