Month: February 2019
Today, NASA will officially have to say goodbye to the little rover that could. The Mars Opportunity Rover was meant to last just 90 days and instead marched on for 14 years. It finally lost contact with earth after it was hit by a fierce dust storm.
gosh but like we spent hundreds of years looking up at the stars and wondering “is there anybody out there” and hoping and guessing and imagining
because we as a species were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe
and we started realizing that things were maybe not going so good for us– we got scared that we were going to blow each other up, we got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently, we got scared that in a hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people out there, we’d never get to meet them
and then
we built robots?
and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image
and maybe in a hundred years we won’t be around any more, maybe yeah the planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead, and if other people come from the stars we won’t be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! we’re people, too! you’re not alone any more!, maybe we’ll be gone
but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like?
the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery; they called us curiosity; they called us explorer; they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important.
and they told us to tell you hello.
Lucasfilm Lessons 6.
Lesson 6 is stay away from garbage. You know it when you see it. Stay near and learn from the best.
Below pictures I took at some point in the vicinity of Vatican museums the Louvre and other odd places.
I’ve always been fascinated with the brown -ness of drawings I had seen in museums around the world so when I first started drawing I used black but black is just too assertive and too dark so I found the most gentle semi-transparent brown ink which is of German origin which is so delicate which serve my purpose and it’s my secret
I find comfort in the old Masters the art of the Renaissance as well as art from two millennia back, it’s my wall against greed, the materialistic the piles of useless garbage and all the empty words it’s like a poetry wall for me against all evil
One of the best things that happened to me in the Silicon Valley was that people really never cared about my gender or my accent, and I highly encourage you if you ever want to try and work, work for somebody that you like and somebody that likes you back. Although the Silicon Valley appears on the surface to really care about middle-aged white men, under the hood what Silicon Valley really cares about is whether you produce great work, and since I was sitting in a cubicle and typing and clicking away nobody really cared if I had a vagina or whether I had come from Eastern Europe or not.
When I first moved to the Silicon Valley I was fresh off the middle of the Midwest University where I had gone to do my Masters and where I had gotten a full scholarship. It is great to have the American government pay for your education so always make sure to get good grades and be well positioned for a full ride. It is much easier than you think – just go for the place that gives you education for free and you will never regret it. Paying for education is a racket and full of regrets and financial woes long term. We moved to the Silicon Valley directly from school basically dragging a U-Haul behind us. In the valley I had no family or friends, and since I was wondering what to do – I worked. Because I had no idea what else to do other than working and I didn’t know anyone, I didn’t have any network, or support network, or friends or family, .. so I started paying attention to what the most talented people were doing, people whom I admired and respected for their work, and tried to do the same thing, and what the most talented people were doing is working a lot so I did too.
I was sitting around in the cubicle in front of a computer and I was having absolutely a great time, I was having a lot of fun, and I was getting paid $100,000 to do the fun. There was a company, a video game company called Activision which paid me about $120,000 – so I will get a yearly salary and then they will have these layoffs whenever a project is over, whenever a project was over they will lay off people and give severance. I would get laid off from a project and get $20,000 severance. In a month or two they will call me back and say hey please come back on board but you have to return the money. I’m like no way I’m not returning the money so I will get on board again and I will keep the $20,000. And then the project will be over again for some reason, it would be over in six months and then they will give me another $20,000 in severance. So it was really nice like that.
I would end up with these fantastic amounts of money in my bank account so what did I do with the money? I went to the Uffizi, I went to the Vatican Museums, St Peters, to the Borghese to see the best of Bernini, the churches and the ruins of Rome, the galleries in Florence, the best Gaudi palaces in Barcelona, the three great museums in Madrid where i spent literally every day soaking the greatest art the world has ever seen – Picasso, Dali, Goya, El Greco, I went to the Louvre, I went to the National Gallery in London, to the National Portrait Gallery. I went to Amsterdam and the Hague to learn of Rembrandt and Vermeer, I was frequently stoping in New York as well, I learned from the best the world has to offer first-hand. It also really helped that as an artist in the Silicon Valley I was getting really acquainted with the best processes in the world, with what the Japanese called kaizen – continuous improvement. There’s one thing about being a commercial artist is that you work together with other people in a collaborative way, you work towards a certain visual goal and that visual goal has a very high standard, and that high standard has to be achieved somehow right? The best possible way is, because you can’t really nail it right off the bat, the best way is to take small steps and do continuous improvement until the final product is satisfactory, ideally, as in the case with the Silicon Valley, the greatest product and the highest standard that can be reached.
When I went to study all the old Masters and I was already familiar with all the processes that the Silicon Valley used to create these marvelous projects and products, I could recognize the same drive for greatness. I could recognize that all the old Masters ( I include in this definition all the Renaissance greats as well as all the great artists from Antiquity ) were not only great artists but great technicians, great engineers as well, they were very very technical in their approach.
Silicon Valley had this really flat management structure where you basically learned how to do things by bouncing off of other great people that were doing their thing. Steve Jobs had the famous rock tumbler metaphor where you put a bunch of rocks in a tumbler and you turn it on and the next day come back to see that all the rocks were polished into nice gems by simply rubbing off of each other for 24 hours.
Although nobody ever spoke of kaizen the spirit of kaizen permeated the Silicon Valley.
Stay away from garbage. You know it when you see it. Stay near and learn from the best. You always know when you see great work, it usually speaks for itself – the people, the products and the processes are usually something you want to repeat in the future, learn from, come back to, deeply respect, greatly admire and want to emulate.
just for fun – my lucasfilm w2
Bottle Flipping ROBOTS part 2
Bottle Flipping ROBOTS part 1
Lucasfilm Lessons 1.
