I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks this letter is not genuine. Even JT knows that "God Himself" didn't write any of the Psalms. The Psalms of David are written by, get this, DAVID.
Strangely enough, I have been considering you as one of the elitist art 'experts', because yours is a position I see many of them taking: that art can be anything as long as it produces a reaction.
I don't get how you could ever think that someone who posits one of the broadest, most inclusive definitions of art possible as being elitist. That doesn't make sense. It's only through broad exclusion that one can be an elitist.
Our posts provoke reactions in each other and hopefully in other viewers. Does that make them art? I don't consider my posts art.
If you don't think there is an art to the persuasive argument, you're never going to make one.
Which specific emotions should Michelangelo's David provoke?
You'd have to ask Michelangelo. I can't tell you what he was intending to say with his art. The majority of the popular works of Michelangelo are first and foremost technically adept spectacles designed to induce a sense of wonder, which is why the church employed him in the first place. It's razzle-dazzle for the church, just like Gospel Music, the Crystal Cathedral, or Deepak Chopra in the modern era. In a sense, much of his work for the church is very literal and not very "deep" (beyond the biblical parables they illustrate). It's not unlike a lot of the highly visceral cinema that is being produced today with spectacular special effect sequences strung together by simplistic plots featuring even simpler characters.
To speculate on the intended emotional reaction from viewing David specifically, how about a sense of awe for the shear size of the work, an empowering sense of beauty and strength in the idealized human form, or most importantly a feeling of inspiration through the inherit symbolism of the meek overcoming great adversity which is the central theme of the story of David and Goliath?
As for the Mona Lisa, I can not speak for Leonardo da Vinci, but isn't the sense of mystery invoked by her curious smile one of the most commonly cited observations of popular art? Did you somehow miss that? I doubt the Mona Lisa was ever intended to be much more than what it is: a commissioned portrait created for a single family so that the owner might look on his smiling wife and smile back.
Perhaps you don't feel any emotion looking at those works. That just proves that art does not affect everyone equally. I don't believe anyone every claimed it should. The specific works of art you cite were created for people who lived hundreds of years ago, not for you, in a period and environment whose context may be lost on the modern observer. Not everyone "gets it" sometimes, and not everyone needs to. While I may love Salvador Dali, you may hate his work, and maybe neither of us could tell exactly the full scope of meaning behind any particular work of his. As long as Dali can communicate at least some of his message to some of its viewers, it is art. If he can't, it's poor art, or maybe just self-indulgent art designed for an an audience of one, the artist.
No, not any form of communication. Simply listing facts without context is not art. And not just any reaction is sufficient. When my modem sends an ACK, it is not an emotional reaction.
See, the problem with the "general consensus" is, they want to elevate art to a place where it has no business being: some unknowable, mysterious thing that is the sole domain of art experts into which the great unwashed have no business exploring. That is the epitome of elitist anti-art, and has no real place in the art world except as a form satire or self-mockery. Is it art because Professor Watzisphuck says so? Or is it art because you can feel it? Those are the choices and I pity anyone who chooses the former. Ask yourself, which came first, the art or the art expert? Only one of those requires the other to exist.
So is kicking you in the balls art because it hurts?
Yes and no. It's not art simply because it hurts, but rather because you selected "the balls" (and phrased it as such) to provoke a specific emotional response. To the viewer it will elicit a different emotional reaction than a slap on the face, or a knife plunged into a pregnant woman's belly. Just because it's dimwitted and not sophisticated doesn't exclude it from being art.
All that plus the chance to get killed in one blow by the princess if you made the mistake of approaching her in a fighting stance!
Dude, that's a SPOILER!
The first time I defeated Akuma and that happened to me I can vividly remember feeling first shocked, then angry, then terribly amused. It certainly made me want to play the game over again. Jordan Mechner packed a lot of emotion into that alternate ending. Surely one of the great moments in gamedom.
It is interesting that a game which was so innovative and is so popular among game designers has failed to be much of an influence on later games. That makes it a true oddity.
By the way, in M.U.L.E. it's called a Mountain Wampus. It's cousin, the Wumpus, favors cave networks of dodecahedral topology.
