Mobile Suit Gundam
February 24, 2010 8:44 PM   Subscribe

 
Real length: 12 hours 56 minutes

Well, whoever did this has an admirable* commitment to wasting their own time in truly inane ways.

* Not really
posted by axiom at 8:47 PM on February 24, 2010 [1 favorite]


OK. We have learned that -

1) Excel is bloatware that needs to concentrate on being a flat-file database and numerical analysis tool that doesn't fucking crash if you sneeze.

2) People with innate artistic ability will perpetually shatter my dreams of attaining virtuosity with a few semesters of community college drawing class.

3) People with innate artistic ability will squander it in new and uninteresting ways.
posted by Slap*Happy at 8:52 PM on February 24, 2010 [3 favorites]


Wow. I remember getting Logo to animate a jet fighter taking off in middle school on an old Apple II, but... yeah, that's some impressively crazy ish there.
posted by yeloson at 8:54 PM on February 24, 2010


I was really hoping it was going to be built with some crazy formulas that generate filled cells to create a pixel art Gundam. If you can draw it in Illustrator or something, drawing it with the Excel drawing tools isn't really any harder. Not that drawing it at all isn't hard.

The AC/DC music video in Excel (downloadable) is pretty cool too.
posted by endquote at 9:32 PM on February 24, 2010 [1 favorite]


Why does Excel have that capability?
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 9:32 PM on February 24, 2010 [4 favorites]


What the hell, dude? Why? Why would you do that?
posted by Caduceus at 9:36 PM on February 24, 2010


Okay, now do a follow-up video in which you calculate the GDP of Zeon using only Adobe Illustrator.
posted by oulipian at 9:43 PM on February 24, 2010 [22 favorites]


Hush. This is like watching Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel, or that PBS guy with the happy trees, only more frenetic.
posted by Panjandrum at 9:46 PM on February 24, 2010


1) Excel is bloatware that needs to concentrate on being a flat-file database and numerical analysis tool that doesn't fucking crash if you sneeze.

I don't think I've seen excel crash once in my entire life.

Why does Excel have that capability?

So you can draw arrows and diagrams stuff on your spreadsheets, I would imagine.
posted by delmoi at 9:51 PM on February 24, 2010 [5 favorites]


(er, should be 'diagram stuff' or 'diagrams and stuff')
posted by delmoi at 9:51 PM on February 24, 2010


As someone who lives in Excel, this makes me cry. At most, the application needs basic line and arrow drawing to connect related cells visually if it's being used to present something. This represents feature creep to the highest degree. Not to diminish this kid's accomplishment, but it could have been done in any of the Microsoft Office applications that share the usually unnecessary draw functions; it being Excel just makes it weirder.

Now, watch this mildly amusing video about Excel.
posted by cgomez at 9:54 PM on February 24, 2010 [8 favorites]


Not to detract from the artistic merit, but you can pretty much do the same thing with any graphics program. Why Excel? Who knows. There was a whole game stuck in one version. Here's a cube.
posted by hellojed at 9:57 PM on February 24, 2010


That gave me the vague "here come the seizure robots" feeling, and I'm not even photosensitive. Those of you who are might want to avoid.
posted by fairytale of los angeles at 9:57 PM on February 24, 2010


For some reason this just made me think that if, through some unimaginable sequence of events, machines like gundams were actually produced, Japan and Germany would make really awesome, well-engineered ones, and incredibly crappy ones that got terrible fuel economy would come out of the US.
posted by clockzero at 10:11 PM on February 24, 2010 [3 favorites]


AAUUUGH this was like watching an RSI pain video.

I once had a design gig - circa 1991- where after I was hired they handed me a shrink wrapped copy of something called Harvard Graphics and informed me that was my graphics software. I actually ended up doing most of the first year's work in a similar-to-the-video bit of bloaty featureware sold with WordPerfect that did not have, IIRC, a separate name.

It taught me layer, points, and object discipline but I did find it very, very trying to draw using only the arrow keys on the keyboard.

No, I am not making this up. Here is some clip art of Mount Rainier which originated as .WPG vector art.

