Video: Red Sun Rising

Another Liberal Resistance video I did.

Again, if you're pro-Trump, feel free to skip. More apolitical stuff is coming.

If you're anti-Trump, well, then, watch away!

Video With Dinosaur

Another liberal resistance vid. But I do like the dinosaur...

Old Woody

And this is yet another GIF...

This is "Old Woody," a tree not far from here. They've decorated with paper lanterns for Christmas. I added the light, and the small blue Christmas/Fairy lights that come on afterwards.

My newest certificate

Got this today for a Udemy class I finished. Trying to move forward on the video stuff. I've gotten a couple of feelers from folks who want me to edit and/or narrate little promo videos they've done or want done.

Be interesting if I ended up doing that sort of thing, even if just as a hobby.

In Unity And Trust

So another anti-Trump video I did for LiberalResistance.net. Again, if you're a conservative, feel free to skip. I'll be lots of less political stuff in future.

Tiananmen, Or, The Gate Of Heavenly Peace

Without comment...

copyright©2019 Michael Jay Tucker

Sunset, Night Sky, Shooting Star

This is yet another GIF. I started with a false-watercolor (many filters on photoshop) of a photo I took, then added the changing light, the stars, and finally the shooting star.

I think it turned out rather well, don't you?

cheers
mjt

Copyright©2019 Michael Jay Tucker

A Bit Of Lampost...GIF

I'm rolling with the GIFs these days. Here's my most recent. This is a lamppost along a path near where I live. I tried to give it a growing dusk sort of feeling.

Copyright©2019 Michael Jay Tucker

A cozy bath...

Yet another GIF, this one based on a stock photo of a extra cozy bath lit by candles. I thought it would be fun to put in changing lights and then have the trees outside the windows become illuminated. I am pretending that they are Christmas trees.

Martha put it best when she said this looked like a bath...in a very cold place.

Anyway, see what you think of the motion and the light effects.

The Madness of King Donald

Another video I did for Liberal Resistance. Feel free to skip if that offends you.

More non-political stuff will come soon.

From Video To GIF

So as part of my experiments with GIFs, I am trying to learn how to turn a video into a GIF. This is my first attempt...somewhat dizzying and probably shouldn't be watched for long periods :-)

Anyway, this is a time lapse video I took of a trail near where I live. I've made it into an endlessly looping GIF. As I say, don't watch it too long :-)

Another GIF

Here's another experiment with a GIF. This is meant to be a building in winter as a day turns to night.

Another GIF

Another GIF, and another building blinking in the night 😀

This one is a bit bigger, though. And the blues are fun, IMHO.

Tap on it (about the center) to get the full screen. Better view.

cheers

Playing With GIFs

Running some experiments with GIFs. Here's one I did recently. See what you think.

Halloween Politics - A Scary Video

Hey, All,

Yet more flaming liberal politics in this video. Give it a glance, if you're not offended by anti-Trump stuff. (If you are, er, ah, wait until the next posting, which will be much nicer.)

Here it is on liberalresistance.net:

https://www.liberalresistance.net/video-happy-halloween-or-not/

And here it is in person:

Video: The Triumph of Death...er, tRump

Another little video that I had on LRnet. it's a bit less complicated than the others in that it is mostly just moving pictures and music...no Voice Over.

However, I did "perform" the version of Dies irae on garageband. So, i guess that's something :-)

More seriously, this piece is a response to Trump's decision to pull out of Syria and leave the Kurds to die. Not, I fear, one of our finer moments as a nation.

Suddenlink

I woke up this morning to discover that I had no Internet service. At first, I thought it was simply a local outage, but then I phoned my provider -- Suddenlink -- and learned that I had been terminated for not paying my bill.

The kicker? To the best of my recollection, I never received a recent bill. I had signed up to go paperless and, before, had been getting it regularly via email. But, not this time. Maybe it went into my spam folder or something, but I haven’t seen it there as yet. 