. i.e. PoP introduced a new kind of animation fo the movements of the character looked realistic.
Actually that was another Jordan Mechner game, Karateka, Prince of Persia's spiritual progenitor. Jordan Mechner is definitely an under-appreciated member of video game history for his bringing realism and cinematic technique to video games. Released five years before Prince of Persia, Karateka was among the first games to have a film-like story line, a personified villian, a hierarchy of henchmen for the player to confront, cut scenes, film-style editing during game play, and of course the rotoscoped graphics Prince of Persia is famous for.
Saying the Wii isn't going to see many triple-A titles is a bit ignorant. The Wii will see plenty of them, but they will be unique and exclusive to only the Wii. I think what you meant to say was that it more than likely wont be seeing many PC/360/PS3 Triple-A titles ported to it. Which isn't a problem, because gamers are not buying a Wii to play those games.
Let me clarify. There are triple-A exclusives and there are triple-A ports. Each platform is going to get its fair share of triple-A exclusives (read: an equal number of them). But only PC/360/PS3 are going to get triple-A ports, of which there will be a far greater number than exclusives. That means less triple-A titles for Wii. People aren't buying a Wii to play ports, you say, but they could have been if Nintendo wasn't stuck back in 2001. I'm not saying Wii should be a powerhouse, I'm just saying it's a shame it's so backwards that ports are not even worth trying. What's ignorant is saying it's not a problem if someone doesn't buy a Wii because some port is not available on it.
* Before you hit the flame button, lemme say I love the Wii, I think it's great. I don't think it's shit at all. In fact, the potential of all of the consoles impresses the hell out of me -- and for my money, the Wii takes the lead by a mile in that race.
However, from the perspective of a developer who is doing cross-platform development for PC, Xbox360, PS3, and Wii... well it doesn't take a rocket scientist to notice that one of these things is not like the other. This is why I've repeated said (and have been repeatedly "corrected") that Nintendo made a big mistake not making the Wii more powerful. Nintendo has totally dropped out of the Next Gen race and are off doing their own thing. I think it's great, but it isolates the Wii from mainstream console development. And that unfortunately means that the Wii isn't going to see many triple-A titles, titles whose budgets are usually only justifiable to publishers when they can count on them being cheaply ported to multiple platforms. Wii doesn't make it so easy to stuff a PC, Xbox360, or PS3 experience into it's cute little innards. Multi-platform development takes a lowest common denominator approach in order to get a consistent experience on all platforms. The Wii is so backwards in terms of CPU and GPU power that such an approach seriously hampers what's possible on all other platforms. At the end of the day, you want your product to look as good as possible and if that means cutting the Wii out of your plans, so be it, it will happen. Sure, if the Wii continues to sell, you can count on plenty of Wii-only titles, just like there are plenty of GameBoy-only titles. But what you won't get is all the PC/360/PS3 titles. In terms of installed units (PC+360+PS3) > Wii and publishers know that.
That's why I think Nintendo made a mistake with the Wii, why I agree with Chris Hecker about the anemic Wii specs, and why I hope for a shorter-than-average life-cycle for the Wii with the imminent release of a Next Gen Wii that offers the best of BOTH worlds in terms of graphics zazz and gameplay spazz, hopefully sometime in the next three years.
About fifteen years ago I was heavily into image processing. I wrote a zoom algorithm that measured the standard deviation of the local area of a subpixel and constructed a fractal model to fill in the details. I designed it specifically for filling in the detail of low resolution DEM data. It worked pretty well and produced some interesting effects for photographic imagery too.
Perhaps the techniques could be applied temporally rather than spatially, since video noise and film grain tend to change from frame to frame.
I'd very much like to see a temporal version of the inpainting algorithm. They might be onto the next big step in automated morphing, smoother slow motion, or tweening for low frame rate animation.
