What are you doing with your free time, pajh? you say. Well, since you asked so nicely, I'll skip the otherwise obligatory free time, what's that joke, and go straight to the incontrovertibly true answer: these days I spend my free time dressing up in skintight Lycra® and wrestling with men I barely know.

I may have mentioned in a previous post that Hollywood-grade motion capture systems create the potential for new narrative paradigms for the 21st century. Well, mostly I mentioned that they allow a specific actor, that actor being me, to hear the single most beautiful phrase ever expressed to an actor. We'll get to new narrative paradigms later. Meantime, there have been a number of very rapid learning experiences while working with thew new tech, not least of which is that I actually don't look totally terrible in skintight Lycra.

Unsurprisingly, most of the research in gyroscopic technologies these days is being done by the ballistics division of the US military and their contractors. Many of my readers may not have a particular interest in the increasingly accurate science of the transformation of alleged insurgents into chargrilled jerky from a distance of many kilometres, but fret not! for those of us so callously disinterested in how to blame friendly fire on technology, there are subsequent benefits for all of us (except for the families of the alleged insurgents, presumably): benefits like the upcoming Wolverine movie, and Skrillex' latest tour. I am, as ever, all about the trickle-down.

Yay us!

Another benefit of the fact that this is all repurposed military technology is that it's all incredibly robust. The suit comes in a case that is waterproof to 500 metres, and also conveniently scaled to comply with most airlines' regulations regarding carry-on luggage. In the event of a terrorist attack on a plane in which such a case was stored, it's more likely to survive than the black box. I dread to speculate on the newspaper headlines once the crash recovery team have spent a week attempting to recover data from it. Apparently the Captain spent twenty minutes trying to have an elaborate fistfight with the first officer, followed by an extended period of merengue dancing, with occasional periods of jazz hands. This presumably contributed to the crash, but exactly how is a question we hope maybe to have answered by next week.

Oh yes, the mocap. The suits are surprisingly accurate and expressive, to a level that I didn't think was possible. And you can play the mocap live in realtime into any 3D world you care to devise. In the following examples, we're going to be using Minecraft, because Minecraft. Also, because Minecraft is incredibly pretty, and it shows you just what you can do with a blocky Steve guy with no facial expressions.

Ye First Video: Meet the Creeper

In this short film I play the Creeper, which while it's not exactly a speaking role, does have the benefit of being in the title.

Took us about five minutes to shoot. About an hour of getting the suits configured first, but that's just teething. On a regular film shoot I spend much more time hanging around waiting, and there are usually fewer copies of Transmetropolitan lying about with which for me to occupy my time. These suits are awesome.

Ye Video the Second: in which pajh does acting

I know I'm a middle-class New Town bastard these days, but I do still pay attention to my acting when I get the chance. I have the most popular text-to-speech voice in the known world, and physical acting is no less an important discipline. I have done courses. I've done the Alexander Technique. I do stretches properly before I perform mocap (judiciously excluding the stretches that are likely to tear the €500 lycra suit, natch). I'm not by any means attempting to put myself up there in Patrick Stewart territory, but I think my research has paid off. In this second video I have more of a starring role.

I showed this to stormsearch and she got about twenty seconds in before she had to pause it and proclaim, oh god. It's you. Something about the way I hold my head slightly to one side, it would seem. And then there are little things, like the fact that apparently I pick my right foot up when I'm considering something. I didn't know that about me until I watched it expressed by a blocky Minecraft Steve.

The level of expressiveness and the subtlety you can get from the tech is quite incredible. I'm quite excited to see where this goes next.

In my Copious Free Time, obviously.

Guys. GUYS. They built a robot in Stockholm and they put my voice into it.

You may recall the pajh-inna-box from a couple of years ago. Now my voice is starring at the Science Museum without inconveniently needing my body attached to it.

FurHat speaks with the CereProc William TTS voice. He uses built-in CereVoice vocal gestures to add extra realism (and sarcasm) to his speech. That's right. When they wanted to teach sarcasm to a cold, unfeeling machine, they knew exactly where to turn.

BBC News segment (skip to 02:18 for me). Also: oh ghod, they gave him hubris.