Also, I had not received any notice from Suddenlink that my service was going to be shut down--even though the company has my phone number and text info on file.  If they had texted me a “friendly reminder” I’d have paid up quickly enough. But...they didn’t.

I then paid my bill via the phone and set up automatic payments so that this won’t happen in future. But I had to pay a late fee along with my regular bill, and I really felt that was a bit unfair. How could I be charged a late fee on a bill I never actually got?

So, I called up Suddenlink’s help line...and got put into a lengthy queue. I put my name and number for a call back, and then attempted to use the company’s chat function on its webpage. That, too, required a wait, but I hung in there until I got a company rep on the line, someone named “Michael.” I had just started explaining my problem to Michael when the chat function froze. It didn’t work then, and it is still not working as of the moment (10:45 am).

I then got a phone call back from the customer service help desk. I explained my problem as best I could and said I would like to remove the late fees. A rather hostile individual informed me that I had had plenty of time to check my bill before the due date and so it was all my fault, and there was no way the fees were coming off.

At this point, I was genuinely angry. The late fee had been annoying, but to be basically dismissed by customer service in this fashion was quite a bit worse. Indeed, it is inexcusable.

I suppose I will never see my late fee again, but I do think I’m owed an apology. I wonder if I will ever get it. If I ever do, I will let you know. But, it is rather unlikely, I suppose. Which is sad, because up to then I had been quite satisfied with my Suddenlink service. Now, I discover that it wasn’t nearly the company I thought it was.

Ah, the joys of life in the post-industrial economy. 

A book of mysterious things...

Another video experiment. I did this partly to see if I could format a video for Instagram's new video feature.

View this post on Instagram

Another video experiment. This is the first time I have ever done a 9x16 (i.e., cellphone specific) video. The music, once again, is by the fabulously talented Kevin MacLeod. Here is the Creative Commons notice: Music from https://filmmusic.io "Stay The Course" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Please check out my Amazon page, https://www.amazon.com/author/mtucker57

A post shared by Michael Tucker (@michael.j.tucker1) on Aug 15, 2019 at 10:25am PDT

No Shingles, Thank You

Spent much of yesterday sick as the proverbial canine. The reason? Because on Tuesday I went and got not one but two vaccinations -- for the flu, and more importantly, for Shingles. I had been meaning to get the latter for some time. I’m a prime candidate for that ghastly disease because I had chickenpox as an adult. Apparently, that means there is a strong, strong likelihood that I would get shingles sometime after middle age.

And I wasn’t planning on getting shingles...not if I could help it, anyway. It’s incredibly painful, can be a bit disfiguring (at least in the short term), and there is no known cure. And that’s just if you get garden variety. A friend of mine, a writer I’ve worked with, got it in her eyes. Feel free to shudder at that thought. I certainly did.

So, I got the vaccine. The problem is that I’ve got a strong immune system (apparently) and whenever I get a vaccine the old body swings into overdrive. It interprets the serum (as it should) as an attack and responds accordingly--i.e., it generates the antibodies which will give you immunity later on. The trouble being that may make you may feel sick in the short run. You may feel fever, aches, queasy stomach, and all the other things that are designed to make life impossible for viruses...and, sort of by accident, miserable for you.

Ergo, I spent pretty much all day yesterday flat on my back and feeling, to quote the immortal P.G. Wodehouse, like something rejected by the pure food committee. 

It wasn’t fun to say the least...but I knew the alternative was to court something a whole lot worse. Better to suffer a little today than much more more next week.

In other words, I was doing something mature.

Don’t you just hate it when that happens?

Video Note To Conservatives: Dump Trump Now!

Another video I did for LiberalResistance.net. This one ran on Friday.

Actually, I really believe this. Conservatives had made real progress in America, and, at least in places like American Conservative Magazine, had explored some interesting new spaces in the ideology.

But, Trump could take them down...hard.

If the Right wants to weather what's coming, it needs to find a way to disassociate itself from him, and do so gracefully but firmly.

Anyway, take a look and see what you think.