Right, because broadening the appeal of a hobby makes it a "lost art". Much better if you have to take a test before you're allowed to do a hobby. That will keep the "art" from being "lost".
This issue hits kind of close to home for me, too, but in a somewhat different way due to the differences in my hobby...
Basically, one of the new things these days with injection model kits is parts that are not simply color-molded, but pre-painted. For instance, some of the recent Armored Core or Gurren-Lagann kits, the Revell of Germany Star Wars kits, the Bandai Star Trek kits... The trend for pre-painted kits is on the rise and I'm afraid it's only going to continue that way. Even Fine Molds is making a prepainted version of their Millennium Falcon...
You could say this makes the kits more accessible - just as snap-assembly or color-molding do - to me it means the product is more expensive due to a feature I don't want. If you want to talk about how the resulting growth of the hobby is a benefit of all this, you have to consider what has the hobby become in order to accommodate this growth? In the case of modeling, I'm afraid the answer is that the hobby manufacturers are making kits for people who don't want kits, and so a lot of people "in the hobby" these days don't actually do anything in terms of finishing their own kits.
Ham Radio has a similar problem - if you take away the process of building your gear (by buying it in a shop, for instance) then IMO you've taken away just about everything there that's worthwhile. It's almost paradoxical - the industry grows to service what the hobbyists want, and as a result the hobby ceases to be what it was...
'Course, the kit manufacturers need to sell kits, I can appreciate that. I also believe that the reason injection kits exist in the first place is because for a while it was the most efficient means to deliver people the product they wanted. People got used to the idea of building the kit themselves 'cause there weren't good alternatives. There was a "sweet spot" that favored injection kits - that "sweet spot" has since shifted elsewhere. So if the hobby is dying, it may at least be a natural and appropriate death.
What I see in fabrication that excites me (and let's be clear, here - I'm not talking about "$50 for a grainy, smallish part from a fab. service" fabrication, I'm talking about "Everybody has one on their desk that is capable of fabricating parts as good as typical garage kit parts" fabrication - a big difference in part quality and economy) is that it could mean there will be a new "sweet spot" in which people will again find kit building (in the form of home-printed parts of designs downloaded over the net) as a worthwhile means to an end - at least until the fab. machines are so refined that there's nothing to do once the machine's done its work.:) But even once things go to that extreme, people who want to build and paint will be able to use fab. machines to get parts to build and paint...
Too expensive, and too low resolution/rough. For models, try www.printapart.com, the parts are durable enough, and the minimal texture covers fine with primer and paint.
I am familiar with printapart - people bring up the subject of fabrication services every now and then on modeling forums... I know it's not ready to take the place of paper craft and GKs now - but there will come a time when it will do so. It's inevitable, in my view - the hardware will get better, and the printouts cheaper - at some point this is going to shake up the hobby in a major way. For the better, I think.
Every time 3-D printing comes up I like to consider what this will do to my favorite hobby, model-building...
Styrene injection kits have been around for ages, and they're generally the cheapest way to get a kit made in large quantity - but because it costs so much to set up the molds, usually they're pretty hesitant to make a kit of anything that's not a pretty sure-fire seller... Additionally the hobby has been dying by inches for a long time.
To fill all the niches of interesting subjects that nobody's bothered to make injection kits of (this would be, for instance, things like the Serenity cargo ship) there's resin kits - but because of the high degree of manual labor involved in casting the parts, as well as the material expenses and the initial sculpting work divided over a run of maybe a couple hundred kits, they're pretty expensive for the person buying the kit...
But then you think about stuff going on these days, like papercraft - people making model designs, putting them online in a form that other people can print out and build dirt-cheap. The results aren't generally as good as injection or resin models but it's quite impressive, and inspiring what they've accomplished...
So it's fun to think about what fabrication could mean for the hobby. On the one hand it may actually mean less people buying and building models, or scratch-building parts themselves. Rather, once the technology is cheap enough, more things will be simply fabricated. But on the other hand - to think of something that would today be a garage kit, only done up as a downloadable design for fabrication... that would be pretty damn cool.
I honestly think that most people simply don't remember their teenage years in sufficient detail to understand what it means to be a teenager. They claim to understand, but their actions and attitudes speak otherwise.
I mean, I'm down with being outraged and all, but have you seen this thing? It looks, and sounds, terrible. It's hard to care that the game got castrated, given what a pathetic load it is in the first place.
I agree with you on the level of the jokes. But to a good 90% all we see is the "I forgot" joke. The kind of attitude that makes me think that they're in severe need of attention and care like 'Look At Me, P-lease!".
