Hiro Antagonist

"Under the law of nature, all men are born free, every one comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will. This is what is called personal liberty, and is given him by the Author"
-Thomas Jefferson

And this is how you shoot hunters out of midair in L4D without breaking a sweat:



(from a scrim last night, most memorable kill I made)

No, this score was not the result of a pub stomp.


(currently playing for these guys)

" If he's right, the tactics in life are the same as in quake. Anything that moves and isn't obviously on your side, shoot it. Anything that doesn't move, shoot it anyway because it's probably thinking about moving and killing you as soon as you turn your back."

So. True.

You know why we're cynical? Because we watched the baby boomers, hippies and all of these people who were going to 'change the world' turn into the very thing they said they despised.

We've seen how it turns out. Today's student rioter is twenty or thirty years away from becoming the oppressor they so valiantly decried.

Wouldn't you become cynical too?

Molon Labe (wikipedia)

"The current administration--along with the Congressional leadership--has shown itself to be hostile to the idea of us mere citizens owning firearms. Demand is through the roof as some of us--the ones who believe that the government is answerable to its people--are stocking up in case of future interruptions in supply."
-Maxwell'sSilverLART


"I'm sorry... Maybe it's cause I'm from Europe, but what does guns have to do with government being answerable to the people?

If they don't answer, you'll shoot them? Hell, in Norway we got 1.5 million weapons with a population of 4.7 million. Yet we don't go around having wet dreams of a future where the government becomes totalitarian so we can shoot people we don't like in an excuse of a revolution.

We got the 11th lowest murder rate in the world. I think you guys just need to stop being so angry at the world."
-Rakshasa Taisab


To elaborate on an earlier post I made in the lj guns community; having small firearms doesn't mean shit - they aren't key to fixing your problems if the US government were to become so tyrannical that the majority of its citizens saw revolt as the only viable option. If it's you, or a few of your friends vs the US military in a shootout, you're going to loose. The only way you don't is if the soldiers decide that the order to fire on US citizens is unjust (which would probably happen first).

In fact, in some ways, there seem to be people itching to shoot authority figures.

It seems that they dislike authority first, and care about government for the people, by the people second. Representative democracy is one small step removed from mob rule, so if you're not willing to accept the tyranny of the majority, time to move the fuck out of the country.

I'm just tired of seeing all the anti-government hysteria. While I have no particular fan-boy love of the US government, by any standards, what you get (elections that actually work, lack of military coups, infrastructure, no secret police, etc) for what you pay is pretty damn good, especially in a country this large.

Until this changes, people voicing this sort of anti-government hysteria need to shut the fuck up.

When it comes to gaming, there's just no point to it if you can't utterly dominate the other team, grind them down into the dust and destroy them.

I have this crazy friend who plays video games 'for fun'. I'm not quite sure what he means - the fun is clearly in decimating the other team or your opponent, the rest is just pointless fluff, right?

Working on a new map, this time for Left 4 Dead, a really fun zombie apocalypse game :D

It doesn't have a name yet, but it's a military base with a working minefield - seeing zombies exploding and flying into the air after walking over a landmine is HILARIOUS! However, they work on the survivors too, and if you get pulled across the landmine field, it's pretty rough. But fun!

Coming home at 3am on a friday night, I was driving cautiously as usual (in the Dallas metroplex, people are pretty reckless drivers in general). So I'm sitting at a red light, and as it goes to turn green, and the perpendicular street light goes to yellow, a guy hits his brakes really hard and barely stops.

At this point, I'm glad I wait a few seconds as usual after a light turns green, usually to make sure the traffic coming the other direction actually stops.

A half second, maybe one fourth second later, a second car rear-ends the first doing at least 40-50 mph. Kind of like watching a game of pool - the cue ball hits another ball, the cue ball stops dead and the other one goes flying.

Except it was a car that went flying. Through the intersection (it was a big one) and turning into the lane I would have been going through had I gone through the intersection and hitting the corner.

It was kind of cool - the guys taillight went out - there were sparks! His bumper fell off, the back collapsed sort of like an empty soda can and he really went flying. The guy in the car that hit him was getting out of his car as I drove by, but I called 911 anyway, just in case someone was injured.

Pretty sobering, really.

