First off - no - , you made a claim that you utterly failed to follow up with. I've read their response - they still didn't write an article, or take an official stance, defending bullying, which is the impression the hysteria from your camp projects. Other people chimed in about the tweet, but nothing you folks clutch your pearls about holds water. You were basically farming for something - anything - to try and legitimize your group as being some kind of misunderstood victim, due to the term "sexist asshole" being nearly synonymous with "GamerGate". Nobody bought the act, sorry. You can't get blood from a turnip, and it was just a fucking tweet, not a Wikileaks dump, ffs.
Seriously fuck off with the whole "shitty human being" schtick. As I already pointed out, you GG folks didn't give TWO SHITS that actual female games journalists were getting DEATH THREATS and publicly doxxed - not having to deal with the much more severe problem, apparently, of reading a sarcastic tweet. How the fuck can you even bring up doxxing with a straight face...as though those women didn't have their personal information spread far and wide, all over the Internet in an attempt to cause them harm? Are you really THAT fucking delusional, that you see all the terrible shit that happened to those women as having nothing to do with what you call GG? Like no connection? All just a big coincidence?
The irony here is thick...on Monday you go on and FUCKING ON about how terrible easily offended "PC" culture is, with all of their SJW melodrama...and give us a lot of emo reasons as to why they're ruining your life, or whatever, and then, on Tuesday, you expect us to call in the national guard because some dipshit made a stupid NY-attitude tweet that hurt your little feelings. Yeah fucking right. Do you people not have a dictionary? Do you not know what a "contradiction" is?
The case is real simple, here. You can't bitch about some tweet, that offended you, when you didn't come to the defense of female journalists that were being ruthlessly threatened, and both condemn such cowardly acts and strongly clarify your group's positions in contrast - at the time. That didn't happen. You fucks added fuel to the fire and made these women's lives miserable.
Just for clarity, again, - my position is that you all suck. Fuck Gawker and their public shaming tabloid horseshit, and fuck GG and your anti-SJW mob-mentality bro-time horseshit. You fucks are two sides of the same god damn coin, and frankly I'm glad that both of you are dropping from the limelight. The world will be a better place. Maybe now people can be gay in the privacy of their own home, if they want to, and a woman can use her 1st amendment rights to speak about video games without a bunch of fucking neckbeards having an god damn aneurysm.
The rest of what you say is bullshit too. Like I predicted, you immediately pulled out the "No True Scotsman" card to explain away how GG is never responsible for anything...it's those mysterious "3rd parties". Give me a fucking break. Assholes have been saying shit like this since the dawn of time to scapegoat blame. Again, you'd have us believe that it was all a coincidence? That these "3rd parties" just happened to target female journalists at the same time your "totally legitimate" organization also had a lot of inflammatory rhetoric aimed at them? Sure....Fuck that.
So yeah, no fucking way do you get to start drawing imaginary borders between the things you do and do not want your little anti-SJW crusade to be associated with, and expect others to simply accept your convenient distinctions. Like a SJW, you know a GG jerk-off pretty much immediately.
Oh cry me a fucking river about the tweet. It was a "tweet", not an article, and one that was quickly clarified to be sarcastic joke, albeit not a very good one. I'm not going to deny that people that work for this news organization are a bunch of dicks...but this was a total red herring, with nothing to it. You're not talking about leaked secret emails or state dept. documents here.
Here's a fucking NEWSFLASH for you - people are human beings with opinions, and senses of humor. Gawker media is made of many, many of these entities, who may or may not all agree with each other.
They didn't write some elaborate article pontificating on the merits of bullying, as a news organization. One person made an unfunny joke in a whiny tweet, and the #Gamergate crowd apparently had skin thickness measuring in the sub-microns. FFS. Grow up. Everyone involved in this sucks, all around, and are a bunch of fucking crybaby drama queens. I shudder to imagine the epic meltdown when someone fucks up your Taco Bell order.
This same logic applies to "hypocrisy" you're attempting to point out. That concept only applies here, if we assume that there is one unifying voice that these entities all speak with. The authors at Jezebel and Gawker were obviously different people, with different motivations for what they were doing. At most, you're simply pointing out contradictory viewpoints from different authors, published on two different websites owned by the same company. That's not exactly a case of "hypocrisy" any more than it is for Fox to have their news channel, and run a blatantly left-leaning program like Family Guy, or a newspaper running contradictory editorials. You need more evidence, showing a biased intent, to support such a claim.
If you want to talk about hypocrisy - how about the attempts to crucify some NY dumbass over a tweet, while meanwhile, the #Gamergate crowd was saying and doing some pretty horrific shit, in a lot of the places that they had an online presence. Can you really fucking bring up "bullying" with a straight face, when women were literally receiving deaththreats for the injurious crime of having unpopular opinions, and wanting to voice those in a public place? If you're so against "bullying" in games journalism why wasn't that the focus of your goddamn campaign? I imagine you have some BS definition of "Gamergate" that does the No True Scotsman's shuffle to distance yourself from those folks, and some token "hey guys...chill out" forum post, but seriously - fuck that. You can't remove those parts of your "movement" for being too extreme, and then condemn something like Gawker media, as a whole, without, yourself, being pretty big fucking hypocrites. I'd put the onus of responsibility on YOU to explain why so many terrible fucking people flocked to your banner, and said and did some pretty terrible things in your name - on your forums, in your comment sections, and so on.
Like I said - you all suck. Gawker sucks for what they did to Hogan, and deserved to lose the case. Gamergate sucked, and was a bunch of horseshit that embraced terrible people saying terrible things. Fuck you all.
Uh...I think you're oversimplifying the situation.
Fact #1: A LOT of multi-platform games have abysmal PC launches. Stability, if not overall performance, is obviously superior on consoles. From the recent release of No Man's Sky, to Dark Souls III, to last year's launch of Fallout 4, PC launches are often plagued with crashes, glitches, and nearly unplayable states, compared to their console versions. That's what "just-simply-work" means. You go to the store, put in your disk, and the game will load and play just fine - not crash to your desktop and corrupt your saves. I personally prefer to game on my PC, but I never count on a game's launch being a window to actually get to play said games, reliably.
Fact #2: You're also not factoring in cheats and hacks, which are HUGE factors for multiplayer PC gaming, that almost never effect consoles. Several high-profile AAA titles are sometimes nearly unplayable only because the mp component is on the PC, such as GTA V.
I think you blow off the problem of older games a bit too easily. If a classic game gets relaunched for the PS4 or Xbox, it's going to work, flawlessly. Ditto for Nintendo's virtual console. Meanwhile, Steam Link has trouble streaming some older games to your TV, creating, what is inherently a flawed experience. This is an actual problem for a lot of gamers.
People like consoles because they come with the assurance that someone else has already teased out any potential problems, and you're going to get a pretty seamless end-user experience. Just turn it on and start the game. Even "Mom" knows how to start Netflix, or play some Mario from a quick-launch screen, and that's considering that "Mom" hates dealing with computers (using my own mother as an example...don't infer too much sexist commentary here, please...). If you're just some random person, not too tech savvy, the process for installing and updating a GPU + drivers is far more advanced than simply confirming a mandatory install for a console's OS. For all it's advancements, PC gaming is still seen as a hobby of investment, with specialized technical knowledge as a prerequisite for participation, as opposed to the pure leisure activity that consoles come off as, which are no harder to get started with than a DVD player.
Of course the problem with console gaming isn't PCs, it's that they have to share all these advantages with smartphones and tablets - which also eat the lunch of PCs, by being somewhat general purpose.
