Category: My Books

Pre-Christmas note on Steve etc

Great Stories, My Books, not Sci-Fi

What really is the overarching theme in my respects to Steve is that I don’t really know him as a person and never got a chance to interact with him personally. What I know about him in a more personal space is what I have heard from colleagues leaving Lucas and going on to work for Apple. But i do know that what he created is exceptional in many respects.

 

My note is more about the reality that we are carbon based beings crawling on top of a lonely rock. And we need individuals like Steve and Elon to help us overcome our limitations. We have powerful consciousness that allows us to influence our environment. We need to realize that we need to develop our capacity to think in terms of our being species capable of one day becoming a multi-planetary species.

 

In Steve’s interview there’s a segment where he is talking about individuals who are capable of working together to lift and improve the lives of many people. So basically the capable and the willing get together and produce in order to move forward the human race as a whole.

 

When I have time I’ll put together the most important segments of this interview as these are the profound realizations of a person with tangible proof he was a capable person.
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There’s Plato, there’s Aristotle and there’s Steve.

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One significant point he makes in the interview in my previous post is that he recognized the significance of Graphical User Interface early on, on his trip to Xerox. But Xerox really died and the technology lost traction at Xerox so if Steve didn’t steal it and improve on it – it would have been lost. So there’s the argument for stealing to some degree – we cannot overregulate neither molecules nor ideas. It is not necessary and it is harmful. Imagine if Xerox had sued Steve for half his empire. So here is the argument against over regulating our society as the way we deal with ideas and innovation. Imagine if the estates of all living artists in Paris had to sue Picasso for infringement.

 

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here’s the “tumbling Rocks” story as told by Steve:

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Steve Jobs – The Lost Interview

Great Stories, My Books, not Sci-Fi, The Lucasfilm Files

The the most important person of the end of 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. I have been a solid Windows person up until the moment I saw our lead engineer at Lucas use a botcamped mac. I bought an intel based mac and gradually moved onto the mac side. Once i moved into the mac side – I realized it is like playing the piano as supposed to chopping wood.

Mac allows very smooth and fast workflows – if you make a living on a computer – this is the way to go to minimize the time you spend on managing your OS. And not just that – many innovative ways to approach visual interface and put machines in service of people and increase productivity.

And this is what the person who made all this possible has to say on variety of topics. He was a brilliant guy who was the epitome of what Silicon Valley was about. Or is.
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it is also available on Netflix.

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“..there are certain things you can’t make electrons do..”

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The case with CG art – with love as well as a bit of regret

Cool Sci-Fi Concept and Background Art, My Books

My first love is creating background art for games and it really is one of the greatest commercial jobs an artist could have. It is fun on steroids, never ending diversion and never ending engagement because after you are done with the art you get to play it..

 

What happens with commercial CG assignments is that artists usually need to get it done and get it over with, this is the purpose of a commercial project – to get it out to consumers. It is only right to never get attached to your work if you work commercially. With all the shuffle from a project to project it happens that artists rarely get a chance to develop a personal brand.. as they are often in service of a brand to begin with.

There are several extraordinary artists working commercially today that have developed a personal brand  – Craig Mullins, Doug Chiang, RYAN CHURCH, but the best and most recognizable art style remains Ralph McQuarrie’s. Ralph’s work is painterly and stylized but at the same time all is drawn up with clarity and radiance (even the gloomy parts) – a world you’d love to be in.

 

 

Ralph McQuarrie’s Coruscant
Ralph McQuarrie’s Coruscant

 

Gifts from George, And The Importance of Being Stupid

George, My Books, Star Wars, The Lucasfilm Files

George was one of the most generous employers I have had – in addition to a six figure compensation and having my dream job, free life drawing and sculpture classes, cafeteria with sushi chefs, costume parties complete with indoor luna park, George regularly dispatched gifts to employees. I know for certain that anyone that has ever worked for George, for the most part, has had the time of their lives. The decision to leave Lucasfilm was probably the stupidest thing I have ever done but I had to go and pursue a war of my own, do my own battles and do a Star Wars of my own making.

 

Speaking of stupid things – being stupid is one of the most important things that will ever happen to you. If you sense that you were somewhat a stupid child – make sure to retain and hold onto that quality. I was personally a stupid child, and lived almost entirely in my head. Later on, when i had to work and create imaginary environments and worlds for large corporations – I felt at home and had no problem inhabiting imaginary worlds for hours on end and could conjure silly and stupid things on the fly. It turned out that was very profitable.

 

After all Star Wars was a stupid popcorn movie, wasn’t it? It was so much full on silly we didn’t see it coming – and all of a sudden fell in love with it.

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Gifts from George - Star Wars Anakin Skywalker toy

 

When I first moved to the States I lived in Ohio and had to buy a car. Now, for starters, I had only been in a driver’s seat about three times previously while getting my driver’s license in Europe ( i wouldn’t call that driving ) – my knowledge of cars was limited to general knowledge about a car  – front, back and wheels below. With very limited resources and had to buy anything that moved really for around a thousand dollars. Had I not been stupid about it – i would never have bought an adorable, stick shift Audi Quattro 1997 that had the windows fall down while I was driving mid-winter on the highway. If I were smart about it – I would have taken the bus and would have skipped the part with trying to hold the middle of the lane ( not hitting nearby cars ), crying my eyes out while trying to merge into traffic on a bridge between Ohio and Kentucky.