Not that I was always a cautious driver. When I was a bit younger, I was pulled over for doing about 125 in a 55 mph zone. In my defense, it was 3am in the middle of nowhere on a country highway. I wondered who could be keeping up with me when I saw headlights in my rear view mirror. Then the flashing lights turned on and I realized it was a state trooper. After that ticket, I just started driving more cautiously. Mostly because I had found the limit - sometimes kids try to push the limits to find out where they are? Yeah. I did that and found it, luckily not injuring myself in the process (any screw up at 125 mph is usually your last).

Caution pays, as it turns out...

pro⋅sa⋅ic
–adjective
1. commonplace or dull; matter-of-fact or unimaginative

In many ways, photography is like writing - you can write about anything, you can do it to inform, amuse, scare, trigger emotions - and you can do it with varying degrees of skill. Anyone can write.

There is a lot of bad writing out there - unskilled, that is. Even Dan Brown has skill. However, people can say when writing is shit. Or just mediocre. They can say it a lot easier than the same can be said about photography.

There's photographers who don't think of themselves as such - your average Joe and Jane that take a quick snap of a friend doing something silly, or a kid's birthday party.

Then there's everyone else with a camera. People who have a purpose in mind for photographs, something more than as a solution to a problem.


God damn, a lot of them suck.

I'm so Ronery / So ronery / So ronery and sadry arone / There's no one / Just me onry / Sitting on my rittle throne / I work rearry hard and make up get prans / but, nobody listens, no one understands / Seems rike no one takes me serirousry / And so I got some nukes / now everyone is listening / ronery no more!


So north Korea has a long history of making threats. In the past though, it's only been just enough to push countries into giving it aid, as there's no other way it'd survive in the long term.

Lately? Lately though, the threats haven't been so idle. Aside from blowing up a nuke or two to show they mean business, they've also withdrawn from the 1953 armistice, something they've never done before.

Perhaps they're in such a hard corner that they have no other choice but to start a fight. Who can say? But it looks like they might actually carry through with the implied threats and go to war against South Korea and Japan. Possibly with nukes.

In the past, China has been a strong ally of North Korea, so no one could push North Korea around too much. Whether China sticks by N. Korea as it seemingly goes off the deep end will be an interesting question. If it doesn't, N. Korea runs the risk of getting a preemptive nuking. If it does, odds are that conventional war isn't far off.

I'm waiting to see what happens next...

In lieu of a post with actual content, here's a new headshot shot taken with a new softbox:


f/4, ISO 250, 1/125th sec.
Softbox above, reflector below


This is what happens when you're bored at 2am, waiting for a game to finish installing and have no one else to test your ideas on. Still, the softbox works nicely!

Via octal

A short story that Neal Stephenson wrote, read the whole thing here - Jipi and the paranoid chip.

I miss him, not sure who the pod person is who wrote the last few novels / tomes attributed to him...

50mm, 1/20th @ f/2
Photo taken last weekend after dinner in Dallas - 5 internet points if you can figure out where

So I graduated last weekend. It feels a bit weird. I've been in college for about eight years now - five years at my first university doing CS and pure math then sculpture, working for a dotcom for a year, then transferring to another university for 3 years and getting a degree in video game development.

I've worked full time before, so that's not weird. What is weird is the feeling that I don't have to eventually start taking classes ever again. That I actually did finish college. I'm very good at the academic side of things, just not very good at sticking to one thing and finishing it.

I'm going to shoot for a job doing level design, hopefully I'll find a good one, as there are quite a few big video game development companies around here, and even more in Austin. If not Texas, there's always California. I like Texas, but I wouldn't be against moving, especially if it's a good company.

It's actually a fairly good time to be a video game development-type person fresh out of college - the industry is laying off a fair amount of senior dev people, but they're hiring far more fresh out of college types on average than they have been the last five years or so. People seek entertainment in a depression, apparently.

It would certainly be nice not to have to be hobbled by living on only a single income - money is always tight, and I miss when both of us worked for the dotcom and we had boatloads of it for that one short year. Lesson learned though, don't put all your eggs in one basket and don't work for dotcoms. And a college degree is actually pretty mandatory for getting a decent job. There's almost a glass ceiling if you don't have one.

Anyway, enough rambling. We'll see what the future brings. Hopefully not Skynet heh.

Just got back from seeing Terminator Salvation. I had looow expectations going into it (given the previous movie and the new director's most famous movie being "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle") and I came out stunned and amazed.