This is an issue about semantics, I'll agree, but I don't see why that's a bad thing. You're not going to find a topic that depends more on semantics than the law. "Semantics" implies that there is an issue about the meaning of a word, which is the absolute core of this issue. If you don't know what a word, like "suspect", actually means, in the legal sense, don't use it in a banner fucking headline involving law enforcement officers.
Similarly, don't cry foul when you get called out for it because YOU were ignorant.
I already replied to your above post, so we're going to have some deju vu here.
Basically, you're not accurately representing what Conservative Treehouse said. They claimed the victim was a SUSPECT in a crime, which -yes- would support the argument that he was "wanted" for said crime. That's what a suspect IS - a person wanted for a crime. It's a legal term, with a legal meaning.
Snopes called Conservative Treehouse out for using the terms "suspect" and "matches the description of s suspect" interchangeably, and rightfully so.
If you have to tell someone at one point in your life that you were a "suspect" in a criminal investigation, or that you "matched the description of s suspect" in a criminal investigation, those words imply VERY different meanings.
Nothing that Snopes has said is factually inaccurate. They didn't change anything.
They claimed he was a "suspect", which was NOT true. You can't argue with the facts, I'm sorry. There's a HUGE difference between BEING a suspect, and matching the DESCRIPTION of a suspect. They are not interchangeable concepts. One is an escalation of the other. "Suspect" is a term that implies established evidence against a person in question has been definitively gathered. It has a very strict legal meaning, which involve things like Miranda rights, and you are NOT a suspect in a crime for merely being detained. This was obviously not the case for the shooting victim, and that's what Snopes was pointing out. He was never a suspect. Conservative Treehouse didn't know the difference, and got called out for it. Now, you're defending that same dumb mistake.
It doesn't matter how Conservative Treehouse qualified their headline in the actual story, the headline was a still a blatant lie. Snopes, in no way whatsoever, misstated Conservative Treehouse's words. They blatantly said that he was an "Armed Robbery Suspect" in plain fucking english. You don't get to pick and choose, after the fact, which facts are supposed to matter, and which ones don't when you speak.
So, yes, it's entirely appropriate to call you out for claiming Snopes made a "strawman" argument. They did not. Everything they said is factually accurate, unlike the Conservative Treehouse article. Quit defending stupidity.
Why should they have to jump through hoops to pick a way to frame something in a way that supports your conservative agenda?
So...if Snopes wanted to investigate the statements made by Conservative Treehouse, how, EXACTLY, were they supposed to do that according to you?
You even use the term "more correct framing". Snopes has no obligation to "correctly" frame things so that it suits your right-wing political goals. You understand that when you're calling for things to be "framed correctly", that you're doing that from a BIASED political point of view, correct? They factually reported on something that had a limited and specific scope, that did not leave the bounds of the website in question. That's all they did. There was nothing "incorrect" about their framing.
All of this bullshit about "false narratives" is coming straight out of your Ronald Reagan themed crystal ball. Nothing they said was "false". If you're telling the truth, and not being misleading in scope, you can't be guilty of providing a "false narrative".
They didn't make any other statements about other conservatives, or use misleading language to imply that this was an issue beyond "Conservative Treehouse", unless you think it's Snopes' fault that the website put "conservative" in their own name.
So...basically if Snopes doesn't go out of their way to have a conservative bias...then they automatically have a liberal one? Think about what you're saying. Snopes is supposed to come to some kind of consensus from the "conservative media" - before - publishing an article, and make sure to print things that represent this broad point of view. You lay out what they should have printed instead, which conveniently ignores the factually inaccurate information laid out by "Conservative Treehouse".
So, Snopes wasn't supposed to be investigating false claims made by individuals, they were supposed to be fact-checking the broad, consensus based, conclusions of the right-wing media, instead. Or what? What you're claiming Snopes should do is BLATANTLY driven by political bias, as it would automatically eliminate undesirable sources like Conservative Treehouse, and ironically, a hypocritical example of exactly the type of thing you're attempting to criticize Snopes for in the first place - which is to show bias.
You're essentially trying to claim conservatives shouldn't be held to standards for what they say, alone, but should be judged, instead, by the broader claims of their peers. To actually hold someone accountable for things they have said is somehow, paradoxically, "misleading", because it's not their individual thoughts that matter, but what the greater group thinks. Yeah, pretty scary shit.
Meanwhile, I can find multiple stories, right now, on the "What's New" page of Snopes which contain damaging things to say about Democrats, including Hillary.
You go as far to call the act of Snopes rebuking a factually incorrect website a misleading "strawman", which is utterly and fundamentally a misuse of those words. You're not making a "strawman" argument if you're fact checking what someone has said. That's not what a "strawman" is.
You see...the part crucially missing from your argument is the non-existent paragraph at the end of the article where Snopes says "Oh yeah, by the way, most conservatives think this way...vote Hillary". If anyone makes judgement calls about another conservative based on the actions of conservative treehouse, that's on them, as Snopes, obviously, didn't advocate this.
Have you considered that maybe it's "reality" and those pesky "facts", and not Snopes, that's making some conservatives look bad? Snopes didn't make up "Conservative Treehouse", after all.
It's gets even harder and harder to accept that this was some kind of "assassination" unless you think the Clintons are the stupidest people on earth. If you were trying to "disappear" someone...wouldn't you...you know...make it "look like an accident"?
Why would you outright murder them - an act SURE to open a criminal investigation, instead of making it look like a suicide, accident, etc.?
When coupled with what, exactly, their motive would have been in the first place, this just doesn't make any practical sense whatsoever. There's no way Clinton is stupid enough to kill someone, before an election, out of "revenge".
It sure does make some kind of conspiratorial sense, I guess...but why would you do something like this? What possible benefit would the Clinton campaign gain through murder that wouldn't be MASSIVELY offset by the risk of actually murdering someone?
Murdering someone for political purposes seems like the worst possible thing you could do right now as a candidate, for any reason. Why? Was he going to "leak" even more? Surely, if so, he had things already in place to accomplish this, in the case of his untimely demise.
In other words, the motive is extremely unclear.
Meanwhile, however, Assange has a double-whammy opportunity here, as a known Clinton hater. He can both insinuate that Clinton might be a fucking murderer AND protect the real identity of whoever he has on the inside, by taking advantage of an unfortunate coincidence.
Until we see some proof that the murder victim actually was the leaker in question, I'm going to go with Occam's razor and pick the latter as the most probable explanation, here.
For your analogy to make any rational sense, the NYT would have to BE a foreign agent attempting to illegally hack into computers under American jurisdiction. This isn't in any way, shape, or form remotely similar to Daniel Ellisberg leaking the Pentagon Papers. Ellisberg, a US government employee, made a choice of conscious, and was charged with conspiracy, espionage, and theft of government property.
Let's repeat that for emphasis...
ELLISBERG WAS CHARGED WITH CONSPIRACY, ESPIONAGE, AND THEFT OF GOVERNMENT PROPERTY. THE NYT WAS CHARGED WITH NOTHING.
The only reason the charges against him were dropped was due to the revelations of the Watergate scandal. The Nixon administration tried to stop the NYT from publishing the information, but was shut down by the supreme court, who made a pretty strong statement in favor of the free press. So NO. These situations are NOTHING alike. Ellisberg is much more similar, in character, to Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden, than China or Russia. I'm going to remind you that Manning is in prison, and Snowden lives in exile. REPORTING NEWS and COMMITTING A CRIME are entirely different actions, for fuck's sake. If the NYT had hacked a computer, and leaked the information, they could both win a Pulitzer AND go to jail for committing a crime. Two actions - two consequences. The news story here is that a presidential candidate is advocating a foreign agent to commit a crime, you fucking idiot, and has nothing to do with reporting the news.
