Hiro Antagonist

Maybe it's just because ruin porn is so incredibly popular that I hate it so.

In the 1700's when people lived in shabby huts, they painted shinning edifices. In the 2000's when people all live in shining edifices, they photograph shabby huts. Go figure.

See craigslist ad: http://bit.ly/3y93qm

I'm selling my Domo Kun costume from last year, it was an absolute blast to wear - tons of people asking for photos, hugs from every cute girl in sight and the sound of people's jaws dropping when I'd walk into a party :D

Very high quality plush fur trousers w/ suspenders, detachable arms and body. This took an amazing amount of labor to make, and it's very well crafted and durable. The body is constructed from foam panels with a plush covering that has teeth and eyes sewn on, and a lightweight frame. The costume is quite comfortable to wear, and light enough that you won't mind wearing it the entire night. The large mouth on the costume also means that eating and drinking isn't a problem, which is really nice on a costume this elaborate. Should fit anyone from 5'5" to 6'6".

Pass this on to anyone you know who might be interested!

Some things are so easy to fix. Others... Not so much.

When it comes to machines, mechanisms, computers - it's rare that it's something I can't fix. When it comes to people? It seems to be pretty much the opposite.

Maybe I've gotten too used to being able to fix broken things, become ensconced in the world where I literally can make everything better, or at least make it into something that makes people happy. I like that last one a lot.

Thought about working on people instead of computers early on in college. Despaired over the understanding that you never can make them as good as new, and they break down sooner than later. Contemplated trying to fix people's heads for an even briefer period, came to an unpleasant realization that I do my best not think of.

Habits can change. People, not so much.

If their problems stem from human nature rather than a nasty bacteria that shouldn't be there, there's not a damn thing you can do. Between genetics and environment, we seem to have been given a permanent stamp that we can't erase, rub out or alter to save our lives. Literally, some times.

I see things that I know can be different, can be better. But in all honesty, they never will be. Whatever the people two thousand years from now will be like, I can guarantee that they will still murder, steal, lie, cheat and in general, be unsavory little bastards in many respects. And I'm giving good odds that they won't have flying cars either :/

We might not be able to change who we are, but what we can do is work with it, not against it. Tiger Woods may be an undisputed master when it comes to hitting a small white spheroid a long distance accurately under challenging conditions, but when his water heater explodes, he calls a plumber. It doesn't make sense to try and be an expert at everything. Aside from being impossible, it's a waste of time. Everyone is good at a few things, better at them than they are in comparison to others. Wrangle those and harness them to get where you need to go, and don't sweat the rest.

I can't fix people. People can't even fix themselves.

Human beings are incredible when it comes to adapting though, finding what works best and then exploiting that as much as they can. And that's a good thing. Actually, that's a great thing.

The rest? That lack of perfection, or having faults you wish you could fix? Fuck that shit. Don't bother with it.

Time is finite. Do the best you can with it. Don't waste it trying to change what can't be. Just go out and do.

I'm not quite certain why I hate suburbia so. It's certainly fashionable to do so these days, though usually that's enough to make me stop doing something right there.

Fashionable or not, there is just sort of a soul-rending feeling that 'Suburbia' with a capital 'S' gives me. Communities should grow and accrete in an organic fashion. Rows of identical houses that spring up overnight, same size plot, same size lawn, same size family - these things disturb me. It's certainly artificial enough to land well within the realm of the uncanny valley, and perhaps that's at the heart of it.

I grew up in an old city, a little over 200 years of age. Which in America makes it the equivalent of growing up right next to the pyramids at Giza. That has a certain psychological effect on a human. What you take to be natural are streets the width of two horse-drawn carriages. And alleys the width of one. Every alley is that width. You don't know why till much later, but in my mind, it's the proper width for an alley to this day still.

Save in the downtown area, streets aren't in terribly exact grids. Or as is the fashion these days, gently rounding curves that only have one tie to reality - the turning radius of a car. The houses and avenues follow the land, more than the land being shaped so every yard has the same exact slope, and the streets are so level you could teleport from one road to the one furthest away in the neighborhood and not stumble as you set your foot down.