I am writing a book of secrets, and not just about Lucasfilm, but about the sauce that produced the greatest franchise of the 20th century. I mean we are talking about not just a business that made money, not just about a brand, but about a story that made generations of adults dream and get silly behind glowing sticks, and made grown ups line up around the block to see a spaceships movie. We are talking about a saga that made many millions around the world shiver with amazement. How do you make stuff like that, how do you create it, where do you start?
Recently it happened that I had to look up a company that does stuff… and I googled reviews on their product and people literally said it was the ugliest thing they had ever seen. How do you live and go home with something like that?
Okay, so what did George do to make Star War so incredibly compelling, so engrossing as to produce mass hysteria in people and a kind of worship. How did he do it, what was the secret sauce?
And you don’t need to read my book to find out although it may be helpful – one of the ingredients in the secret sauce is people.
When I first got at Lucas I sucked. I hit the ground running and I literally made, for the first months or so, garbage. It was difficult, I had to learn everything from scratch, how it worked, how I worked, how to put together very technical artwork. There was no manager or boss to tell me I sucked. in fact I had the most amazing managers you can possibly imagine. But the most pressure I felt and the reason I strived to get better every day was peer pressure. Every day there were these guys around me and every one of them was literally a genius at what they did. Every single artist was on top of their game and I couldn’t accept the fact that I would be the one to let the team down. So I put in 16-18 hour days to learn and get better. So these people were the A-players.
Every industry has A-players, the A-player company or the A-player team. I encourage everyone starting out to head directly for the A-player place, so they can compete with the A-players. Each industry has exactly one A-player company. It is one, not two, nor several. It is always one. And the other thing was that Lucas had taken Lucasfilm out of Hollywood and established it in San Francisco, and Lucasfilm was not just a creative endeavor, a film company, but was also a technology company. Same with Pixar. They both benefited from being children of the Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley style management and operation. Silicon Valley is important in the way the French Revolution was important, the kind of operation… where a 12 years old Steve Jobs can call up a CEO of a company and have a decent chat. No barriers to entry but your own abilities, and your ability to articulate ideas. But I am gonna talk about this at length later on.
When I decided to leave Lucas I realized there’s one place in the world that is the center of the Universe in art and that is New York. I applied the same principle when I started drawing – I never looked at the contemporary scene in drawing, I always looked at the drawings of the masters – Michelangelo, Leonardo, Durer, Rembrandt, all the old masters drawings I can possibly lay my eyes on. When I wanted to shift my work and enter the surreal space – I started looking at Dali. And the lesson is to always learn from the best, from the A-players, even the dead ones.
Lucasfilm Lessons 2.
One of the greatest effects that working in the Silicon Valley had on me and one of life’s lessons I will never forget, in the greatest possible ironies of all, is that dreams come true. To dream well is very important and making a very good dream come true is very, very profitable. Ironic right? One of the management manuals at Lucasfilm had to Dream at number one position to do when starting a project.
There’s stigma to dreaming, in that somehow to dream is to be detached from reality and not stand on firm ground. Or that it is not very profitable or practical, or very difficult. Of course it is. It is difficult to make a dream come true. You gotta make molecules do things they haven’t done before, you need to convince people to try something they have never seen or done before.
The Valley, as one of the most economically motivated places on Earth, was built on dreams. The crazier the dream – the greater likelihood to change the world. An easy dream is easy to be dreamed up by the numbers. A hard dream has more likelihood to be unique and to get traction. Thus was Silicon Valley made on dreams. You would think that motivator was money – no, in fact a lot of the companies in the Valley that later went on to make global impact on literally millions of people were started in the backyards of modest homes.
Look at what Disney bought for four billion dollars – forty seven thousand characters. Not real estate, not diamonds or gold, nor oil wells. But Fantasy. Good dreams can be very profitable.
Hollywood Hills mansions are built on dreams. The dream factories of Hollywood create very profitable dreams by selling a great product at bargain prices, a movie that costs millions to make is sold to us for 15 bucks a piece. For Ridley Scott, for Spielberg, (no longer) for George – it is a numbers game. What has boggled my mind is the scale of it all. It really is of biblical proportions.
So imagine a Michelangelo – okay, perhaps that won’t work if you have no special place in your heart for George Lucas – imagine hundreds of talented individuals who collectively make up a Michelangelo talent. And they toil day and night for months or years to make a perfect marble statue. And the next day half a billion people on the planet get one, the same exact perfect copy. For a tenner. That’s Hollywood for you and this is how it works.
My old little iPhone is a dream, right? Gandalf the Grey’s Staff of Power is like a stupid twig compared to what the latest generation iPhone can do. In that regard Gandalf is practically a puppet compared to the great wizard Steve Jobs. My Mac Book Pro beats any wizard from Harry Potter at magic, I can put together a figment of my imagination and send it to 3D print across the globe and voila – we have a conjuring.
I was watching a video of several movie directors of high caliber, guys that get handed hundreds of millions of dollars to work on dreams. One of them was Ridley Scott. The moderator asked Ridley if he got any surprises during filming. And he said, no, not really, I storyboard everything, it is exactly as I storyboarded it. I shoot the film on paper before we begin.
One thing that becomes clear is that dreams don’t come true in a dreamlike manner. Usually hard work is involved and serial dreaming. Dream up a good dream. A good dream ensures you will be entertained and motivated for a long time.
When you were growing up they told you to stop dreaming and plant you feet on the ground.. when instead they should have told you to dream more and better. It is important to have more than one dream. One day you will outgrow a dream, or an organization – you will need to be ready for the moment to employ another dream. Use your time wisely to dream better, get better at dreaming.