A Klingon, A Ferengi, A Hologram, and YOU!

[Montresor]

Well, as you may have noticed, my av is a bit higher-res now. I finally found a simple (probably too much so, not a lot of options) little freeware program that will create an animated gif without dithering the hell out of it. What do some of you use to make gifs?

I'll be switching to my Collateral av tonight, probably. Imagine Miles with Tom Cruise's hair...

 

[eastman23]

Ah, okay. I'll send them an email or something. I'm currently rewatching season 1 since I left a big gap about the middle of the season for a couple months. I'm also reading over the Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5 after the episodes that I watch.

 

[The Evil Dead]

I wish more shows had a Lurker's Guide style webpage. They literally dissect every episode. So much good information there.

It's funny, I remember checking out the Lurker's Guide way back in Jan. 1998, when I first got hooked on Babylon 5. Has it really been seven years? I feel so old... And I'm 21.

 

[eastman23]

/\ Got ya beat. I feel old, and I'm only 20.

[edit]
Okay, I'm just going to drop a few thoughts about B5 while I'm here.

I am enjoying it to an extent, but I'm still not really warmed up to the characters (but then, that's sort of true for anything I watch, including DS9).

Also, for some reason, the B5 universe seems a bit... smaller then the Star Trek one. I've watched through all of season 1, and I suppose it's because there's not much that really happens off station (that we see, there's always references to other things going on). It also doesn't help that DS9 had two precedessors filling in the details, but even on it's own, it seemed like a bigger area. We saw more going on off the station (Bajor, Cardassia, the DMZ, etc). B5 seems more confined to... well... Babylon 5. Haven't really made up my mind whether that's a good thing or not.

 

[BigFoot]

^ Well, I hope you won't consider this a spoiler, but they do get off the station a lot more in the following seasons.

 

[kevsthaman]

Posted by Vash:
kevsthaman...you have 3,977 posts and the Admiral's Lounge awaits.

I WILL NOT BE ASSIMILATED!! Well, not real soon anyway. 4 days pass and I'm only up by 1 (as of this post anyway) Take that, you Soulless Minions of Admiralcy!

Posted by Montresor:
Well, as you may have noticed, my av is a bit higher-res now. I finally found a simple (probably too much so, not a lot of options) little freeware program that will create an animated gif without dithering the hell out of it. What do some of you use to make gifs?

It does look more detailed, though not moving (maybe cause O'Brien's impressive forehead is covered by that Cruise crop ). Still, looks like your program did a good job. It's been a while since I've really played with programs, but I used GIF Construction Set Professional for my Kaga av and others in the past. It's not exactly free, but they let have let me "try" it for a limitless time so far, so I'm pleased. You can check them out here.

What program did you use? If it's actually a good freeware program, I may have to move to it.

 

[BigFoot]

Well I've been having a lot of fun over the last couple of days. Me and my dad have been playing darts a lot, and I've gotten really good at it. Man, it would be so cool to hang out with Miles and Julian, playing darts, drinking beer.
I also read a wonderful Trek book in the last three days. It's the first in the The Lost Era series. It's called The Sundered and it's a really awesome read. I'm probably gonna start the second The Lost Era book tomorrow, and I've already the third (there's six all together).

 

[eastman23]

/\ Yeah, The Sundered was pretty good. I especially liked the history parts showing how the Neyel developed. Serpents Among the Ruins is pretty good, I enjoyed The Art of the Impossible a bit more.

 

[kevsthaman]

I read The Sundered & The Art of the Impossible, and they're both excellent stories. I think I was really into them because of the characters that received more depth thanks to these stories, namely Sulu & Worf (the grandfather). Both of their parts are ones who really caught my attention in ST:VI, and I'm glad these books made good use of them. And I also enjoyed the tracking over time of the Neyel in The Sundered

I couldn't get into Serpent Among the Ruins when I first tried it. I only read the first few chapters, but it didn't really grab me. I attribute it to Trek overload (having just read several titles back-to-back and pouring through the DS9 DVDs). So I may pick it up again. But I think The Lost Era is a fun series overall. They do well what I think is great about good Trek novels - they take characters and things we've been introduced to on the screen and give us the kind of depth that we normally don't see.

