Slashdot Mirror

In general, I agree with your opinion of the popular portrayal of Native Americans, but I would like to add one more positive/non-negative portrayal: the character of Deputy Hawk from Twin Peaks. While his character frequently used "Injun skills" as part of his job as Deputy, they were not crude caricatures or exaggerated for effect. Made me proud to be 1/32 Cherokee. =)

Malcom In the Middle of course, after Francis (or his friends, I forget) steal a totem pole.

Indian man: Hey! Are you the dirtbag that stole my pole?

Francis: You... you own this? Please, sir... please...can you tell me what it means???

Indian Man: It means I'm 5 inches from the back of my carport.

Francis (incredulous): You mean you use that as a wheelstop?? This beautiful piece of art and wonder??

Indian Man: It's something I carved with my kids on a Sunday afternoon.

Francis: But..... you can't tell me you don't feel its power!!

Indian Man: You white boys are all the same. You think that because I have dark skin, I have to "run with the bears" and "dance with the spirit of the wind"! Let me tell you something... I work. I'm a baptist. And I'm proud of it! (He grabs the pole and starts to carry it out the door into the blizzard). And by the way.... I have only one word for snow. Snow!"

I think you misunderstand - the Uncanny Valley isn't a myth so much as an observation. It's pretty simple to demonstrate that most people are less comfortable with things that look nearly-but-not-quite human than things that are human, or things that look completely inhuman. Take, for example, Toy Story vs. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. The first one was a 3D cartoon, and hence it was easy to identify with the caricatures of toys. The second tried to be 'photorealistic' and (due to some rushed animation) was a little off, and as a result was much harder to identify with the characters. That's not to say that with excellent mocap/animation/production, an animated model can't be accepted as human. If they are, that just means that they're good enough to appear on the 'near side' of the valley.

The composite faces you mention are likewise on the near side of the valley. Images of faces fabricated from scratch often are likewise, with current technology, due to the fact that still images contain so much less information than moving ones. Compare modern CGI faces to those of the late 90s and you'll see how they gradually got better, climbing the near slope of the valley and becoming more believable and identify-with-able.

I'll be impressed when they can recognize caricatures as well as humans.

Are they really all that caricatured? Do you really believe they are less human than the Oblivion character?

That seems like an artificial line. Remember, this is a curve.

Here's some more Shrek 2 pictures.

• Prince Charming
• Queen and King
• Fairy God Mother and Prince Charming
• Bartender

That seems like an artificial line. Remember, this is a curve. I think it's clear the Oblivion guy is near the bottom of the curve, and something like cell-shading is to the left, and the humans in Shrek 2 managed to crawl out of the valley. If they were as good as photographs they'd be all the way to the right.

Obviously we're discussion chocolate and vanilla given that we're discussing a purely subjective material =)

For me, I think the caricature nature of the models in Shrek2 put it on the left of the valley. Their features are exaggerated and I think that anything which doesn't try wholly to be realistic in every aspect will always be on the left. I think these exaggerations are exactly how they can use so many really realistic effects without quite entering the valley.

In my book, anything on the right of the valley, you would have to look at it closely to determine if it were a photograph or a CGI. Shrek's characters are clearly CGI.

However since there's so many aspects to making a good looking model, it's logical that different people would assign different weights to different aspects. Each aspect has its own separate valley curve, and the cumulative effect makes up its own curve which is weighted by how much you value each of the individual aspects. You seem to value texture over shape, while I seem to value shape over texture. The movements are motion capture for the most part, so very very far right on the curve, while hair and clothing are really just physics equations which they seem to have very nearly perfect, and so also fairly far right on the curve.

I'm a Fundie, and the faith you describe is not the faith I believe God asks of me. In fact, the hammer analogy is a good depiction of the type of faith I subscribe to. I'm unaware of any part of the Bible that claims salvation is based on belief without evidence. Quite the contrary, Christ's authority to teach was "proven" (fundie speak - "testified to") by performing physical miracles for all present to see. Not feeling the need to go into great detail here (it's late and I'm tired), but suffice it to say that God is the creator of reason, proof, evidence and is not afraid to use any of it. For someone seemingly as engaged in the debate as you are, it could make for an interesting intellectual study to read up on the biblical concept of faith.