Those kinds of burners existed in the early days of DVD recording, designed for authoring, but they fell out of favor pretty quickly. And I can tell you that there are a lot of DVDs being pressed without CSS and Macrovision. In fact I'd wager there are several times as many unencrypted DVD productions getting pressed than Hollywood titles in any given year (more productions albeit not more in shear volume of discs). Getting DVDs pressed is dirt cheap at just over a dollar a disc with art, case, insert, and shrink wrap for small quantities, 1000 units being the usual minimum order. Even if you are doing only a few hundred discs it's worth it to just get a thousand pressed anyway -- possibly wasteful but you get a better product for a better unit price.
Pressing real discs is much cheaper than burning DVD recordables. If you are dealing in quantities over just a few hundred, real replication is the faster, more reliable, and more economical solution. This idea makes no sense for the consumer or the business owner and there is nothing convenient about it. The only possible good that can come out of it is the increased availability of obscure DVD titles that there is currently no retail shelf space for. But it's never going to happen because this business model doesn't make sense for any business that is interested in volume: a requirement in the retail media channel. Too much overhead in terms of time, equipment, and pissed off customers stuck with useless or failing DVD recordable discs. The concept will fail before obscure titles ever are considered for this kind of duplication.
Marty DiBergi: The last time Tap toured America, they where, uh, booked into 10,000 seat arenas, and 15,000 seat venues, and it seems that now, on the current tour they're being booked into 1,200 seat arenas, 1,500 seat arenas, and uh I was just wondering, does this mean uh...the popularity of the group is waning?
Ian Faith: Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no...no, no, not at all. I, I, I just think that the.. uh.. their appeal is becoming more selective.
My dad is was a bee-keeper as part of his duties as a park ranger and the bee populations have been dwindling like crazy here in the Southeast USA. The Varroa are bad, but today the main culprit seems to be Small Hive Beetles putting stress on the hives. They are absolutely devastating the bee industry here in the south, and it looks like they are going to take over the whole country. We tried to set my dad up with an apiary at home and we got everything set up, the hive, the supers, and ordered the bees. When they arrived, it was not even two minutes -- literally two minutes -- before the first beetles showed up and they just kept on coming. Their ability to find bees is uncanny. We tried many things to stop them or slow them down but needless to say, the colony gave up in the first few weeks. Heartbreaking.
The law is pretty clear about that. If you are 21 years or older you can brew 100 gallons for personal use. If there is more than one adult in the household you can brew up to 200 gallons. Under no circumstances can you sell your brew without a license. Thank you, President Carter.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks this letter is not genuine. Even JT knows that "God Himself" didn't write any of the Psalms. The Psalms of David are written by, get this, DAVID.
Yes, absolutely, art.
I don't get how you could ever think that someone who posits one of the broadest, most inclusive definitions of art possible as being elitist. That doesn't make sense. It's only through broad exclusion that one can be an elitist.
If you don't think there is an art to the persuasive argument, you're never going to make one.
You'd have to ask Michelangelo. I can't tell you what he was intending to say with his art. The majority of the popular works of Michelangelo are first and foremost technically adept spectacles designed to induce a sense of wonder, which is why the church employed him in the first place. It's razzle-dazzle for the church, just like Gospel Music, the Crystal Cathedral, or Deepak Chopra in the modern era. In a sense, much of his work for the church is very literal and not very "deep" (beyond the biblical parables they illustrate). It's not unlike a lot of the highly visceral cinema that is being produced today with spectacular special effect sequences strung together by simplistic plots featuring even simpler characters.
To speculate on the intended emotional reaction from viewing David specifically, how about a sense of awe for the shear size of the work, an empowering sense of beauty and strength in the idealized human form, or most importantly a feeling of inspiration through the inherit symbolism of the meek overcoming great adversity which is the central theme of the story of David and Goliath?
As for the Mona Lisa, I can not speak for Leonardo da Vinci, but isn't the sense of mystery invoked by her curious smile one of the most commonly cited observations of popular art? Did you somehow miss that? I doubt the Mona Lisa was ever intended to be much more than what it is: a commissioned portrait created for a single family so that the owner might look on his smiling wife and smile back.
