Nachimir

For a second, I mistook this for the "Life" thread and thought you meant logging in and out of the forums. Get well soon, Brannigan!

This says more about human nature than it does about games or Kickstarter.

Dog Strangled by Phone Cord Saves His Own Life by Dialing Emergency Number

You're probably seeing posts from the old forums, which converted those IDs into youtube embeds.

By Clovis' bladder and bowel!

via Salka on Twitter:

A former landlady of mine is a performance artist. She got a load of ex-police gear (shoes, trousers, gore-tex macs and earpieces), had "INSECURITY" professionally printed on the back of the coats, and went around with a partner, randomly stopping people and searching their bags. Nearly everyone submitted without querying it. Outside an art museum in Amsterdam, they were only searching ladies handbags, while other people were walking by with large suitcases. One woman asked why they were searching handbags, and the partner, absolutely deadpan, said "We've had some paintings stolen". When the lady made an incredulous gesture at her bag, without missing a beat he responded "Yeah, they're miniatures". They did it for a while outside the American Embassy too. Everyone submitted to have their bag searched, and a few tourists thanked them and said it made them feel a lot safer that someone was doing this. They even did it outside an arms fair in London, as the dealers were arriving they would simply surrender their briefcases and allow them to rifle through their papers. The police had their hands so full forming a line to hold back protesters that it was down to the line of actual security guards to keep running forward shouting "No! Don't talk to them, they're not real security guards!". -- There was another experiment, which I can't find with a quick google search, but it went like this: A backpacker gets on trains, alone, and asks someone for their seat, usually in a carriage with plenty of spare seats. As you might expect, the request is almost always refused or at least questioned. The experiment was then repeated many times again, but this time with someone in an authoritative looking uniform also there, sitting within sight of the person being asked to give up their seat. The results of the second set of tests were a dramatic rise in people being willing to give up their seat, without question. I'll try to find a source for that. I saw a recreation of it in the 90s, when I was pretty submissive in general, and it really changed my attitude toward authority. I didn't exactly develop a problem with it, but resolved to question it at every turn. People are scarily compliant, and we often don't realise it. I think, in some ways, that lack of realisation might stop some people from being more predatory.

This is horrific. A lot of the people I follow are basically divided along lines of "What's being done to him is disgusting and hypocritical" and "He's a rapist, fuck due process". I don't think those two views necessarily conflict, and being outraged about the way the UK, US, and Sweden are working does not equate to thinking he's a good person or any kind of hero. By the witness statements and various accounts of other events, he seems to be a terrible human being. He should face justice for whatever he's done to those women. However, in that event it's likely that he'll also be extradited to the US for a show trial, creating a very real possibility of facing great injustice for humiliating a super power. Whatever ultimately happens, it's going to be a shit sandwich.

I only just noticed the cat's face in the second one! Thrik, I was doing this kind of thing: http://shutterskills.com/make-your-own-bokeh-shape.html But a bit fancier: http://ympt.co.uk/bokeh/bokeh-p-series.jpg You need a fast lens that can do shallow depths of field to get a lot of control over it; the more out of focus you can make the background, the bigger the bokeh get. Your camera might be a bit slow at f3.8, though it does have tiny bokeh in the background of that shot with the pebbles. (Apologies if that's still jargon to you )

<-- Lapsed. Excited. Probably too short on time to play, but this looks magnificent.

Thanks, Wikipedia. brkl: Yes, messing around with a laser cutter and some polypropylene sheets. I drew a few symbols myself, and got some public domain ones from The Noun Project.

Here are some photos I took today, messing around with cheesy bokeh effects. My brother lent me his DSLR with a 50mm prime. The depth of field at low apertures is so ridiculously fine you have to pay an absurd amount of attention to focussing; it's intersting to mess around with.

Some incredibly good news about Why I Hate Saturn today.