So the fact that their jokes aren't very imaginative is a cry for help?:D
I dunno. I think sometimes you gotta go for the low-hanging fruit. Lots of people don't know all the eventualities of dementia - but just about everybody knows that Alzheimer's makes you forget things. Hence it's a lot easier to make an effective (and funny) Alzheimer's memory-loss joke than a real dementia joke...
I don't know, maybe people should look at this post as an open invitation - a challenge, even, to produce a good dementia-based joke, something that would be funny whether or not the person reading it is really familiar with dementia... I'm not sure how you do that, at least without crafting a fairly elaborate character and setting to frame it in...
Bike to work. (Make living close enough to bike a priority.)
I've been doing this lately and I want to say that I've really enjoyed it.
It's helped tremendously that I've found a very good route - my old route went through a perpetual construction zone, crossed a couple busy streets, and led me through a maze of twisty little residential roads, all alike. It was also around 10 miles each way, with some fairly substantial hills.
The new route is shorter - about 7 miles - there's just one little stretch with traffic (plus three crossings of fairly busy roads) and the rest is all fairly flat residential stuff. I also take a small shortcut that wasn't on the map - a foot-path connecting a cul-de-sac at the end of a residential street to a sort of industrial road. That cut about half a mile off my route and kept me off larger streets. Because the ride is easier and shorter, I've enjoyed it more and done it more frequently.
The big surprise for me lately is how much I've enjoyed it. I enjoy getting places under my own power, I like the self-sufficiency of it. I also like that my route allows me to bypass traffic congestion (if all else fails I can get off and walk - pedestrian crossing takes time but it gives you right-of-way.)
Comparatively, going to the gym is a chore. I hate the feeling that I'm taking a big chunk of time out of my day to do it, (never mind that biking takes just as much time and probably isn't as good a workout) as I have other things I want to get done. Biking to work becomes a natural part of my day. "Oh, I have to go to work now."
If you don't live close enough to bike to work... Well, that sucks. I may be in that boat some day when I change jobs...
Shame on you making jokes about this dreadful disease.
My dad seems to have Alzheimer's - he now lives in a veteran's home, often doesn't know who his kids are, or that he has any, who his wife is, etc. It seems like his greatest point of clarity is that he doesn't want to be in the home, so we have to make excuses every time we leave there without him. Plus he had some recent dental issues (all his upper teeth are falling apart) - my mom arranged for him to get dentures, but he had a habit of taking them out and now he's lost them. She won't be getting him more, and I can't blame her.
This from a guy who used to be very active in the Ham Radio community, a sometimes-tinkerer in programming and circuits, etc. One of the sadder stories, IMO, is of how one time after the onset of the disease (when he could still live at home but had degraded to the point where he couldn't track complicated discussions or follow instructions, etc.) someone from the ham radio community called him up looking to ask him a question - and I guess from the course of the discussion figured out what happened. That must be really sad.
So, yeah, when people post lame jokes like "I was going to post something here but I forgot what" - it's like I want to smack 'em up-side the head and be like, "do you know what this disease really does? It made this man paranoid that my visiting 7-year old cousin might constitute some mortal threat. It's not just about forgetting things."
But, you know what? I also hate this whole attitude of bitching out the "insensitive clods" of the world. Yes, "my dad has Alzheimer's you insensitive clod." But all the same I don't think anything should be considered outside the domain of a good joke. Let's have fun and laugh!:D
How can anyone trust ANYONE's writings if they have the initials "A.C."?
You're thinking, no doubt, of Anonymous Coward - but let's not forget the other great ACs of the world!
There's Armored Core, with its warring corporations and mercenaries in their robots There's A.C. Moore, when you need to buy some craft stuff There's Art Carney, of "Honeymooners" fame There's Alternating Current, which makes it easier to transmit electricity over long distances or change its voltage level There's Air Conditioning, which is great on a hot day There's AC/DC, who at one point were away but later were back in black... There's Adam Corolla, who was funny on "The Man Show" There's Ann Coulter, who is an obnoxious asshat (I guess your comment is valid with respect to her) And don't forget good old "After Colony", the era of "Gundam Wing"!
So let's remember the good ACs of the world, too, shall we?
I think it would be a supreme irony for a pro-privacy group to abuse their members in such a manner.
Not "ironic", just hypocritical.
Isn't it ironic?...don'cha think?
(Also, my sister got married this weekend and there were some thunderstorms later in the day after the ceremony. So I did have an opportunity to bring up the fact that it was "like, rain on your wedding day". Good times.)
I was terrified that they'd give them voices. I was actually quite relieved to discover that they never did.
