Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Open letter

Dear slow driver,

Why did you buy an SUV with a V8 to go 50 down a 60 zone?

Jackass.

Monday, September 26, 2011

Apparently digital is the new traditional

Creating the Art of Innistrad

New Phyrexia was rife with digital painters, not only to really sell the terrible sheen of metal, but also so I could redirect for the look of Innistrad, which is a more grounded, relatable and straightforward place, and would benefit from a more "traditionally painted" feel.

From that point on, I count finished Innistrad pieces 5,6,8,9,14,15,16,17,18,20,21,25,26 and 28 are almost certainly digital, and pieces 2,10,13,19,20,27 stand a pretty good chance of being digital.

That's 19/28.

Also, Painter is pretty tank, so even ones that look real might still be digital. <_<

Saturday, September 24, 2011

Of course

Tumblr is worthless, why would you share pictures one at a time? They're not even yours, so you're clearly not limited by production.

And most of the stuff being shared is generic low res shit anyways.

How can you compete with stuff like Boston Globe's picture blog?

Some places

I've been collecting images of places for a while now. I haven't done many pictures of scenery so I've been collecting them in hopes of getting inspired.

Well that never happened. But there are some great pictures in that folder; these ones I think are each enough to inspire a world unto itself. My apologies they're not all high quality.

Afghanistan, by my estimation about 30km North of Fuck Nowhere.

Along the Chicago river.

CityPoint in London; from this angle it looks like the buildings extend forever.

Dubai, pre-bust presumably.

This is (somewhere) in Egypt, you can see the crops surrounding center-pivot irrigators.

A bridge being constructed in Guizhou.

Hyesan.

This is at Ijen volcano; I believe they use the pipes to transport sulfur from the volcano. Yes, they are mining a volcano, crazy!

The Maunsell sea forts.

Unfortunately I don't remember what this is, the image says Mina but I'm not convinced it's not a mosque in Mecca proper.

Anyways, you can see that I neglected to include any ghost towns or abandoned and derelict building photos because, honestly, everyone's seen those before already.

And of course, there's no way I've covered all the craziness in the world here.

Thought exercise



I was thinking if I would take a Charger coloured like that.

No.

Nothing made in America could look like that.

But maybe a Veyron.

You know, black out all their stupid chrome.

Could be hot.

What if you just had an all beige car? Like wheels and everything.

But then you could have bright red brake calipers.

Anyone remember the time Richard Hammond brought on a dark grey GT3? Except its tyres were jet black, the rims were red, and it had yellow brake calipers.

What a retarded idea!

Sunday, September 11, 2011

They did it already: it's called Battle Royale

This is how my version of The Hunger Games would be:

It will be based around a group of housemates who are playing fighting games.

They are hungry because they are lazy and can't be bothered to cook food.

The story would come to a thrilling conclusion as they end up going out for sushi after not eating for the entire day.

Inspired by a true story.

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Don't use it, lose it

People think that the easy dissemination of information makes it difficult to lose knowledge in the modern age.

Actually, it's extremely easy to to lose knowledge. Especially technical expertise. So much of it is very specialized and only existent in the private hands of corporations. And within these corporations, specific and important facts are only kept in the minds of a handful of people.

If the engineers depart and the line workers depart, without replacement, you've already lost most of the knowledge.

For instance, the principals of an internal combustion engine are well known, and there's quite a bit more than that circulating around in papers. Do you think that's enough to reconstruct a modern car engine? Engine fundamentals from the Model T to the Fiesta haven't changed. But over the last century, Ford has figured out how to squeeze out more than 3 times the mileage and 6 times the power with an engine volume of half the size. Do you know what they did? Do you think your educational institution knows what they did? Not a chance, unless your professor worked in a very specific field within the industry. Even then, his knowledge grows more outdated year by year as Ford engineers continue to squeeze out a few more percentage points of performance year by year.

Or let's say that you already know that you can get a 5% efficiency gain by tweaking the inlet aero. How would you know where to tweak? You'd have to go through all the testing that was done before, and you'd need to design and build the infrastructure to conduct the tests in the first place.

It's the same across all fields, from cars to bridges to computers. Good luck building a modern virtual machine using the Dragon Book. And that's still only talking design knowledge.

Im CAD hat's passt.

It fits in CAD. Not good enough.

You can't learn how to build something without actually building it and, more than anything else, this is something kept exclusively in the minds of workers. And god help you if the toolset had been struck already (which is common), because now all of sudden all of your work instructions are worthless without the accompanying equipment. Now you have to redesign and rebuild the infrastructure too and go through the teething process all over again. Think you can make a violin from an instruction book? Nope, you learn by building a violin and a lot of crappy violins.

See how we've decided to stop going to the moon for a couple of decades and suddenly it's a pain in the ass to figure out how to do it again. And that's with all of the previous generation's artifacts around, more computing power than our predecessors could ever imagine and an extremely competent corp of people who've been shooting things into space non-stop in the intermediate period. Sure you don't have to go though the paradigm shift breakthroughs again, but most of being able to do something is just grinding, and that's a feat that'll need to be replicated if you ever forget. Technology has not dark age proofed us.

Sunday, September 04, 2011

What I like most:


Is that the cover says that it is Blu-Ray but actually DVD-9.

Saturday, September 03, 2011

Everyone should be getting close to graduating, right?

And then we'd be like real adults, right?

...

What do?

Friday, September 02, 2011

Sounds promising

My Google Reader frontpage publicizes:

"I have no breasts, but I do have a camera!"

That's Good News.