Apples and oranges, but don't let logic get in the way of that axe you have to grind.
Yeah fuck that. Apple just made my decision, for me, of which phone to get next.
How can anyone defend the deplorable practice of doing away with a common industry standard, and instead coming up with some new, proprietary solution to a problem that's already solved. I don't want headphones that run on batteries...and I REALLY don't want to buy lighting-adapter headphones that will ONLY work on Apple products, or have to worry about losing some bulky god damn adapter. Trying to expand the walled garden so that in encompasses something as simple as headphones if beyond fucking offensive.
The entire premise of this article, comparing an audio jack to a floppy drive, is so utterly stupid, it defies logic. You see, floppy drives were SUPPLANTED by superior technology, the CD, as were CDs by DVDs, and DVDs by USB drives, and so on. There were tangible benefits to doing without them. A lighting adapter adds nothing of value - to anyone - as far as audio is concerned. People are not going to replace the analog ports on their amps with lighting adapters, you fucking idiot. The comparison makes zero sense, and only stands to benefit Apple. How can people be such transparent shills. Jesus fucking Christ.
You're comparing apples to oranges. The Titan X was pushed more towards people that want a card for Software use, such as 3d rendering, not just for gaming. In desktop software applications, that aren't gaming, the Titan X has a clear performance gain.
I mean, Nvidia aren't - that - stupid, to release an inferior product for hundreds of more dollars, lol.
...are there two "news" stories about a new Nvidia card? Didn't ya'll just post about the unveiling of the card? Why do we need a follow-up story, when someone plays a new game on it? That seems less than newsworthy...I'm not saying that we've got paid articles being posted....but something doesn't smell right...
NOBODY that actually lives in the south thinks "redneck" is a racial slur. Nobody. Your college definition has little relevance to the real world. Being a redneck is about your attitude towards life and your actions, not your income or intelligence level. It's more akin to words like "gangster", "intellectual", "hippie", "tomboy" and so on, not words like "white", "black", or "asian". It's not a god damn racial slur, despite whatever eggheads think it's historical origins might be, for the same fucking reason that you can't be racist against hippies. Two brothers can come from the same family, and one of them can be a redneck and one of can not be. It just depends on how you turn out. I should know, I'm one of those brothers.
I'm not saying that you can't use the term in a bigoted way to denigrate poor folks, just don't call it a damn racial slur. The south has enough problems with race relations without jackasses wanting to muddy the waters with this kind of horseshit. Calling someone a redneck in no way carries the gravity of calling a black person ANY racial slur. Just don't even compare the two.
That's a spurious argument. Amazon already sells tons of Apple products, including the Ipad, which is a direct competitor with their cheaper Kindles.
Apple is a specialty store, only carrying their own products, or products closely related to them. Amazon in a general marketplace, selling almost everything under the sun. Huge difference.
As someone who grew up playing 90's era Squaresoft titles, I think this is pretty much the case, but I think it's worth elaborating on.
Whether intentional or not, older Squaresoft titles had a decent mix of western and Japanese cultural influences. The original FF games, for example, largely pulled from D&D for their bestiary, and by and large reflected the western medieval fantasy atmosphere with a Japanese take on character development and storytelling. When you took a game like FFVI, it really felt like the best of both worlds. Fantastical, but cohesive, despite having several influences. I'm not saying that they need to go back to these medieval roots - it's just that Squaresoft was more willing, then, to fuse multiple cultural influences. Obviously, it's their games and they can do what they want.
For me, it's not really the mechanics of the games, it's the culture of them. I'm not knocking it if it's your thing, but I really have no interest in all of the whiny, teenage, anime, emo, costume, hairdo stuff that seems to make up modern Jrpgs, which is a shame because I really like Jrpg gameplay mechanics. I've tried, mind you. There was a point in FFXII when a character pulls out a pair of "cool" sunglasses...for some reason. It just made no fucking sense. Wait...this universe has plastic? And they apparently ONLY use it to make cool sunglasses? Early on in FFXIII - the only game in my very nerdy history I've ever returned because I've hated the game so much - there's a moment when you encounter some kid with the most ludicrously impractical giant blue hairdo I've ever seen. It must have taken, like 5 hours to get that right. It would have been awesome if I were watching a John Waters movie, but there was no way I was going to put with an entire game's worth of self-important drivel with crap like that just being part of the norm. I decided then that I was done with Square. Way too much style, fashion, and attitude, anachronisms be damned. That, and irritating porcelain supermodels instead of actual characters.
These types of things aren't the challenges I want my suspension of disbelief to overcome when I play rpgs. To be fair, every game is going to have to bend logic to a certain extent, but you can handle it one of two ways - you can either tread carefully around the liberties you're taking and attempt to give your universe some kind of well crafted internal logic and reasonable justification, or just say fuck it and put in whatever teenagers think is cool at the time. Modern FF games feel way too much like they want to have their cake and eat it too - we want a SERIOUS, emotionally engaging gameworld with swords, monsters, magic, and so on...but we also want cell phones, pop-star singing, sports cars, and modern technology - when it's cool. Just put in whatever's cool. Like sunglasses. No wait! - cars! Vrrroooommmm! It just seems like an 11-year old is coming up with this shit.
I guess what I'm saying, is that they're way too Japanese for me, no offense to anyone. It makes sense. I don't like 95% of the anime I've tried to watch for similar reasons. Square game were increasingly a battle for me to enjoy them, having to look past the hairdos, fashion, and skimpy/big-titty nonsense to appreciate them. I can't do it anymore though, because it seems like they just keep cranking the dial up at every turn. It's not a concept unique to Squaresoft, there are similar debates going on right now about the gun-toting stripper they shoehorned into MGSV for "reasons", in what is considered to, otherwise, be a stellar game.
If you want to look at an example of a Japanese rpg that doesn't pull this crap, look at the Souls series. These are some of my favorite games, primarily, I think, because they are a great mixture of multiple influences. Sure, they have some of the annoying impracticality found in Japanese tropes, like swords about 50 times too heavy to ever be used or "costumes", but on the whole, it's negligible and very optional. No annoying teenage emo characte
It's nice how you try and package those two concepts together as though you can't have one without the other. Yes, we are slaves to labor, given that it's a situation of life-long forced dependance. If you don't believe that, take your soon to be homeless ass out into the street and quit working. American-style chattel slavery is not the only form of slavery, you know, despite standing out as a situation of unimaginable horror. It's very similar to way that the term "holocaust" is almost exclusively associated with the mass extermination of the Jews, when Native Americans suffered far greater casualties in the American holocaust.
That being said, why would you then think we don't have responsibility for the choices we make? Choice and slavery are not dichotomous. In a situation of slavery, the consequences can be dire for the choices you make, but you still have them - and you are still responsible for them. For example, in history, chattel slaves have had the choice to attempt rebellions. Sometimes, like with Haiti, it actually worked out for them. They weren't on some form of fatalistic autopilot, every one of those people had a choice to rebel, and enough heroically chose to do so to overthrow the French enslavers.
This looks pretty cool, but I have a lot of questions.
On it's surface, it looks like a lot of the results they're getting wouldn't currently be outside of the realm of student level work, such as the simple practice of projecting and baking textures into materials from photographs, the innovation seems to be that they're quickly automating a lot of that stuff into a UI with a fast lighting solution. One of the things I find most rewarding about 3d is that you sometimes get this huge burst of increased productivity, as long as you're not too bummed out about things you've spent time and energy learning how to do becoming obsolete. This isn't that different, fundamentally, than setting your viewport background in Maya, 3ds Max, etc. to be a photograph after properly matting your foreground objects and projecting textures with adjusted reflectivity, just without all of the manual tediousness. Also, there's also been other, similar work done on the subject, that I've heard of, but this still looks pretty neat if it's something you can use right now without a billion dollar computer.
