A Sound of Thunder (vids are up)

No, I refer not to the recently released (and by all accounts awful) dinosaur movie. Neither do I refer to the excellent Bradbury short story. I just spent the last half an hour or so in complete and utter awe of what must be, bar none, the most incredible light show I have ever witnessed. I was, as always, working late, and kept seeing flashes of lightning out of the corner of my eye. It only occured to me as I was getting ready to hit the sack that there was nought the sound of thunder. None whatsoever (*hhhwat'soevah*). Popped my head out my window, then promptly grabbed my Treo and ran out to the dining area, where I have a completely unobstructed view of the western horizon, and started recording. For what I saw from my window, was simply the biggest fucking electrical storm I could never imagine. All over, too. East, west, south (if I had a view of the north, I'm sure I'd have seen more).

Fireworks? Pfft. Solar eclipse? Meh. Meteor showers? Please. This is where it's at. Shit, I think this trumps that amazing suunset I was raving about not one week ago. What looked to be an only somewhat cloudy sky was revealed to be great thick masses of cloud cover with each lightning strike (and I use the term "strike" only because I can't think of a better one; remember that this was all taking place what looked like many miles above the earth). Huge swaths of sky lit up each time. Incredibly beautiful cloud formations. Light and shadow interplayed amazingly. Every so often, I'd actually see great long arcs of lightning; vertical, diagonal, fucking horizontal. Absolutely awe-inspiring. The beauty of it was that all this time, aside from the birds and random sounds of goddamned noisy motorbikes, the entire affair was completely and utterly silent.

Once I get these vids converted to a multiplatform-viewable format, I'll put 'em up.

Update:
Goddamned Opera keeps eating my blog entries. This would be the second time. First time round I nearly had a heart attack when the above entry came up blank. Thank god for Opera's method of caching pages in their entirety. Too bad I closed the tab after posting the recent update. o_O Note to self: remember to use Firefox for blog entries. o_O

Right, the videos. Not the most amazing quality. They were, after all, taken with my Treo. And subsequently compressed. And reduced from 352x288 to 320x240 (I couldn't get my convertor to not reduce the size, for some cockamamie reason). So yeah. But they get the general idea across of what the entire spectacle looked like. I didn't bother to edit them for length, so there's random dead space where nothing much is going on, but sit through them. They're rather nifty. :) Oh, the first one's in color, and the subsequent two are in sepia, since it takes better low-light shots in that mode than in color or b&w. Oh yes, no preview thumbs. This not being able to conveniently take screencaps of DirectDraw overlays is annoying. Anyways.

Light show 1 (3:40, 1.59MB)
Light show 2 (3:56, 1.16MB)
Light show 3 (9:18, 2.76MB)

All three are at 320x240, XVid MPEG-4. If anyone wants to convert to QT, feel free. I don't have anything handy that'll export to QT, and I've never had much luck with the codec with regards to quality v compression.

Enjoy! :)