it would be silly to put a pre-packaged blog software on there.:)
Would it? Unless you have some crazy-ass unique use-case that you need to fill, I could make a case that writing your own blog package might suggest that you're the kind of guy who wastes a lot of time on wheel reinvention.
If you wanna write your own because you like to code, then fine - do it for fun, and say "I use my own blog package because I thought it would be fun to roll my own."
Who are these guys? What's their methodology for getting data?
When I go to their home page to see if I can discover these things, a bar on the side tells me that I'm running "Operating System Mac OSX - Puma 10.4.11". This does not make me wanna trust these people.
"Sorry, man, the battery's just about dead." "Sorry, man, the net's broken, I just use this for my notes and shit."
Or you could just say "no" unless it's a screaming emergency. I mean, if someone's expecting to show some files on an usb key, they'll have set things up to have a machine handy, right?
And if you feel you must let everyone (or some subset of everyone) use your machine, set up a guest account and turn on fast user switching.
Or you could just leave the thing at home as often as not so that people don't expect you to be That Dude With The Laptop. This really sounds like it's more of a social problem than a technical one.
Depends on your teachers and the focus of the school. If you're going to a "fine art" curriculum, yeah. But there are schools that focus on trying to beat all the skills of Actually Being Able To Draw into your tiny little head, too.
And then there's going out and getting a job at an animation studio and having a grizzled old vet tell you exactly how shitty your art is in loving detail, and how to make it better...
I have seen this exact same phenomenon for years in a completely different online market: artists offering commissions.
When you're young and still unsure of your skills, it's really easy to promise that you'll do a full-color piece of art for something like US$5 - waaaaay too low. After all, all the other beginners are pricing like that; hell, some of the people teetering on the cusp between "fan" and "pro" are still pricing themselves like that.
Now, artists will trade stories about their nightmare commissions; like any specialist group, we share our war stories. And the one thing I've noticed is that almost every story about a picky commissioner who demands ten rounds of changes on an finished piece is also one about a commission that's way below what the artist's time is worth.
I avoided doing commissions for a long time. When I finally did start doing them, I looked around at the going rates and positioned myself well above the bottom, offering very limited numbers of commissions at a time. And you know what? The first set sold out like lightning. I raised my prices for the second set and they still went quick. And everyone's reaction upon getting their art was "wow!" - some people even threw in a bit more money afterwards. Nobody asked for changes, everyone knew they'd be getting my interpretation of their scenario.
A few sets of commissions down the line, I did an experiment: instead of setting a price, I let people pay what they thought it was worth. One person who was quite broke paid about half of my usual price; the other two people in that set of commissions more than made up for her lack of funds.
If you price yourself like a slave, people will treat you like one. Set your rates to something fair and you get treated like the skilled professional you are.
All the people writing iPhone games for $.99 are hanging out a sign that says "my hard work is worth next to nothing"; it is not surprising to find consumers treating them badly.
Yeah. There's this place in Boston - "Newbury Comics" - that mostly sells CDs. And action figures, and DVDs, and posters, and... stuff. Comics are just two or three little units way in the back, as far away from the entrance as you can get. It must be working well for them because there's nearly thirty Newbury Comics stores scattered around New England.
All I ever get there is hair dye; when I want to get comics I go to other stores that still primarily have... comics.
I think it's more that a lot of us have phases where we hang out with nothing but other trannies, so we don't have anyone else to do. It's also a matter of finding the right guys; I am mostly hot for ladies myself but I have two lovely boyfriends.
Well, hey, I know a lot of transwomen who are total nerds. I mean, one is a malware researcher who regularly spends hours of her life staring at raw x86 disassemblies. If you're not hung up on breeding, some transchicks make pretty awesome girlfriends for the slashdot type.
No, seriously; the article is of no use, and the link in the article to what appears to be the homepage of this DotA game that this code hacks on top of is also completely useless in telling me what kind of game this actually is; everything involved in this is a cryptic thicket of terms for this highly involved game I have never heard of.
