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lizacstuff · 4 years

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Bunch of anons about Carina and Roswell NM drama

Under the cut because it’s long and gossipy...

Anonymous said: Whatever nonsense Carina may have been up to with Jeanine and Nathan, both the leads have seemed to keep their private issues to themselves by not telling other cast or friends. That's why it angers me that the person who leaked the information disregarded Jeanine as a person and victim.

I’m of two minds on this. On one hand I totally agree and I hate that Jeanine’s name was drug into this and her involvement was shared by the multiple inside sources, but on the other hand I do not like Carina, I think she was awful to work for, and I think it’s a good thing if it’s know in the industry that she created friction on set and was investigated by HR.

She was so unprofessional, just from what we could see as fans, that she should NOT be put in charge of another show any time soon. So I think for the sake of people she will work with in the future, it’s a good thing it’s out there. She has a whole lot of growing to do before she should ever work in television again.

You make a good point about Jeanine and Nathan keeping their business to themselves. Carina is out there over-sharing constantly, putting every neurosis on full display, and forcing half the cast to be out drinking and entertaining her on a regular basis. While those two, kept quiet and out of the spotlight. In interviews/panels they’ve both been completely professional, doing their jobs while also being charming, funny and eloquent.

It was obvious to those of us watching closely that all was not well between J/N and Carina when the season started shooting. Carina was bitchier when she talked about them and those characters than she had been before, and J/N were nowhere to be seen in her braggy out-partyin’-with-my-cast IG stories and posts.

As you say, it doesn’t look like J/N tried to drag any other cast or crew into whatever the issue was. I’m not sure the same can be said for Carina, that speaks volumes about the character of all involved.

Anonymous said: I saw that abnormallyadam is doing a live social media thing with Jeanine and Vlamis soon. I guess we might get more information then and if Jeanine decides to say anything.

How hilarious would it be if Adam gets the scoop of a lifetime!?

I’m guessing this chat or whatever it is was set up before Jeanine and Vlamis knew the studio was going to swoop in and make their lives a whole lot better by firing Carina. So it will be interesting to see if it still happens on schedule or if it’s postponed for awhile.

If it does go on, I think they will probably cover it really quickly and superficially like Vlamis did when he was schilling his merch the other night and then move on. They won’t deep dive into it, that’s for sure.

Anonymous said: Carina has been tweeting incessantly today! Like tweeting about other meaningless things won't make people forget lol. Also about that anon message you received about unfollowing nathan - wowwww she used to be up his butt.

Yes, remember the days when Carina used him as her social media crutch (every post she makes like that with a hot actor or country singer is basically her rampant insecurities saying: “hey look at the hot guy(s) who hang out with me and take pictures with me, it means I have value ya’ll!”) before she moved onto Trevino and then Vlamis. So sad.

They were clearly friends after The Originals and she invited him to audition. I’m glad she did, he’s great in the role. Although it sounds like he was lucky that the President of the CW saw him and told her he was a leading man, since she didn’t see him as a lead. Sometime a friend’s preconceived notions might actually hold a person back...

Who knows what happened, but just knowing human nature and Carina’s energy, I’ve always wondered if she thought she was going to have her friend on set and he was gonna be her social crutch, her go-to to entertain her and party with her, but right off the bat he and Jeanine got together so during the first season filming he wasn’t so much interested in the single, going-out partying lifestyle that she’s clearly addicted to and that rankled her a bit. Perhaps she lost her party buddy to her leading lady, and the loss of that attention “displeased” her. (to quote Kamran who said Carina told the writers to punish actors who displeased her by reducing their screen time. Interesting thought, no?)

Anonymous said: Well the interesting thing is some of the other people she follows don't post much either and she continues to follow them. Interesting interesting.

I know. She didn’t unfollow him because of that. That was definitely a show of cutting ties with him. It was probably in a fit of rage because she can’t unfollow Jeanine (because that would look terrible). Also she has been so humiliated between being unceremoniously fired and losing her development deal with WB, the Hollywood Reporter article making her look terrible, and that writer spilling tea, that my guess is she’s hoping to shift focus to someone else and she knows unfollowing him will make us all wonder why.

Anonymous said: Well shoot, maybe it was Nathan and not Jeanine who went to hr? And Carina found out? Or Nathan took the fall? Sorry I'm just going down a rabbit hole of conspiracy.

In my opinion there’s no reason to think those sources got it wrong. I would guess that Jeanine was involved, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t also involve Nathan. Those two are a self-professed team, so no reason to think they wouldn't be in this instance as well.

Anonymous said: Does this mean she'll unfollow Jeanine too??

I’m sure she wants to, but she can’t unless she wants to confirm that, yes, there was friction on the set and, yes, there was a specific problem with her leading lady.

Carina went out of her way to try and combat the “rumors” about her and Jeanine not getting along, addressing the situation in her goodbye post-- drawing more attention to it in the process-- so unfollowing her now would just make her look foolish and like everything she said was a lie and everything from the inside sources is true.

Anonymous said: Carina will definitely do something stupid. She can't help herself. But even though there's no reason to follow Nathan, he's been inactive on Twitter for over a year and for her to unfriend now during this drama and mess...how is that a coincidence?

