Stuck In Customs

This is just an attempt…

So, here’s another in a series of an experiment. A new type of vlog thing where I take you along, in 360, as I wander the cityscapes and landscapes of the places I visit. These will likely evolve over time, they are experiments for now, so expect a few rough edges and a slower pace than the average YouTube travel vid. And definitely some wind noise (sorry!) I hope you find them interesting… here is Glasgow Attempt #2… and remember you can spin the camera all around any time you want. Even during the hasty exit from the hotel bathroom!

A couple of weeks ago I connected with the team at Australian Blockchain Week for a fun panel on the NFT industry. You can watch the recording here. (Registration required but it’s free and you can put in random info.)

Well, this one is certainly different than many of the other Machine Elf creations I’ve been releasing. I’ve had these images of everflowing liquids that are no different than the life they sprout. Of course, the cool thing about fractals is you never know how far you are zoomed in. I’ve been working on this one for ages and tried out 3 or 4 kinds of music and nothing stuck until my Burning Man roomie, The Jonatas of Brazil (who introduced me to Ayahuasca), sent me this new soundtrack he discovered. As he would always say to me and Rene (my other Burning Man roomie) before we go on a trip together in his delightful Brazilian accent of broken-English words: “I have 700,000 musics, and of all the musics, dis, dis, DIS is the best. Yes yes yes…” He says that every time, and he’s always right. Wow do we have some stories. Anyway, thank you my lovely friend 🙂

Check out Rarity.Tools

Hey everyone – if you are following the AiVATAR project, we recently went live on Rarity.Tools where you can see how everything ranks. Note that you may have a lower-ranked AiVATAR that actually says something very interesting so it will have a different, more subjective value.

An inside look at Rarity.Tools

Rarity.Tools is the gold standard of ranking various NFTs. I do a little bit of a deep dive here to show how the rankings are done! Enjoy!

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Machine Elf 100 – The Pineal DMT | Visual Fractal Meditation | Trey Ratcliff & Joshua Ryan

I’m extremely interested in how DMT is indeed an endogenous molecule (meaning naturally produced internally) that is in our bodies, plants, animals, and everything that is alive. What’s all that DMT doing in there? Not even any of the top studies (more scientific studies happening now at Imperial College London and Johns Hopkins University) can figure out what the hell all that DMT is doing inside of us. I experientially know with a surplus, you certainly have an ego death and leave your body to travel to “The Matrix” in a way. It’s quite tough to describe. But, if we’re in a simulation or a video game, you get to meet entities and Machine Elves that are building the reality around us. I know that sounds crazy… but, if you know, then you know.

As for the music, I collaborated on the it with Joshua Ryan, and he sent along these notes: “This was inspired by the visual entirely, no reference material was used and the journeys the music takes is an attempt at conveying the many fractal environments you can see. The seamless transitions flowing into one another melodically not diverging from the heavy meditative tone – just as the visual component achieves.” You can follow awesome Josh is on that new app called Instagram or something at @joshuaryancomposer or visit his website at www.joshuaryancomposer.com.

This was another fun collaboration with a musical artist I really respect, Jesse “The Scumfrog” Houk ( @thescumfrog on Insta ). In a very small world situation, this song, Just Before Dawn was performed many many years ago at Burning Man and I listened to the whole set out in the desert. Then, of all things, he actually has a house here very close to me in Queenstown, New Zealand! He would put on fun deck sets at night and now we’re like supa tight! He’s so talented… a true treasure!

Fun Passport Sunday How-To

Today is a fun video for Passport Members where I use Plotagraph Pro to make some cool animations for a future NFT launch.

The Swirrrrrllly Canyon making-of

Here you’ll see how I use this fun and easy tool to make a rather complex animation. Enjoy! 🙂

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Daily Photo – Swirly Canyon

Here’s a cool view of Antelope Canyon. There are really no bad photos of this place… I think that’s why photographers love it so much! I spent a few hours in here getting waaaaaay too many photos. I still haven’t gone through all of them.

Swirly Canyon

Photo Information

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• Date Taken2013-08-22 18:19:22
• CameraNEX-7
• Camera MakeSony
• Exposure Time1
• Aperture14
• ISO100
• Focal Length13.0 mm
• FlashOff, Did not fire
• Exposure ProgramAperture-priority AE
• Exposure Bias

Passport Sunday New Photoshop Trick

Hey if you’re one of our awesome Passport members then today you’ll see a new video that shows how you can 4x the number of pixels in your photos. Fun!