It'll sure have a huge impact on movies being made by five friends with whatever effects they and their buddies can put together! Hack together your own mo-cap studio for a couple thousand, and the amount of stuff you can do goes way up.
Also:
For the movie industry, this potentially means that motion tracking can be done on a regular set, which would save production time and let the actors work in a natural setting. "These elaborate systems get in the way of trying to shoot these films," says Steve Sullivan, the senior technology officer at Lucasfilm's Industrial Light & Magic (ILM). "A lot of people see motion tracking as being a solved problem, but I think there's much more we can do to make it more accessible to a range of people and less in the way."
Mm, point. I read the 'original' version and the restored version; my memories are more of the restored version.
Mostly I think it was just the part where Mandella visits his aging mom in an overpopulated Earth? I dunno, it's been a while and Wikipedia doesn't have the obsessively detailed spoilerriffic list of changes that I would expect to be there.
Did you read a different book than I did? One of the important plot threads is Mandella's fragmented-by-interstellar-travel romance.
If all you remember was the battles on remote planets and the clone armies and whatnot, you did not get the point of the book at all - it's Haldeman's Vietnam-era rebuttal to the largely pro-war stance of Heinlein's Starship Troopers. The human dimension is important.
The programmers have grown up, just like you. They have families, they have hobbies, they would like to go out and have fun now and then.
This article is not complaining that he can't charge $60. He's complaining that he can't charge $30 in these new downloadable channels, which is barely above break-even for his sales and his costs.
I am a long-time fan of Jeff Minter. The other year, he released "Space Giraffe" for the XBox360. As a downloadable game for $5.
He did not, I believe, make back his development costs.
(Admittedly, it was a hard game to get into; I'm hoping he learnt from the reactions people who are not wired the same way he and I are, and that his next game will be more approachable.)
Me, I loved it. And when he ported it to the PC, I leapt at the chance to buy it again. Not because I wanted the extra levels he added, not because I wanted to play it on a PC - but because I wanted to finish paying Jeff for the fun I had. I literally felt guilty because $5 felt like I was ripping him off for the amount of fun his game gave me.
The race to the bottom, with the $1 games on iPhones, is one that nobody wins - developers abandon their indy dreams and get a job as a minor cog working on "Derivative Safe Game IV", users don't get more cool games. All we get are throwaway pieces of crap that extend brands, and first efforts by newbies living in their parents' basements.
The myth of the suffering artist is a load of bullshit. Pernicious, damaging bullshit - it kept me depressed for quite a few years because I was afraid that the Muse would vanish if I stopped being so damn mopey. I got out of that and guess what? I don't suffer for my art, and I do more of it; I'm confident enough to embark upon year-long personal projects and get them done.
Have you ever done any beautiful art? I have. I like to think I have, at least, and people look at my stuff and call it that. Yeah, there are sparks of inspiration that come from nowhere. I have whole sketchbooks chock full of that kind of thing. Then I look at the books and decide which ones to bother working up into finished pieces. I have a lot more bits of awesome inspiration than I will ever have the time and energy to finish.
And the last place I feel inspired is when I am stressed out, tired, worried, and fearful. That part of the brain comes on when I'm relaxed and have the freedom to jumble all kinds of random things around in my head until two or three things blend together into something neat.
Me, I haven't done any video games - I had enough crunch in the animation industry under someone who thought like you did. I burnt out and left. That's what perpetu-crunch does.
I won't disagree on the code-is-art front; I've done enough programming to know there is a near-infinity of ways to solve a problem, and an art to picking which one to use!
Visual artists stand on the shoulders of other artists too; we constantly steal from each other (or are influenced by each other - same thing, really *grin*). We need each other's critique, we need each others' lessons. We don't rely on each others' work quite as directly as a programmer - I can as easily sit in a cafe and draw in a sketchbook as I can do it here at home with a ton of reference and inspiration in reach. But I wouldn't draw the way I do without having had them in the past.