As I said above, I know it’s not a coincidence. She’s dumb because by doing that she pretty much confirmed that there was friction on the set. If there wasn’t, she wouldn’t be unfollowing the person in the main cast who she was closest too prior to the show.

Part of me wonders if, as an old friend, she asked him for something (to defend her or a show of support) and he wouldn't do it. Perhaps she’s most hurt by him not supporting her since they were friends before and she did give him a lead role on a network show (and also accidentally introduced him to his girlfriend.) Maybe she thought he owed her and he didn't step up to defend her or even just give a tacit show of support by responding to her social media posts on leaving??

I’m guessing if he had come out of social media hibernation to give her one of those paltry “Thanks for everything” responses to her IG post like the other actors she wouldn't have unfollowed him.

Anonymous said: Someone said the writer deleted all his tweets about Carina.

Not surprising, it was a crazy spree he was on, who wants to bet that he got contacted by a lawyer late Friday night?

I’m sure Carina was doing everything in her power to threatened him and to get him to stop.

Anonymous said: I remember the writer also referring to Nathan as Carina's "friend." Is it in quotations because they are not actually friends? Frenemy? Carina was recently saying nice things about Nathan so based on her perspective, she thinks they were still on good terms?

Well they were apparently friends before he was cast, what happened after that is hard to say. They seemed fine during the promotion of season 1, but as soon as season 2 started filming, Carina’s tone when talking about him and Max got ugly and Nathan and Jeanine were staying far away from her socially. I mean Jeanine hosted a ladies Friendsgiving at their house, where 40 women from the cast and crew came over for a Thanksgiving feast, but the female showrunner wasn’t there. Hmmmm...

However, this spring things seemed to have thawed a bit. Jeanine and Carina would occasionally like each other’s IG post (someone pointed out to me that had stopped during summer of 2019 and they didn’t engage with each other’s posts much if at all during S2 filming) Jeanine and Carina did that IG live and Carina was talking positively about Nathan and Max and seemed to be setting him up for a big season 3 with the dual roles and talking excitedly about that, so honestly, to me, it seemed like they had made their peace. Perhaps Carina getting fired (and the straw that broke the camel’s back on that was clearly her idiotic tirade against the UK distributor) brought back up all the issues??? Or maybe Carina blamed them because of the prior issues? Or maybe they didn’t support her with the studio when she was trying to salvage her job? All I know is that Carina’s public behavior on social media is enough grounds to fire her, so she has no business blaming anyone but herself.

Anonymous said: Someone said to the writer that jeanine, amber and nathan are staying silent on the matter and kamran replied that "Silence speaks louder than words." just above that they also were wondering who Carina harassed and bullied into silence? was it nathan?

Who knows... ask the writer.

Anonymous said: Carina going from Zapit straight to writing for TVD is peak white privilege. After that THR article you could tell she believed a little too much how far that privilege would get her. Good riddance. Good luck getting another job for being such a big liability. I don't see any corporation hiring her again.

I think the only way she’s getting another job in TV anytime soon is if Julie gives it to her. She’s talented, once she grows up maybe she’ll be capable of running a show, but it was clear from the peanut gallery she should never have been given that amount of responsibility that she had on RNM.

#anti carina #carina fired #fandom wank #asklizac #anonymous

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tenchiforum · 5 years

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For the first time ever, the Toonami versions of OVA1/2, Universe, and Tokyo are available online! On their respective archive.org pages you can access each episode easily.

Watch now: OVA1/2, Tenchi Universe, Tenchi in Tokyo.

For users who keep up with contemporary anime communities, we also have an upload for the entire run available on Nyaa.

It’s been quite a journey in getting these episodes from analog to digital. If you’re interested in reading about the process of how these almost lost-to-time edits came into our hands and how we’ve gone about preserving them before the tapes rot, then sit back and enjoy the story below!

Part 1: Toonami – A Love Story.

Tenchi Muyo! and Toonami are tied together like the red thread of fate often times referenced in many East Asian myths. For those who aren’t aware, Toonami was a programming block on the Cartoon Network channel. Starting in 1997, it did one thing for anime that no other channel in the English-speaking world had ever done: showcased anime during “PrimeTime” (In North America at least, this was 4pm to 7pm Eastern Standard time). Before the internet, having this block of time meant having the most eyes on your product, meaning exposure was huge. Oftentimes whoever got on this block, regardless of the channel, was “made.”

However, it wouldn’t be until mid 1999, with a soft-rebranding, a new host, and an almost entirely anime-focused block, that Toonami would take over the world.

And on July 3rd, 2000, an entire generation was introduced to Tenchi Muyo! for the first time.

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- The now legendary two minute Toonami promo.

Thanks to the efforts of Jason DeMarco, Sean Akins, Gill Austin, Sean Polinski, and the rest of the Toonami crew, the “Toonami generation,” still to this day, is the largest block of Tenchi Muyo! fans. Whether it was Toonami US, UK, or Australia. Tenchiforum is a testament to this fact. I personally would not be here were it not for Toonami, so to say that fans of Tenchi Muyo! hold Toonami in a high regard is an understatement.

