Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

Peering into my “office” at any given moment in time it would be very easy to convince yourself that my life is more full of depraved and self-destructive vice than hard work, but don't let the excess of alcohol and sex fool you — I am a highly productive worker that like some cartoon robot is in fact fueled by these poisons rather than slowed down by them… albeit one that wilfully ignores the warning: “the flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long”

Anyway, my WorldLog program is rapidly maturing and is now able to output its first sequential files (and is much faster and more optimized than the primitive code I was using initially). Still to add is better date math (not too hard), titling tools (very easy), and the day-night-alpha blending (not too hard), some minor cosmetic fixes, and then I'm done. As my first test animation I spit out a one month (two-second long, less than 1/4-meg WMV file) sequence of the views to ServMe's FriedKitten blog.

Watch it on loop!

I'll probably play with it for another day and then shelve it for a while. Believe it or not, building this sort of toy is more of a “vacation” to me than going to Africa (not that Africa wasn't amazing). I'll say once more that if you want to send me some zipped up copies of your log files so you can get an animation, shoot them over to glider@zentastic.com and I'll see what I can do. If you have a preference as to what kind of animation you'd like and how you'd like it titled, let me know.