Young artists also tend to be insanely paranoid about ART THEFT. We tend to see our art as this super-precious excretion of our SOUL and there is no WAY we'd let just ANYONE play with THAT. And again - this is the culture surrounding the core skills. This is what we're taught as we decide to become artists. A scarcity culture.
People will download huge torrents of comics while being worried someone will steal their precious, precious (derivative) creation. One foot in the post-scarcity world where stuff is infinitely duplicatable once it's digital, one foot in the scarcity world where every item is as valuable as the time you spent, because you can only sell it once... but programmers have a culture that came out of the science world, which is all about sharing information, and was shaped by the incredible ease of sharing bits.
Artists also act like this because of the way so many people shamelessly swipe their images against their wishes - there are a lot of people who ruin everything they post online with huge ugly watermarks because they'd rather that than find it reposted to some kid's Deviantart account as "theirs".
Also, the culture of artists has been handed down through eons of scarcity: we have been trained to see our art as a scarce resource, and to require money for its creation and/or reproduction. The culture of programmers comes from a world of plenty, where getting the respect of your peers pretty much MEANS sharing everything needed to recreate your final product - in part because it's so damn easy. Sharing a painting is hard, it's made of atoms. And we still have artist culture based on everything we make being atoms - hell, I still see people whinging about how only traditional media can be "real art" because of some mystical connection between the artist's soul and the blobs of paint they laid down on the canvas.
Hi! I prefer Macs to Windows or Linux boxes. I'm not rabid; use what you like. I'm willing to pay a bit more for Apple smoothing as many corners as they can off of the user experience; if you're happy with more corners and more left in your wallet, that is awesome for you!
I stopped being fanatical when they finally pried my cold, dead Amiga from my hands.
It makes more sense in the original context, where these thoughts and suggestions are ascribed to record company execs: the suggestion is that a record company exec who would rather sue someone who did this than sign them should be ready to be unemployed.
Re:I know no one likes a smartypants but ...
on
Jurassic Web
·
· Score: 1
I think I remember seeing people saying "FTFY" back when I was giggling at alt.fan.warlord in '94 or so. HTH, HAND.
Slashdot Mirror
it would be silly to put a pre-packaged blog software on there. :)
Would it? Unless you have some crazy-ass unique use-case that you need to fill, I could make a case that writing your own blog package might suggest that you're the kind of guy who wastes a lot of time on wheel reinvention.
If you wanna write your own because you like to code, then fine - do it for fun, and say "I use my own blog package because I thought it would be fun to roll my own."
There is a chunk of Javascript that can get you 90% of the way to IE compatibility a lot of the time. Saves days of my life.
Who are these guys? What's their methodology for getting data?
When I go to their home page to see if I can discover these things, a bar on the side tells me that I'm running "Operating System
Mac OSX - Puma 10.4.11". This does not make me wanna trust these people.
"Sorry, man, the battery's just about dead."
"Sorry, man, the net's broken, I just use this for my notes and shit."
Or you could just say "no" unless it's a screaming emergency. I mean, if someone's expecting to show some files on an usb key, they'll have set things up to have a machine handy, right?
And if you feel you must let everyone (or some subset of everyone) use your machine, set up a guest account and turn on fast user switching.
Or you could just leave the thing at home as often as not so that people don't expect you to be That Dude With The Laptop. This really sounds like it's more of a social problem than a technical one.
Depends on your teachers and the focus of the school. If you're going to a "fine art" curriculum, yeah. But there are schools that focus on trying to beat all the skills of Actually Being Able To Draw into your tiny little head, too. And then there's going out and getting a job at an animation studio and having a grizzled old vet tell you exactly how shitty your art is in loving detail, and how to make it better...
When you're young and still unsure of your skills, it's really easy to promise that you'll do a full-color piece of art for something like US$5 - waaaaay too low. After all, all the other beginners are pricing like that; hell, some of the people teetering on the cusp between "fan" and "pro" are still pricing themselves like that.
Now, artists will trade stories about their nightmare commissions; like any specialist group, we share our war stories. And the one thing I've noticed is that almost every story about a picky commissioner who demands ten rounds of changes on an finished piece is also one about a commission that's way below what the artist's time is worth.