I had always wanted to somehow, some way, get the Toonami version of Tenchi up for everyone to see again, but my old Toonami VHS recordings were long gone, and I figured trying to piece together the Toonami version from other people’s tapes would just be too hard with how many episodes were broadcast, that was until… 2012

In mid-to-late 2012, I found out that Pioneer actually released a home video version of what was shown on Toonami. It was simply released as “Tenchi Muyo!” in those big, white, clam shell VHS cases (that most people probably remember for old Disney movies). I felt as though I had struck gold! I was able to get a hold of the first two OVA, and was able to rip them to my computer.

- Vol. 1 & Vol. 5 of “Tenchi Muyo!” – No distinction was made that they were separate series.

Though I was high on my endorphin-induced nostalgia, I ran into a couple of unforeseen problems.

First and foremost, the equipment I was using was not great. I used an old StarTech composite to USB dongle and the software that came with it. While this isn’t necessarily bad at first glance (it doesn’t support Windows 10), I had no experience whatsoever in the field of digital transfer. While I think my rips were okay for the time, I knew even then that they were too low of bit-rate and the quality of the rips suffered for it.

Because I also had no VCR at the time that had S-Video output, I was only able to output from composite, which meant the whopping 240p equivalent VHS tapes look fuzzier than they probably should. (I realize that VHS is technically an analog format, meaning that a 1:1 equivalent digital representation is hard to pin down or that someone might argue that it did technically output 480i over composite, but basically it was 240p.)

Another problem was the software itself, I had no idea about Virtualdub, AmaRecTV, or other helpful capture software, so I only recorded at a lower bit-rate, again producing an inferior quality rip.

I also ran into the problem of showcasing the videos. Funimation (who now owns the vast majority of the Tenchi Muyo! franchise in North America) had finally started really cracking down on people uploading videos to Youtube. Even though my videos were not completely the same, the algorithm immediately flagged and blocked them. This led me to uploading the videos to Facebook. I had to cut them in half because of Facebook’s restriction to roughly only 12 minutes of video. Somehow in the process, some of the videos had audio drop out for a minute or two, and for some the audio dropped out completely.

Arguably the biggest blow though, was when I learned that this set of Toonami tapes was incomplete. Pioneer stopped producing the Toonami version for home video after they finished releasing Universe. Meaning, the only way to get the Toonami version of Tenchi in Tokyo, was hope that someone, somewhere, had taped it 11 years earlier.

While Tenchi in Tokyo has been getting more appreciation from fans as of late – thanks in part to most newer entries in the Tenchi OVA sucking harder than a vacuum – in the year 2000, it was the black sheep of the Tenchi Muyo! franchise. So expecting fans to have recorded any of it, let alone the entire series, was the long shot of all long shots. But even still, I made a post on the forum in 2013 asking if anyone knew anyone that might have anything.

Naturally, no one had any leads, and all of these previous problems meant that this project would, frustratingly, have to be shelved indefinitely.

Or at least, that’s what I thought.

Part 2: Deferred Dreams Don’t Die.

On April 5th, 2019, a person by the name of Talos dropped into our Discord server, and posted an introduction. Like so many, they had gotten into Tenchi through Toonami, but what would change everything, was this.

I couldn’t believe what I was reading, someone actually had it!

Instinctively, I reached out to Talos via PM to ascertain how to go about acquiring these tapes, and admittedly, to see how legit this claim actually was. Because the fact of the matter is, when you’ve been around Tenchi fandom as long as I have, you’ll quickly realize the best bullshitters in the world come from this fandom.

But Talos was more than the genuine article! They sent over pictures and an incredibly detailed analysis of the quality of their tapes, watching through them all again to prove to me that their claim was valid.

It can’t be said enough that this all would not be possible without Talos, their willingness to work with me and send me their own personal tapes that they’ve kept for almost two decades just goes to show how awesome they are and how much they care about the fandom.

So the deal was struck, and the dream that laid deferred for almost six years lived again.

- A time capsule from another era.

But with dreams from the past, come the demons that plagued them way back when. I still only had the setup I once had, and at this time I was really trying to be tight with my finances for a number of different reasons, but this opportunity was too good to pass up, I wasn’t going to let this dream go, even if it wasn’t perfect.

Talos’ tapes showed up, and I rolled up my sleeves.

So I put in the first tape, the first seven episodes of Tokyo, into the old VCR I used to originally rip the Pioneer tapes, a JVC HR-VP650U….

And static…

Or rather, a tape that would play for 3 seconds, then immediately drop to static.

This wouldn’t work.

I then tried my other VCR, a Sony SLV-N50 from the mid-to-late 90’s that I was able to “fix” by removing the old Android Kikaider tape that got stuck in there many years prior.

It worked!…..but…..not all that well.

While it did actually play the tape relatively smoothly, the colors were completely washed out in comparison to the JVC, and it had this weird color flickering that was particularly noticeable when black backgrounds were on screen. (This was not unique to this tape, it did it with everything I put in there.)

As much as it pained me, there was no way I was going to rip it with this setup.

