Month: November 2008

Generated worlds

“Another big benefit of procedural content creation is that you end up being able to do stuff you simply couldn’t do otherwise. It opens up innovation fields. If you’re creating things through code, you have a deeper understanding of what you’re doing, and you can bake in some limitations. Our artists needed to be able to build not a random tree, but a type of tree. It’s actually much closer to building a particle system than building traditional art assets. Artists play with parameters more than they play with vertices.”

the same will happen to movies too. directors have reached a limit about the level of detail they can micro manage. lord of the rings was probably one of the peaks.

Auto Bailout

People are neatly lining up on either side of this auto industry bailout subject, but most of them are ducking the core issues. If you’re pro or you’re con, here are some of the questions you have to answer to be credible. Pro. If you’re in favor of a bailout, you need to explain how the buck – literally – stops here. Why will capping salaries, for example, change diddly with respect to the US auto companies’ competitiveness? Or are you merely arguing that this was a perfect storm – economic downturn, super-spike in oil, etc. – and so we should bail the auto companies out? (In which case, what about the airlines? Oh wait, they haven’t all failed yet – so much for that argument.) Con. If you’re in favor of letting the auto companies go bankrupt, you need to explain why we’ll be right this time about the systemic consequences when we have been wrong most of the way to this point about every other company, especially Lehman. There is no doubt that the auto companies need to restructured, consolidated, and generally folded, spindled, and mutilated, but do we know enough about the implications to let it happen during the worst downturn since the Depression?

no bailout.

Reactionary Change

“Nothing has been so direct as the Netanyahu Web site, though we have seen others with shades of it”. When a campaign is successful, “people are going to knock things off, both in terms of functionality and aesthetic.” Websites aside, for liberals in both countries, the idea of Mr. Netanyahu as the Obama candidate of Israel seems mystifying. Of the 3 main contenders for prime minister in February’s election, including Tzipi Livni of Kadima and Ehud Barak of Labor, Mr. Netanyahu is the most hawkish and the least interested in the focus on dialogue with adversaries that Mr. Obama made a centerpiece of his foreign policy platform.

Wherein “change” is co-opted by the ultra reactionaries