Zach Sobiech was diagnosed with terminal cancer at age 14. He used the small amount of time he had left to produce music, which has reached and touched millions.
I want to be remembered as the kid who went down fighting and didn’t really lose.
Zach passed away on May 20, 2013. Buying his album on iTunes will support a cancer research fund set up on his behalf, or you can donate directly.
I’ve been getting a few questions about the script used to generate the Pokemon Fusion sprites, so I thought I would write a quick blog post to describe the process.
The inspiration of the website was the idea that it should be possible to automate the process of combining pokemon sprites, and each image is automatically generated by a computer script. Some of the results are less impressive than others, but I think that it adds to the fun and makes it that much more satisfying when you come across ones that work really well.
There is a small amount of manual work that goes into adding a new pokemon to the website. It comes down to collecting some basic information about the head’s size and position, as well as the colors that are used.
First, I download the new pokemon’s sprite from Bulbapedia, and manually cut out the head and save it as a new image. The body is also saved separately, and these become the basic parts that are combined with those from other pokemon to create the fusions.
To collect and save each pokemon’s data, I made a simple admin page.
Face size is taken automatically from the size of the image, and Head size is used to adjust for unusually-shaped faces. In this example, I wanted the lower jaw and whiskers to hang below the main head location so I set the head size to be smaller, matching the colored-out area of the body.
After all of the data is saved, I run my fusion script to combine the new pokemon with all of the existing pokemon. At this point, by just adding a few data points for a new pokemon I can generate over 100 new fusions nearly instantly.
The image processing is done with ImageMagick, and I use the RMagick gem to work with it in Ruby. I plan to open source the code after I clean things up more, but here are the most important parts:
body1 = body1.opaque_channel("##{pk1['primary'][i]}","##{pk2['primary'][i]}")
This code looks at the image body1 for every pixel of the given color pk1['primary'][i] and changes it to the second given color pk2['primary'][i]. We will then loop for each of the 5 shades of each of the 3 colors.
headratiox1 = 1.0 * pk2['headsize'][0] / pk1['headsize'][0]
headratioy1 = 1.0 * pk2['headsize'][1] / pk1['headsize'][1]
newx = pk1['facesize'][0] * headratiox1
newy = pk1['facesize'][1] * headratioy1
face1 = face1.resize(newx, newy)
First, we compare the heads of the two pokemon and see much bigger/smaller the head we’re working with is. Once we have this ratio, we resize the face image by this ratio.
Since we made defined the head to be smaller than the face (to support irregular faces with beaks, tongues, or whiskers that spill over the head area), this makes sure that the face image isn’t shrunken down too much.
body1 = body1.composite(face2, face2x, face2y, Magick::OverCompositeOp)
composite is the function that overlays an image over another image, and here we are placing the image face2 on top of the image body1 at the coordinates (face2x, face2y).
After looping over each existing pokemon the script generates all new combinations using the new pokemon, and I just upload the new images and update the site to show the new combinations.
If you have any other questions, feel free to reach out over email or twitter.
See a Google Street View at a random point in the world, guess where it is on a map.
Here’s a quick Mac OSX service that will allow you to save any link to Pocket by right-clicking it. It will work from within basically any app that lets you right-click text. Prerequisite is that you have the Pocket OSX app installed.
After downloading, unzip and place the file in ~/Library/Services (or create the folder first if it doesn’t exist already)
After doing so, you should be able to simply highlight a link and right-click it to see the “Save to Pocket” option. (You might find it under a “Services” category)
4/21はいつもお世話になっているBackgammonの3周年パーティー。楽しいライブの演奏が盛りだくさんでした。
I absolutely love the energy
似てることよりも、この画像を探しだせたことが一番すごい。
A chilling story told by a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay. I hope that someday we’ll look back and wonder how anything like this could have been possible.
I’ve been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial.
[…]
The situation is desperate now. All of the detainees here are suffering deeply. At least 40 people here are on a hunger strike. People are fainting with exhaustion every day. I have vomited blood.
And there is no end in sight to our imprisonment. Denying ourselves food and risking death every day is the choice we have made.
I just hope that because of the pain we are suffering, the eyes of the world will once again look to Guantánamo before it is too late.
The program is given a set of inputs from a human playing the game, and analyzes the RAM to define success in the game. It then plays the game with no knowledge of the rules, and works incredibly well.
#OnionOrActualHeadline
The announcement from the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) did not indicate a new scheduled time for a missile test, saying only that it was “working with Windows 8 support to resolve the issue.”
A source close to the North Korean regime reported that Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un is furious about the Windows 8 problems and is considering a number of options, including declaring war on Microsoft.