One of the big things this tech might be doing is streamlining the process of match lighting. I personally can't wait till the major software packages have integrated solutions for easy lighting from photo sources. Currently the setup for photo matting is a pain, it requires stitching together panoramic photos of reflective chrome spheres - on location - or carefully using observation skills to recreate the lighting by hand (which can be very difficult for glossy surfaces). It would appear, however, that we're on the brink of not needing those things anymore. That being said, this software still has a bit to go, however.
For example, the lighting information baked into the diffuse textures of the objects, in these examples, does not appear to be dynamic - if you watch the taxi-spinning segment you'll notice that the specular highlights on the hood of the car do not properly update as the orientation of the model changes in relationship to the light sources, making the taxi appear to have white paint streaks once rotated out of alignment with the light source. The car falling off the cliff example is probably the most apparent in final results, as the strong baked lighting makes the coloring look off. The way we 3d artists get around this problem is to eliminate the lighting information in our diffuse textures as much as possible before reapplying them as flat color, and then let our lighting rigs take care of the reflections, shadows, and such. As they mention this software doesn't support transparency, and I would guess is rendering everything as matte objects, meaning the renderer probably isn't robust enough to handle anything coming close to complicated reflections/refractions and so on, making this software's usefulness very situational, currently. It would be a great way to quickly populate photos with hordes of smaller objects, for example. However, with a more powerful renderer, feature wise, this tech could be really useful for the Photoshop crowd. I wish Autodesk/Mental Ray would focus on stuff like this instead of the boring crap updates we usually get (Maya's new fluids are pretty cool though, tbh...).
If we're talking about unbiased render engines, Max got the Iray engine a couple of years back. 3dsMax and Maya already both come packaged with Mental Ray, which produces amazing results. Lots of people use 3rd party render engines, such as V-ray, but that really comes down to preference.
I'm not trying to be an ass, but if you use the same program day in and day out, missing a transform gizmo is rarely going to be an issue. Even if you do, a quick undo brings that selection right back. Furthermore, Max has a lock selection hotkey assigned by default to the biggest key on the keyboard for dense, overlapping scenes. On top of that, you can use the + and - keys to change the size of the gizmo if you're having a hard time selecting them at your resolution.
In other words, there are plenty of features designed to address the problem you bring up, in this particular software. The amount of times you're going to be frustrated by dropping a selection doesn't merit removing a left-click based workflow.
Again, it's just silly and borderline arrogant to set up Blender the way they do. The 3d cursor tool that is assigned to left clicking by default, by far the most important button in almost all other DCC software, isn't exactly a killer feature. As far as I know, it's unique to Blender, however, and one suspects that this is the reason it's given such coveted real-estate hotkey wise. The 3d cursor has it's uses, but should be assigned to a sub-menu. I would rarely use the tool - which would mean I'd want to turn it off completely to quit mucking up the viewport, and only turn it on when I needed it. That would mean that left-clicking in the viewport would essentially do nothing useful for me most of the time, which is just an absurd waste of resources. Sure, these things can be remapped, but I'd rather not bother trying to learn the bass ackwards Blender way of doing everything, and spend that energy learning software that actually works with you through relying on well established workflows and customs and only breaks from those customs when it's actually necessary or truly innovative.
Honestly, it's like a document editor that uses right clicking to place the cursor and select text, has non-standard hotkeys for things like copying and pasting text, and assigns an occasional useful tool, like bullet pointing, to left click by default. I love to use OS software, but I wouldn't dream of using Open Office if it shippped like this...
In most 3d programs, left clicking is the main tool for interacting with menus and objects in general. In 3ds Max, for example, you select, move, translate, edit, select menu options, push buttons, change spinners, etc., all with the left mouse button. The right mouse button is used to cancel operations, or bring up sub-menus. Most DCC software is similarly left-click based. To intentionally change this pattern, for no real good reason, is just silly.
When you say Blender has one of the "fastest GUIs in existence", I would assume you are including the viewports. If you make a torus with 200 segs both in width and height, Blender will be chugging to edit such a high density object. Selecting ring and edge loops takes at least a second in time (if that doesn't sound like much, believe me that time adds up...) 3dsmax will edit such a mesh with ease, any sub-object selections are nearly instantaneous. Also, you're going to see noticeable slowdown in Blender even navigating around such a mesh if edit mode is on. Along those lines, copy that mesh about ten times into your scene. By about the tenth copy, Blender's viewports become pretty unusable, on my rig. Meanwhile in 3ds Max, I have to get to the 120th copy of that 200x200 torus to even see a drop in fps, let alone anything approaching unusable. After increasing the torus count to 480 I had a noticeable drop in fps, but a still totally usable scene. The poly count from the torus primitives was over 38 million, and I had a workable viewport of between 12-14 fps, if you want the details. What does this mean? For pro level work involving millions of polys, Blender isn't really an option as a modelling/animation tool. It does fine on low poly models, such as for gaming, product vis, etc., but it wouldn't be able to run any of the scenes I use on a daily basis, regardless of my hardware. I haven't tested Blender for how responsive it is with hundreds or thousands of low poly objects, but I'm guessing not great. If you're going to call something a "kick-ass pro-level 3D Tool" you have to account for these kinds of major limitations. Blender can deliver professional results, but it's going to take a lot more time
Lightwave is not an industry leader in the field of particles. Anyone working in 3d knows that Houdini is the top dog here, and the cost of that package reflects that status.
UI's are part taste and part ergonomics, and I personally find Blender to fail both of these tests, in my opinion. Blender seems to intentionally be as different as it can. The last thing I want to do is have to learn another set of shortcuts and conventions, especially when they are as topsy turvy as blender's. Believe me when I say the intentionally unorthodox UI is one of the biggest reasons why a lot of experienced 3d artists don't even bother with Blender (there are zero overlapping common shortcuts, except for undo, that I've found so far). Take the annoying "3d cursor" that follows around your left clicks, and is bound to confound any newcomer to 3d. What does that do? Why is it here? Why doesn't clicking in black space deselect an object or seem to do anything important? The 3d cursor is a niche tool that could easily be relegated to a sub menu where you could turn it on or off or edit it's properties. Assigning this unintuitive tool to a left click by default, the main method of interacting with objects in the viewports of most 3d software, is simply baffling. I find flippant, experimental decisions like that frustrating, personally. Of course you can take the time to learn the Blender way to do things, or you could take way less time to learn software that works more like you're used to, such as Modo or Mudbox. For example, my first time using Mudbox was an absolute joy. I was happily sculpting for days without ever having to refer to the manual. Things were layed out in a way that made intuitive sense. I would have still been trying to figure out where Blender put some common tool by the time I was already making satifying art in Mudbox. Software is allowed to be "unorthodox" if the payoff is big enough. This is how Zbrush gets away with it's wacky shit. Unfortunately, for a lot of 3d artists I know, Blender isn't worth the investment/muscle memory it takes to become proficient.
