Luftmensch

Interesting homunculus. So is it possible to rigorously demonstrate that this understanding is more consistently useful and accurate in describing the behavior of life, or is it just intuition? Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck. Philosophically, nothing can fit into any definition unless you define your axioms to allow it. In my opinion this gives far too much credence to kook idealism in far too many cases to be useful (take, for just one example, Morrissey's opinion that the British Crown is, by definition, tyrranical. Of course it bloody is if you write a definition to say so). In general, it doesn't seem very useful to take such a loaded term as Altruism and try and give it a definition that makes it nonexistent. It might be more helpful to figure out what altruism, as we understand it, actually is and entails.

This isn't exactly following the rules of the thread, since I don't actually use this, but I've heard a lot of people say they really like ZenWriter. The principle is that it creates a calming and distraction-free setting for you to write. I think it's portable too, so you can put it on a thumb drive and work anywhere. Related to things I do use, I have two workout books, which I only got because I respect the authors. The serious one is The 4-Hour Body by Timothy Ferriss, which is a mighty comprehensive tome of all things health and fitness. I haven't made my way through it, but just flipping through it and picking out tips, I've felt better about myself already. Encouragingly, it's really emphasizes tracking data and experimenting, and notes that everything in the book is effectively based on individual cases, and you should really record your own data to see what really works for you. The other workout book I use is Solitary Fitness, written by the infamous Charles Bronson, Her Majesty's most expensive inmate. I've found it useful because it's about how to exercise when you don't have any special equipment (or, in his case, you're locked int solitary confinement, thus the title), and the writing is very optimistic and jovial.

Seems odd, but it sort of makes sense since 3D projectors are specially equipped to project extremely high frame rates (at least four times as high as regular projectors). THAT TICKLES

Don't care.

Hey, I think that's a good metric. Although, I had a lot of trouble getting through Dune the first few times I read it, but when I finally had the time to read the whole thing, I really liked it. So it does depend on when you read it. Anyway, I figure this thread warranted another one of these:

I can't find the interview or the specific quote, but I remember Maurice Sendak explained that he never specifically intended to write children's books, just that the sort of books he writes seem to fit into that niche. IMO describing Maurice Sendak books as "for kids" is a bit limiting. They do appeal on a level that children can appreciate, certainly. On the thought of what's kids stuff, I feel like most musicians don't really have that prejudice. There's snobs, certainly, but most musicians I know, even if they've gone through conservatories and played in swanky concert halls, don't turn their noses up at four-chord pop songs. Whereas children's authors are asked at parties, "do you write any real books?" you'll almost never hear a bassist for a rock band asked, "do you play any real music?" Just some thoughts fwiw

My point was that it's not something inherently contentious, and accusing members of being verbally abusive is kind of inappropriate. Text is tone-deaf, so it's not necessarily an invalid interpretation to assume someone asking "WTF does that even mean?" could be combative, but as far as I read it was just neutral befuddlement. It strikes me extremely unfair to accuse someone of being rude or abusive for asking you to explain yourself. Or to call me a dick for saying, no, he wasn't necessarily being rude. Of course, that's contingent on acronyms being tone-neutral, which in my experience they are. Evil, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder.

This is a pretty great Hobbit/LotR related print http://society6.com/product/There-And-Back-Again_Print

I've been using a fun app called Unfuck Your Habitat. It doesn't have many fancy features or anything, it basically just a foul-mouthed motivation tool. Nothing fancy or engineered. Unrelated, I've been playing Super Hexagon to get me pumped to do things. Generally any game I can pick up and play and is pretty intense works, Super Hexagon is just the one that's worked for me lately. Whenever I do try to unfuck my house, I use the breaks to hexagon. (an aside, my biggest complaint about SH is that it uses frame dropping instead of slowdown when the framerate drops. This wouldn't be a huge deal except that it ignores input when a frame is being dropped so a good percentage of my game overs are from having my input ignored when a frame was being skipped. Or at least that's what seems to be happening, maybe I'm totally wrong and just suck) If you don't live in a town with ethnic markets, even the ethnic section of your supermarket will be cheaper. Funny how that works. BTW does anyone know why the Mexican food section always has St. Jude candles?

