demagogue

Sounds to me like Smoove B. While I am freaking you, I will whisper various things in your ear. Some of the phrases I will say to you are, "Baby, you are my everything," "You feel so good, I can't stand it," and, "Girl, ride me." There will also be candles and a CD featuring the music of Keith Sweat to create an atmosphere of unbridled romance, making you wet. This is how you will get Smooved. Just say the word, and we will share interplanetary cocoa love until the break of dawn. We will bump across the galaxy, exploring the known solar system with our passion. We will journey to places even the astronomers have never been. We will bump to Pluto, as well as to the moon.

I took a class on this ages ago. But I do remember my prof pointing out that you sometimes see, like in movies, a tent at night using a red light, e.g., for pilots getting ready for a night-flight or soldiers planning a raid or whatever, so when they run out of the tent they won't have to worry about their eyes adjusting to the night; everything will be clear right away ... because red is the least sensitive, as obscurus said. And apparently all of this is by design (natural selection), something to do with red just not being around at night, so it wasn't built into the night-vision system (part of the whole theme of vision about the tension between 2 competing systems: animalistic, b/w, night vision, "fuzzy", motion sensitive vs. high detail, daytime, vivid color, etc.). By the way, while we're on this completely irrelevant tangent , a curious thing is that we *see* colors in a cycle where red and violent actually connect (the color wheel, roygbiv), whereas in reality the spectrum is linear from red (low energy) to violent (higher energy), and there's no logical reason why it has to stop at red and violent, much less for them to seem to actually connect. It's just to say that our visual experience is somewhat an arbitrary selection of the total spectrum and has as much to do with biology and natural selection than what's the "reality".

This thread reminds me of watching movies with my film-studies neighbor.* Seriously every scene he'd want to point out what the director was doing with the lighting, or the blocking, or the camera ... usually stopping the film to literally point it out, as if the smallest details had a purpose. I quickly learned if I was going to watch a movie with him, it wasn't to passively enjoy it and take it for granted, but to always be on the look out for how the director did things. I actually found it very interesting, because he could spot important things better than I could ... but other friends couldn't stand it! Now when I watch movies, though, I can't help thinking like that a little, from his influence. *(now working on films in Europe, one in Budapest, another in Belfast. Reminds me I need to look him up).

My favorite (fringe) theory is that some massive body passed through the solar system and in the course ripped off a chunk off of Earth, which fell back to become the moon, the rest of it becoming Pangea. (it also apparently obliterated the planet after Mars (making the asteroid belt), and it ripped off chunks off other planets making their moons, as well, and by looking at the rotational differences of different moons, the guy actually plotted the trajectory and rough planet arrangement, allowing him to date it ... convienently to 65 million years ago, his version of the extinction of dinosaurs, which carries the necessary implication of dino fossils on the moon , and the beginning of Pangea's break-up, as well as weird stuff like out-of-place boulders, what we now usually attribute to glaciers). I don't think it is credible, certainly the dating part (the idea of the gravity of another body pulling off the moon I don't know, but I've never heard it anywhere else, which probably means no one takes it seriously), but I really liked the guy's enthusiasm in putting facts together and seeing how far he could go. It's sort of like recreational psudo-science, trying to figure out where his reasoning works and where it might go astray. Even if a theory is wrong, people may disagree *why* it's wrong, and that itself can be interesting.

Not exactly, although people do (so far) get "killed", well, gunned down by military guards for being found where they aren't supposed to be. Another thing I was wondering about ... has there been any team that's used modding to make a (good) movie via screencapture. It seems natural because you could make really elaborate sets and characters (AI) and then just script in the basic blocking, throw in some cool particle effects and events with objects, etc, set the camera and its motions, and let each scene play out. And then maybe add in facial emotions and mouth movements, etc, even afterwards. Esp if you use stock assets, the main outside thing to add would just be voice acting, sounds, and music. I mean I know this has probably been done, but have there been any good ones. If the writing were good, this also has a lot of potential to make something good relatively cheap and easy. (although maybe then you couldn't market it unless the engine and assets were all custom.) I'm thinking a big limitation would actually be the writing (and time to do it) ... although I'm sure there are technical reasons why it's not so popular ... limited or unrealistic movements of the AI, limited stuff you can do with the camera, difficulty blocking, sequencing events in tandem. But then again, there have been some kick ass cartoons, like in the 80s, that had relatively simple animation but awesome writing that were still great.