If you disbelieve it, that's fine. But know what you're making a decision about. Don't willingly choose to disbelieve a caricature.

Just take away all the dialogue from Lucas. From Jar-Jar Binks needing to light up some big ganja to complete his ethnic caricature, to the "Fu Manchu Menace" of the Trade Federation accents, to taking the amazingly hot and intelligent and skillful character of Padma and turning her into 15 year-old's dream of how princesses would worship their manly manhood while losing every characteristic that made them hot, Lucas's dialogue in the prequels was an absolute failure.

Replacing all the dialogue with old "Bonanza" episodes would be a noticeable improvement.

For you to discard the viewpoints these people by a caricature of "nutjob" demonstrates your intellectual carelessness. People who disagree with conventional wisdom may have some unique insight. People who disagree with you may have some good points to make? How much literature on the subject of Intelligent Design have you read? Have you read any of Ham's writings?

For you to call names indicates that you are ignorant. Thankfully, ignorance is fixable, an exercise left to the reader.

most non-christians and even many christians don't really know the real Jesus. There's a perception that he's gentle and kind and meek...but that isn't the savior you get to know when you really get up to the higher tiers of a REAL Christian church. We know our Jesus. He was ripped, aggressive, a take-no-prisoners-in-your-face kind of guy. And why not? He was god, he had the truth, can't argue with that! Yes, you non-believers (or unenlighted faux-believers) can wallow in your ineffectual caricature of our Christ, being "charitable" to the lazy and satanic poor, and promoting hellish pacifism...but we'll be down at our Kentucky museum observing truth, smashing whiskey bottles on the Devil's head, cuttin down some trees to burn some scientific lies, and paving an extra-wide thoroughfare to heaven for us and our kids!...Have fun taking the rutty dirt path to hell...sinners.

Things that are actually alien. You can get a taste in some of the best hard-core sci-fi, but it's generally understood that we really can't imagine it very well yet. (Not necessarily because we're inherently stupid, but just because right now we don't have much experience with non-human human-quality intelligence; same reason you don't see a lot of Virtual Reality simulations in 1960s science fiction, back when computers were still blinkenlights.)

Almost without exception, species in Star Trek either act random ("mysterious", don't forget the finger waggling), or human. They're not just humans with bumpy heads, they're just humans with bumpy heads. "Peaceful" species are just species full of humans that are peaceful; we've got real people who are equally pacificistic. Klingons are just humans who like to fight; we have those in real life. We have people that would only need to be slightly exaggerated to be Vulcans. We have Romulans in the real world. And so on. It's a rare "alien" that you can't find walking around on Earth today as a human being. Even AIs and holograms have mysteriously human motives and needs. (Sometimes there's good reason for that, sometimes there isn't.) There are exceptions, but they are quite clearly the exceptions, showing up in one episode, where only the human caricatures are recurring characters.

So, to summarize your argument: "I like money. I don't like games. Therefore, games are meaningless, and making money is meaningful."

That's a fine conclusion to reach when it comes to your own life, but please don't assume that your priorities are universal. Some people have goals that are different from your own. Some people are deeply religious. Some people look at art or philosophy as the meaningful elements of life. Some people feel that learning as much as possible is meaningful. Some people have political goals that can not be achieved by amassing personal wealth. All of these groups of people might feel the same way about your business software that you do about games.

Some people feel that having fun is a major goal of their life(or parts of it), and some of those people may find it fundamentally meaningful to play video games, assuming they have fun doing it. (Other gamers might view video games as a form of art, or as a mental challenge. Most, of course, will not have as clear-cut and conscious a view of the matter as the exaggerated caricatures presented here; this applies equally to the groups of the last paragraph.)

Of course, you're free to criticize them for their priorities, but you should have a better argument than simply noting that their priorities differ from yours before dismissing their activities as "empty".

i am not a neocon,

Oh please. Save me the bullshit. I don't care what your social beliefs are, because I'm not an idiot who can only think in one-dimension. The neo-cons grew within the Republican aparatus, and thus share their social stances for largely political reasons, but that's not relevent to what they are.

