The other day, I had this idea for a short story. As it happened, I found out about a screenwriting competition at work around the same time, so I wrote it up. It’s a very fast read. It’s sort of science fiction-y and it involves waking dreams and multiple timelines so if that’s your sort of thing, check it out and let me know what you think.

Rollin’ 3 – 48 Hour Film Project from Mach Kobayashi on Vimeo.

I already did a post on this a couple years ago, but the video was pulled from YouTube so I just put it up on Vimeo.

Back in 2008, a few friends and I participated in a 48-hour film festival where we had to make a movie in two days using the given list of “ingredients” (a plunger, a line of dialog repeated 3 times, and a case of mistaken identity). Our idea was to create a fake trailer for a fictional movie “Rollin’ 3″, the epic third movie in a series about the dramatic world of roller boogie. I was the Assistant Director. I also played “Johnny The Human Dynamo” and drew the “Skate!” tattoo of a giant roller skating skull on one of the actors’ back using a sharpie. That was fun. Possibly toxic, though…

Do you have an iPhone 4? The one with that awesome LED light in the back? You know what you need? An app that turns that thing on. Oh yeah. My friend wrote one that’s on sale for $0.99. “But Mach, why would I pay money when there are so many free flashlight apps out there?” Good question.

Well, for one thing, this app has a cool image on it that makes it look like you’re seeing inside your iPhone and when you turn it on, it looks like it’s illuminating it from the other side. Also, would you believe it makes toast? No? Well, that’s because it doesn’t. But it will make your friends chuckle when you show it to them. And that’s worth a buck, right? So check out The Flashlight on iTunes.

Edit: Updated with new screenshots!

We were out for a walk around our neighborhood when I spotted something on the ground, a dead dragonfly. It was a little sad but it was also very beautiful. I’d never seen one up close before. The colors were brilliant. But the most beautiful part were its eyes. They were huge and iridescent.

The colors of the eyes were spectacular, like the rest of its body. But it also felt like I could see beyond the surface of the eyes and actually see inside of them. I tried taking a few pictures to get a sense of that but none of them had the same effect. Then it hit me, I needed to do a stereo image to get the depth effect. So click on the image and try looking at it with your eyes crossed. Hopefully, you’ll get a sense of what I mean.

One of the things I attended at SIGGRAPH was the RenderMan Users Group Meeting. At the end of the meeting, they hold an event called Stupid RAT Tricks where people present silly things they’ve done with their tools.

This year, I gave a brief presentation about the silliest thing I’d ever done with it: implemented the game Minesweeper in the shading language. It’s a little trickier than you might think because all the shading language does is let you control the color of a given pixel so I had to come up with a way to display numbers and grid, in addition to a way to place the mines, etc.

If you happen to have a copy of RenderMan and Slim, you can check out the source code. The comments at the top show how to load it. Enjoy!

I’m still working on this, but I’ve mostly got rounded 6-sided dice implemented for Mach Dice. I actually implemented rounded dice for my dice game, Boom Dice, but I hadn’t updated my code for the former project.

The only real issue is that the geometry to make all those nice round corners is a lot heavier than just a simple cube, which would really slow down those 100d6 rolls. So I think I’ll make it an option.

By the time you see this, I’ll be in Los Angeles attending SIGGRAPH. I think there’s going to be decent Wi-Fi at the conference and hotel, but I’ll be pretty busy the whole time so I’m writing this ahead of time.

It’s been a while since I’ve gone and I wasn’t even planning on going this year because of the baby and all. But I’m giving a few short presentations, so off I go.

I grew up in LA and now I’m going back for a business trip. It’s a little weird to feel like a stranger in the city I grew up in. It’s the sense that this thing I once thought I knew was never really there, like I grew up in some fantasy that didn’t really exist.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skxT4Exhyiw

A friend of mine told me about Ridley Scott’s Life in a Day project. The idea was for people all around the world to shoot some aspect of their day on July 24th and then they collect all that footage and turn it into a documentary about that one day.

It sounded like a neat idea so I thought, “Sure! I’ll give it a shot” and started shooting … on July 23rd, a day too early to submit for the project. But since I had the footage, I thought I’d cut together a little movie about what a typical day in my life is like.

Have you bought my iPhone / iPod app, Mach Dice? It’s been, like, forever since I’ve done an update to it, right? Well, I’ve started taking one night a week to try to work on iPhone stuff and this week, I implemented fudge dice — one of the most popular feature requests I get.

What are fudge dice? They’re dice that have an equal number of plus sides, minus sides, and blank sides. Typically, you roll 4 of them and then add up the plusses and subtract the minuses to get a value from -4 to 4 in a rough normal distribution. But you can also add them to other dice, like a d10 in my screenshot.

The way you’ll create them in Mach Dice is to tell it to use a “d3″. Why d3? Because there are three possible values: plus, minus, and blank. There will also be a setting to let you use d3 as values from 1 to 3.

It’ll be a while before I submit an update because there are a couple other things I’d like to implement as well. But hopefully, it’ll be out in the next few weeks.

I attempt to do a great many things in life, not all of them successfully. But sometimes failure is funny:

http://www.youtube.com/v/U_dc91ZrZaY