Of course, one of the biggest problems with Blender is it's lack of a decent native renderer. Complex shaders and GI in Blender aren't really up to task currently. It's great t
Slashdot Mirror
First off - no - , you made a claim that you utterly failed to follow up with. I've read their response - they still didn't write an article, or take an official stance, defending bullying, which is the impression the hysteria from your camp projects. Other people chimed in about the tweet, but nothing you folks clutch your pearls about holds water. You were basically farming for something - anything - to try and legitimize your group as being some kind of misunderstood victim, due to the term "sexist asshole" being nearly synonymous with "GamerGate". Nobody bought the act, sorry. You can't get blood from a turnip, and it was just a fucking tweet, not a Wikileaks dump, ffs.
Seriously fuck off with the whole "shitty human being" schtick. As I already pointed out, you GG folks didn't give TWO SHITS that actual female games journalists were getting DEATH THREATS and publicly doxxed - not having to deal with the much more severe problem, apparently, of reading a sarcastic tweet. How the fuck can you even bring up doxxing with a straight face...as though those women didn't have their personal information spread far and wide, all over the Internet in an attempt to cause them harm? Are you really THAT fucking delusional, that you see all the terrible shit that happened to those women as having nothing to do with what you call GG? Like no connection? All just a big coincidence?
The irony here is thick...on Monday you go on and FUCKING ON about how terrible easily offended "PC" culture is, with all of their SJW melodrama...and give us a lot of emo reasons as to why they're ruining your life, or whatever, and then, on Tuesday, you expect us to call in the national guard because some dipshit made a stupid NY-attitude tweet that hurt your little feelings. Yeah fucking right. Do you people not have a dictionary? Do you not know what a "contradiction" is?
The case is real simple, here. You can't bitch about some tweet, that offended you, when you didn't come to the defense of female journalists that were being ruthlessly threatened, and both condemn such cowardly acts and strongly clarify your group's positions in contrast - at the time. That didn't happen. You fucks added fuel to the fire and made these women's lives miserable.
Just for clarity, again, - my position is that you all suck. Fuck Gawker and their public shaming tabloid horseshit, and fuck GG and your anti-SJW mob-mentality bro-time horseshit. You fucks are two sides of the same god damn coin, and frankly I'm glad that both of you are dropping from the limelight. The world will be a better place. Maybe now people can be gay in the privacy of their own home, if they want to, and a woman can use her 1st amendment rights to speak about video games without a bunch of fucking neckbeards having an god damn aneurysm.
The rest of what you say is bullshit too. Like I predicted, you immediately pulled out the "No True Scotsman" card to explain away how GG is never responsible for anything...it's those mysterious "3rd parties". Give me a fucking break. Assholes have been saying shit like this since the dawn of time to scapegoat blame. Again, you'd have us believe that it was all a coincidence? That these "3rd parties" just happened to target female journalists at the same time your "totally legitimate" organization also had a lot of inflammatory rhetoric aimed at them? Sure....Fuck that.
So yeah, no fucking way do you get to start drawing imaginary borders between the things you do and do not want your little anti-SJW crusade to be associated with, and expect others to simply accept your convenient distinctions. Like a SJW, you know a GG jerk-off pretty much immediately.
Oh cry me a fucking river about the tweet. It was a "tweet", not an article, and one that was quickly clarified to be sarcastic joke, albeit not a very good one. I'm not going to deny that people that work for this news organization are a bunch of dicks...but this was a total red herring, with nothing to it. You're not talking about leaked secret emails or state dept. documents here.
Here's a fucking NEWSFLASH for you - people are human beings with opinions, and senses of humor. Gawker media is made of many, many of these entities, who may or may not all agree with each other.
They didn't write some elaborate article pontificating on the merits of bullying, as a news organization. One person made an unfunny joke in a whiny tweet, and the #Gamergate crowd apparently had skin thickness measuring in the sub-microns. FFS. Grow up. Everyone involved in this sucks, all around, and are a bunch of fucking crybaby drama queens. I shudder to imagine the epic meltdown when someone fucks up your Taco Bell order.
This same logic applies to "hypocrisy" you're attempting to point out. That concept only applies here, if we assume that there is one unifying voice that these entities all speak with. The authors at Jezebel and Gawker were obviously different people, with different motivations for what they were doing. At most, you're simply pointing out contradictory viewpoints from different authors, published on two different websites owned by the same company. That's not exactly a case of "hypocrisy" any more than it is for Fox to have their news channel, and run a blatantly left-leaning program like Family Guy, or a newspaper running contradictory editorials. You need more evidence, showing a biased intent, to support such a claim.
If you want to talk about hypocrisy - how about the attempts to crucify some NY dumbass over a tweet, while meanwhile, the #Gamergate crowd was saying and doing some pretty horrific shit, in a lot of the places that they had an online presence. Can you really fucking bring up "bullying" with a straight face, when women were literally receiving deaththreats for the injurious crime of having unpopular opinions, and wanting to voice those in a public place? If you're so against "bullying" in games journalism why wasn't that the focus of your goddamn campaign? I imagine you have some BS definition of "Gamergate" that does the No True Scotsman's shuffle to distance yourself from those folks, and some token "hey guys...chill out" forum post, but seriously - fuck that. You can't remove those parts of your "movement" for being too extreme, and then condemn something like Gawker media, as a whole, without, yourself, being pretty big fucking hypocrites. I'd put the onus of responsibility on YOU to explain why so many terrible fucking people flocked to your banner, and said and did some pretty terrible things in your name - on your forums, in your comment sections, and so on.
Like I said - you all suck. Gawker sucks for what they did to Hogan, and deserved to lose the case. Gamergate sucked, and was a bunch of horseshit that embraced terrible people saying terrible things. Fuck you all.
Uh...I think you're oversimplifying the situation.
Fact #1: A LOT of multi-platform games have abysmal PC launches. Stability, if not overall performance, is obviously superior on consoles. From the recent release of No Man's Sky, to Dark Souls III, to last year's launch of Fallout 4, PC launches are often plagued with crashes, glitches, and nearly unplayable states, compared to their console versions. That's what "just-simply-work" means. You go to the store, put in your disk, and the game will load and play just fine - not crash to your desktop and corrupt your saves. I personally prefer to game on my PC, but I never count on a game's launch being a window to actually get to play said games, reliably.
Fact #2: You're also not factoring in cheats and hacks, which are HUGE factors for multiplayer PC gaming, that almost never effect consoles. Several high-profile AAA titles are sometimes nearly unplayable only because the mp component is on the PC, such as GTA V.
I think you blow off the problem of older games a bit too easily. If a classic game gets relaunched for the PS4 or Xbox, it's going to work, flawlessly. Ditto for Nintendo's virtual console. Meanwhile, Steam Link has trouble streaming some older games to your TV, creating, what is inherently a flawed experience. This is an actual problem for a lot of gamers.
People like consoles because they come with the assurance that someone else has already teased out any potential problems, and you're going to get a pretty seamless end-user experience. Just turn it on and start the game. Even "Mom" knows how to start Netflix, or play some Mario from a quick-launch screen, and that's considering that "Mom" hates dealing with computers (using my own mother as an example...don't infer too much sexist commentary here, please...). If you're just some random person, not too tech savvy, the process for installing and updating a GPU + drivers is far more advanced than simply confirming a mandatory install for a console's OS. For all it's advancements, PC gaming is still seen as a hobby of investment, with specialized technical knowledge as a prerequisite for participation, as opposed to the pure leisure activity that consoles come off as, which are no harder to get started with than a DVD player.
Of course the problem with console gaming isn't PCs, it's that they have to share all these advantages with smartphones and tablets - which also eat the lunch of PCs, by being somewhat general purpose.
This is an issue about semantics, I'll agree, but I don't see why that's a bad thing. You're not going to find a topic that depends more on semantics than the law. "Semantics" implies that there is an issue about the meaning of a word, which is the absolute core of this issue. If you don't know what a word, like "suspect", actually means, in the legal sense, don't use it in a banner fucking headline involving law enforcement officers.