There are like a million of those kinds of books! Seriously, I went to Barnes and Nobles (bookstore) to that section and *make your own movie* books, from writing to storyboarding to cinematography to producing, were everywhere. So I've been working on a treatment for a little while and sometimes wonder if I could make something out of it. I really like the idea and I can see it having a kind of mass-cult market appeal like Blair Witch did if it's made and promoted correctly. I mean, it's custom made for the reality generation. Maybe when I'm ready and have a little money I'll get in touch with some of you guys to help me think about how I'd want to do it.

Well, science is science. No place for politics in a decision like this. (edit: I'm actually being ironic in saying this; I tend to think it's *mostly* a kind of politics and science is playing a supporting role at best.) I suppose to be consistent we ought to stop kidding ourselves and similarly admit that Europe and Asia are (scientifically speaking, you know, since this is entirely a scientific question) one continent (Eurasia) and Australia merely the largest island. As for my real opinion, I agree with a lot of the scientists from the recent conference that actually this isn't an important, or even very relevant, issue to science at all, since it is about nomenclature ... while most of the scientific debate is about the processes that create solar systems, which this decision will hardly effect. It's about the same way in which geology isn't about continents so much as plate techtonics, and whether you label some land masses as continents vs. islands, the theory doesn't care so much. Nomenclature is largely just for social uses or human-centered purposes, which is why it has to bend to both science (the facts on the ground) and a lilttle politics. But anyway, apparently this decision has been coming for a long time, scientists just feel more comfortable being a little consistent if they're going to claim authority based on reason, so it's no surprise ... and no one is really in a position to seriously disagree with them. So it goes.

Thanks to goldfish, I'm totally going to build my own movie projector now and wow all my friends with one of our high-school projectors being put to good use. It looks fun to do just for the sake of doing it.

Keep the faith, team. Of course the beauty of the Darkmod is it will be more than one campaign ... you're laying a foundation so one guy *can* make his own map or even campaign. And of course this team has showed every indication so far of being more dedicated. But all that work to get the assets, I can see how it's a long road... And it's disheartening to see these big TCs go down. But keep the faith, nonetheless. I wonder in the future if there isn't a movement for artists to start putting up public domain assets for all the big genres -- scifi, medieval, contemporary, urban, forest, etc. -- as they are inspired, so it builds a large repository of high-quality public domain assets over time ... in expectation that big TC projects will coattail on their work (since it seems like the largest time/effort drain of everything) so they can focus on the gameplay aspects. Is that wishful thinking, or even practical? Looks like spar's call for help sort of fell on deaf ears so far in that thread (it's still early in the thread, though) ... like they aren't even finished burying the dead, but I hope that some of them join the team here. I'd imagine some of them would like to think they can work on something that sees completion. Let's hope so.

Shows how much you're glossing the movement and not really trying to look into the real-world, psychological/socio-political motivations going on beneath the surface. To me, it's the most natural thing that they'll tend go anti-govt. It's like most "evangelical" periods in history are built on an anti-establishment base ... even if it's in or *is* the establishment. "Running against the grain" is part of the ethos that they have to tell themselves, in about the same way existentialism is ... because you're making a "radical" "personal" choice, by definition it's supposed to be "diverging" from the beaten path and not something you can adopt as being part of the establishment. I mean, I like looking at groups like this because they usually have their finger on the pulse of deeper socio-economic and cultural undercurrents of the country in trying to vent them. They're frustrated with the superficial lifestyle that modern capitalist societies so easily fall into, like a lot of people are, and the dead-blah glob we watch it turn our daytime-TV-watching friends into ... and they're trying to break out in the only way they can see how. The main issue to me isn't their motivations so much as their integrity to be critically minded towards their own beliefs and really take them seriously if they're going to believe it, like a professor of mine used to say: If you say you believe it, you really better believe it. I think of it is our duty to be benevolent and show them a more responsible way to enlightenment and personal spiritual awareness that is every bit as invigorating and meaningful in the face of the grey-blah of modern "soulless" capitalist socieities but that also shows integrity and honesty with the world as scientists have spent the last 400 years fighting to understand ... or why even bother struggling to understand the universe! Haha ... there's my manifesto; I've been caught!