My wrists and forearms still hurt.
posted by mwhybark at 10:11 PM on February 24, 2010 [7 favorites]


I think someone got bored of working on his financial model at a bank somewhere and started doodling.
posted by armage at 10:18 PM on February 24, 2010


Japan and Germany would make really awesome, well-engineered ones, and incredibly crappy ones that got terrible fuel economy would come out of the US.

But the German ones would require ridiculously expensive maintenance, and the accelerators on the Japanese ones would get stuck.
posted by armage at 10:25 PM on February 24, 2010 [2 favorites]


but it could have been done in any of the Microsoft Office applications that share the usually unnecessary draw functions

Dear Microsoft: please get rid of the half-assed drawing tools in every Office application and just include an actual vector drawing program in the suite.
posted by benzenedream at 10:37 PM on February 24, 2010


Why do cells keep getting selected in the video? Sorry, I don't draw in Excel much.

I did work as an interface designer once, where one of the VPs decided I could be his art buddy.

He used to send me all these elaborate Excel drawings of interface ideas. One day he spent about 5 minutes on a conference call telling me how he discovered that putting some really small text next to something big made every composition look better.

I still wish I had kept in touch and maybe sent him books on design for his birthday or something. It's still such a cute memory for me.
posted by circular at 10:53 PM on February 24, 2010


OK, but can it do my taxes?
posted by Edgewise at 11:06 PM on February 24, 2010


But the German ones would require ridiculously expensive maintenance, and the accelerators on the Japanese ones would get stuck.

1) If you have a gundam, you have money to spend on maintenance. This is sort of a given.

2) Gundams are made out of gundamium. It is stronger, pound for pound, than love. You don't have to worry about crashing because the gundam will break anything.
posted by clockzero at 11:08 PM on February 24, 2010


You can also use excel as a synthesizer.
posted by empath at 11:26 PM on February 24, 2010


cgomez: Now, watch this mildly amusing video about Excel.

Thanks, that was truly brilliant. I laughed so hard it hurt and I had to stop watching for a while...

"you probably use powerpoint to surf the web..."
posted by Skygazer at 11:46 PM on February 24, 2010


Yeah, the cube video which hellojed linked to is actually from this 3d rendering engine done completely in Excel.
posted by ooga_booga at 11:49 PM on February 24, 2010


The wrongness, it hurts me.
posted by pompomtom at 12:10 AM on February 25, 2010


Next: Gundam in PowerPoint!

+-----------------------------------------+
| . . THE GUNDAM UNIVERSE . . . . . . . . |
| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
| . . -> Giant Robots . . . . . . . . . . |
| . . -> Lots of complicated plot . . . . |
| . . . . points and alternate .. . . . . |
| . . . . timelines and shit. . . . . . . |
| . . -> Silly Anime Geeks think .. . . . |
| . . . . that it's TOTALLY REAL, DUDE. . |
+-----------------------------------------+

posted by koeselitz at 12:19 AM on February 25, 2010 [6 favorites]


Nobody thinks Gundam is totally real, dude. We think it's an ingenious metaphor for the human condition, you see.

Anyway this was impressive in a totally useless sort of a way. Hats off to this fellow.
posted by Mizu at 1:10 AM on February 25, 2010


Mizu: “Nobody thinks Gundam is totally real, dude.”

Ahem: "Gundam cartoon academy to turn science fiction into reality in Japan" (Times Online, November 1, 2008). I've sat through quite a few conversations with Anime geeks who insist that Gundam brought 'complete realism' to giant robot cartoons.

I love Gundam too, of course - and I thought this Excel drawing, while insane, was also awesome. I'm just taking the piss, really.
posted by koeselitz at 1:39 AM on February 25, 2010


I don't think I've seen excel crash once in my entire life.

I saw it crash just before I wrote that comment.

You'll need to use it for really, really complicated stuff to get it to crash, like an eight column, forty row table of task assignments. It crashed when I changed the fill color of one of the cells from red to green, and had the temerity to try to save it to a shared directory over my VPN connection. It then crashed when I told it I didn't need the file recovered, as I'd just open up the original again. Then it crashed when I tried to open up the original file again, requiring a force quit. Then I was able to turn the fucking "done" field from red to green, save it, and exit without Excel suiciding, and I was done with three seconds worth of work after ten minutes. Apparently I should have been using it to draw mecha, as it seemed pretty stable for the artist in the video.