It's based on a comic. You shouldn't hear their voices. You've presumably already got an idea of how they sound in your mind. So, no, they never do have any voice acting in the full version, thankfully.
Don't you think that seems a bit closed-minded? I mean we've been down this road a million times before - characters which started out as comics suddenly having voices in animation or TV shows or whatever. Superman, Dragonball, Naruto, Ninja Turtles, X-Men, Harry Potter, Charlie Brown, Garfield, whatever, take your pick...
The point is, yes, people can find cause to complain about voices put on characters when they're used to them not having any - but that doesn't mean that putting a voice on that character and making it work is impossible, or that the results can't be good. It just means that in this case, they didn't bother trying.
Ok, I've got to hear this one. What the fuck does threading have to do with video quality?
Couldn't tell you for sure - but the multi-threaded version of a task may be a whole different algorithm. So if you're not splitting the job on a convenient boundary (like CPU1 for audio, CPU2 for video, for instance - if you're using more than one CPU for a single task) then it may be a different algorithm with a different implementation. That's where you can see behavior diverge.
Joseph Javorski. Respected scientist. Touch a button. Things happen. A scientist becomes a beast. Shockwaves of an A-bomb. A once powerful, humble man. Reduced toâ¦nothing. Joseph Javorski. Respected scientist. Now a fiend. Prowling the wastelands. A prehistoric beast in a nuclear age. Kill. Kill, just to be killing.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, because broadening the appeal of a hobby makes it a "lost art". Much better if you have to take a test before you're allowed to do a hobby. That will keep the "art" from being "lost".
This issue hits kind of close to home for me, too, but in a somewhat different way due to the differences in my hobby...
Basically, one of the new things these days with injection model kits is parts that are not simply color-molded, but pre-painted. For instance, some of the recent Armored Core or Gurren-Lagann kits, the Revell of Germany Star Wars kits, the Bandai Star Trek kits... The trend for pre-painted kits is on the rise and I'm afraid it's only going to continue that way. Even Fine Molds is making a prepainted version of their Millennium Falcon...
You could say this makes the kits more accessible - just as snap-assembly or color-molding do - to me it means the product is more expensive due to a feature I don't want. If you want to talk about how the resulting growth of the hobby is a benefit of all this, you have to consider what has the hobby become in order to accommodate this growth? In the case of modeling, I'm afraid the answer is that the hobby manufacturers are making kits for people who don't want kits, and so a lot of people "in the hobby" these days don't actually do anything in terms of finishing their own kits.
Ham Radio has a similar problem - if you take away the process of building your gear (by buying it in a shop, for instance) then IMO you've taken away just about everything there that's worthwhile. It's almost paradoxical - the industry grows to service what the hobbyists want, and as a result the hobby ceases to be what it was...
'Course, the kit manufacturers need to sell kits, I can appreciate that. I also believe that the reason injection kits exist in the first place is because for a while it was the most efficient means to deliver people the product they wanted. People got used to the idea of building the kit themselves 'cause there weren't good alternatives. There was a "sweet spot" that favored injection kits - that "sweet spot" has since shifted elsewhere. So if the hobby is dying, it may at least be a natural and appropriate death.
What I see in fabrication that excites me (and let's be clear, here - I'm not talking about "$50 for a grainy, smallish part from a fab. service" fabrication, I'm talking about "Everybody has one on their desk that is capable of fabricating parts as good as typical garage kit parts" fabrication - a big difference in part quality and economy) is that it could mean there will be a new "sweet spot" in which people will again find kit building (in the form of home-printed parts of designs downloaded over the net) as a worthwhile means to an end - at least until the fab. machines are so refined that there's nothing to do once the machine's done its work. :) But even once things go to that extreme, people who want to build and paint will be able to use fab. machines to get parts to build and paint...
Too expensive, and too low resolution/rough. For models, try www.printapart.com, the parts are durable enough, and the minimal texture covers fine with primer and paint.
I am familiar with printapart - people bring up the subject of fabrication services every now and then on modeling forums... I know it's not ready to take the place of paper craft and GKs now - but there will come a time when it will do so. It's inevitable, in my view - the hardware will get better, and the printouts cheaper - at some point this is going to shake up the hobby in a major way. For the better, I think.
Every time 3-D printing comes up I like to consider what this will do to my favorite hobby, model-building...
Styrene injection kits have been around for ages, and they're generally the cheapest way to get a kit made in large quantity - but because it costs so much to set up the molds, usually they're pretty hesitant to make a kit of anything that's not a pretty sure-fire seller... Additionally the hobby has been dying by inches for a long time.