Similarly, don't cry foul when you get called out for it because YOU were ignorant.
I already replied to your above post, so we're going to have some deju vu here.
Basically, you're not accurately representing what Conservative Treehouse said. They claimed the victim was a SUSPECT in a crime, which -yes- would support the argument that he was "wanted" for said crime. That's what a suspect IS - a person wanted for a crime. It's a legal term, with a legal meaning.
Snopes called Conservative Treehouse out for using the terms "suspect" and "matches the description of s suspect" interchangeably, and rightfully so.
If you have to tell someone at one point in your life that you were a "suspect" in a criminal investigation, or that you "matched the description of s suspect" in a criminal investigation, those words imply VERY different meanings.
Nothing that Snopes has said is factually inaccurate. They didn't change anything.
That wasn't Conservative Treehouse's claim, and you know it. The exact headline was...
"Confirmed – Philando Castile Was an Armed Robbery Suspect – False Media Narrative Now Driving Cop Killings"
source
They claimed he was a "suspect", which was NOT true. You can't argue with the facts, I'm sorry. There's a HUGE difference between BEING a suspect, and matching the DESCRIPTION of a suspect. They are not interchangeable concepts. One is an escalation of the other. "Suspect" is a term that implies established evidence against a person in question has been definitively gathered. It has a very strict legal meaning, which involve things like Miranda rights, and you are NOT a suspect in a crime for merely being detained. This was obviously not the case for the shooting victim, and that's what Snopes was pointing out. He was never a suspect. Conservative Treehouse didn't know the difference, and got called out for it. Now, you're defending that same dumb mistake.
It doesn't matter how Conservative Treehouse qualified their headline in the actual story, the headline was a still a blatant lie. Snopes, in no way whatsoever, misstated Conservative Treehouse's words. They blatantly said that he was an "Armed Robbery Suspect" in plain fucking english. You don't get to pick and choose, after the fact, which facts are supposed to matter, and which ones don't when you speak.
So, yes, it's entirely appropriate to call you out for claiming Snopes made a "strawman" argument. They did not. Everything they said is factually accurate, unlike the Conservative Treehouse article. Quit defending stupidity.
Why should they have to jump through hoops to pick a way to frame something in a way that supports your conservative agenda?
So...if Snopes wanted to investigate the statements made by Conservative Treehouse, how, EXACTLY, were they supposed to do that according to you?
You even use the term "more correct framing". Snopes has no obligation to "correctly" frame things so that it suits your right-wing political goals. You understand that when you're calling for things to be "framed correctly", that you're doing that from a BIASED political point of view, correct? They factually reported on something that had a limited and specific scope, that did not leave the bounds of the website in question. That's all they did. There was nothing "incorrect" about their framing.
All of this bullshit about "false narratives" is coming straight out of your Ronald Reagan themed crystal ball. Nothing they said was "false". If you're telling the truth, and not being misleading in scope, you can't be guilty of providing a "false narrative".
They didn't make any other statements about other conservatives, or use misleading language to imply that this was an issue beyond "Conservative Treehouse", unless you think it's Snopes' fault that the website put "conservative" in their own name.
So...basically if Snopes doesn't go out of their way to have a conservative bias...then they automatically have a liberal one? Think about what you're saying. Snopes is supposed to come to some kind of consensus from the "conservative media" - before - publishing an article, and make sure to print things that represent this broad point of view. You lay out what they should have printed instead, which conveniently ignores the factually inaccurate information laid out by "Conservative Treehouse".
So, Snopes wasn't supposed to be investigating false claims made by individuals, they were supposed to be fact-checking the broad, consensus based, conclusions of the right-wing media, instead. Or what? What you're claiming Snopes should do is BLATANTLY driven by political bias, as it would automatically eliminate undesirable sources like Conservative Treehouse, and ironically, a hypocritical example of exactly the type of thing you're attempting to criticize Snopes for in the first place - which is to show bias.
You're essentially trying to claim conservatives shouldn't be held to standards for what they say, alone, but should be judged, instead, by the broader claims of their peers. To actually hold someone accountable for things they have said is somehow, paradoxically, "misleading", because it's not their individual thoughts that matter, but what the greater group thinks. Yeah, pretty scary shit.
Meanwhile, I can find multiple stories, right now, on the "What's New" page of Snopes which contain damaging things to say about Democrats, including Hillary.
You go as far to call the act of Snopes rebuking a factually incorrect website a misleading "strawman", which is utterly and fundamentally a misuse of those words. You're not making a "strawman" argument if you're fact checking what someone has said. That's not what a "strawman" is.
You see...the part crucially missing from your argument is the non-existent paragraph at the end of the article where Snopes says "Oh yeah, by the way, most conservatives think this way...vote Hillary". If anyone makes judgement calls about another conservative based on the actions of conservative treehouse, that's on them, as Snopes, obviously, didn't advocate this.
Have you considered that maybe it's "reality" and those pesky "facts", and not Snopes, that's making some conservatives look bad? Snopes didn't make up "Conservative Treehouse", after all.
I have to double reply to this, sorry.
It's gets even harder and harder to accept that this was some kind of "assassination" unless you think the Clintons are the stupidest people on earth. If you were trying to "disappear" someone...wouldn't you...you know...make it "look like an accident"?
Why would you outright murder them - an act SURE to open a criminal investigation, instead of making it look like a suicide, accident, etc.?
When coupled with what, exactly, their motive would have been in the first place, this just doesn't make any practical sense whatsoever. There's no way Clinton is stupid enough to kill someone, before an election, out of "revenge".
It sure does make some kind of conspiratorial sense, I guess...but why would you do something like this? What possible benefit would the Clinton campaign gain through murder that wouldn't be MASSIVELY offset by the risk of actually murdering someone?
Murdering someone for political purposes seems like the worst possible thing you could do right now as a candidate, for any reason. Why? Was he going to "leak" even more? Surely, if so, he had things already in place to accomplish this, in the case of his untimely demise.
In other words, the motive is extremely unclear.
Meanwhile, however, Assange has a double-whammy opportunity here, as a known Clinton hater. He can both insinuate that Clinton might be a fucking murderer AND protect the real identity of whoever he has on the inside, by taking advantage of an unfortunate coincidence.
Until we see some proof that the murder victim actually was the leaker in question, I'm going to go with Occam's razor and pick the latter as the most probable explanation, here.
For your analogy to make any rational sense, the NYT would have to BE a foreign agent attempting to illegally hack into computers under American jurisdiction. This isn't in any way, shape, or form remotely similar to Daniel Ellisberg leaking the Pentagon Papers. Ellisberg, a US government employee, made a choice of conscious, and was charged with conspiracy, espionage, and theft of government property.
Let's repeat that for emphasis...
ELLISBERG WAS CHARGED WITH CONSPIRACY, ESPIONAGE, AND THEFT OF GOVERNMENT PROPERTY. THE NYT WAS CHARGED WITH NOTHING.
The only reason the charges against him were dropped was due to the revelations of the Watergate scandal. The Nixon administration tried to stop the NYT from publishing the information, but was shut down by the supreme court, who made a pretty strong statement in favor of the free press. So NO. These situations are NOTHING alike. Ellisberg is much more similar, in character, to Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden, than China or Russia. I'm going to remind you that Manning is in prison, and Snowden lives in exile. REPORTING NEWS and COMMITTING A CRIME are entirely different actions, for fuck's sake. If the NYT had hacked a computer, and leaked the information, they could both win a Pulitzer AND go to jail for committing a crime. Two actions - two consequences. The news story here is that a presidential candidate is advocating a foreign agent to commit a crime, you fucking idiot, and has nothing to do with reporting the news.