With such an incredibly artificial environment as the one presented by Suburbia, you start to have doubts about the sort of people who'd willingly live there - are they just as artificial as the 'neighborhood'? In all honesty, they're probably not - a safe place to live for a decent price, not far from work. The rest doesn't matter terribly much to them, I suspect. Whatever terrors besiege them in the night, the artificiality of their neighborhood isn't one of them.

Lucky bastards.

"Actually, raw reaction time, which doesn't even change too much between 20 and 30, is not the primary element of skill at first person shooters. I've looked at the raw reaction time (i.e. click your mouse when you see a light turn on) of many gamers, some who absolutely dominate me and some at or below my level, and there was no real correlation between that reaction time and skill. From what I've gathered, I've determined that skill at FPS games is more a function of experience and training rather than raw reaction time.

The basic categories that set an elite gamer apart from an average or newbie gamer go something like this:

Predicting your opponent and being unpredictable yourself: Knowing where your opponent is going to be, and acting in a manner that your opponent can't predict. If you can put your crosshair where you know your enemy is going to be, and he can't do the same, you're going to win even if he has better raw reaction time than you. This is a function of experience with the game.

Decision making: Evaluating the importance of the various high-level goals in the game, deciding which ones to prioritize, and acting on that decision. Making better decisions, making them faster. Again, a function of experience with the game.

Aiming skill: If an enemy appears on your screen away from your crosshair, how quickly and accurately you can move your mouse to put the crosshair over him. This is a function of training, learning exactly how much mouse movement corresponds to how much movement on screen, and being able to precisely produce that movement with your hand. This is often confused for reaction time when watching people play, but really, the reaction time component is only in seeing the enemy and deciding to shoot him. The rest is muscle memory.

This is where input lag really hurts, it's very very important that your field of view appears to correspond to your mouse movements with absolutely no lag. Console games don't suffer from this because aiming with console controllers is far less precise than using a mouse, so the input lag "hides" behind the imprecision of the joystick. When the game meets the PC where people are using mice, the lag between moving your mouse and your on screen view changing becomes perceptible.

Movement skill: The ability to manipulate your controls to allow you to travel faster. Not just finding the most efficient routes, but being able to use quirks in the game's movement code to give yourself more velocity. Another function of training, getting the control inputs just right can be difficult to master.

Teamwork: In team-based games, communication, chemistry, planning, and effective group decision making."
-sahonen

^not me, but in the field I wish to be paid for working in

So I'm volunteering again at the Austin Game Developer's Conference. Last year was a blast, and the only frustration at the time was having to finish another year of school, thus being unable to take anyone up on job offers.

YAY! GRADUATED!

Now comes the hard part.

Lessons learned from last year:

1. Be in a position to be able to take a job. (check)

2. How ever many business cards you brought with you, it's not enough (working on that)
2.1. Try to make the business card visually interesting and a bit informative. (working on that)
2.2. It's just an excuse to get their card anyway - yay social rituals!

3. Have work to show (almost done)
3.1. Have an easy way to show people your work (hmmm...)
3.2. Have a website (halway mocked up so far)


So, those of you with experience in this area, please comment with advice.

I'm contemplating bringing my laptop with me, and putting the video footage of my level design on that, and designing a visually interesting card and getting like... 250 copies of it. I'm not sure if lugging the laptop around with me everywhere is the best idea though...

Thoughts?

"Software development is a lot like a having a baby. 1 woman, 9 months = 1 baby. You can't add 8 more women to the equation and get a baby in one month."

Why, did you think they all looked like this?

To be fair, the stereotype of the fat nerd isn't true when it comes to gamers - they're more underweight than over (QuakeCon, a 3,000 person LAN party was filled with 25-30 skinny guys for every chubby fellow).

But what of the stereotype of the female gamer?

From personal experience, I'm not at all surprised that 40% of the people that play video games are female. Back in the 80's as a kid, that would have been odd, but as games became more complex, they picked up a bigger audience. Especially sims, the Sims, if you will.

I'm at odds with how I feel to female gamers. Half the time I wish I'd never heard them on the mic, because all of the sudden prejudices rush in and I don't think of them the same way any more. Gamers that sound younger than 14 also do this to me.