So the hunt began for not just a replacement VCR, but one that was high quality and recommended among enthusiasts for digital transfer. Which meant research and long winding rabbit holes of non-answers and vagueness, and unfortunately, money.

Without a doubt, the de facto list of best VCRs for transferring comes from digitalFAQ.com. This list is not only informative but gives you a broad range of ones to look for in the event you can’t find an “elite” one. However, this list has also become the de facto list used by people who are hawking their sets on eBay to try and get every penny from enthusiasts and new-comers as possible.

After three frustrating weeks of losing bid wars on eBay, someone finally put up one of the good sets, the JVC SR-V10U. I quickly sent them what I thought was a reasonable but not bank-breaking offer….

And they accepted! The beast was finally mine.

Immediately upon unwrapping and testing it, the quality difference between what I had then and what I was looking at now was staggering. The SR-V10U had beautiful color, while having the incredible ability to stabilize the old tapes with its TBC (Time Base Corrector), as well as onboard Video Stabilization option. Combined with the ability to output video via the superior S-Video cable, I now had something that, despite its age and typical old VHS wear, was way better than I could have imagined.

Part 3: No Need for Nostalgia.

You’re probably thinking to yourself “Dagon, why go through the trouble? The OVA has a beautiful Blu-ray release, and Universe and Tokyo have pretty decent DVD releases. Why would you ever want to rip old VHS tapes of an inferior quality release that was in some cases censored?”

- The now famous Toonami “bikinis”.

Because this version of Tenchi Muyo! is a piece of history. Not only is it a piece of Tenchi history, but a piece of Toonami history as well. Being able to preserve this in the best quality possible is being able to point to future generations and say “This is why I’m here.”

For a lot of us it’s about taking us back to a simpler time, grade school, high school, university. Taking us back to a time before the internet was what it is today.

So now we can, after almost 20 years, re-watch the version of Tenchi Muyo! that brought so many of us joy and wonder.

#tenchiforum #tenchi muyo #toonami #toonami promo #cartoon network #tenchi universe #tenchi in tokyo #toonami tenchi muyo #anime nostalgia #90's anime #vhs #vhs anime

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cinchel · 6 years

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Mirror of Nature

What the Photograph Reproduces to Infinity Has Only Occured Once by Mirror of Nature

allow me to get sappy/sentimental for a moment. apologies if i've told parts of this story before..

we moved to chicago in june of 2001 i am not sure how but one of the first bands i remember seeing after moving here was Zelienople and i was hooked. bought all the releases i could. i discovered Under The Spire Recordings because they had a release on it, which lead me further down the rabbit hole of weird ambient music that has really stuck with me. around the same time i started to use the internet to get my music out there. it was myspace days and i would browse around looking for other people making weird music, especially in chicago. which is where i found music by Neil Jendon. i bought some mini-cdr from him and saw him perform a really cool drone/guitar peice at hyde park art center. for most of the early 2000's i would just try and see their shows, or buy their music but never broke my shyness to reach out. i even played a show opening for Mike Weis and Matt Christensen and the most i could do after the set was quickly walk up to matt and say how much i liked the set and then run away.

somehow in like 2012 neil and i started playing some duets together. which was awesome and is still awesome. we just did a guitar duet a few months ago and i hope we do more soon.

in 2016 neil asked if i would join him and mike in a new group because Kwaidan was not going to be playing anymore but they still wanted to explore a 3-piece guitar/synth/percussion group.

i was fucking honored. to be able to play with musicians that you've been following for about 10 years is crazy.

so that became The Mirror of Nature and we've been playing slow ambient/jazz around chicago for 2 years now. frequently having various guests join us, all excellent and people i never thought i would share a stage with

this past January we spent a few days in Neil's basement and recorded about 3 hrs of music as our base trio. we carved it down to the 6 peices that are on this tape. thank you Muzan Editions for releasing it.

we hope to have a release show somewhere in the new year. and i hope we have more shows and recordings and collaborations forever.

thanks

#ambient #Experimental #tape #cassette #improvisation

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browndragon · 4 years

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Liquid Tiles and State Machines

Hello again! I got stuck in a rabbit hole, but I had fun.

One of the things I built is strictly less fun than the other, so I'll lead with it even though it's not what you wanted. The other is the pretty video above.

State Machines

TL;DR: See https://www.npmjs.com/package/@browndragon/sm .

I got annoyed that the big state machines in javascript were too verbose for what I wanted, so I wrote my own. I think I've already written this post, but this time it's even better.

Each "state" (inconsistently called a node) is a function that returns another node. You load some initial node up in a state machine (here called Cursor). The Cursor invokes its current node whenever you call next (and whatever it returns is the next node). However! It's invoked in the context of the Cursor itself, so you get some interesting bells and whistles automatically: this.here is the current node, for instance -- normally it's hard to get access to that in javascript, but not so here. Since they're each function objects, they're less prone to object equality stupidity of certain sorts, and more prone to it of other sorts. There is no method to predeclare the set of states that exist, so your states can create states (by returning inner functions for instance). These are all features I thought I'd need ;).

You can write nodes that assume they're useful for their side effects, or nodes that assume you'll examine the state machine's here. Cursors implement the iterable & iterator interfaces, so you can use them in loops and such also.