Sounds like some left brain vs right brain squaring off in this thread. I think I'm somewhere in the middle as well, or so they tell me.

I watched it without sound on this computer. ... which reminds me, did that guard look up because he heard a sound of someone coming? (I couldn't hear.) But then it looks absurd that he'd look *up* since he's on the top floor. (edited by Gildoran to condense the posts as per your request)

I actually don't have anything against gun ownership per se. While it wouldn't kill me to see guns heavily restricted, I also enjoy going out to the country to go skeet shooting or hunting. I can see how a lot of gun owners would feel indignant that they'd have to give up their guns just because a few innercity/drug user types (the statistics) can't control themselves owning them. "Why should we be punished for their criminal tendancies?" they might think ... even if it's true a gun ban might well make a noticable difference in the impact of their criminal tendencies. But like before I think it doesn't quite get to a source of the problem, which is much more economic oriented. So that's why the gun-control debate doesn't move me much one way or another; I don't have a strong opinion about it ... I could be fine with either way, but I don't think it's any real solution. One idea I heard that sounds really stupid at first but actually starts sounding good when you start thinking about it is that gun manufactuers should be liable to a tort suit for the criminal mishandling of their weapons that results in harm. That is, the person injured (or the family of deceased) could sue the manufacturer of the gun that hurt them in a criminal context to pay damages. The reason is because it's a market failure when guns, which can serve valid purposes outside the criminal context, are put in contexts where they serve invalid purposes, like crime ... and like most market failures, the manufactuer (the one that profits from it) is in the best position to make sure their product is marketed or constructed in a way that best avoids the failure. But it won't happen unless the "harm" from the market failure is internalized into their profit margins (this is true of any externality). So like corporations can be sued for foreseeable environmental damage from pumping out toxins, gun manufacturers could be sued for foreseeable criminal uses of their product (since crime is one very foreseeable possibility of gun ownership, so they can't well argue that it wasn't their choice). The advantage is, they'll now have an economic incentive to come up with ways to keep guns in the right hands; the market is always better at handling these sorts of things than the State anyway. What do other people think? (The idea comes from my tort law professor, who developed a legal theory on this idea.)