I play competitive, twitchy games. I've got a knack for them and the obsessive mindset to practice them far past when most sane people would stopped playing. During tournaments, I'll put in as much as 75 hours a week. No classes helps, of course.

I don't mind people that casually play twitchy games - they're playing to have a relaxing good time. Perfectly legitimate pursuit. Sane, even. I'm also playing to have a good time, though more for being the best at something than anything else.

So I find myself resenting female gamers (the ones that play twitchy FPS games, that is). Which is frustrating, because intellectually I'm all for people being all equally meritable.

When it's not silent frustration over every other male around me drooling to do things for them, it's over how easily they give up. And emote. "Oh My GOD! Did you see that? Gosh I hate this game! Stupid [insert whatever here]!"

There's these male reflexes that leap to say 'shut the fuck up kid, get your head in the game or get out'. But that's what I'd say to a younger guy who didn't know better. The odds are they'd shutup and work harder, or quit. Doesn't seem like a productive strategy for female gamers though. Just grit teeth and say 'yeah, we'll do X next time and things will work out' or 'yeah, you've just got to do Y, don't sweat it, you'll get it next time'.

I hate myself for feeling like this. Both in that I feel I have to act a certain way, coddle people, and that I feel like a female gamer won't take the game as seriously as her male counterparts and just give up when it gets tough. Or give up a lot easier than a male would.

To be honest, games are entertainment. If you're not entertained, there's a failure somewhere and the odds are that it's not you. If someone has a low frustration threshold and doesn't place significant import on a game, all said and done, that has little play on games as a whole.

Gaming is also a social exercise though, and interacting with people is part of it. Where should you expect others to live up to, and what is too much to ask?

I'm not certain that any of us know.

On James Cameron's 'Avatar':

"While I'm very interested in watching the movie, at this point Avatar looks like it's going to feature the same old contrived storyline featured in sci-fi over the last decade: humanity and industrialization are evil and nature and those connected to it are good. There's been this tendency to depict humans are awful, uncaring monsters."
-MaWeiTao


What I want to see is a movie where the earth is invaded by cruel and uncaring hyper-industrialized aliens with advanced technology that manages to replicate all sorts of human tools and machines yet not out-do any of them, where caring humans teach the invading aliens about the wonders of living with nature, or pull off a reverse of the European colonization of the Americas.

Executive bonuses are something of a political hot-button these days. The thing is, a lot of talking is done, but nothing changes. Nor will it change. Even though the pointless greed is abhorrent to most folks, those in a position to change this sort of thing seem to see it as a cost of doing business.

And as long as that stands, as long as companies *can* pay giant severance packages and ludicrous bonuses far out of seeming proportion to what is deserved, they *will* pay them.

Sure, it's despicable in many cases. A lot of things are despicable though, and little is done about most of those things. Things only change when people are directly affected, or there is large amounts of political capital and will to make a change available.

None of these three conditions have been met, as far as I can tell. The average Joe might be pissed off about it, but it's not like it affects him as much as the price of gas does. If something doesn't directly affect people, it's pretty rare anything gets done.

Even if it doesn't make sound economic sense, that doesn't mean that there's any particular reason it won't happen. The business world really doesn't act on sound economic premises - perfect knowledge doesn't exist. And when decisions are made with an imperfect understanding, don't expect the logical thing to happen.

Business is more of a study in 'how badly can people run things before it implodes?' From first-hand experience, pretttttty badly.

I expect abhorrent bonuses and the like to be around for a long time to come.

Something that's bothered me for a while has been the difference between what we say and what our actions say.

To be more specific, that we say human life is worth so much. There's this meme going through society that says that human life is the most precious thing in the universe, or darn close to it. But on the whole, the actions of humanity imply that human life is worth very little.

We fight, murder, kill, commit suicide, take fatal risks at times, etc. If human life is so precious, why do our actions say that it's only worth how convenient it happens to be at the moment?

Why are we willing to die for *anything*? Why are we 'willing to die' to begin with? I won't pretend that the barrel of a gun can't change things. But it would be foolish to say that the only viable means of effecting change is with the barrel of a gun, or at the price of someone's life.