Wow. It's within a hair of being as good as T2 was, and at this rate, I think I'm definitely up for seeing the next film in the series :D

GIANT ROBOTS. OMG, OMG, OMG, OMG, OMG, OMG!!

I had a very meta dream - I was dreaming that I was laying in bed, dreaming, and just waking up a tiny bit here and there. Which was exactly what I was doing at the time - laying in bed, dreaming and just waking up a tiny bit here and there.

I was awake enough to realize how odd it was to be having a dream that was exactly like what was happening in real life at the time.

How terribly meta.

So NPR airs this bit about how odd it is that the same black pastors that led the civil rights movement are against gay marriage.

It's fine by me if someone doesn't hold with something. I personally don't believe people should be screwing outside of marriage, regardless of gender. But any people that are capable of loving each other getting married seems like it can only be a good thing.

So why would a group of people who led the civil rights movement in the 60's be against what is essentially more of the same? One of the black pastors who'd been in the civil right's movement was recorded saying "If anybody can get married, that devalues marriage".

I sat there, stunned for a second. This was quite possibly the most stupid thing I'd heard in a long time, not to mention quite possibly the worst argument I'd ever heard.


Because, as we all know, 'If anyone could have civil rights, that'd devalue civil rights!'

The thing is, basic rights belonging to all human beings cannot be devalued by letting all humans exercise them. Rights are not like gold in the sense that the more everyone else has, the less your own supply is worth.

I'm not sure which I hate more, hypocrisy or people who make stupid arguments that aren't logically sound.

"Funny, for me it's been the reverse--from a young age I felt that it was very wrong to lie and almost never did (and always felt bad about it). Only later did I discover (much to my surprise and, when participating in it, discomfort) that being disingenuous and even lying outright is not only widely accepted in the adult world, but very often expected.

This is especially common in business, I've found, where being perfectly honest on a résumé and/or application will practically never land you a job, especially on those "why do you want to work here"-type question (let's face it, 99% of the time the real answer is "I want money and this job sounds like it won't suck too much"). Then there's "networking" which often involves creating a whole false persona. It's sickening, but damn-near unavoidable, and certainly considered to be normal and acceptable."
-Fallingcow


Born an idealist with a penchant for bluntness, this is definitely something I had to work at. Some things are best treated as a poker game, where bluffing and lying are valid methods in winning. Perfect honesty is only worth employing when it will be received by those who would value it.

In other words, business entities don't want you to be bluntly honest, just to work well with others, get the job done, and not create problems. This doesn't mean one should lie and embezzle, or use lying as a cover for actions that are morally or wrong, mind you.

However, moral absolutes are only viable when they can be afforded, which is usually only in situations where there are no negative consequences for doing so. The business world is, without a doubt, not one of those places.

A useful trick picked up after reading things by Carlos Hathcock-type people was that when you're out in the dark, or going from a dark area into a bright one, keep one eye closed, that way when you go back to where it's dark, you can open that eye and see far better with it than you can with the eye that's been exposed to bright light.

In short, keep one eye closed when going into bright areas to retain your night vision.

This has saved me a lot of stumbling about when going about the house at night, or camping.

"I don't use P2P but for everyone else I say go for it. Rob those bastards blind. Why? One sentence: Steamboat Willie is still under copyright. Think about that for a minute. That man has been worm food (or a Popsicle depending on who you believe) for a half a fricking century and yet his first work, one made when cars were started with a crank and antibiotics were just a crazy dream, is STILL under copyright.

Copyrights were a CONTRACT, nothing more. In return for a LIMITED copyright We, The People got a richer Public Domain. Instead they used outright bribery to corrupt our politicians and buy our laws away from us. So I say screw the thieving bastards. Let them rot. They used their money to steal our public domain away from us so if someone wants to steal from the thieves I say more power to them. I just can't be bothered because I honestly think their product is shit and isn't even worth stealing. But frankly expecting us to feel so sorry for those thieving bastards is just pushing it too far. Put the copyrights back to the way they were for over a century and quit robbing our public domain!"
-hairyfeet


Certainly raises a few interesting points. Especially one that's usually forgotten in the US - what is legal is not always right, and what is right is not always legal. Just because you do something does not mean you can demand compensation for it.

Music used to only be something one could get money for by performing live (pre-1800's). It's actually still that way today for artists, just not the parasitic companies that represent them.