 

[Sakrysta]

I liked Serpents among the Ruins best of the four Lost Ere novels I've read so far. The Sundered is next - I really enjoyed the Neyel and hope to see more of them in the future. Third was The Art of the Impossible - highly entertaining. Well of Souls took too long to get going, and drove me nuts with all the angst, psychobabble, and gory descriptions, but once the plot took off, I found it more enjoyable.

Right now I'm reading A Time to Kill which is going very fast (and I'm in this one! ), and I'll probably re-read it before moving on to Deny Thy Father. I do finally feel like I'm making some progress with The Lost Era, though. I was beginning to think I'd never make it through them all!

 

[kevsthaman]

OK, you've gone & peaked my interest. Who's in the book? Sakrysta? Who is that anyway?? Inquiring minds wanna know

 

[Sakrysta]

David Mack put a few of us beggars into his books. The thread actually started out as a joke, but then a couple of the authors started saying "okay," and I was one of the lucky ones, because David said he thought my name was pretty.

I'm Kriosian (same race as Kamala from "The Perfect Mate" - which means I get spots - LOL), and I'm on a mission team with Vale and an officer named Lt. Fillion.

First mention, p. 119. *bounces in glee*

 

[The Evil Dead]

Lt. Fillion, huh...?

 

[eastman23]

/\ Really? I'm going to have to find that... I noticed the transporter officer T'Bonz in the last couple of A Time to... novels that I read. I just started laughing when I first read it.

[edit]
Damn, I guess I won't. I thought I had that one.

 

[Sakrysta]

Posted by The Evil Dead:
Lt. Fillion, huh...?

Yep! He said he thought I'd appreciate that.

 

[PKTrekGirl]

Posted by kevsthaman:
I WILL NOT BE ASSIMILATED!! Well, not real soon anyway. 4 days pass and I'm only up by 1 (as of this post anyway) Take that, you Soulless Minions of Admiralcy!

I need to find a way to shorten this enough to put it in a sigline!

And congrats, Sakrysta on being in that book! That is way cool!

 

[PKTrekGirl]

The Evil Dead...I watched two more episodes of The X-Files last night - Killswitch, which was excellent...and the one about vampires - Bad Blood is it?

The first one was fantastic. The second was pretty doggone funny! This is such a great show!

 

[The Evil Dead]

Oh, Kill Switch is one of my absolute favorites. It has such an incredible epic quality to it, didn't you find? They should've done something like that for The X-Files movie, if you ask me. Completely stand alone, but totally epic and important nonetheless.

It was written by a couple of novel writers I believe, that's why it was a tad over the top - it had a HUGE budget for an episode of television. Unfortunately, those same two writers wrote a similiar (But unconnected) episode in season seven that was quite possibly... one of the worst episodes.

Bad Blood is a lot of fun too. Very well written. It scores high on a lot of people's top ten lists. I love the small subtle differences in Mulder & Scully's reflecting views of each other. I think David Duchovny's performance in Mulder's own version of events is hysterical. He's so shy and timid toward Scully.

"I... uh, um... have slides... if... you want to, uh, see."

 

[PKTrekGirl]

Yep...I agree with both of those assessments. I thought the differences in their perception of events in Bad Blood was hilarious! And Killswitch was just *great*. I think it is prolly in my top 10 episodes of the show. I really enjoyed it!

 

[Montresor]

Posted by kevsthaman:
It does look more detailed, though not moving (maybe cause O'Brien's impressive forehead is covered by that Cruise crop ). Still, looks like your program did a good job. It's been a while since I've really played with programs, but I used GIF Construction Set Professional for my Kaga av and others in the past. It's not exactly free, but they let have let me "try" it for a limitless time so far, so I'm pleased. You can check them out here.

What program did you use? If it's actually a good freeware program, I may have to move to it.

Thanks! I'll check out that program, and see how it is. I've been using this little program called UnFREEz; basically you add pictures to a list and it animates them slideslow-style. The bad thing is that it'll only let you add gifs to the list, and if you want to have layers of graphics (like the different glasses or hair I've been putting on O'Brien) you have to do that in Photoshop or something similar. So it takes a little longer than it did when I was using AfterEffects.

I would have tried to make O'Brien's Cruise-hair move, but I'm not that great of an animator, so I let it be! I had a higher-res The Village av up before I switched to Collateral, and the hair moved fine with that one.