Apples and oranges, but don't let logic get in the way of that axe you have to grind.
Yeah fuck that. Apple just made my decision, for me, of which phone to get next.
How can anyone defend the deplorable practice of doing away with a common industry standard, and instead coming up with some new, proprietary solution to a problem that's already solved. I don't want headphones that run on batteries...and I REALLY don't want to buy lighting-adapter headphones that will ONLY work on Apple products, or have to worry about losing some bulky god damn adapter. Trying to expand the walled garden so that in encompasses something as simple as headphones if beyond fucking offensive.
The entire premise of this article, comparing an audio jack to a floppy drive, is so utterly stupid, it defies logic. You see, floppy drives were SUPPLANTED by superior technology, the CD, as were CDs by DVDs, and DVDs by USB drives, and so on. There were tangible benefits to doing without them. A lighting adapter adds nothing of value - to anyone - as far as audio is concerned. People are not going to replace the analog ports on their amps with lighting adapters, you fucking idiot. The comparison makes zero sense, and only stands to benefit Apple. How can people be such transparent shills. Jesus fucking Christ.
You're comparing apples to oranges. The Titan X was pushed more towards people that want a card for Software use, such as 3d rendering, not just for gaming. In desktop software applications, that aren't gaming, the Titan X has a clear performance gain.
I mean, Nvidia aren't - that - stupid, to release an inferior product for hundreds of more dollars, lol.
...are there two "news" stories about a new Nvidia card? Didn't ya'll just post about the unveiling of the card? Why do we need a follow-up story, when someone plays a new game on it? That seems less than newsworthy...I'm not saying that we've got paid articles being posted....but something doesn't smell right...
Seriously. What the fuck is the appeal?
Shut up.
NOBODY that actually lives in the south thinks "redneck" is a racial slur. Nobody. Your college definition has little relevance to the real world. Being a redneck is about your attitude towards life and your actions, not your income or intelligence level. It's more akin to words like "gangster", "intellectual", "hippie", "tomboy" and so on, not words like "white", "black", or "asian". It's not a god damn racial slur, despite whatever eggheads think it's historical origins might be, for the same fucking reason that you can't be racist against hippies. Two brothers can come from the same family, and one of them can be a redneck and one of can not be. It just depends on how you turn out. I should know, I'm one of those brothers.
I'm not saying that you can't use the term in a bigoted way to denigrate poor folks, just don't call it a damn racial slur. The south has enough problems with race relations without jackasses wanting to muddy the waters with this kind of horseshit. Calling someone a redneck in no way carries the gravity of calling a black person ANY racial slur. Just don't even compare the two.
That's a spurious argument. Amazon already sells tons of Apple products, including the Ipad, which is a direct competitor with their cheaper Kindles.
Apple is a specialty store, only carrying their own products, or products closely related to them. Amazon in a general marketplace, selling almost everything under the sun. Huge difference.
As someone who grew up playing 90's era Squaresoft titles, I think this is pretty much the case, but I think it's worth elaborating on.
Whether intentional or not, older Squaresoft titles had a decent mix of western and Japanese cultural influences. The original FF games, for example, largely pulled from D&D for their bestiary, and by and large reflected the western medieval fantasy atmosphere with a Japanese take on character development and storytelling. When you took a game like FFVI, it really felt like the best of both worlds. Fantastical, but cohesive, despite having several influences. I'm not saying that they need to go back to these medieval roots - it's just that Squaresoft was more willing, then, to fuse multiple cultural influences. Obviously, it's their games and they can do what they want.
For me, it's not really the mechanics of the games, it's the culture of them. I'm not knocking it if it's your thing, but I really have no interest in all of the whiny, teenage, anime, emo, costume, hairdo stuff that seems to make up modern Jrpgs, which is a shame because I really like Jrpg gameplay mechanics. I've tried, mind you. There was a point in FFXII when a character pulls out a pair of "cool" sunglasses...for some reason. It just made no fucking sense. Wait...this universe has plastic? And they apparently ONLY use it to make cool sunglasses? Early on in FFXIII - the only game in my very nerdy history I've ever returned because I've hated the game so much - there's a moment when you encounter some kid with the most ludicrously impractical giant blue hairdo I've ever seen. It must have taken, like 5 hours to get that right. It would have been awesome if I were watching a John Waters movie, but there was no way I was going to put with an entire game's worth of self-important drivel with crap like that just being part of the norm. I decided then that I was done with Square. Way too much style, fashion, and attitude, anachronisms be damned. That, and irritating porcelain supermodels instead of actual characters.
These types of things aren't the challenges I want my suspension of disbelief to overcome when I play rpgs. To be fair, every game is going to have to bend logic to a certain extent, but you can handle it one of two ways - you can either tread carefully around the liberties you're taking and attempt to give your universe some kind of well crafted internal logic and reasonable justification, or just say fuck it and put in whatever teenagers think is cool at the time. Modern FF games feel way too much like they want to have their cake and eat it too - we want a SERIOUS, emotionally engaging gameworld with swords, monsters, magic, and so on...but we also want cell phones, pop-star singing, sports cars, and modern technology - when it's cool. Just put in whatever's cool. Like sunglasses. No wait! - cars! Vrrroooommmm! It just seems like an 11-year old is coming up with this shit.
I guess what I'm saying, is that they're way too Japanese for me, no offense to anyone. It makes sense. I don't like 95% of the anime I've tried to watch for similar reasons. Square game were increasingly a battle for me to enjoy them, having to look past the hairdos, fashion, and skimpy/big-titty nonsense to appreciate them. I can't do it anymore though, because it seems like they just keep cranking the dial up at every turn. It's not a concept unique to Squaresoft, there are similar debates going on right now about the gun-toting stripper they shoehorned into MGSV for "reasons", in what is considered to, otherwise, be a stellar game.
If you want to look at an example of a Japanese rpg that doesn't pull this crap, look at the Souls series. These are some of my favorite games, primarily, I think, because they are a great mixture of multiple influences. Sure, they have some of the annoying impracticality found in Japanese tropes, like swords about 50 times too heavy to ever be used or "costumes", but on the whole, it's negligible and very optional. No annoying teenage emo characte
It's nice how you try and package those two concepts together as though you can't have one without the other. Yes, we are slaves to labor, given that it's a situation of life-long forced dependance. If you don't believe that, take your soon to be homeless ass out into the street and quit working. American-style chattel slavery is not the only form of slavery, you know, despite standing out as a situation of unimaginable horror. It's very similar to way that the term "holocaust" is almost exclusively associated with the mass extermination of the Jews, when Native Americans suffered far greater casualties in the American holocaust.
That being said, why would you then think we don't have responsibility for the choices we make? Choice and slavery are not dichotomous. In a situation of slavery, the consequences can be dire for the choices you make, but you still have them - and you are still responsible for them. For example, in history, chattel slaves have had the choice to attempt rebellions. Sometimes, like with Haiti, it actually worked out for them. They weren't on some form of fatalistic autopilot, every one of those people had a choice to rebel, and enough heroically chose to do so to overthrow the French enslavers.
This looks pretty cool, but I have a lot of questions.
