Hiro Antagonist

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

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.