To fill all the niches of interesting subjects that nobody's bothered to make injection kits of (this would be, for instance, things like the Serenity cargo ship) there's resin kits - but because of the high degree of manual labor involved in casting the parts, as well as the material expenses and the initial sculpting work divided over a run of maybe a couple hundred kits, they're pretty expensive for the person buying the kit...
But then you think about stuff going on these days, like papercraft - people making model designs, putting them online in a form that other people can print out and build dirt-cheap. The results aren't generally as good as injection or resin models but it's quite impressive, and inspiring what they've accomplished...
So it's fun to think about what fabrication could mean for the hobby. On the one hand it may actually mean less people buying and building models, or scratch-building parts themselves. Rather, once the technology is cheap enough, more things will be simply fabricated. But on the other hand - to think of something that would today be a garage kit, only done up as a downloadable design for fabrication... that would be pretty damn cool.
For God's sake, do not make me a nigger.
I hate niggers and I do everything I can to keep them down.
If you give me the face of a nigger, all my racism against niggers will be turned back on me!
Not to worry, only those who remained neutral in the battle between Elohim and Lucifer were cursed with black skin.
Beat everyone else to the Laughing Man reference.
He's a nut, 'cause he's a Salinger fan!
Compare "Beer Pong" to "Major League Eating"
- If you assume people are going to mimic what happens in the game, which do you suppose is more reckless?
- Which game, overall, is more stupid?
I honestly think that most people simply don't remember their teenage years in sufficient detail to understand what it means to be a teenager. They claim to understand, but their actions and attitudes speak otherwise.
You don't understand me! Just leave me alone!
I get your point, and it's a good one (though it's been said a million times before, and you're preaching to the choir). What I want to know is:
I can fuck for my country?! Sign me up for three tours!
Yes, but it's not one or the other, it's both. "fuck and die" for your country.
Me, I'd rather do it on my own time and live to get some more later...
WTF? Just play real beer pong.
According to TFA, that, too, has been outlawed in various places and contexts...
Oblig. XKCD
I mean, I'm down with being outraged and all, but have you seen this thing? It looks, and sounds, terrible. It's hard to care that the game got castrated, given what a pathetic load it is in the first place.
Everyone is spying on everyone else, eh? Are they going to start printing the newspapers in invisble ink? :D
I demand the cone of silence!
I agree with you on the level of the jokes. But to a good 90% all we see is the "I forgot" joke. The kind of attitude that makes me think that they're in severe need of attention and care like 'Look At Me, P-lease!".
So the fact that their jokes aren't very imaginative is a cry for help? :D
I dunno. I think sometimes you gotta go for the low-hanging fruit. Lots of people don't know all the eventualities of dementia - but just about everybody knows that Alzheimer's makes you forget things. Hence it's a lot easier to make an effective (and funny) Alzheimer's memory-loss joke than a real dementia joke...
I don't know, maybe people should look at this post as an open invitation - a challenge, even, to produce a good dementia-based joke, something that would be funny whether or not the person reading it is really familiar with dementia... I'm not sure how you do that, at least without crafting a fairly elaborate character and setting to frame it in...
Bike to work. (Make living close enough to bike a priority.)
I've been doing this lately and I want to say that I've really enjoyed it.
It's helped tremendously that I've found a very good route - my old route went through a perpetual construction zone, crossed a couple busy streets, and led me through a maze of twisty little residential roads, all alike. It was also around 10 miles each way, with some fairly substantial hills.
The new route is shorter - about 7 miles - there's just one little stretch with traffic (plus three crossings of fairly busy roads) and the rest is all fairly flat residential stuff. I also take a small shortcut that wasn't on the map - a foot-path connecting a cul-de-sac at the end of a residential street to a sort of industrial road. That cut about half a mile off my route and kept me off larger streets. Because the ride is easier and shorter, I've enjoyed it more and done it more frequently.
The big surprise for me lately is how much I've enjoyed it. I enjoy getting places under my own power, I like the self-sufficiency of it. I also like that my route allows me to bypass traffic congestion (if all else fails I can get off and walk - pedestrian crossing takes time but it gives you right-of-way.)
Comparatively, going to the gym is a chore. I hate the feeling that I'm taking a big chunk of time out of my day to do it, (never mind that biking takes just as much time and probably isn't as good a workout) as I have other things I want to get done. Biking to work becomes a natural part of my day. "Oh, I have to go to work now."
If you don't live close enough to bike to work... Well, that sucks. I may be in that boat some day when I change jobs...
Shame on you making jokes about this dreadful disease.