I avoided doing commissions for a long time. When I finally did start doing them, I looked around at the going rates and positioned myself well above the bottom, offering very limited numbers of commissions at a time. And you know what? The first set sold out like lightning. I raised my prices for the second set and they still went quick. And everyone's reaction upon getting their art was "wow!" - some people even threw in a bit more money afterwards. Nobody asked for changes, everyone knew they'd be getting my interpretation of their scenario.
A few sets of commissions down the line, I did an experiment: instead of setting a price, I let people pay what they thought it was worth. One person who was quite broke paid about half of my usual price; the other two people in that set of commissions more than made up for her lack of funds.
If you price yourself like a slave, people will treat you like one. Set your rates to something fair and you get treated like the skilled professional you are. All the people writing iPhone games for $.99 are hanging out a sign that says "my hard work is worth next to nothing"; it is not surprising to find consumers treating them badly.
Yeah. There's this place in Boston - "Newbury Comics" - that mostly sells CDs. And action figures, and DVDs, and posters, and... stuff. Comics are just two or three little units way in the back, as far away from the entrance as you can get. It must be working well for them because there's nearly thirty Newbury Comics stores scattered around New England.
All I ever get there is hair dye; when I want to get comics I go to other stores that still primarily have... comics.
Steve Reich? Come away with me and have lesbian codebabies.
Wow, way to avoid reinforcing stereotypes there, Eric!
I think it's more that a lot of us have phases where we hang out with nothing but other trannies, so we don't have anyone else to do. It's also a matter of finding the right guys; I am mostly hot for ladies myself but I have two lovely boyfriends.
Well, hey, I know a lot of transwomen who are total nerds. I mean, one is a malware researcher who regularly spends hours of her life staring at raw x86 disassemblies. If you're not hung up on breeding, some transchicks make pretty awesome girlfriends for the slashdot type.
Thanks! I've never played any incarnation of Warcraft, so almost nothing about this article made a damn bit of sense to me.
What is DotA?
No, seriously; the article is of no use, and the link in the article to what appears to be the homepage of this DotA game that this code hacks on top of is also completely useless in telling me what kind of game this actually is; everything involved in this is a cryptic thicket of terms for this highly involved game I have never heard of.
It'll sure have a huge impact on movies being made by five friends with whatever effects they and their buddies can put together! Hack together your own mo-cap studio for a couple thousand, and the amount of stuff you can do goes way up.
Also:
Mm, point. I read the 'original' version and the restored version; my memories are more of the restored version.
Mostly I think it was just the part where Mandella visits his aging mom in an overpopulated Earth? I dunno, it's been a while and Wikipedia doesn't have the obsessively detailed spoilerriffic list of changes that I would expect to be there.
Did you read a different book than I did? One of the important plot threads is Mandella's fragmented-by-interstellar-travel romance.
If all you remember was the battles on remote planets and the clone armies and whatnot, you did not get the point of the book at all - it's Haldeman's Vietnam-era rebuttal to the largely pro-war stance of Heinlein's Starship Troopers. The human dimension is important.
There's a very hardcore skill challenge in Braid: Find all the stars and make the constellation light up.
The programmers have grown up, just like you. They have families, they have hobbies, they would like to go out and have fun now and then.
This article is not complaining that he can't charge $60. He's complaining that he can't charge $30 in these new downloadable channels, which is barely above break-even for his sales and his costs.
Yes, they should be more.
I am a long-time fan of Jeff Minter. The other year, he released "Space Giraffe" for the XBox360. As a downloadable game for $5.
He did not, I believe, make back his development costs.
(Admittedly, it was a hard game to get into; I'm hoping he learnt from the reactions people who are not wired the same way he and I are, and that his next game will be more approachable.)
Me, I loved it. And when he ported it to the PC, I leapt at the chance to buy it again. Not because I wanted the extra levels he added, not because I wanted to play it on a PC - but because I wanted to finish paying Jeff for the fun I had. I literally felt guilty because $5 felt like I was ripping him off for the amount of fun his game gave me.