Aside from willing to end the lives of others, we are almost just as willing to end our own to further whatever cause we believe in the most at the moment.


Something is seriously fucked up here. Wish I knew how to fix it.

"A great deal of consumer relations in big business nowadays boils down to this Frederick Douglas quote:

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."

So. True.

Note to self - when becoming evil dictator and taking over the earth, have polling firm determine this value on a per-city basis.

So last night some random teammates and I played a pickup game against some other random professional L4D players.

To preface, I don't suck at L4D. In fact, I'm really damn good at it. I put together a team 3 hours before the rosters closed for a national tournament (Newegg L4D) with random people, and we made it to the top 32, out of 279 competing teams.

Unfortunately, the other team was better. One of their players was from Eximus, currently the best L4D team in the world (they won the Newegg tournament and plenty of others).

We got stomped. It sucked pretty hard. It's even more frustrating when you're really good at something to lose, even if it's to a team with one of the best players in the world on it.

I've been trying to run a l4d team, and while getting talented players on the roster hasn't been a problem, we never manage to get people who are online consistently and practice. So there hasn't been a single week where I've practiced with the same teammates. Past a certain point, when you get to the top reaches of the competitive world, it stops being about personal skill and starts being more about teamwork. If you have four people that are really damn good at it, but they never practice together... It all falls apart.

Another thing that makes or breaks teams is a good strategy caller, basically the person who tells the team how to set up attacks. I'm the only one willing to do it, and I suck hard at thinking on my feet for other people.

It's been such an uphill battle trying to run a team and get people to practice and be online at the same time on a day to day basis that I'm frankly about ready to call it quits.

Between all the time it takes to play that well, all the time it takes to run a team, and having to build a portfolio to find a job, I never have enough of it. And L4D doesn't pay the bills. At what point is it wise to call it quits and dissolve the team?

I'm... tired.

From the department of "Gosh, we never sat down and considered this for very long", I bring you two very different views on robotics:


Versus


So Nike uses this spiffy chalkbot to print out dot-matrix style messages with chalk at the Tour de France (video here). Apparently they're primarily in support of the Livestrong foundation, raising awareness of cancer victims.

All well and good, right? Not quite, it seems. Apparently Nike's chalkbot had an eerie resemblance to a previous robot, StreetWriter, a robot created by the Institute for Applied Autonomy to "...protest the militarization of robotics research...".

Namely at the DARPA Grand Challenge "...where its mission was to print Isaac Asimov’s First Rule of Robotics "A ROBOT MUST NOT KILL" at the starting line of the military robotics event."

So the IAA is getting all huffy about a evil corporation stealing their robotic thunder (which is covered in excellent detail by Near Future Laboratory here) and it struck me that the hullabaloo was really over a certain idea, namely that robots are somehow inherently moral devices.

To be moral to begin with, something must be capable of good and evil, or be inherently one way or the other. Humans can make moral actions that are 'good' or 'evil', because there's free will behind it, along with intent.

Inanimate objects; tools, on the other hand, can't be moral in the sense that they're inherently evil or good. The same hammer can be used to build a library or break knees - did it suddenly become evil or good because how it was used?

If you pause to think about it for a second, you'd realize that a hammer doesn't act on its own. Human beings direct the hammer, and it is the actions of the human that are moral - the hammer just helps.

To be certain, there are some tools or inventions that have very limited or no moral use in one category or another - torture chambers or pretty paintings, for example. It'd be difficult to do good by using a torture chamber, and it'd be hard to do evil by using pretty paintings. Not impossible, mind you, just difficult.

I hate it when some artistic group, or political group gets all worked up about something they didn't think through for more than ten minutes. Because frankly, if you go nuts over a concept and berate people over it, and make press releases, it should be over something that can't be proven to be false in a single paragraph.

Robots can be easily used in either moral direction, but protesting their militarization is just stupid. It isn't robots that are being militarized, it's just that people are militarized and they keep on finding news tools to aid them in this.

You know, evil villains just can't cut it in most forms of literature and entertainment. Take the evil AI from the Terminator series, Skynet. Not only does it build its facilities in easy to find and easy to penetrate locations, it also builds them to standards that are very accommodating to human beings.