However, for more power you need the full Machine (which extends Cursor). This does things like track state for every node (which is why the nodes are not called states...), with advanced features like history, traps (so that if a node returns undefined it can be rebound to actually go to handleUndefined()), and similar. This makes them O(n) in the number of nodes (and indeed, O(n) in the number of calls to next), but sometimes that's the featureset you need!

Give it a try. Or don't!

Liquid Tiles

TL;DR: The demo above, but the code isn't published anywhere [yet].

I kept playing with dough connected by springs, but I think I'd need to do tile deformation or shader tricks to make the dough look good. As written, the arbitrary offsets allowed glue tiles to shift, leaving gaps. Ensuring coverage would require stretching the tiles or having additional backing color. Or: a change in scheme.

Dough is just a really thick liquid, right? (Over a long enough timescale, aren't all solids?) So how would I model a liquid? I might do it with freely chosen blocks connected by links (the current dough system), but that would likely be too chaotic. Instead, I'd probably split the liquid up into regular domains and analyze each domain. So I did that! Liquid tiles are the result, a system similar-to but different-from phaser Tilemaps, but providing a similar grid-based interface to the world.

First, the data structure

I'm continuously at a loss for high quality datastructures, so instead I write my own low-quality ones. I needed a store of tile information -- unindexed integer 2-tuple keys, arbitrary1 values. Easy enough; I wrote a dense one which uses an allocated array of fixed size (so that array[y*width+x] is the value for (x,y)) and a sparse one which uses fully arbitrary (x,y) pairs and stores points under their stringification. As I write this, I realize that these data structures are not so very different in javascript, where arrays can arbitrarily allocate keys, but what's done is done.

I called the keys in this datastructure x,y tuples, but that's not entirely true: they're really u,v tuples; I wrote a little tilemath class to hold the geometry for mapping between an XY space (like phaser) into the UV space of the tiles (like the tilemap indices) and vice-versa. I am pretty sure it still has some ugly edge effects (tiles do nothing to fix the default anchor(0.5, 0.5), potentially favoring the top/left sides! etc), but it's functional by visual test. The naming scheme (xy space vs uv space) provides very sensible method names -- u(x) is pretty unambiguous. There's no obvious uv analogue to width and height, so I settled for uCount and vCount, which is what it is.

Second, a dip in the Pool

Obviously, we need a Pool of tiles (where tiles are just managed instances of Image, Sprite, or subclasses). A Pool is obviously a Group2, providing mechanisms to manipulate its managed contents -- putTileAt and removeTileAt for instance. But then the next question: what are you putting in these tiles; how are you passing the grid-based information which you need to pass to them into them? I say that Tilemap got this right, you're passing them a tileId (whatever your arbitrary first parameter to putTileAt is); I say that Tilemap got this wrong in that it knew that tileIds were lookups into arrays which were preregistered along with spritesheet geometry etc.

Everything else: mappings and shadows

Anyway: I created Conformers to address the problem of how to map tileId onto actual asset. Conformers are functions which take a tile entry (a gameObject, uv coordinates, tileId, maybe other stuff) and makes the game object conform with the other parameters. A simple one can setFrame(someTexture, someFrame) by just looking the tileId up in a big array; a more complex one might play(someAnimation) or do wangId calculations or whatever. This is also a great place to put state transition logic, since you can detect whether this conformation is a change from a previous state, or a put for a state that the tile was already in.

Okay! Now we're ready: since I know I want this to follow dough blobs around, and the doughblobs are acted upon by the rest of the physics system, I needed some ability to have a sprite "cast" an effect into the dough tile system. I called this a ShadowPool (which extends Pool extends AutoGroup extends Group). Every element of the shadow pool's WatchGroup casts a shadow into the pool made of tileIds; each tile's tileId the bitwise or of its place within the element's boundary (so for instance the upper left corner of an element's boundary is 0b0010, the bit for the lower right corner set.) That, at long last, is what the video above is showing, with fancy transition effects.

Next?

The animation of specific dough elements remains tricky; doughjiggle is still going to look bad under this new quantized regime, even as the interior of the dough looks better. But now I can emulate slugs, and spilled paint, and footprints, and other mass nouns without feeling like I've got to pay the cost of a full tilemap. Indeed, since tilemap layers render in one pass, using a pool even for walls might let me do the fabled "figure in front of bush & behind tree" 3/4 view I've been after this whole time. Certainly the ability to "layer" collisions by material type is very valuable to me, and missing from the current tilemap classes.

I'm now imagining a hybrid scheme: dough is drawn as nodules (free moving spheres of dough with weakly drawn borders) on top of a ShadowPool which draws the base of the nodule, thus the outline of the dough group (wang tiles with strongly drawn borders). Dough regions which quiesce could remove the nodule and mark the tiles from the shadow pool as "permanent", so that they can take over the nodule's mass. Animating the movement of the base can add more detail to this, since it can theoretically hide the quantization by masking portions of the tile and sliding it out in the (known!) direction of change. For instance, if the tile had been undefined and now has the bottom right set, it is clearly sliding in from the bottom right. This will cause slightly strange initial effects (of course), but edge effects are to be expected.

