Oh dear, it seems that YouTube's video feed format has changed which means that my mew videos aren't showing up properly any more. So much for web standards! Here are the links to my latest things: Improvisation 1/3: Angels - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZRIlDk6-MU and my Axel F silliness: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5eRiaai3Ug

Hope you don't hate them!

...when I'm not in Canonical Towers.

I've been busy day and night recently. I feel I should catalogue my various half-finished projects.

1) I'm building an OS X Cocoa version of Animata along with a Quartz Composer plugin and the elements of a suite of live performance software based around all the work I did at the start of the year but unified into a neater package, to make it more fun to use and to improve performance (and so that undo works!)

2) I'm writing a semi-autobiographical graphic novel that I will be publishing in the App Store (as a follow up to my first one)

3) I'm writing an iPhone version of Mood Tracker

4) I'm recording a bit of dubstep here and there

5) I am working on a music-oriented internet dating website with my sister

6) I am working on André Durand's new website

7) I am maintaining the Facebook Mood Tracker app

8) I am polishing and documenting my ActionScript framework and planning to do some proper screencasts about it soon

9) I also have some music-based iPhone apps underway. I'm planning on starting some Ubuntu audio hacking soon to discover some nice open source ways of producing interesting sound from these apps (I have the graphics working already)

10) I am worrying that I am doing too much code and not enough art.

The first thing I did after installing Ubuntu 9.04 was to head straight for the Appearance settings to choose a desktop picture. Here's what I was offered:



Naturally, a panic ensued while I tried to work out how to synchronise filesystems between OS X and the VirtualBox Ubuntu installation so I didn't have to drown in brown every time I looked at Ubuntu.

For Ubuntu 9.10 we asked people to submit images on Flickr, and selected 19 of these for inclusion on the CD. Here's what you get now:



Much nicer.

Here's the default appearance on 9.04 and then 9.10.





It's not a quantum leap, but it feels like the lights have been turned on. The new default background is an organic version of the previous one - warmed up and subtly intriguing. The icons have been smartened up, the window title bar is darker yet somehow less intrusive, the 'panel' icons (top-right) are monochrome, and generally colour is being used more where it means something and less where it only adds visual noise.

I feel that we've managed to move things forward. There is a lot of work to do on a million other aspects of Ubuntu so I hope people won't get fixated on things like the default desktop too much - these are matters of taste and there are no correct answers - you have to trust that we have a long-term vision and that decisions are made to move things in a certain direction. We don't think you'll be disappointed when things really start to come through over the next few releases.

I always planned to make my millions and then spend them philanthropically, on a technological venture. Nanotech, bioengineering or artificial intelligence - some scientific enterprise for the benefit of humankind.

Earlier this year, when the credit crunch was in full swing and I was never sure how my rent would get paid, and my creative attention continued to fracture and fray with a new idea coming every few days - ideas never really completed to perfection and production continuing to gravitate to 'proofs of concept' instead of actual works of art, earlier this year when loan terms were shouting out my dreams, and compromise (awful compromise) could no longer be avoided, earlier this year, all of a sudden, I received a phone call from a balkan witch.

Ivanka (she's not really a witch) said she was putting together a team at a company called 'Canonical'. I'd heard through mutual friends that she was involved in some sort of altruistically-oriented company, and I'd seen a photo of the impressive view from her new office via Twitter. I didn't know that much about what she was actually doing.

Canonical is the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu. Ubuntu is an operating system, like Windows (blaaaaargh) or OS X, but free and open-source (source as in source code, which means you can read or change the source code if you want, which you can't do that with commercial operating-systems as they think that they need to keep their source code secret so nobody can steal their work). I had been using Ubuntu as a Windows replacement on my home computer and second work laptop for a couple of years, so I knew what it was. Actually, I didn't really use it (I used, and still use, a Mac) - I ran certain applications on it and it had Windows XP on a VMware instance (this is how you should run Windows - as a virtual machine in a little sandboxed window, where it can't do any damage and its incessant idiotic securlty warnings become a source of mild amusement instead of irritated, impotent frustration). I had seen Ubuntu run productively as a primary operating system by one of the developers in my team at LBi, so I knew it could work well (if you were sufficiently motivated to run an open-source operating-system).

Canonical was started by Mark Shuttleworth, who made an absolute shit-load of money in the dot com boom. I tell people he invented the little padlock in your web-browser that lets you shop online. Obviously it's a bit more complicated than that. If you're interested, read his wikipedia entry. Canonical is not your run-of-the-mill short-term-profit-oriented company. Mark wants to make something that will last, with the highest possible quality, and give it away for free. Windows isn't even on the map here - the idea is to compete with Apple and make the best operating system.

So, was I interested? Well. It would certainly be a detour. I had quit my Flash job a year earlier in search of something more meaningful, in search of a way to make money from art. The thought of abandoning this plan made me very sad. I did not want to feel I was admitting defeat. But there were many upsides. I liked the idea of working with Ivanka. I liked the idea of meeting Mark (he's been to space, which is reason enough to want to meet him). I really liked the idea of learning from Mark - to see how he was making a techno-philanthropy project work in real life. The opportunity to be part of a design team instead of a technical team was also novel (albeit scary). So I decided that it chimed well with my long-term plans and would be a good way to spend my early thirties while my artistic enterprises baked away in the background. So, following an enjoyable job interview, I signed up.