I will admit it's been a lot better since Office 2007 came out. I still hate it with a blind, seething fury. The last Microsoft product worth a damn was MS Word 5.1 for Mac.
posted by Slap*Happy at 6:01 AM on February 25, 2010


Slap*Happy - I have seen the very behavior you're talking about, but only while working with a ".xlsx" (new format) file. When I said "Save as .xls" (ie old-style file format), it worked fine.
posted by kcds at 6:37 AM on February 25, 2010


I'd be more impressed to see Outlook do this. Or anything useful, really.
posted by flabdablet at 6:56 AM on February 25, 2010 [1 favorite]


flabdablet, why do you have to pick on the fish in the barrel?
posted by oddman at 7:18 AM on February 25, 2010


Was it a shared file? Excel is usually very stable unless you're using the shared file feature, which is a buggy piece of shit that no one should ever use.
posted by zixyer at 7:48 AM on February 25, 2010


Is it just me, or did this artiste never save the file? Now that's taking a big bite of lose-yer-Gundam risk.
posted by chavenet at 8:01 AM on February 25, 2010


Why does Excel have that capability?

Doesn't the Office suite simply share art and visual basic capabilities among its various standard apps, including Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc.? It's not like someone just arbitrarily added it to Excel. I am thinking that this could have been done in Word or PP, too, though that wouldn't have shocked people as much.

Now, the real fun in the old days was to play the flight simulator and pinball games that were secretly easter-egged inside Excel. (I haven't checked Office 2007 to see if its apps have similar hidden games.)
posted by aught at 8:14 AM on February 25, 2010


I recognize that song in the background ... wasn't that originally a piano piece written so that it could be played with one hand?
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 10:01 AM on February 25, 2010


I just had a RipPaint flashback.

it's TOTALLY REAL, DUDE
posted by Tenuki at 10:01 AM on February 25, 2010


Wow, I always knew I was using Excel all wrong.
posted by Lokisbane at 11:10 AM on February 25, 2010


The best use I've come up for Excel (I mean aside from boring spreadsheet-y things) was Excel Battleship. You and a coworker both come up with a set of ships - length, number, etc. You then determine a field size (say A1 to E20). Use fill color to fill in your ships.

Next, spend the day exchanging emails with your guesses. You can even play this on a regular spreadsheet if you like. That way if a boss happens to catch you, it just looks like you've done some odd coloring to your work.
posted by ErikaB at 11:28 AM on February 25, 2010


Excel Football Manager is quite good.

(excel version link in lower left of page)
posted by Mr Bismarck at 11:43 AM on February 25, 2010


Our old buy plans (SKU information for buyers) used to be 10-15 pages with 5 thousand rows in each and TONS of linked files to our data warehouse. It would take 10 minutes to open and god help you if you needed to change forumlas or a data point in a pivot table, but once up and working, it was pretty stable.

...until you went above 10,000 cell variations then it would become completely unusable.
posted by subaruwrx at 11:56 AM on February 25, 2010


Awesome Gundam, dude, really, and I totally appreciate the use of primitive tools to accomplish great things but, um... you sure did spend an awful lot of time shining and polishing up that Gundam crotch over and over.
posted by majick at 12:09 PM on February 25, 2010 [2 favorites]


I recognize that song in the background ... wasn't that originally a piano piece written so that it could be played with one hand?

At least at the end, the guitars are playing the first three-quarters or so of BWV 847, one of the preludes from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. It is definitely a two-handed piece.
posted by aaronbeekay at 3:19 PM on February 25, 2010


No, Access is for emailing pictures to your friends. Sometimes even people you barely know.
posted by sneebler at 8:14 PM on February 25, 2010


I use Access for composing my trio sonatas for violin and basso continuo. Doesn't everyone?
posted by armage at 2:42 AM on February 26, 2010


A friend of mine wrote an online PONG game in access once (using the db to store the paddle location), or so he claimed.
posted by delmoi at 5:59 PM on February 26, 2010


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