My dad seems to have Alzheimer's - he now lives in a veteran's home, often doesn't know who his kids are, or that he has any, who his wife is, etc. It seems like his greatest point of clarity is that he doesn't want to be in the home, so we have to make excuses every time we leave there without him. Plus he had some recent dental issues (all his upper teeth are falling apart) - my mom arranged for him to get dentures, but he had a habit of taking them out and now he's lost them. She won't be getting him more, and I can't blame her.
This from a guy who used to be very active in the Ham Radio community, a sometimes-tinkerer in programming and circuits, etc. One of the sadder stories, IMO, is of how one time after the onset of the disease (when he could still live at home but had degraded to the point where he couldn't track complicated discussions or follow instructions, etc.) someone from the ham radio community called him up looking to ask him a question - and I guess from the course of the discussion figured out what happened. That must be really sad.
So, yeah, when people post lame jokes like "I was going to post something here but I forgot what" - it's like I want to smack 'em up-side the head and be like, "do you know what this disease really does? It made this man paranoid that my visiting 7-year old cousin might constitute some mortal threat. It's not just about forgetting things."
But, you know what? I also hate this whole attitude of bitching out the "insensitive clods" of the world. Yes, "my dad has Alzheimer's you insensitive clod." But all the same I don't think anything should be considered outside the domain of a good joke. Let's have fun and laugh! :D
Methylene Blue is PEOPLE! It's PEEEE-PULLLLL!!
They all seem different and complicated, I don't trust any of those things!
:D
How can anyone trust ANYONE's writings if they have the initials "A.C."?
You're thinking, no doubt, of Anonymous Coward - but let's not forget the other great ACs of the world!
There's Armored Core, with its warring corporations and mercenaries in their robots
There's A.C. Moore, when you need to buy some craft stuff
There's Art Carney, of "Honeymooners" fame
There's Alternating Current, which makes it easier to transmit electricity over long distances or change its voltage level
There's Air Conditioning, which is great on a hot day
There's AC/DC, who at one point were away but later were back in black...
There's Adam Corolla, who was funny on "The Man Show"
There's Ann Coulter, who is an obnoxious asshat (I guess your comment is valid with respect to her)
And don't forget good old "After Colony", the era of "Gundam Wing"!
So let's remember the good ACs of the world, too, shall we?
I think it would be a supreme irony for a pro-privacy group to abuse their members in such a manner.
Not "ironic", just hypocritical.
Isn't it ironic? ...don'cha think?
(Also, my sister got married this weekend and there were some thunderstorms later in the day after the ceremony. So I did have an opportunity to bring up the fact that it was "like, rain on your wedding day". Good times.)
Gambit was my favourite X-man!
threw those cards with kinetic energy and carried a long staff!
Personally, I think a large rock would be more effective than thrown cards, as the rock has more kinetic energy than a whole deck of cards.
Hey, look at me! I'm more powerful than Gambit!
Originally he threw metal spikes - more sensible than cards for the reasons you described, and more versatile than rocks...
Um, did you try the internet?
The interwhat?
The intertwat?
I was terrified that they'd give them voices. I was actually quite relieved to discover that they never did.
It's based on a comic. You shouldn't hear their voices. You've presumably already got an idea of how they sound in your mind. So, no, they never do have any voice acting in the full version, thankfully.
Don't you think that seems a bit closed-minded? I mean we've been down this road a million times before - characters which started out as comics suddenly having voices in animation or TV shows or whatever. Superman, Dragonball, Naruto, Ninja Turtles, X-Men, Harry Potter, Charlie Brown, Garfield, whatever, take your pick...
The point is, yes, people can find cause to complain about voices put on characters when they're used to them not having any - but that doesn't mean that putting a voice on that character and making it work is impossible, or that the results can't be good. It just means that in this case, they didn't bother trying.
Too bad that usually means making fools of themselves.
You say that like it's a bad thing...
We should use the Cone of Silence!
How's that?
Ok, I've got to hear this one.
What the fuck does threading have to do with video quality?
Couldn't tell you for sure - but the multi-threaded version of a task may be a whole different algorithm. So if you're not splitting the job on a convenient boundary (like CPU1 for audio, CPU2 for video, for instance - if you're using more than one CPU for a single task) then it may be a different algorithm with a different implementation. That's where you can see behavior diverge.
Joseph Javorski. Respected scientist. Touch a button. Things happen. A scientist becomes a beast. Shockwaves of an A-bomb. A once powerful, humble man. Reduced toâ¦nothing. Joseph Javorski. Respected scientist. Now a fiend. Prowling the wastelands. A prehistoric beast in a nuclear age. Kill. Kill, just to be killing.