Blarghagh

Mark Kern, longtime game developer who worked on heavy hitters at Blizzard such as StarCraft, Diablo II, WarCraft III: The Frozen Throne and World of WarCraft in the past has created a petition in the form of an open letter asking Kotaku and Polygon to help heal the rift in the greater gaming community by attempting to change games journalism for the better, as an olive branch. Among others, BioShock creator Ken Levine shared the petition on social media, calling it "encouraging". The general response from the gaming press has been lackluster to downright inflammatory. Especially website VG247 has been a vocal opponent, calling those who created and/or signed the petition "ill-informed idiots", including the high profile game developers that make the games the site writes about. My personal view on this is that the response, especially that by the aforementioned site, is intently inflammatory. VG247 is a website that was pretty much no longer existed on anyone's radar, being essentially replaced in the gaming community's consciousness by the often seen as more interesting website Rock, Paper, Shotgun. They have gotten a slew of exposure with their earlier inflammatory articles dealing with #GamerGate. In essence, it's clickbait. Ken Levine has also been accused of being "pro-#GamerGate" for supporting the petition that calls for journalistic ethics, meaning that supporting ethical behaviour in games journalism makes you "pro-#GamerGate", implying that as so many people have claimed, it is actually ethics in journalism. Thoughts?

Well those things are pretty easily solved, though. Dynamesh and a high enough polycount pretty much prevent most artifacts and then you retopologize it and export what you have as texture maps. What I like about ZBrush now that I'm using it is that I'm focusing on the creation and how it looks the entire time and not being distracted by worrying about the technical aspect of making sure my polyflow is correct the whole time, which can wait until retopologizing. It's compartmentalized the artistic and technical parts making it easier to focus on both. I'm generally the rigger/animator at work though, so I'm still going to be stuck with everyone else's crappy polyflow. I've yelled at these people so often about how a model won't deform right when animated unless you have proper edge loops that I've become convinced they think it's funny and do it on purpose.

Playing It Cool - a cynical man's romantic comedy starring Chris Evans that's very clever, well-acted and has bunch of good actors as side characters. Evans plays a Hollywood screenwriter who is hired to rewrite a terrible romcom script but can't figure out how because he's never actually been in love.

Picked up Zbrush sculpting in my lunch breaks the last month because I'm sick of modeling stuff in 3D Max. It's wonderfully intuitive and much more artistic compared to the more technical modeling technique in Max and such programs. My first few attempts were awful but here's my latest result (not finished, but I wanted to share it anyway), about a week and a half's worth of lunch breaks:

Merged topic with posts from movies thread. The saddest mod action ever. RIP Leonard Nimoy, nobody lived long and prospered like you.

Who's Kyle Katarn? But yeah, I rarely used HK or Carth. Or anyone non-Jedi for that matter. Except Zaalbar, if I needed some muscle. That bastard cuts through enemies like a knife through butter.

The step backwards from KotOR 2 to KotOR is very awkward. It's hard to go from intrigue and subtlety (as far as Star Wars goes) to the most overblown cliches. I kinda understand that you can't step back. Sometimes I feel like I'm alone in not hating Carth. I do think that darkside moment where he leaves Mission to die is cowardly, but it's also extremely out of character and just goes to show the dark side path isn't really how Bioware intended the story to be played, I guess. And the voice actor is a little awkward, I guess. Also, the fact that the game prompts you to talk to him and he brushes you off with "I don't want to talk!" is annoying, but that's more a problem with the game design. I mean, obviously I have to start with so many reservation means I don't love the character either, but I feel the hate he gets is a little overblown. At least he's not Anomen.

Hah, Putin's disappointed face is so fitting to that awkward placement of his photo.

So the FCC voted to make it a utility, right? So they kept net neutrality? Because if so America is lucky and the rest of the world is less likely to to change it too.

Man, nobody ever cares about our KotOR section. Last time one of these showed up I moved it but that was a death sentence, so I guess we'll keep it here. Anyway, I didn't see the twist coming. In my defence, I was 15 when that game came out. Talk about mind-blowing. I also didn't understand the D&D system as well at the time so those fights everyone complains about being easy gave me a lot of trouble. I guess that happens when you dump all your scoundrels points into INT and WIS. Jolee and HK-47 are still two of my favourite game NPCs ever.

What mechanics are good Subjective vs Objective is an interesting topic but lets keep the focus on that topic in regards to what features could improve PoE in a franchise rather than discussing who is more or less intelligent? Thanks.

Well, that's what the article about it I read said, but I can't find it now. It was on Ain't It Cool News though, so not exactly a good track record...