Neo-cons are the combination of the worst aspects of the Liberals and the Conservatives.

Like the Libearls, they believe that they can change the world for the better without having any understanding of what it is they're trying to solve.
Like the Conservatives, they believe that the best tool for executing foreign policy is military force.

Thus "spreading Democracy" by invading Iraq. You may not self-identify as a neo-con, but you don't self-identify as an idiot either, and you are clearly both. I'm not referring to what club you're a part of, I'm referring to the nature of your reality-deficient philosophy, and it's 100% neo-con.

"liberal warhawk" == "neo-con who supports gay marriage". Big deal. If the neo-con philosophy hadn't turned out to be such a flop in reality I'm sure we'd be seeing them start to pop up on the Democratic side of the

But it is funny hearing you all-caps screaming "respond to me not a caricature", Captain Straw Man. Keep it up, the ironing is delicious.

i am saying that if it is starkly clear there are no other choices, then the little green men get wiped out, adios, hasta la vista baby

In an absolutely trivial and meaningless case where all humans are in a box and all aliens are in another and in the human box there's a button that kills all the aliens and a timer that if it expires before the button is pushed kills all the humans, sure, anyone would agree what to do. Like all such trivial statements, it's irrelevent and extremely boring because reality is never going to be like that. Do you get it? Reality will never be like that.

So the problem is that in any real situation your interpretation of "starkly clear" is highly suspect. Your previous assessments of this nature are -- how shall I say this generously -- retarded. The fact that you didn't even mention an alternative to genocide until after you had rhetorically wiped out a whole planet and had moved on to another just demonstrates how deeply ingrained your warmonger thinking goes. Along with the assumption that any choices must have already been tried, so if nothing is being tried that leaves only war. As if the existence of alternatives is the hypothetical, rather than the black-and-white decision which will never appear in reality. Which is an extremely frightening way to think, because it deliberately avoids thinking.

Your simplistic binary "us-or-them" thinking is fine and dandy up until the very second it collides with reality, at which point it becomes not just irrelevent, but also foolish and dangerous.

So, her charicature of a spineless leech of a human is useless simply because she said it?

Essentially, yes. One may as well quote Marx (a noted racist) when discussing the economic pitfalls of modern-day Africa. It isn't merely that she wrote a caricature, it is that the idea itself is a straw man to begin with, she uses this idea to push an agenda, and finally that her agenda has been thoroughly discredited on historical, scientific, and philosophical grounds. If you want to score an intellectual point, invoking Rand is not the way to do it.

Her philosophy doesn't do much for me, but her critique of Socialism seems accurate.

Socialism is not a monolithic political ideology so any particular characterization is useless. Beyond that, Rand's ideas about it don't fit ANY of the major flavors of socialism, even those of her own day.

Lets pick up our favorite mantra: Technology does not equal game play.

The Wii owns the best game play right now, hands down. Graphics are just icing on top of the game play cake. And for too friggin' long game companies have been trying to sell their games with graphics rather than gameplay - all icing, no cake. For some people, this is a good thing. For me, not so much.

I can't tell you how much time I have spent playing on the Mii Channel. Caricaturing people is a lot of fun and oddly very engaging for my entire family (my wife, two boys under 5, and myself). Watching them play in Wii Sports - awesome! We've even set up a competition with some friends to try to make the better Mii's and send them to each other via Wii-mail. And the Mii Channel? Crappy graphics. Even my wife (not a gamer) has commented on how simple and unimpressive Mii's are on the surface - but that's really the source of the fun. For all its simplicity, the amount of seamless variety is amazing.

If graphics ever truly equated to fun, computer games would never have been successful. Granted, graphics can totally destroy a game, but that's due to poor design and planning - for consoles, it's never the fault of the graphics card.

And if you can produce a game like Princess Twilight, I don't think there's too much more to want in a game, graphically. The only thing left is photorealism ... and that's a lot of work for ... what? In the end, it doesn't make the game more interesting. It'll knock your socks off the first few times you play it ... and then you'll play it and think no differently of it as when you play Wind Waker (assuming you can get over yourself playing a cartoon).