Perhaps you don't feel any emotion looking at those works. That just proves that art does not affect everyone equally. I don't believe anyone every claimed it should. The specific works of art you cite were created for people who lived hundreds of years ago, not for you, in a period and environment whose context may be lost on the modern observer. Not everyone "gets it" sometimes, and not everyone needs to. While I may love Salvador Dali, you may hate his work, and maybe neither of us could tell exactly the full scope of meaning behind any particular work of his. As long as Dali can communicate at least some of his message to some of its viewers, it is art. If he can't, it's poor art, or maybe just self-indulgent art designed for an an audience of one, the artist.
No, not any form of communication. Simply listing facts without context is not art. And not just any reaction is sufficient. When my modem sends an ACK, it is not an emotional reaction.
See, the problem with the "general consensus" is, they want to elevate art to a place where it has no business being: some unknowable, mysterious thing that is the sole domain of art experts into which the great unwashed have no business exploring. That is the epitome of elitist anti-art, and has no real place in the art world except as a form satire or self-mockery. Is it art because Professor Watzisphuck says so? Or is it art because you can feel it? Those are the choices and I pity anyone who chooses the former. Ask yourself, which came first, the art or the art expert? Only one of those requires the other to exist.
Yes, see above.
Yes and no. It's not art simply because it hurts, but rather because you selected "the balls" (and phrased it as such) to provoke a specific emotional response. To the viewer it will elicit a different emotional reaction than a slap on the face, or a knife plunged into a pregnant woman's belly. Just because it's dimwitted and not sophisticated doesn't exclude it from being art.
If the artist can intentionally provoke a specific emotional reaction in the viewer, it is art. The end.
... or roller, as the case may be.
Dude, that's a SPOILER!
The first time I defeated Akuma and that happened to me I can vividly remember feeling first shocked, then angry, then terribly amused. It certainly made me want to play the game over again. Jordan Mechner packed a lot of emotion into that alternate ending. Surely one of the great moments in gamedom.
It is interesting that a game which was so innovative and is so popular among game designers has failed to be much of an influence on later games. That makes it a true oddity.
By the way, in M.U.L.E. it's called a Mountain Wampus. It's cousin, the Wumpus, favors cave networks of dodecahedral topology.
Actually that was another Jordan Mechner game, Karateka, Prince of Persia's spiritual progenitor. Jordan Mechner is definitely an under-appreciated member of video game history for his bringing realism and cinematic technique to video games. Released five years before Prince of Persia, Karateka was among the first games to have a film-like story line, a personified villian, a hierarchy of henchmen for the player to confront, cut scenes, film-style editing during game play, and of course the rotoscoped graphics Prince of Persia is famous for.
Yes, the former Game Developer magazine columnist.
Let me clarify. There are triple-A exclusives and there are triple-A ports. Each platform is going to get its fair share of triple-A exclusives (read: an equal number of them). But only PC/360/PS3 are going to get triple-A ports, of which there will be a far greater number than exclusives. That means less triple-A titles for Wii. People aren't buying a Wii to play ports, you say, but they could have been if Nintendo wasn't stuck back in 2001. I'm not saying Wii should be a powerhouse, I'm just saying it's a shame it's so backwards that ports are not even worth trying. What's ignorant is saying it's not a problem if someone doesn't buy a Wii because some port is not available on it.
* Before you hit the flame button, lemme say I love the Wii, I think it's great. I don't think it's shit at all. In fact, the potential of all of the consoles impresses the hell out of me -- and for my money, the Wii takes the lead by a mile in that race.
... well it doesn't take a rocket scientist to notice that one of these things is not like the other. This is why I've repeated said (and have been repeatedly "corrected") that Nintendo made a big mistake not making the Wii more powerful. Nintendo has totally dropped out of the Next Gen race and are off doing their own thing. I think it's great, but it isolates the Wii from mainstream console development. And that unfortunately means that the Wii isn't going to see many triple-A titles, titles whose budgets are usually only justifiable to publishers when they can count on them being cheaply ported to multiple platforms. Wii doesn't make it so easy to stuff a PC, Xbox360, or PS3 experience into it's cute little innards. Multi-platform development takes a lowest common denominator approach in order to get a consistent experience on all platforms. The Wii is so backwards in terms of CPU and GPU power that such an approach seriously hampers what's possible on all other platforms. At the end of the day, you want your product to look as good as possible and if that means cutting the Wii out of your plans, so be it, it will happen. Sure, if the Wii continues to sell, you can count on plenty of Wii-only titles, just like there are plenty of GameBoy-only titles. But what you won't get is all the PC/360/PS3 titles. In terms of installed units (PC+360+PS3) > Wii and publishers know that.