I wouldn't call it rude, calling the hobbit a "non-book" is a completely nonsensical and baffling statement. WTF is a pretty fair response to total befuddlement. Calling it a children's book is entirely fair though, but as someone who really likes children's literature and think they get an unfair rap for being lame and trivial, it's a shame to see "for kids" equivalent to "not really a book"

I dunno, seems better than lurking. Which plenty of folks probably are. Whatever, he's not causing any trouble yet.

Reminds me of this

Modern reactor designs are nonsustaining. If the system fails, they stop. Problem is most reactors in working order were designed in the 70s, and sadly nuclear energy research is a much smaller field than it once wasAnyway I don't want to derail the thread, so here's a comical picture

I'm sort of baffled that people always regard nuclear energy as dirty. As far as I've ever heard from people for or against, the only existing hazard is that the health standards are very poor in countries where uranium is mined. That's kind of nutty because that's strictly a casualty of affluent nations refusing to mine uranium, leaving the dirty work to the third world. Of course, I'm absolutely thrilled that Germany's solar program has been so successful, but the environmental impact of nuclear is so bafflingly low compared with coal or hydroelectric power it's nutty to me to call it dirty. The biggest nuclear catastrophe of all time was chernobyl (hiroshima and nagasaki were intentional and aren't pertinent) and if you go to chernobyl today, it's a fantastic nature preserve, because animal populations don't actually mind radiation as much as heavy metals. /rant Still funny images.

...Nope. But, since I'm the guy who draws Brkl now, here's one for you. I don't even know the guy. For all I know he's probably a pretty decent fellow and not a Scandinavian goblin like I drew.

I'm definitely at that point where I wish I could afford to go to art school. I don't have a problem shitting out stuff but I wish I was surrounded by a community of enthusiastic artist to give me input. I keep looking at what I did and thinking, I know it could be better/I know it's not very good, but why, and what can I do to fix it? As far as technical skill I think I'm learning as I go along well enough, but even when I read theory books it's hard to step back and not only be able to judge my own sketches objectively, but apply lessons from something totally different to my own work. When I was first working as a graphic artist at the local t-shirt shop, I learned a lot of great technical stuff about printing and using Illustrator (it was great when my boss' daughter, who's a graphic design student (and double-parenthetically on the dean's list and art student of the year) would always come to me to learn how to do things in Illustrator). I never really was challenged to push myself though, I'd always be met with input like "it's good enough for what they paid". It's a real shame imo. Anyway here's a couple things I pooped out recently. So many little "can't put my finger on it" nagging problems, so few creative peers.

Whoops, I meant 24. I'll not edit because then the replies wouldn't make sense. Carry on. Goddamn I'm just going to be the forum cartoonist then huh? Alright, but you brought this on yourself. Good thing there's important Video game developers who browse these boards who can see me draw shitty cartoons and can think to themselves, "we could be paying him to do this"

American Television runs at roughly 30fps, and before sound there wasn't a set standard, although I think it averaged out to about 18fps (animation is still sometimes measured by "feet" of film, which are 18 frames.) But that's all technical trivialities. The current Hollywood blockbuster standard is 48fps, but I've never seen that advertised.

I wish I knew what these were from. It's probably something popular I miss out on from not watching TV.

I don't think I've ever seen an American cinema advertise it's frame rate. Which is somewhat odd because my TV advertised a refresh rate of 60Hz in big letters on the box (the difference is striking when you first use it; makes everything look like a soap opera or a bad British sitcom). Then again I don't go to the movies that much these days.

brkl, don't get a big head, it wasn't a cartoon of you any more than anyone else. You just happened to make the pedestrian comment, and pedestrian is a damned funny posh word. I haven't watched the films since my family got on the whole extended edition DVD kick so I haven't any concrete points to make except to make fun of you guys for being armchair directors.

Sorry guys, reading this thread put this image in my head.

I'm going to copy your patent application and add a horse bag.

Huh, I've always thought it was pretty nifty that Peter Jackson could pull off making crazy long movies like that. It's a unique film experience. We generally accept two hour films or full series' with dozens of hour long episodes, it hardly seems like bloat to put something in the middle.

Speaking on nonsensical poses... also, related