So here I am. I'm back doing Flash (after a frantic couple of weeks trying desparately to find a better way to produce prototypes than with Flash). I'm making a fake version of Ubuntu in which we prototype user interaction designs, and I'm working with some very good people. And finally, after a few months of intensity learning about how everything fits together, I'm ready to start talking about it. Because there are a great many things that need to be proposed, discussed, defended, developed and denied.

Dear Michael Bay

Thank you for that two and a half hour epic of indistinct muttering and non-existent characterisation saturated in testicle jokes and ludicrously contrived situations designed around showcasing Megan Fox's cleavage.

Honestly, why would I mind you riding roughshod over my childhood memories. You know what's best for me. Sure, no - why should the characters in your films bear any relation to the characters from the 80s comic books or cartoons? Why should they look similar? You just go ahead and chuck it all in the bin and make up your own thing. I'm sure nobody will notice.

I NOTICED, MICHAEL. I NOTICED.

Here is what Ratchet looks like:



So who the fuck is this guy?



And why the fuck does he look exactly like this guy?



And why, in the first film, wasn't Jazz, like, a white sports car with a stripe? You couldn't have painted a big blue stripe down the middle of a modern sports car?

I have a few notes for you Michael.

Ironhide is RED. Optimus Prime is RED. 'Red doesn't work on film' you say? What? Um. I'm pretty sure I've seen red in films. All sorts of films. Three Colours Red. The Hunt for Red October. Films like that. They wouldn't put 'red' in the title if they couldn't put red in the film would they? NO MICHAEL THEY WOULDN'T.

Also: Starscream is WHITE with RED BITS. So you can tell him apart from the other two otherwise identical Decepticon planes Thundercracker and Skywarp. I remember, because I had the toy of Starscream. When I got him for Christmas, my first Transformer toy, when I was six years old, I was overjoyed. Overjoyed. He was my dream come true. I couldn't believe my luck. Little did I know that you were WAITING FOR ME MICHAEL. WAITING TO TAKE HIM AWAY FROM ME. WAITING TO MAKE HIM LOOK LIKE SOME SORT OF INDISTINCT STUMPY TRIANGLE-LOOKING THING THAT LOOKS ALL WRONG BECAUSE YOU THOUGHT IT WOULD BE "COOL" TO TRY AND MAKE HIM LOOK LIKE THE DECEPTICON INSIGNIA MICHAEL. YOU THOUGHT YOU COULD DO BETTER. WELL YOU DIDN'T. YOU DID WORSE. HE LOOKS SHIT NOW MICHAEL. HE LOOKS THE SAME AS ALL THE OTHER SHIT LOOKING ROBOTS IN THE SHIT FILMS WITH WHICH YOU'RE RAPING MY CHILDHOOD MEMORIES.




Also, Bumblebee was a VW Beetle. It was the 80s. They were in the 80s. That's what cars they had then.



The only thing you seem to have brought in from the 80s is some backwardly racist 'jive talking' characters.

I will refrain from spoilers because if anybody else reading this letter is anything like me then they'll want to see your film regardless of any bad reviews because they hold Transformers so dear that they're willing to embrace any live action realisation because they've been waiting for it since they were little children. And they probably think 'how could Giant Robots Fighting go wrong'? And then they'll go and see it and they'll realise that Giant Robots Fighting can indeed go wrong. It just takes enough hubris and a big enough budget and enough of a contemptuous disregard for the history of the phenomenon. It can go very wrong. Very wrong indeed.

I read the UK Comics in the 80s. I loved them. Every Saturday morning I would sit in the front room waiting to the paper delivery to hit the mat. From, like, 5:30am or something. Until 9:30 or whenever it was. I would read the stories with glee, read them again, then read them again, until the pages turned to rags.

Reading some of them again as a grown-up, I realised that the beauty of having SO many distinct characters meant that there was a healthy churn - a lot of danger, a lot of death, new characters constantly emerging, fostering a writing style that didn't need to be super-protective of a central set of characters because there were always new, more exciting characters around the corner. And in the comics, thanks to Simon Furman et al, the robots were characters. Some were likeable, some were heroic, some were annoying, some were super-cool, some were treacherous, some were incompetent, some were psychotically evil and hell-bent on destroying the Earth, and it worked.

In your second film I did not at ANY POINT feel concerned for the safety of ANY of the characters. With all the buzz-saws and shrapnell and barbed metal and pointy hooks it was pretty unbelievable when any of the human characters lasted more than ten seconds in the situations in which they were placed. Even the robots didn't seem to be in much danger. It was all dust and masonry and near-misses and as a result it was boring and irritating and it made me MAD.

I wish I could see a Transformers film with a Furman screenplay, set in the 80s, with much simpler robots, with Soundwave with a robot voice and Megatron that transforms into a small gun. That would be so much better than this shit you have been putting out, Michael Bay.

Thank you for your time Michael. We shan't speak again.

Regards

Michael Forrest