Yes. Violent crime is an abberrition in Japan, almost inconceivable; but just as unknown is a significant immigrant/outsider population competing with the natives for a sizable chunk of the economy. As for the "the price to pay for doing the right thing", I didn't word it correctly since it's misleading from my thinking and I didn't mean it as Orb understood it (since I would agree with what he said), and I meant it as Darkness-Falls said. Also, in my mind I was sort of thinking of the Civil Rights movement to integrate African Americans into white schools and employment sectors, which was undoutably the morally right thing to do, but similar to the problems Europe is having with absorbing immigrant populations into its economy -- except on a much wider scale -- when you intergrate a "non-accultured" population into an economy, people fall through the cracks and you get persistent un/under-employment that (the important part) creates a culture around itself that may be more susceptible to criminality. Before the 1960s, a lot of African American neighborhoods were sort of little bubble economies that couldn't be sustainable ... and even aside from the Civil Rights movement, it is the nature of economic systems, and globalization only accelerates it, to pop these sorts of bubbles and pressure the economy to be more fluid. I mean, 1940s-50s US was a much safer era, but I don't think anyone aside from a few right-wing kooks is suggesting we try to recreate the economic/demographic conditions of basically bottling black neighborhoods back up and putting them back into the country, even if we could. My point was, it's these sorts of pressures that are actually driving unemployment; also the urbanzation of African Americans as a demographic-event probably plays in here as well; all adding up to a culture that builds around it that sustains the "bad" conditions it in certain neighborhoods. I mean, I think it is this kind of "culture" that's really at the root; since criminality is so not-in-a-person's-interest that it only really makes sense as a community-bound sub-culture that develops given the appropriate conditions, not one that parents actually encourage to their kids, but one that probably develops in the margins, something at first tolerated that reaches a critical mass. Anyway, you can blame the gov't for not responding to it appropriately, but it's not like the gov't is *intending* for there to be large, persistent unemployment among black youths in urban neighborhoods that develop a culture for being "bad". And the point about "globalization" as a catalyst is that a lot of the driving problem is something a national gov't can't control no matter what it does. It's no longer possible for the Federal Reserve just raise the interest rate as a national monetary policy; inflation is occuring in the US (and world) because of higher oil prices, making jobs more conservative and more African Americans in the US and Muslim-immigrants in European cities out on the street getting frustrated in "bad" neighborhoods. So there's a question if it's true that Toronto has a similar racial demographic to Detroit, why there is more violence in the latter. Part of the story I'm sure is the American economy is more fluid, including illicit trade like drugs, and there's less of a social net to catch unemployment. Another part may be that African American communities in Detroit are much older, so there's more of a "culture of resignation" (not my argument), as well as more "bad" neighborhoods, whereas such communtiies in Toronto are sort of self-selected "movers and shakers" better able to respond to economic uncertainty and living in "good" neighborhoods. My main problem with Moore's treatment was *not* that he wasn't putting his finger on a real problem; he was. I just thought he wasn't really asking the right questions to get what the problem really was, nor did he seem really anxious to. It seemed like more of a stump to make a political point (liberal Democratic values are the right ones; get guns off the street, stop a "culture of fear" (of blacks? of every perceived threat? I'm still not really sure how he links a "culture of fear" with any actual incidents of shooting a gun), and create more of a social net for blacks), which comes across more as straight-up ideology; not that all of those things wouldn't be useful stuff to do, I'm sure they would. But what seems to me *more* helpful is to tell a technical story in terms of demographics and socio-economic forces, and solutions should be on the technical, system side as well ... whereas many of Moore's "solutions" seem to be more superficial, not really getting at the root problem with integrating "non-acculturated" populations into a fluid, globalized economy, and what's driving a "culture of criminality" in them. In that vein, some of his explanation irked me. For example, when he gave the statistics between Canada and US murder rates, he gave raw numbers, when it is just so much more helpful to put it as a percent per-capita, since of course the US has a much larger population, and the raw numbers are misleading. He also didn't break up the numbers by demographic, regional, or socio-economic factors (I don't remember anyway); and and freaking MOST IMPORTANT, by type of gun killings -- accidental, drug related, theft, hate crime, mental defect/sociopathy, domestic abuse, etc. (How can you have any idea what the numbers means without at least this?) These two things would be the *first* sort of stuff I'd want done with the numbers to have any idea about what the problem is, otherwise the numbers don't tell me much of anything, nothing useful anyway. If 80% of the killings in the US are drug related, well, maybe the difference is in drug policy between the US and Canada. That kind of slack attitude to statistics is sort of thematic of what irked me about it. Also, why wasn't he interviewing actual murderers, or those in their demographic situation? Their psychology and incentives are what's at issue here and should be at the *center* of analysis. Why aren't we visiting bad neighborhoods and seeing first hand what's angering violent people, what's encouraging criminality, etc. For fuck's sake his centerpiece was the Columbine shootings which statistically are very aberrational (sociopathy). His main contribution was just getting people to think about the issue, I think.

I sometimes think about getting either an old British Triumph (to be unique and retro-cool) or a big Kawasaki (because I lived in Japan and like to stay connected to it) ... 2 very different bikes, I know, but just what I was thinking. I get worried because one of my best friends died in a motorcycle accident about 5 years ago, and it's always struck me as gratuitously risky just to drive around town ... but there's no denying it's a real thrill to be on a bike and feel right on top of the road. The turning you described does sound unintuitive, but it's easy to imagine once you think about it and "feel" the physics of it. Sounds fun, actually.

Haha ... one of the best parts is the announcer's megaphoned voice: ARE YOU READY TO RUUUUUMMMMMBBBBLLLEEEEEEEEE?!!!!! and everybody cheers. Like professional wrestling, it's all sort of an act and if you go you may as well play along.