The race to the bottom, with the $1 games on iPhones, is one that nobody wins - developers abandon their indy dreams and get a job as a minor cog working on "Derivative Safe Game IV", users don't get more cool games. All we get are throwaway pieces of crap that extend brands, and first efforts by newbies living in their parents' basements.
The myth of the suffering artist is a load of bullshit. Pernicious, damaging bullshit - it kept me depressed for quite a few years because I was afraid that the Muse would vanish if I stopped being so damn mopey. I got out of that and guess what? I don't suffer for my art, and I do more of it; I'm confident enough to embark upon year-long personal projects and get them done.
Have you ever done any beautiful art? I have. I like to think I have, at least, and people look at my stuff and call it that. Yeah, there are sparks of inspiration that come from nowhere. I have whole sketchbooks chock full of that kind of thing. Then I look at the books and decide which ones to bother working up into finished pieces. I have a lot more bits of awesome inspiration than I will ever have the time and energy to finish.
And the last place I feel inspired is when I am stressed out, tired, worried, and fearful. That part of the brain comes on when I'm relaxed and have the freedom to jumble all kinds of random things around in my head until two or three things blend together into something neat.
Me, I haven't done any video games - I had enough crunch in the animation industry under someone who thought like you did. I burnt out and left. That's what perpetu-crunch does.
I won't disagree on the code-is-art front; I've done enough programming to know there is a near-infinity of ways to solve a problem, and an art to picking which one to use!
Visual artists stand on the shoulders of other artists too; we constantly steal from each other (or are influenced by each other - same thing, really *grin*). We need each other's critique, we need each others' lessons. We don't rely on each others' work quite as directly as a programmer - I can as easily sit in a cafe and draw in a sketchbook as I can do it here at home with a ton of reference and inspiration in reach. But I wouldn't draw the way I do without having had them in the past.
Young artists also tend to be insanely paranoid about ART THEFT. We tend to see our art as this super-precious excretion of our SOUL and there is no WAY we'd let just ANYONE play with THAT. And again - this is the culture surrounding the core skills. This is what we're taught as we decide to become artists. A scarcity culture.
People will download huge torrents of comics while being worried someone will steal their precious, precious (derivative) creation. One foot in the post-scarcity world where stuff is infinitely duplicatable once it's digital, one foot in the scarcity world where every item is as valuable as the time you spent, because you can only sell it once... but programmers have a culture that came out of the science world, which is all about sharing information, and was shaped by the incredible ease of sharing bits.
Artists also act like this because of the way so many people shamelessly swipe their images against their wishes - there are a lot of people who ruin everything they post online with huge ugly watermarks because they'd rather that than find it reposted to some kid's Deviantart account as "theirs".
Also, the culture of artists has been handed down through eons of scarcity: we have been trained to see our art as a scarce resource, and to require money for its creation and/or reproduction. The culture of programmers comes from a world of plenty, where getting the respect of your peers pretty much MEANS sharing everything needed to recreate your final product - in part because it's so damn easy. Sharing a painting is hard, it's made of atoms. And we still have artist culture based on everything we make being atoms - hell, I still see people whinging about how only traditional media can be "real art" because of some mystical connection between the artist's soul and the blobs of paint they laid down on the canvas.
Hi! I prefer Macs to Windows or Linux boxes. I'm not rabid; use what you like. I'm willing to pay a bit more for Apple smoothing as many corners as they can off of the user experience; if you're happy with more corners and more left in your wallet, that is awesome for you!
I stopped being fanatical when they finally pried my cold, dead Amiga from my hands.
It makes more sense in the original context, where these thoughts and suggestions are ascribed to record company execs: the suggestion is that a record company exec who would rather sue someone who did this than sign them should be ready to be unemployed.
I think I remember seeing people saying "FTFY" back when I was giggling at alt.fan.warlord in '94 or so. HTH, HAND.