On it's surface, it looks like a lot of the results they're getting wouldn't currently be outside of the realm of student level work, such as the simple practice of projecting and baking textures into materials from photographs, the innovation seems to be that they're quickly automating a lot of that stuff into a UI with a fast lighting solution. One of the things I find most rewarding about 3d is that you sometimes get this huge burst of increased productivity, as long as you're not too bummed out about things you've spent time and energy learning how to do becoming obsolete. This isn't that different, fundamentally, than setting your viewport background in Maya, 3ds Max, etc. to be a photograph after properly matting your foreground objects and projecting textures with adjusted reflectivity, just without all of the manual tediousness. Also, there's also been other, similar work done on the subject, that I've heard of, but this still looks pretty neat if it's something you can use right now without a billion dollar computer.
One of the big things this tech might be doing is streamlining the process of match lighting. I personally can't wait till the major software packages have integrated solutions for easy lighting from photo sources. Currently the setup for photo matting is a pain, it requires stitching together panoramic photos of reflective chrome spheres - on location - or carefully using observation skills to recreate the lighting by hand (which can be very difficult for glossy surfaces). It would appear, however, that we're on the brink of not needing those things anymore. That being said, this software still has a bit to go, however.
For example, the lighting information baked into the diffuse textures of the objects, in these examples, does not appear to be dynamic - if you watch the taxi-spinning segment you'll notice that the specular highlights on the hood of the car do not properly update as the orientation of the model changes in relationship to the light sources, making the taxi appear to have white paint streaks once rotated out of alignment with the light source. The car falling off the cliff example is probably the most apparent in final results, as the strong baked lighting makes the coloring look off. The way we 3d artists get around this problem is to eliminate the lighting information in our diffuse textures as much as possible before reapplying them as flat color, and then let our lighting rigs take care of the reflections, shadows, and such. As they mention this software doesn't support transparency, and I would guess is rendering everything as matte objects, meaning the renderer probably isn't robust enough to handle anything coming close to complicated reflections/refractions and so on, making this software's usefulness very situational, currently. It would be a great way to quickly populate photos with hordes of smaller objects, for example. However, with a more powerful renderer, feature wise, this tech could be really useful for the Photoshop crowd. I wish Autodesk/Mental Ray would focus on stuff like this instead of the boring crap updates we usually get (Maya's new fluids are pretty cool though, tbh...).
If we're talking about unbiased render engines, Max got the Iray engine a couple of years back. 3dsMax and Maya already both come packaged with Mental Ray, which produces amazing results. Lots of people use 3rd party render engines, such as V-ray, but that really comes down to preference.
I'm not trying to be an ass, but if you use the same program day in and day out, missing a transform gizmo is rarely going to be an issue. Even if you do, a quick undo brings that selection right back. Furthermore, Max has a lock selection hotkey assigned by default to the biggest key on the keyboard for dense, overlapping scenes. On top of that, you can use the + and - keys to change the size of the gizmo if you're having a hard time selecting them at your resolution.
In other words, there are plenty of features designed to address the problem you bring up, in this particular software. The amount of times you're going to be frustrated by dropping a selection doesn't merit removing a left-click based workflow.
Again, it's just silly and borderline arrogant to set up Blender the way they do. The 3d cursor tool that is assigned to left clicking by default, by far the most important button in almost all other DCC software, isn't exactly a killer feature. As far as I know, it's unique to Blender, however, and one suspects that this is the reason it's given such coveted real-estate hotkey wise. The 3d cursor has it's uses, but should be assigned to a sub-menu. I would rarely use the tool - which would mean I'd want to turn it off completely to quit mucking up the viewport, and only turn it on when I needed it. That would mean that left-clicking in the viewport would essentially do nothing useful for me most of the time, which is just an absurd waste of resources. Sure, these things can be remapped, but I'd rather not bother trying to learn the bass ackwards Blender way of doing everything, and spend that energy learning software that actually works with you through relying on well established workflows and customs and only breaks from those customs when it's actually necessary or truly innovative.
Honestly, it's like a document editor that uses right clicking to place the cursor and select text, has non-standard hotkeys for things like copying and pasting text, and assigns an occasional useful tool, like bullet pointing, to left click by default. I love to use OS software, but I wouldn't dream of using Open Office if it shippped like this...
Yeah, nice work. Keep it up!
In most 3d programs, left clicking is the main tool for interacting with menus and objects in general. In 3ds Max, for example, you select, move, translate, edit, select menu options, push buttons, change spinners, etc., all with the left mouse button. The right mouse button is used to cancel operations, or bring up sub-menus. Most DCC software is similarly left-click based. To intentionally change this pattern, for no real good reason, is just silly.
I'd have to disagree with some of your points.
When you say Blender has one of the "fastest GUIs in existence", I would assume you are including the viewports. If you make a torus with 200 segs both in width and height, Blender will be chugging to edit such a high density object. Selecting ring and edge loops takes at least a second in time (if that doesn't sound like much, believe me that time adds up...) 3dsmax will edit such a mesh with ease, any sub-object selections are nearly instantaneous. Also, you're going to see noticeable slowdown in Blender even navigating around such a mesh if edit mode is on. Along those lines, copy that mesh about ten times into your scene. By about the tenth copy, Blender's viewports become pretty unusable, on my rig. Meanwhile in 3ds Max, I have to get to the 120th copy of that 200x200 torus to even see a drop in fps, let alone anything approaching unusable. After increasing the torus count to 480 I had a noticeable drop in fps, but a still totally usable scene. The poly count from the torus primitives was over 38 million, and I had a workable viewport of between 12-14 fps, if you want the details. What does this mean? For pro level work involving millions of polys, Blender isn't really an option as a modelling/animation tool. It does fine on low poly models, such as for gaming, product vis, etc., but it wouldn't be able to run any of the scenes I use on a daily basis, regardless of my hardware. I haven't tested Blender for how responsive it is with hundreds or thousands of low poly objects, but I'm guessing not great. If you're going to call something a "kick-ass pro-level 3D Tool" you have to account for these kinds of major limitations. Blender can deliver professional results, but it's going to take a lot more time
Lightwave is not an industry leader in the field of particles. Anyone working in 3d knows that Houdini is the top dog here, and the cost of that package reflects that status.
UI's are part taste and part ergonomics, and I personally find Blender to fail both of these tests, in my opinion. Blender seems to intentionally be as different as it can. The last thing I want to do is have to learn another set of shortcuts and conventions, especially when they are as topsy turvy as blender's. Believe me when I say the intentionally unorthodox UI is one of the biggest reasons why a lot of experienced 3d artists don't even bother with Blender (there are zero overlapping common shortcuts, except for undo, that I've found so far). Take the annoying "3d cursor" that follows around your left clicks, and is bound to confound any newcomer to 3d. What does that do? Why is it here? Why doesn't clicking in black space deselect an object or seem to do anything important? The 3d cursor is a niche tool that could easily be relegated to a sub menu where you could turn it on or off or edit it's properties. Assigning this unintuitive tool to a left click by default, the main method of interacting with objects in the viewports of most 3d software, is simply baffling. I find flippant, experimental decisions like that frustrating, personally. Of course you can take the time to learn the Blender way to do things, or you could take way less time to learn software that works more like you're used to, such as Modo or Mudbox. For example, my first time using Mudbox was an absolute joy. I was happily sculpting for days without ever having to refer to the manual. Things were layed out in a way that made intuitive sense. I would have still been trying to figure out where Blender put some common tool by the time I was already making satifying art in Mudbox. Software is allowed to be "unorthodox" if the payoff is big enough. This is how Zbrush gets away with it's wacky shit. Unfortunately, for a lot of 3d artists I know, Blender isn't worth the investment/muscle memory it takes to become proficient.
Of course, one of the biggest problems with Blender is it's lack of a decent native renderer. Complex shaders and GI in Blender aren't really up to task currently. It's great t