I mean, really - if you were a robot, and humans were your main enemy, wouldn't it be fairly obvious to make your own facilities in the fashion most inhospitable to human life? Maybe on the surface of the moon? Deep in a trench a few miles down in the ocean? If you're a robot, why not just induce nuclear winter and kill all those pesky humans *AND* get a planet free of all that nasty biological infestation it suffers from?

I think if I ever write a novel featuring an evil villain, I will write the character with enough intelligence to have The Evil Overlord List right on his bookshelf, along side The Prince and Jean-Paul Gaultier's "How to make your troops recognizable individuals with one size fits only them uniforms!"

Versus



"...I don’t believe that school can teach you something like prop and costume making to its fullest extent. A “hobby” like this really requires field experience and just going out there and making stuff at your own skill and pace."
-Izy Cheung

An interesting dichotomy that's come up every now and then is the value of university education versus field training for various disciplines. Some things are best learned in a university setting, where an expert in the field lectures and you take notes and replicate the work of other leaders in the field. Other things are best learned in the field, where hands on experience is the only useful teacher.

I've spent a fair amount of time doing both for different pursuits, math, fine art and philosophy, contrasted with photography, fencing and building things. Some of these things really benefit from being at a good university with excellent professors. Other things would only make you worse off for having an excellent professor try to teach you about it.

Having friends who are proponents of both styles of learning, the academics on one side, the grunts on the other, I've heard the argument back and forth more times than I care to count, one side discounting the other completely.


And they're right. For the things each system excels at teaching, the other system is terrible.


Take photography. It's something I've learned on my own from the beginning, but decided it wouldn't hurt to take a class in, as I was already at a nice university. What did I learn? Honestly, the nuts and bolts of printing were the only useful things I took away from the course. The rest of it was literally worthless - I could have learned the same things faster on my own. I did, actually.

Academic photography is shitty photography on the whole. But photography is often confused with fine art, where sculpture and anatomy professors are actually useful things. Sans the nuts and bolts of photography (printing, darkroom, basic photoshop), a university professor in photography is useless. Everything that makes photography something more than snapshots - vision, technique, etc - are things that are best learned hands on in the field, from doing it time and time again.


A professor could lecture about shooting, you could read about the history of guns, look at diagrams, learn physics as it applies to ballistics, and you'd be a shitty marksman by the time you'd finished. Put in the same amount of time down on the range, or out in the field on active duty in Iraq or Afghanistan, you'll be able to put university training to shame.

Things like philosophy, and math theory, on the other hand - those are things you won't do well at on your own, unless your name is Issac Newton or Georg Cantor. They depend on vast systems of previously discovered and analyzed information, rather than things that are particular to the individual.

And that's where it breaks down, really. Things that are dependent on the individual more than they are human knowledge as a whole are ones that are best learned in the field. There may be a thousand marksmen out there, but each one of them learned in relation to how they shoot, not how everyone else happens to shoot. The same goes for photography. Things that are dependent on the group more than the individual are the ones that benefit the most from a university setting - math, philosophy, fine art, etc.

Conversation might seem like a simple endeavor, but without a great deal of practice, it rarely is.

From breaking an awkward silence to simply getting along with others, there's quite a few good reasons to start a conversation.

Traditionally, two topics best avoided are religion and politics, as the particular variant the other person adheres to is not a decision that stems from primarily from reason, although the choice may be given some reason in hindsight. If something is adhered on primarily non-logical basis, it's a baaaad topic for a first conversation.


So, religion out, politics out. What else do people share that can be used as a topic for conversation? What does every person care about? Themselves! People enjoy talking about themselves - it's something they know well, care about and don't talk about as much as they'd like.

So ask people about themselves. What they like, what they do, what they want, what brought them to the place you're both at, etc. You'd be surprised how often it leads to a flowing conversation.


A key thing to remember is that everyone else shares the same fears you do, to a degree. Fear of stumbling over their words in a first conversation, etc. So do your best to put both the other person and yourself at ease. Things work much better that way if they feel safe.

"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