Quad Size that Photo!

Here’s a cool video I made and here are some details from Adobe:

Raw Details, previously called Enhance Details produces crisp detail and more accurate renditions of edges, improves color rendering, and also reduces artifacts. The resolution of the enhanced image stays the same as the original image. This feature is especially useful for large displays and prints, where fine details are visible. The supported file types are raw mosaic files from cameras with Bayer sensors (Canon, Nikon, Sony, and others) and Fujifilm X-Trans sensors.

Super Resolution, introduced in Camera Raw 13.2, helps create an enhanced image with similar results as Raw Details but with 2x the linear resolution. This means that the enhanced image will have 2x the width and 2x the height of the original image, or 4x the total pixel count. This feature supports the same file types as Raw Details, plus additional file types such as JPEG and TIFF. Super Resolution is especially useful to increase the resolution of a cropped image.

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Daily Photo – The Nunatak

Ready for a fun, nerdy geology fact? Sure you are! That pyramidal structure in the middle is called a nunatak. I used to have a double-major in comp sci and geophysics, but quit the latter after a fight with a moronic tenured professor. It wasn’t a fist-fight… an intellectual one, a fight with which I contend I won. I just studied geophysics it because I love the Earth and I think rocks and landscapes are super-interesting, not because I wanted a job drilling for oil or anything (the career path for many geophysicists… reminds me of a great Alan Watts lecture that it’s frowned upon for people to study things in universities unless they are looking to fit a cog in a machine) – anyway, this nunatak was formed when the two glaciers from the Dart and Rees from the left and right side came together to carve out that perfect triangle. Technically, it’s not a triangle or pyramid, but a sloping triangular prism… okay nerd talk done. Who cares? It’s pretty. Okay, a little more nerd talk… nunatak is one of the only Greenladish words in our lexicon if you’re into etymology. I got this pic on a fun helicopter ride a few weeks ago with Joann and some friends from Over The Top Helicopters.

The Nunatak

Photo Information

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• Date Taken2021-03-04 09:20:45
• CameraILCE-7RM3
• Camera MakeSony
• Exposure Time1/1000
• Aperture5
• ISO200
• Focal Length43.0 mm
• FlashOff, Did not fire
• Exposure ProgramManual
• Exposure Bias

I ended up at this rather unique place in New Zealand, so I thought it would be a fun place to make a mini tutorial for you. If you’re a Passport Sunday member then you’ll get to see the making-of.

Editing the Yellow Carpet

I jumped across for you… Oh, what a thing to do… ‘Cause you were all yellow…

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Daily Photo – The Yellow Carpet

This area of New Zealand is about exactly halfway between Queenstown and Te Anau. What a cool spot, eh? You pass a little “Scientific Research Area,” which I thought sounded a bit mysterious and Area 51ish. So, I happened to park the truck to get out to pee, and I ended up walking into the bush to see this. At first, I thought it was all yellow because thousands of people were doing what I was doing, but that is not the case. And no, did not pee in this stuff… I went over to some dead bushes or something to make them, perhaps, more dead.

The Yellow Carpet

Photo Information

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• Date Taken2014-08-17 15:05:34
• CameraILCE-7R
• Camera MakeSony
• Exposure Time1/320
• Aperture8
• ISO160
• Focal Length42.0 mm
• FlashOff, Did not fire
• Exposure ProgramAperture-priority AE
• Exposure Bias

Orders of magnitude are always a bit elusive for the human mind to comprehend, so I thought to start at the size of a single cell and then zoom out to a slightly larger organism. The entire experience is still inside of a small microcosm of life where entire hidden ecosystems can flourish. The music is a compilation of some of my favorite relaxing tunes from Jon Hopkins. Enjoy!

To see all the Machine Elf videos on YouTube, check out the Machine Elf playlist.

We’ve put a few of these Machine Elf creations in 360 for a cool VR app called TRIPP. If you have an Oculus Quest, Go, Rift or Playstation VR you can download TRIPP which features guiding experiences to make you happier, calmer and more focused. Grab that here.

For more Machine Elf creations, including physical installations, check out the website.