However, from the perspective of a developer who is doing cross-platform development for PC, Xbox360, PS3, and Wii
That's why I think Nintendo made a mistake with the Wii, why I agree with Chris Hecker about the anemic Wii specs, and why I hope for a shorter-than-average life-cycle for the Wii with the imminent release of a Next Gen Wii that offers the best of BOTH worlds in terms of graphics zazz and gameplay spazz, hopefully sometime in the next three years.
About fifteen years ago I was heavily into image processing. I wrote a zoom algorithm that measured the standard deviation of the local area of a subpixel and constructed a fractal model to fill in the details. I designed it specifically for filling in the detail of low resolution DEM data. It worked pretty well and produced some interesting effects for photographic imagery too.
Perhaps the techniques could be applied temporally rather than spatially, since video noise and film grain tend to change from frame to frame.
I'd very much like to see a temporal version of the inpainting algorithm. They might be onto the next big step in automated morphing, smoother slow motion, or tweening for low frame rate animation.
Those kinds of burners existed in the early days of DVD recording, designed for authoring, but they fell out of favor pretty quickly. And I can tell you that there are a lot of DVDs being pressed without CSS and Macrovision. In fact I'd wager there are several times as many unencrypted DVD productions getting pressed than Hollywood titles in any given year (more productions albeit not more in shear volume of discs). Getting DVDs pressed is dirt cheap at just over a dollar a disc with art, case, insert, and shrink wrap for small quantities, 1000 units being the usual minimum order. Even if you are doing only a few hundred discs it's worth it to just get a thousand pressed anyway -- possibly wasteful but you get a better product for a better unit price.
Pressing real discs is much cheaper than burning DVD recordables. If you are dealing in quantities over just a few hundred, real replication is the faster, more reliable, and more economical solution. This idea makes no sense for the consumer or the business owner and there is nothing convenient about it. The only possible good that can come out of it is the increased availability of obscure DVD titles that there is currently no retail shelf space for. But it's never going to happen because this business model doesn't make sense for any business that is interested in volume: a requirement in the retail media channel. Too much overhead in terms of time, equipment, and pissed off customers stuck with useless or failing DVD recordable discs. The concept will fail before obscure titles ever are considered for this kind of duplication.
Marty DiBergi: The last time Tap toured America, they where, uh, booked into 10,000 seat arenas, and 15,000 seat venues, and it seems that now, on the current tour they're being booked into 1,200 seat arenas, 1,500 seat arenas, and uh I was just wondering, does this mean uh...the popularity of the group is waning?
Ian Faith: Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no...no, no, not at all. I, I, I just think that the.. uh.. their appeal is becoming more selective.
My dad is was a bee-keeper as part of his duties as a park ranger and the bee populations have been dwindling like crazy here in the Southeast USA. The Varroa are bad, but today the main culprit seems to be Small Hive Beetles putting stress on the hives. They are absolutely devastating the bee industry here in the south, and it looks like they are going to take over the whole country. We tried to set my dad up with an apiary at home and we got everything set up, the hive, the supers, and ordered the bees. When they arrived, it was not even two minutes -- literally two minutes -- before the first beetles showed up and they just kept on coming. Their ability to find bees is uncanny. We tried many things to stop them or slow them down but needless to say, the colony gave up in the first few weeks. Heartbreaking.
You want to be a better designer?
1. Open your eyes.
2. Engage your brain.
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2.
There's nothing intrinsic about it. If you are relying solely on your instincts, you are not a designer.
That's 100 or 200 gallons per year.
The law is pretty clear about that. If you are 21 years or older you can brew 100 gallons for personal use. If there is more than one adult in the household you can brew up to 200 gallons. Under no circumstances can you sell your brew without a license. Thank you, President Carter.