I realised something amazing today, and it's that the London 2012 is annoying pretty much everyone, regardless of where they sit politically: Fucking with small businesses: http://www.independe...rs-7945436.html Fucking up transport from day one: http://www.telegraph...pens-on-M4.html Treating workers badly: https://twitter.com/...812924424814592 https://twitter.com/...813101294419969 My condolences to any of you that are in London and anywhere near the games. I know people who don't give a fuck about social issues or landlords turfing out tennants to make a quick buck on accomodation, but now they're fucking with transport and small businesses, it's as if they're going all out to annoy people. When the case for them coming here hinged largely on economic growth, they're doing all of the above, and sponsors get to operate in a temporary tax haven, that's pretty fucking awry. Pretty much everyone I know now, from the most ardent free market advocates to the crustiest protestors, hate LOCOG and everything they're doing. A business owner I know had a run in with LOCOG three or four years ago, so I already knew they were septic cunts. The extent of it is amazing me though. I could totally get behind the Olympics, if they were actually imbued with any of the values they claim to embody.

Pretty much this. I find the athletes amazing and pretty inspiring, and a lot of the sport extremely entertaining (I never really watch sports). I object to the colossal amount of corporate cock we had to suck just to get them to sponsor 10% of it, and likewise the suppliers, such as G4S, were massively exploitative and incompetent dickheads. The heavy handed treatment of small businesses on branding (and chips) was a bitterly stupid way to exclude and limit the cultural potential of the games, and the arguments given in favour of it utterly facile. The Olympics are an amazing piece of global culture, which have partly been stolen and turned into a rich dude circle-jerk. One of the highlights for me was the Daily Mail retracting a massively racist article about it being unlikely in the UK to find the kind of happy, middle class mixed race family shown in the opening ceremony, then less than a week later, Jessica Ennis becoming one of our most prominent winners. Here she is with her family. There are other good things, such as the stadium being designed to deconstruct into a smaller more practical venue for Stratford, rather than be a huge, empty space sucking behemoth. Temporary architecture for events is a much better idea than trying to make something like the Millennium Dome profitable.

The closing ceremony had a bizarrely weak opening, random wanky symbolism, successive anticlimaxes, and I suspect, a tiny fraction of the budget given to the opening ceremony. All of the cynics coming out to play on Twitter made it enormous fun though.

I can't remember everything I got rid of. Some went to charity shops, some to friends. One thing I held onto is a complete set of Cerebus phone books, because it might be out of print soon. I wouldn't recommend it as a whole though, because during the last half it steadily degenerates into mad sexist rambling and the weird personal Christian mythos of Dave Sim. It's a long time since I read it, but as I recall he equates feminists with the Taliban. Gerhard's backdrops are really beautiful though.

That's my friend Michael. He skates there with a load of friends every Sunday, and they loosely refer to their sessions as Middle Aged Shred

Thanks It's a kit I'm hoping to make and sell for various existing devices (I'll post pictures soon, but not yet). It started with me making a really shitty one to go snowboarding last year. It was handmade, with wonky edges and a big wide angle lens zip tied to the front. The camera survived all the crashes well, and enough snowboarders asked me about it that I thought "Hmm…". For the rest of the year, other mountain bikers kept spotting it and asking about it. I got access to a small CNC mill, taught myself CAD, and started cranking out better prototypes (Not a huge jump to do 2.5D work if you already know anything like UnrealEd, Illustrator and Photoshop). The main difference between the thing I'm making and similar products (apart from it being much uglier and cheaper) is that it's designed to be modified. I think my biggest realisation during the early stages of this is that the crowd I meet in hackspaces and the crowd I meet doing action sports have some surprising similarities: Sports people are very practical, and can be just as nerdy as hackspace people, just in a very specific way about their gear. Those who film often cobble together mounts out of random stuff like sponges and zip ties. I realised I could make something to make that process easier, rather than just selling a proprietary case and mount system. Hopefully, it won't fail horribly and I can raise enough to do the first production run without needing any kind of major backing. The manufacturing processes I'm using mean fairly small runs are possible without taking a colossal hit on costs.

Some skate stuff: It's also been drop tested in the bowl. Films all the way through 15 foot drops onto concrete, no damage

The now only semi-secret work project I've been doing for the past 18 months or so is a near indestructible camera enclosure. Here it is hanging off me on a mountain bike yesterday: Here are a bunch of early tests:

There are lots of the things in the title of this thread at this website, but specifically related to programming.

These two are brilliant. I had a clearout recently, and couldn't bring myself to part with them. Baker's dialogue is sharp, and he's really deft when it comes to facial expressions.