Damn, there goes my one redeeming thought that might show that the academy isn't complete idiots because that snub is ridiculous. The LEGO movie was by far the best animated movie of the year (that I've seen, haven't gotten around to Book of Life).

I haven't seen Book of Life, but I figure the Lego movie might not have been eligable due to the live action sequences.

God, that moment in Wreck-It Ralph when he has to smash Vanellope's car.

Yeah, I never did understand the win for Return of the King. It's a third of a movie! I just rationalize it as them giving it the win for the entire series rather than that specific part.

American Sniper was too popular and suffered backlash. I'm surprised Bradley Cooper didn't win the best actor for it, though. On the other hand, I think J.K. Simmons should have won because I considered him one of the leads of Whiplash rather than supporting, but I guess he won the oscar for supporting actor so it's all good. Best animated shortfilm had a dutch entry that didn't win. Too bad, I know some of the people who made it and they deserved it.

Yes. The first two trump the last one. Agreed. This is really one of those "you can only pick two" triangle things because I've never had a job that had all three. You have interesting work and good pay. I'd also probably stay at fun colleagues and interesting work, or fun colleagues and good pay. As long as they have two out of three I figure I'm at a good place because that's rare enough as it is - most can barely muster one of the three.

Neither. We're talking about whether it's moral to advise somebody who has suicidal thoughts to kill themselves instead of seeking professional help first. For me its obvious, we have an absolute moral responsibility as a society to help people who suffer from mental ailments and to ensure they get professional help if they want to kill themselves. And this professional help should be mandatory if they refuse it because someone suffering from some sort of mental issue may not be in the best position to know what's best for them There is absolutely nothing moral about what you're saying here. In fact, it's quite evil. Evil..... How is getting people professional psychiatric help evil? I don't think it's evil but I do think the last bit is misguided - it's a utopian ideal that would work in a world that works a lot differently from this one. Who classifies what "mentally ill" is? Who forces people to get their "help"? Most psychiatric help eventually comes down to behavioural conditioning or getting put on medication. Is a kid with ADD mentally ill and has to be forced to get treatment? Is a conspiracy nut delusional and has to get treatment? Sometimes just being slightly different can be considered "mentally ill" by the psychiatric community. And how does it get checked? Most of these things don't even get caught unless the person gets help themselves - mental illness is not readily apparent all the time. I know someone with PTSD from sexual abuse - her psychiatrist took years to find that out simply because she wasn't able to open up and bear that part of her past to the psychiatrist. What happens then, is that "not cooperating" with your fancy required mental treatment? Would she be subject to fines or whatever? I refused medication to deal with my depression, would I get an orderly to forcefully shove them down my throat under that system? "Mandatory" mental treatment may sound good on paper if your goal is "removing mental illness" but there's too many problems and factors for it to really be effective or even possible in my opinion, and "mandatory" usually meaning "government" it also would be way too easy to abuse to try and remove "undesirables" from society. I think people who want help need to be able to get it more easily, so we need more insurance coverage for psychiatric help and better education on the subject, but "mandatory" treatment just has too many problems to be viable. Just my two cents.

The difference being that the leaked Deadpool footage was commissioned and the Alien thing having no studio involvement at all. But yeah, very true.

Really, only last year? I was sure they were released longer ago.

I was actually completely prepared to hate Olaf based on the previews but the little guy won me over and he's by far my favourite element of the movie. Possibly because he's such a punching bag and everything he does is pretty much black humor. Those silly rock trolls were totally out of place though. Weird stone smurfs ruining the flow of the movie with a song lighthearted song about matchmaking right when the drama has started happening. EDIT: Missed this post before, sorry. A lot of it has to do with Lasseter now being the lead of both studios, essentially. Ever since Bolt the Disney team has been doing really well. I think with Big Hero 6 they looked very hard at Dreamworks instead, though, because that movie is essentially just How To Train Your Dragon reimagined as a superhero movie.

Seems to me pushing your limits all the time must have some effect too, but yeah most of the time it's just circumstances or them being completely idiotic.

Looks like posting "here's the Alien movie mockups and designs I made just for fun" on Twitter is how you get people to greenlit your movie. Well played, Blomkamp. Anyway, here's something that tugged at my heartstrings a little. Local theme park released 2 black swans, a male and a female, in one of their ponds about five years ago. They were inseperable, but recently the male died (infection or some such). Now the distraught female is spending her days hanging out in front of a shiny trash can in the theme park, making odd noises towards it. The shiny trascan is reflective and not having ever seen another black swan, the female regards the reflection as her mate.