I find his documentaries are good for entertainment value, but the analysis (if you can call it that) is always piss poor and nothing I can really take seriously. I don't see how our media is any more "fear mongering" than other countries I've lived in, but anyway it doesn't really make sense as an explanation since mass media is by definition consumed on a mass level, whereas the violence level is of course very localized, even in the range of different city streets or neighborhoods. I tend to think that there are more basic socio-economic and demographic reasons which explain violence rates. I mean, I live in NYC, and a bad neighborhood just feels bad. Lots of unemployed young men with nothing to do but hang out on the street and get frustrated ... then you add drug pushers on the street corners and that's fuel to the fire, since it provides a reason to need money, and just creates a culture or atmosphere of criminality/violence. At the same time, about a decade ago the murder rate in NYC plummeted very sharply down, and sociologists attributed it to demographic shifts where the main perpetrators just literally grew up, got jobs and families and couldn't afford to be so adventerous, coinciding with economic conditions having to do with the 90s bubble pushing a lot of capital around that trickled down; jobs were just willing to take bigger risks in hiring. Also, one thing he doesn't emphasize is the fact that most developed States with less violence, because people just trust each other more or whatever, are because their population is just more homogenous. At least for me, this is certainly why Japan and Scandanavian countries (maybe more so 10 years ago) felt very safe to me even in the most inner of cities. It's sort of the price America pays for doing the right thing and integrating (and pushing racial diversity as a virtue, which doesn't even make sense, e.g., in Japan), but then the US has a dilemma in making sure the income gap doesn't spiral out where minorities aren't getting work and have an incentive to be distrustful. As I see it, doing the right thing helps foster the problem, so it's something of a Catch-22 that takes patient work to resolve with no silver bullets ... and Moore seems to miss that point. It sort of reminds me of the violence around Paris last year, just integrate that kind of frustration across every major city, and the US doesn't seem so unique anymore in essence, but only in degree. As for Moore, like a lot of people not actually doing politics but talking about it, I think he doesn't like the idea that much of the problem is out of a government's control, so throws out superficial possibilities as if it's worth thinking about them just so we don't feel so impotent.

Showing it to my friend, I noticed a few more things: 1. I wonder, in the opening scene, if all of that is brushworked city, or is some of that a creative skybox. In any event, it's such a large looking area, like a real city. I hope it'll be possible to put vistas like that in-game since it's impressive. 2. it seems we've got AI hammer-bashing the PC now. For some reason, I thought that was still a ways off. 3. anybody notice the black moon?

Fun to watch! I was going to first critique the fact that many of the buildings look so similar in style, but after a while it sort of starts looking cool, like a really anonymous city that almost abstracts itself. This is the first time we've, at least I've seen AI expressions featured -- or at least what appear to be expressions (glances, etc). Anyway, cool video.

Haha! It's even more useless than I thought!

I can't turn the sound on this computer, so I'm going to guess there's more to this than a bumping "?". I'm also going to guess that even if I could hear it I wouldn't be very impressed. In related news, though, NYCity in general (and my apartment in particular) is apparently going through a bug epidemic right now; we could probably use a few spiders to clean the place up.

Well, to give this topic a boost in the helpful direction, can anyone summarize how Unreal 2007 is going to be any different in essence than any other past incarnation (putting aside the graphics, etc)?

Yes, I like the city street in particular, too. It's exciting to think that these are just showing what's possible, and that things can only look better from here.

I think it would be much better to be more liberal with the Beta-Mapping position as it gets closer to release. Public-betas are bad ideas, esp with something like this, because people will treat the release as if it's a finished product (warning or not), and it just isn't finished, and shouldn't get any notion of being "public" until all the core stuff is in, IMHO. But I think, as I just said, it may be a good idea near release time to start letting even newbie mappers try out the system as a beta-mapper, (esp if they have a nice full Komag tut to guide them by then ) just to see if there are any issues from their perspective.

I know you guys have probably already talked about it, but what it sounds like is that the easiest stuff to postpone are the non-essential, labor-intensive, discrete stuff like specific AI, textures, objects, ambients that are relatively easy to add to the package piecemeal ... and it's the core mechanics, and some core AI, textures, and objects that will come out in release 1.0. Well, it sounds like a reasonable plan, like out-sourcing labor-intensive stuff to the community post-release. I'd also think you really want to get the core mechanics down as tightly as possible before the first release. Anyway, I don't think I'm making any new revelation, but just thinking aloud for the sake of the public forum.