A roundup of serveral people who had interesting responses to my Seesaw probability theory:
Darkenna sets a non-believer straight in this thread.
Everyone knows that anecdotal evidence is the most convincing.
The science behind seesaw probability.
EDIT: Also, never mistake superstition for science! Or is that the other way around?
I saw I sold several shirts at my Cafepress store. I’ve wondered who bought them. Well, here’s one. With a guitar!
Now I feel just awful for getting worked up about Striker. The young man has posted a full retraction and an apology here. A video apology. He did this of his own volition.
He apologized publicly, so I’m going to do the same. Striker: I’m sorry I called you a moron. And an idiot. That was petty of me. I could (and should) have handled this without childish name-calling.
Striker really is a teenager. When I saw him I thought of a lot of the blunders I made as a teenager. Except, when I made my mistakes I made them in front of dozens of peers, not hundreds (thousands?) of strangers on the internet. When I wrote my initial post, I had assumed “this guy” was an adult, and judged his actions as I would a grown man. (I also judged his grammer the same way, which wasn’t fair either. I would cringe if the stuff I wrote at 16 was still around today.)
This is way too much angst for a situation where nothing bad happened and nobody got hurt. Striker also humbled me with the video apology: At 16, I never would have done that on my own.
I’ve removed the link to his profile. Please, if anyone is still giving him a hard time, I’m begging you: let the guy alone.
Also: Comments closed. I really would like to let this rest.
In response to Roxysteve here, I’ll outline the stuff I use to make DMotR. (I’m sure he’s right: I’ve probably done this before, but it was ages ago and I can’t find it now.)
I use Comic Book Creator to make DMotR. The software is not the best. It feels half-finished. I suggest taking a good look at the free demo and deciding if the software will cut it for you as-is. It isn’t likely to improve anytime soon.
The biggest missing feature is the ability to move and resize panels. This is a pretty basic thing, and the software doesn’t let you do it. You have to use one of the existing pre-made page layouts. If you look at DMotR, you may notice certain panel layouts appear over and over. Another glaring oversight is that it can’t fill round bubbles with text: It puts text into rectangular regions within a bubble, which can eat up a lot of excess page real estate.
There are a lot of useless features in there, like adding clipart (yuck) and sound effects (wha????) to your work. It’s an odd bit of software, to be sure.
There are many other small bugs and annoyances. I’ve come this close to running off and writing my own software that can do panel layouts, round text bubbles, thought bubbles, and fancy bubble outlines. It would be a fun project, but I couldn’t do it AND write a comic at the same time, and if I stop doing comics I won’t need it. Hmmmm.
Sorry. Where was I?
I hear there is a program called Comic Life for Macs, but I don’t have access to a Mac so I can’t tell you if it’s any good or not. (Actually, being Mac software, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t intuitive and polished, but I can’t speak from experience. I’d put money on it being a cut above CBC, though.)
The other major tool you want is this: Blambot. Lots of wonderful fonts. Many are free, the others are a reasonable (to me) $20US. The fonts look great and the site doesn’t pummel you with nonsense like many fonts sites do. In DMotR, the king of the dead speaks using their outstanding “Manga Temple” font. Aragorn issued his first decree (and Boromir mocked the Elves) using “Ale & Wenches”. Some of the sound effects use “BADABOOM”. There are a few other gems over there you may recognize as well.
The main font I use is “Pig Iron”, which comes with CBC. Actually, I use “Pig Iron Bold”, because “Pig Iron Medium” wastes miles of vertical space for no apparent reason. On the other hand, “Pig Iron Bold” has a defective Q with too much trailing space, which I have to correct manually using image editing software, after I’m done in CBC. (Although you can probably find a few places I forgot.)
I use Paint Shop Pro 8 for retouching. I use it to color normal word bubbles yellow (for NPCs) because CBC can only do white chat bubbles. I have to do quite a bit of Photoshopping to make the King of the Dead talk in that glowing green text. I also use PSP to do the “photoshoping” on screencaps, in order to make composite images, flip the scene, edit out unwanted characters, or whatever other abuse I need to do to Peter Jackson’s work.
There it is. That’s what I use. Good luck with your project.
Which reminds me: This comic is popular enough that I’m surprised nobody else has done something similar. Harry Potter? Aliens? Spider-Man? X-Men? Star Trek? Star Wars? The Matrix? There are tons of movies which are well known and take themselves very seriously, which are the two main ingredients for good satire. I keep expecting another movie comic to appear someplace, but it hasn’t happened yet.
This just in from Striker1057:
Wow. I have no way of knowing what he’s experiencing. I’m not even sure what he’s talking about. In any case, if anyone is giving this guy trouble, please let him alone. Thanks for the support from my friends, but I don’t want to be seen as some sort of bully here. I still wonder who Striker is and why people behave this way, but I don’t wish the guy any harm. He hasn’t hurt me.
Let’s all enjoy the video again and put this behind us.
Heads up.
Wednesday is a holiday. I’m going to be goofing around instead of spending time on the website. DMotR will resume on Friday.
I’m working on a research project right now that involves deforming polygonal faces and bodies in real time. It’s strictly low-polygon stuff. I’ve had an itch to work on this sort of thing for years. The idea is to have a few basic controls that allows the user to radically change the appearance of the starting mesh. If you’ve played with the face builder in Oblivion then you have the basic idea, although the models I’m working with have a tiny fraction of the polygons to work with. (A wild guess tells me the Oblivion meshes are 5 to 10 times denser.)
What has shocked me is how easy it turned out to be. I thought I was going to need a lot of logic to manipulate points on a face. This is complex business, and I assumed it would need complex code. It doesn’t. The only real trick is identifying the right points on the mesh. Once you know which points make up the tip of the nose, you can pull them around in different ways to make different noses. It’s so simple it’s stupid. In fact, the surest way to make it work badly is to make the logic too complex. I keep trying to come up with more “intelligent” code that will do more with a face based on calculations, but the results are rarely as realistic as simply moving groups of points along an axis. For example, if you want higher or lower cheekbones, then identifying the “cheekbones” points yanking them down is much more effective than trying to analyze the shape of the cheekbones and re-create that shape using points in the desired location.
In the midst of this project, my wife has sent me this video:
Not realtime, but very, very interesting. I remember an episode of Star Trek: TNG where the ship’s computer reconstructed someone’s face based on a small portion available in a photograph. It seemed far-fetched at the time, but here we have the ability to turn flat photos into moveable 3d shapes, which is half the battle right there. Amazing.
What lessons can we learn from the abrupt demise of this once-impressive games studio?
Finally, the age-old debate has been settled.
Remember the superhero MMO from 2009? Neither does anyone else. It was dumb. So dumb I was compelled to write this.
A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really.
Yes, this game is loud, crude, childish, and stupid. But it it knows what it wants to be and nails it. And that's admirable.
Yeah, this game is a classic. But the story is idiotic, incoherent, thematically confused, and patronizing.
This is a horrible narrative that undermines the hobby through crass stereotypes. The hobby is vast, gamers come from all walks of life, and you shouldn't judge ANY group by its worst members.
What does it mean when a program crashes, and why does it happen?
Deus Ex Mankind Divided was a clumsy, tone-deaf allegory that thought it was clever, and it managed to annoy people of all political stripes.
Both a celebration and an evisceration of tabletop roleplaying games, by twisting the Lord of the Rings films into a D&D game.
T w e n t y S i d e d