Fast moving dough would be represented as nodules (large borders). Slow speed dough would be thin-border nodules on top of a ShadowPool, sticking-and-unsticking the dough and an unstable equilibrium. Stopped dough would be pure ShadowPool entries. Dough spring would be provided via interaction with the shadowpool.

I mean, arbitrary at first. Obviously they're gonna be tiles. ↩︎

As an implementation note, each Pool is actually a singleton group; that's just more convenient to my way of thinking about these things. ↩︎

#gamedev #phaser

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keamo3-blog · 7 years

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Outsourcing IT MAY 2, 2017|IN BUSINESS, SOLUTIONS|BY TYLER GARRETT The Outsourcing IT Bubble Are you looking to do some Outsourcing of your IT? Outsourcing IT or technology services can be a mixture of great and sour. Delegating work to experts is the key to rapidly expanding, avoiding pitfalls, less bean counting in the future, and overall time savings. The money equation comes into play when you have no earthly idea how to do the work. Outsourcing Examples If you were not the most proficient with a weed wacker, you might ask little Jimmy down the road to assist. Well, the technology works the same way, except in the digital age, you can remote into anyone’s office digitally. This generates a huge gap for anyone saying anything. Studying Outsourcing Trends and Fads We did a silly study after spotting a few outsourced teams were changing the amount they told us they had as team mates. contacted the same teams with different emails. Found ten teams around the world, and 9 of them turned out to be 9 individuals, not groups. Another trend is very savvy sales people finding out they can outsource work for marginal prices out of the country. They have never worked a single technical project, and are landing customers with real world needs. The real dealer of shadow IT are unqualified professionals buying or selling these outsourced services. Shadow IT is that topic every one is discussing the effect, but never the causes! Outsourcing risk factors Being Tableau consultants we understand outsourcing risk factors. We are the consultancy they call when other consultancies crap out a proof of concept without documenting. The risk factor is outsourcing teams are not all created equal and there is no agency checking other BI firms. What if the outsourcing team doesn’t document? Welcome to my favorite clients. Padded by inexperienced solutions without a single document, and because of that have been paying their shadow IT team to keep things barely running. Premium charges coming from individuals that could ave documented but instead built a gate keeping role, welcome shadow IT. I was recently asked on a meeting with a 300million annual run rate custome. Their lead DBA challenged me when I said we needed to document more. The DBA got upset because I the problems kept rolling back to zero documentation. He got flustered and said, “Do you document everything?” My response was simple, “Only if I want others to be able to use it again.” Outsourcing risk is hidden risk Customers never hear about this risk factor, they never hear about the entire consultancy has never taken a single day of any programming or data courses, and have never worked in a single production environment. So, they have never implemented anything advanced. This can be a dangerous deal for unknowing business owners, and that’s a business opportunity for these new companies. From a digital perspective, it’s just easier to paste logos, make fake testimonials, and do all of that without ever implementing any technology. Outsourcing to unskilled project managers If you sell a services engagement and place a consultant, you are not automatically a wizard of agile methodology. The customer sends you money, and the work begins. This does not teleport you to the future of 8 years of project management experience. Rather you’re a sales person who sold a widget that you don’t understand. You might get things to work today, you might find an outsourced person for $8/hr, but you will never know if that outsourced team is real or fake. You can’t know if an outsourced team is genuine or fake unless you yourself know the technology. So how do people outsource if they can’t determine if they team is real? One thing you learn from consulting for years is that things break and expectations are always set incorrectly by people without any technical project or data experience. Clients are quickly put in dangerous situations when the quality levels of the efforts are misbalanced too. Imagine your sales person is great but your outsourced person has 8 times more experience. That sales person is going to look like the biggest waste of time and money, and often times in typical enterprise engagements, clients will ask for their money back if they feel like they were duped. Outsourcing generates a massive risk when seeing companies produced without a single onshore expert, and corporations legitimately collapse under the burden of spending thousands and thousands on unskilled and untrained hands. Also, after meeting client after client and seeing what happens when customers are duped for decades. It seemed apparent someone needed to start looking for that transparency or calling them out for being scam artists. Outsourcing turned into a fun data project Here at Dev3lop we live and die by data, that’s why we have been taking time off to study and learn more about new digital trends. I know that’s absolutely crazy, a consultancy that takes time off to train and research. What we noticed is we can have as many clients and customers as we could ever dream of, and it’s all relatively easy just requires a lot of intelligent clicks and strategies. So, like any rational business owner, we wanted to start outsourcing to teams and take on more clients. I like money, who would say no to more money! We said no to outsourcing to fake teams Fake Teams are generated by pre-sales or sales people, who have not done any of the advanced work before, and have no idea what happens when one of these things break. What you learn from consulting and programming is that things evolve and need extra attention. When your dashboard or website works today, what happens when it needs updates, what happens when that salesperson on the phone isn’t able to follow through? How to fact check outsourced teams Ask for a picture, resumes, and to speak with the teammates and this is where the first rule of fight club pops up. Never talk about who’s on the team, that’s against our company blah blah blah. Scam. When you want to determine if the outsourced team is real or not, ask for details. Personally, I found ten different teams from all around the globe and started asking them a lot of questions. Issues that were documented and the data just doesn’t match up. Every team has the same offer, $8/hr and you pay up front for the month. When asked technical scoping questions, easy questions we know the answer to, outsourced teams always added 10-15days padding on to their estimates. Leading us to determine a few things because websites are getting easier to build, and now authentic companies are starting to come up in the ranks and telling the story of the clients. Ready for the Outsourcing Bubble Burst – Scam Alert I’m writing this article as more of a public service announcement, to anyone looking to outsource their work to companies online. After seeing what an ‘outsourced SEO’ shop, with decorated logos and a beautiful website, did to our client’s website. We started doing research on this mythical $8/hr full stack developer. Companies taking a subscription for increased rank, dashboards, and consultancies with decorated logos, and not a single person in the business with a technical background. Something is fishy about this and especially fishy when they can take on an unlimited amount of customers, and only say they have a team. Outsourcing organizations pretend to be female Oh, so you haven’t noticed every single support chat or pre-sales email isn’t from a female? That’s the biggest web life hack of them all. They find a stock image of a woman, and crop it down, give her a name and now you have your first employee. Fake Outsourcing Teams in a Distant Country They are in a distant country because it’s easier for them to scam you. That’s 90% of what’s happening currently and big business is only getting away with using outsourced teams because they hire exceptionally gifted architects to interview, train, and manage their work 100% of the time. That logic can be used to determine if your consultancy is worth a damn. Instead of letting them run off and work on it, ask them to work on it, in front of you, on a screen share web cast. Did they just tell you they can’t do that? That’s likely because they are scamming you and it’s just one person managing lots and lots of accounts. The Outsourcing Rabbit Hole The rabbit hole leads you to a single person who lives in India, Malasia, or some distant country that removes any chance of getting your money back. There is no number to call, your lawyer will not be flying to Serbia to serve someone papers over $1000 WordPress website, and outside of emailing them to escalate, they are just one click from blocking you and taking your money. Outsourced Rabbits tell you they have a huge team of professionals Outsourced teams are saying they have a team of 100, 50, 30, and always with a plus sign on it. That’s because they want to simulate a team to ensure anyone untechnical or not in the know will only jump at the idea of spending $1000 a month for a full stack developer. Remember big business use, outsourced teams, because they manage their work and none of them are paying $8/hr. That’s a scam. What is the scam behind outsourcing? There are zero checks and balances when it comes to outsourced teams. They offer you a rate that is so low it’s silly not to send them money. When you have one customer paying you $1000 a monthly, the $8/hr is not manageable. This is why they pad everything with 10-15days of extra waiting and charge people insanely cheap rates, these rates are low because they are going to bill you and not work. What do you mean my outsourced team isn’t working? Are you telling them to clock in and out every day? That means they are doing the very least to earn those $8/hr. Especially if they live in a country that is 1000 miles away and in a single click they can erase you from their inbox, and block you for good. The scam is simple; they say they have a manageable amount of people.