 

Until this day I cannot touch stick shift with a ten foot pole. So what happened to the silly Audi? Well, owing to the fact that I lived on the border between the good and the bad parts of town – someone slammed into it with full force and then run away ( they never found the culprit, obviously drunk driving in the early hours of the morning ). The Audi got totaled and  State Farm gave me three thousand dollars compensation, which i used to move to California and start my career as a digital artist there.

 

 

 

 

 

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Speaking of stupid – there is a theory in Japanese and Korean aesthetics where imperfections,  accidental damage ( like cracks in pottery ),  roughness and irregularity are highly valued. There is the art of Kintsugi and Wabi-sabi.

 

If you look at the Star Wars universe – it is a well-used world, with cracks and scratches and battle damage. In Wabi-sabi it is called the “appreciation of the ingenuous integrity of natural objects and processes”.. Leonard Koren says wabi-sabi is  “the most conspicuous and characteristic feature of traditional Japanese beauty and it occupies roughly the same position in the Japanese pantheon of aesthetic values as do the Greek ideals of beauty and perfection in the West.”
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Han Solo stuck in carbonite pencil case

 

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Stupid is the other side of the Mastery coin. When you are stupid you act without having made the necessary calculations, which is exactly what you do when you have mastered a craft, an art or a process.

 

This is what Sadhguru says intuition does – allows you to skip the calculations because, in case of mastery, you have accumulated enough information and skills that will enable you to enter a state of flow. Often times you do not have all the data – you do not have all the information available to you. You will need to make decision based on very little information. At the same time you may have not enough time to do the calculations. this is when intuition steps in. Not enough information, and not enough time – ( short of course of hurting yourself of others ) I have always relied on being stupid.

 

 

A picnic set !

 

The Force

My Books

May 27th 2016 (transcription of a recording I made in May)

Yesterday I was watching a video on youtube and the video was about the Force, is the Force real.
The guy looked at various forces in nature like electromagnetism, and gravity, and trying to find similarities with the Force as George had conceived it.

The reason I am looking at this video is because this guy is wrong. He missed the mark on what the force is.

So what is the Force? Well, look around you. Look at the floor you stand on, is it wood, is it concrete? Is it some sort of hardwood floor that has been laminated,.. ceramic tiles? What are you sitting on? Is it a chair, or a couch? What surrounds you.. walls?

How did this come about? Did these walls just conjure themselves? Not really, somebody built them. But before somebody built them – someone thought them up, right? They didn’t just say, hey, let’s just put a wall here, put a wall there. First somebody had an idea.. that we need some sort of separation from the elements. You can easily.. very very easily see these, the very seeds, the germination of that idea .. where a guy does primitive technology on youtube. Here you can see the very very beginnings of the desire to be separated from the elements. The guys just builds stuff out of twigs and mud. His channel is basically an expression of the Force.

The very nascent expression of the Force.

Somebody had a desire to be separated from the elements… and all very well could have been done with that right, they successfully separated themselves from the elements and they said .. well. How is it we make it better, better insulated, we make it work through all seasons, we make it indestructible. So somebody sat down the thought about it.

They basically conjured, they had ideas. They had ideas in their heads and they were contemplating reality.. and said, well we understand this reality and all the variables, we can try to do this and that. And if you follow this train of thought all the way to modern times look at everything around you – it is artificial. And not only it is artificial, it is very very complicated and usually a result of very very complex process.

Like the glass panes on you window have undergone tremendous transformation, it was just minerals in ores, and somebody conjured the technology .. somebody thought about how to make a transparent pane out of these minerals. And somebody worked on that to fix it, maybe over centuries.. they had this drive to perfect a thing… A glass pane doesn’t have to be perfect, it could have a smudge here and there and imperfections.. however we strive to remove these imperfections to make the glass panes more beautiful, more transparent, maybe decorated.

So what is behind all this – the Force – yeah? This is the force where you conjure new stuff out of thin air. Isn’t that incredible?. You can basically get up in the morning and probably build a chair in a day.. Right – just kind of find some wood in the attic and get some nails together, get a little hand saw, and just cut up some pieces and put together a chair by the end of the day, or a table. Ain’t it the Force?

You conjure something out of nothing.. well – it’s not instantaneous but you know in the grand schemes of things it is nothing it’s like a second, a rotation of Earth. This is the Force.

And The Force is all around us – anyone can do it. The blind could conjure thoughts and can write books and inspire millions. You do not need sight to be seen. take Helen Keller for example. She could move millions. you can move millions with your words. Isn’t that the force?

Let’s take.. martin luther king for example, we are not bound by kinship, we are not bound by any other bonds. However, i can hear and read his words and can be inspired and his words can move me, reaching across from back in the 60s out into today in the 21 st century, when i am sitting and I am having my morning coffee. This person could inspire me to have dreams. To dream up stuff. hey, this person with their words with the simple expression of opening their mouth with an intent, could inspire millions of people across the centuries.

You can say, hey, i have a dream. It really is an odd dream but hey I have a dream and you should dream too.

Words are also the force. It doesn’t have to be a physical, it doesn’t have to have any physical manifestation. Although it does have, you have to voice your stuff.. but.

So the Force is all around us – so, who is the jedi then? Why would you need a jedi? When the Force is all around us? Sure, the creator is the jedi. if you are not a creator, if you are just a consumer you are just another cow chained to a couch instead of to a .. a little feeding stall. When you are a creator, you are in charge of the force. And you are the jedi. And the more influence you have on the world as a creator – the jedier you are. This is the Force and this is how it works.