Wednesday, March 20, 2013

From the Aberrant Spiderweb Department

OK, who's been letting the spiders drink the Christmas Ale?

UPDATED with Bonus artistic spidra from Ursula LeGuin.

Also, bonus Cyclosa spider -- a clever little species that creates a copy of itself, but five times larger, out of "of tiny bits of leaf, debris, and dead insects" stuck to the Web. It is an inspiration to bloggers.
It then pulls at threads to make its detritus-based replica "wobble quickly forward and back" in a crude but convincing display of animation. It is often seen with its giant puppet at political protests.

Yes, the artistic possibilities are endless if only our Cyclosa specimens can be convinced to branch out from self-portraiture; but Christmas Ale is not the way to go. Right now we have a laboratory full of spiders flat on their backs, waving their legs erratically and singing songs about goblins.

20 comments:

Substance McGravitas said...

I'll bet you could merge a couple of .dae files (a plane and a head) in Sketchup and remove vertices to get that done.

Now I kind of want to figure out a Quartz Composer way to do it.

OBS said...

Don't do it Substance, that way lies madness!

Smut Clyde said...

Did you look at the code the artist used to do it in the Processing environment?
http://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/85413

zombie rotten mcdonald said...

I like those.

Substance McGravitas said...

Did you look at the code the artist used to do it in the Processing environment?

I've played with the Processing code, but QC does JavaScript and not Java and I dunno if I have the chops to translate. So I'm thinking of ways I could cheat it.

OBS said...

You could totally cheat it, the languages are different but the syntax would be very familiar. I use both languages so I'll look when I've had fewer beers.

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

I think A.K. was in charge of ale distribution, was he not?
~

Mandos said...

Side note to AK: I saw your comment at Jennifer's, but actually, I had gotten to that link via another route before I clicked on the Riddled link, which of course I did not give credit for either, since the person who provided it to me wouldn't notice.

Hamish Mack said...

No worries Mandos, that was my attempt to be like the cool kids.

OBS said...

I've played with the Processing code, but QC does JavaScript and not Java and I dunno if I have the chops to translate. So I'm thinking of ways I could cheat it.

Now that I'm sober I looked at the Processing stuff a bit (and only that -- I could easily get sucked into that rabbit hole and spend way too much time playing there). Processing is its own add-on to Java, so requires its own learning regardless. The language syntax would still be familiar but it would definitely take some work.

Substance McGravitas said...

And I didn't mention the QC JavaScript constraints: it takes in and spits out a limited set of values that you have to write your routines around. Still, there are a bunch of ways to cheat: start with a rectangle made of triangle mesh and draw the vertices to the bright spots of a reference image? That should be fairly writable.

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

That looks like Roy Orbison stuck in that first web.

mikey said...

I once made a large simulacrum of my junk out of polenta and various shapes of dried pasta.

Sadly, it only attracted flies and a curious and somewhat aggressive possum.

Smut Clyde said...

I hope it wasn't actually attached to you.

mikey said...

The possum?

No, he was on the back deck...

OBS said...

Remember those pin-cushion things you could leave an impression of your hand or face in? Yeah?

As a teenager, I got the pleasure of finding the surprisingly small erect penis of my step father impressed into one of those. I wish I could forget that.

Narad said...

Christmas Ale? To try to recall Fritz Zwicky's actual quote, Ve haf known zis for ze past 30 years!

Smut Clyde said...

All I know of Zwicky is that (a) he argued with everyone (or, in the carefully cadenced language of Wikipedia, "Zwicky had difficulties in personal relationships with his peers"); and (b) he discovered everything back in the 1930s.
I can only see a limited cross-over between astrophysics and spiderwebs.

I think this was the first Riddled spider-blogging entry, which still brings a lot of our web traffic.

Narad said...

I can only see a limited cross-over between astrophysics and spiderwebs.

The triangulation method, on the other hand....

Narad said...

As I cannot locate the relevant RI item, I will mention here that I hope you haven't been indulging strange pirate-fiction blogs.