I like the fact that they gave him a hat. It seems to be a truth, universally acknowledged, that a voice this awesome needs to have a hat on top of it.

Well, Phase One of my grand plan to construct an invincible robot body for myself is complete. Now I just to need to work out what Phase Two should be.

Tenuously related: research for this article involved googling for fur hat robot, which turned up—natch—I Am Russian Robot, a rather nice little comedy skit.

Also, please note that guys is gender-neutral. American women with names like Chrystal and Ronnette use it all the time.

ETA

@marksutherland: @gominokouhai I just spent the last half hour pasting GladOS quotes into the box on the Cereproc homepage

@marksutherland: The canonical voice of sarcastic rouge AIs is now @gominokouhai : gominokouhai.dreamwidth.org/246773.html See: free.dom0.org/PajhOS.mp3

Glad to be of service.

It's okay, Moff. Everybody kills Hitler on their first trip.

(I didn't know it was possible to hold one's breath for forty-five minutes.)

Oh, Amy.

These are absolutely lovely. I'm grinning like it's 12th March 2003 again.

No additional plot to speak of, just some marvellous character moments and a handful of fannish callbacks. Oh yes, and there's another shot of Amy's legs. As ever, this is likely to send certain haters into an uncontrollable frenzy of totally unjustified rage, and they may wish to avoid for that reason, but you don't know what you're missing.

Seriously. Calm down. They keep her feet attached to her hips.

(Hat duly tipped to lizbee and her capslock-abusing friends.)

Courtesy of matgb, who got it off nwhyte, who got it off frostfox: this is absolutely lovely.

See how many references you can spot. The somewhat anachronistic NuWho one doesn't count.

Anne Francis is eighty years old now. And she has a website. Wow.

Just a thought: in Forbidden Planet (1956) she says He's the mad scientist, I'm the beautiful daughter. Just how old is that trope anyway?

ooweeooweeoo, doo-lang, doo-lang

Spike Milligan's Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall at the Lyceum, early part of October.

Who's going?

I know you're going to dig this.

For those who haven't seen it yet: The Last I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue Of All

(...or is it?)

(With thanks to figg, as often.)

Okay people, Blog Like It's The End Of The World Day was the 13th June. You can all stop now.

I didn't participate, and for this reason: when the real Zombie Apocalypse comes, we're all going to waste the first half hour Googling to find out if it's all some sort of hilarious meme. When the mushroom clouds light up the midnight sky, even as our eyeballs turn to ashes we'll be wondering if it's a new form of advertising. And Rage-infested monkeys are just viral marketing with the dial turned up to 11, right?

(Rage-infested Monkeys wbaenfarb.)

A million years from now, when alien prospectors land on our planet and survey the ruined wastelands of our once-great civilization, they'll find six billion charred skeletons all sat in front of Windows Messenger. Coda to Aristotle, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Amis, the last words ever inscribed by humanity will be HEY YOU GUYZ IS THIS 4 REAL?!!?

You can all stop pretending to be Bruce Campbell now. Some of us did this when we were eight.

Oh, all right then. You can continue saying Groovy for the next couple of days.

And the cricket bats are okay too.

~

ION: The Shuttle Atlantis delivers a package of new solar panels to the International Space Station. While it's there, a computer systems crash knocks out the guidance and navigation systems. Presumably the solar panels needed Service Pack 1 or something. In any case, Atlantis is required to stay docked to provide the Station with attitude control.

Meanwhile, they have to perform a spacewalk to repair the Shuttle's thermal blankie with a medical stapler borrowed from the first-aid kit and some surgical-steel fishhooks. NASA officials have as yet remained silent on the inclusion of duct tape and string on the Shuttle's standard equipment list, or whether Richard Dean Anderson has been conscripted into astronaut training.

Meanwhile, a woman in Palatine, Illinois, picks up NASA transmissions on her son's baby monitor. Real Life apparently isn't just a bad sitcom, it's a bad sitcom IN SPACE. We've already got nappy-wearing astronauts on improbable road trips to resolve bizarre love triangles. All we need now is for somebody to step on a rake and for two guy astronauts to leave someone's baby on a passing flying saucer, and I think we have a ratings winner.