#technology #outsource #outsourcing #computer #tech

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avanneman · 7 years

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War for the Planet of the Apes: Silence is golden, so it would seem

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Back in the day, I used to work as a contractor with the National Commission for Education Statistics. Whenever we put out a report, we agonized, not over data, but over pictures. We have to send the right message here! We need Hispanic kids and black kids! The black boy is looking down the microscope? Can’t we have a black girl for that? This is a math report! Aren’t there too many Asian kids on the cover? And this kid! He could be American Indian, couldn’t he? And what about Hawaiian natives? And Alaskan natives!

Yes, we worried about things like that. We worried about girls who were too pretty (or, absolutely the worst of all, sexy.) We didn’t have the budget to go out and hire models, which we didn’t want to do anyway, but when you’re using unposed pictures, well, did the kids give their permission to be photographed in the first place? If only there were some sort of generic, all in one and one in all kid you could use, that would please everyone and offend no one!

Well, surprisingly enough, life in DC can be a lot like life in Hollywood, except of course in Hollywood they’re smarter, because they have found generic all in one and one in all sympathy figures: Apes!

I am a severe late comer to the whole planet of the apes thing, passing on the Charlton Heston1 original and passing on all the sequels and reboots that have, well, rebooted themselves, but I’m damned if I’ll pay to see a rebooted Spiderman, and War for the Planet … has been an unqualified smash, 98% at Rotten Tomatoes! So naturally I saw it and so naturally I’m going to bitch.

A week or so ago I bemoaned the fact that Baby Driver sought to yank if not actually masturbate our heart strings by equipping “Baby” (Ansel Elgort) with a step dad who is both black and deaf—how cute is that?—and by having Baby (who can, of course, talk natural) sign with dad as well.2 Yes, we do find the deaf touching, and signing is touching too. And speaking of touching, you know what else is touching? Apes! Oh yeah! You see where I’m going with this? How about a whole nation of apes—chimps, mostly, but gorillas and orangutans too—and they all sign? And we’ve got a hero who signs and talks! Who needs ethnicity when we’ve got apes? Signing apes!

Okay, since you’re probably seen earlier “Apes” films—I’m assuming you’re less of a culture snob than I am—this is probably old news to you. But I was a total virgin to this stuff, and since I didn’t have my bifocals with me, I couldn’t read the backstory in the screen, but it didn’t take long to figure—apes good, humans bad. Except for this one human who—wait for it—can’t talk.

It’s perfectly okay to create a world of humanized animals for any purpose whatsoever, from Beatrice Potter’s Peter Rabbit to Swift’s houyhnhnms and yahoos (arguably, the “source” of the whole “apes” thing in the first place). I myself created a whole galaxy of mostly giant insects for my hero, Vorak of Kolnap, an amiable (usually) six-foot cockroach. But I find It a bit silly to romanticize apes for having human qualities which they in fact do not have while demonizing humans for having qualities which we, well, which we do have but which we share in some manner with our simian cousins.

The specific plot of War is set in motion when the evil “Colonel” (Woody Harrelson) kills “Cornelia” (Judy Greer) wife of signin’ and speakin’ boss ape Caesar (Andy Serkis)3, as well as the elder of their two sons, “Blue Eyes” (Max Lloyd-Jones4). Caesar sets off with “Rocket” (Terry Notary), a fellow chimp, along with “Red” (Ty Olsson), a gorilla, and Maurice (Karin Konoval), an orangutan (a very large orangutan), who may be part Vulcan (just a guess) to avenge their deaths.

What follows can best described as the drippings and leavings of Star Wars, Star Trek, some bad-ass posturing from Apocalypse Now, and a big chunk of the Book of Exodus. Our searchers pick up an ally in “Bad Ape” (Steve Zahn), another chimp, who comes across as a less racist (fortunately) Jar-Jar Binks, who seems to spend a lot of time falling down holes. Funny!5 Also they pick up this sweet chick “Nova” (Amiah Miller), a mute who is the only female of any species to get decent screen time.

Is it rude to point out that male chimps don’t hug their sons? That’s because they don’t know they have sons! They aren’t “faithful” to their “wives”, which they don’t have. Struggles for male dominance within a chimp troop frequently lead to mutilation or death, and conflicts between groups can be equally lethal, sometimes resulting in cannibalism.6 I’m sorry, but it’s silly to contrast “innocent” apes with wicked humans by assigning to apes virtues that they don’t have, that only humans even conceive of. All the sexual morality that War for the Planet of the Apes attributes to apes is found—to the extent that it is found—only among humans, because morality is a human construct—which is why we find it so easy, and, often, so exciting, to violate.

As I’ve suggested, there are no “strong” females in this film, and, as far as I could tell, no LGBT apes either, which, after all, could be kind of fun. They could distill chartreuse and give each other apish attitude—“Either this banana tree goes or I do”. That sort of thing.

Am I the only one who notices this stuff? I mean, in the year of Wonder Woman, a critical smash/blockbuster that’s virtually chick-free? And I could also complain about the geography. First it’s tropic, like, Africa, then they’re in the “North”, and then it’s pretty definitely Monument Valley, where John Ford used to shoot all his westerns, before ending up by a lake that looks like a pre-development Tahoe. How chimps are supposed to survive in an environment like that is anybody’s guess.

Earlier, the chimps are building this huge wall for the Colonel that’s almost like the ancient Hebrews making bricks for old Pharaoh without straw. And when they reach the, you know, “Promised Land”, and then Caesar dies, it’s sort of like Moses, or since they’re clearly in the American West it’s like if the Indians got away from the white folks and got their country back. So why not do a remake of Exodus if that’s what it really is? Or an outright Indian picture, if that’s what it is?

Well, Hebrews—Jews, really—that can be controversial. You might be sending the wrong message. And if you did an Indian picture, well, the Indians would probably want in on it, would want Indians in the lead roles. And when did an Indian carry a picture? I’m trying to be realistic here.

But apes, Jesus. Everybody loves apes. Everybody!

Afterwords It's "interesting" that all of the critics who are falling all over themselves for the cheesy sentimentality of "Apes" are also falling all over themselves over the campy cynicism of Game of Thrones, which is pretty much The Sopranos with dragons or maybe Lord of the Rings without any good guys.

Why can’t Word spell “Heston”? What is the deal here, Bill? ↩︎

The shtick of gaining sympathy for a speaking character by endowing him/her with the ability to sign goes back at least as far as Lily Tomlin’s character in Robert Altman’s Nashville. ↩︎

In “real life”, of course, Julius Caesar’s wife was named Cornelia. I’m not sure what this is supposed to mean. ↩︎

I don’t know why Max gets a credit, because I don’t remember Blue Eyes doing anything except die. I guess the guy has a good agent. ↩︎

The slapstick here was so sloppy that at first I couldn’t believe it was supposed to be funny. Largely because it wasn’t. ↩︎

None of the apes ever show their canines, which, in gorillas especially, are quite “impressive”, not to mention scary as hell. But apparently admitting that apes sometimes bite would be “sending the wrong message”. ↩︎

#War for the Planet of the Apes #irony #2017 movies

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