TipVFL

It sounds like you saw the "Love Conquers All" version, but saw through the illusion. It's actually part of the original ending, but with all the framing of the scene removed. Definitely check out the director's cut.

I feel like it's kinda expected on Twitter, but I was genuinely creeped out when it happened within 10 minutes of me posting a complaint about a company on Facebook. Ironically, my complaint about the company was that they were creepy.

I was complaining about a property management company who sent everyone in my neighborhood a letter warning us that renters would be moving in, and asking us to keep an eye on them and report back.

They showed up, really defensive, claiming that they didn't want us to spy on their renters, just report issues like if a fence had fallen over (pretty sure the renters can handle telling their landlord themselves). Then they said they were going to send a new letter to clarify.

After more of my friends replied and said their "explanation" didn't really change anything they deleted their promises, and never sent any follow up letters.

Good job company, you really convinced me you're not creepy.

My wall of pixels is a 42" 60hz 4k display I bought on Amazon for $200 3 years ago. Best purchase ever, it's basically like having four 21" 1080p monitors stuck together with no gap.

Really hard to get myself to code on my laptop now.

If you're interested in story structure, Dan Harmon (creator of Community, co-creator of Rick and Morty) wrote some great tutorials that you can read here: http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Story_Structure_101:_Super_...

It's basically a distillation of Joseph Campbell, and it's really entertaining and informative.

I recently ran across similar issues while developing a web app, https://rap.coach , that features simultaneous audio playback and recording. A lot of people are saying that Bluetooth headsets have to go into a super-low quality mode when both playback and recording are enabled, but based on my testing it appears to be a software issue.

The issue appears when I use Rap Coach with Chrome on Android, but doesn't happen in Firefox on Android. It is very frustrating, getting better control over the audio hardware is one of the main reasons I'm going to end up building app store versions of this thing.

I do video effects work and I'd suggest this could be very useful even with jitter, if you allow expanding the selection. A lot of time is spent creating "garbage mattes" for green screen footage, basically just roughly rotoscoping out the background so you can do key removal on just the important bits. So you could even massively downsample the video for your processing and still have a good enough matte.

Although, with your tech, and the more limited problem space of green screens and poorly lit green screens, you could probably make a pretty amazing tool to do the entire green screen removal.

We're getting very close to high quality and inexpensive eye-tracking technology that will make it cheap and easy to implement foveated rendering in VR headsets (basically, only rendering high quality where your eye is looking in a completely unnoticeable manner). That will really drop the hardware requirements and make high field of view/high resolution headsets totally doable.

It's an exciting time for VR.

I'm actually building in something similar to what you suggest, I'm calling it party mode.

Basically you pull up Rap Coach on any device, enter party mode, and then a party URL is displayed on the interface. Anyone can go to that URL and pick a beat and topic and add it to the playlist. At the end of each song it announces the next person.

So kinda like karaoke without needing a KJ. We're planning to host live Rap Coach events once that's in place.

Me too! Right now I'm doing everything except the music, and it's a lot of work, but I am planning to film a lot of videos of people freestyling with Rap Coach.

The current videos are pretty much placeholders, but I do think they give a decent idea of what the app is about.

Yeah, I've gone down on a motorcycle at a low speed and I crushed my foot. On a bicycle it would have just been scrapes.

I stopped motorcycling after that.

The work done to clean up the footage in that Peter Jackson documentary is impressive, but the colorization is not. It basically looks like a movie colorization from the 80s, where they just segmented the image and painted one color over each section.

Nice, your version of the time tunnel looks awesome!

I love slit-scan effects, it's such a simple but powerful concept.

They're actually really easy to do now in post, After Effects has an effect called time displacement that allows you to displace time on a per pixel level. So to recreate a standard slit scan you'd just supply it with a gradient from black to white, but you can also create even more bizarre effects by mapping the pixels differently.

A few months ago I did all the effects for some music videos, and I created multiple effects based on slit-screen. Things like, having the video smoothly break apart into slices where the time moves at different speeds and then smoothly splice itself back together.

Another cool effect I figured out: using a blurred copy of the video as the time displacement mapping. This makes everything that's colored similarly move together in time, but out of sync with everything else.

I did that effect for a video that was just one long shot, and then I rotoscoped out the performers so they move in regular time and match the music: https://youtu.be/-0zO7Fnqnvs

I really love old school effects work, they're a constant source of inspiration.

The model shots as CGI reminds me of RoboCop's "thermal vision". Renting an actual heat sensing camera was too expensive, so they just filmed people in black spandex covered in fluorescent paints under a black light.

It's clever, but I don't think it really holds up: https://youtu.be/Md14H_qD8iQ

I always thought that shot looked weird, but I never questioned the wireframes in Escape From New York.

I had a similar level of access to my school's network when I was 12. It was really easy, just watch the teacher slowly peck-type her password. It was "teach". That gave me access to everything for her class.

Later on she had to log in to the admin account, and that password was "burger". It turned out to be the password for every admin account in every school in my district. I'm guessing they were all set up by the same guy, with a note saying, "make sure to change the password!"

I had access to EVERYTHING. But, I was a pretty good kid, so I just poked around enough to really verify that I could do anything and then I logged out and never logged back in. I was terrified that I was going to get in huge trouble just for accessing things I shouldn't have.

This reminds of an eBook of Neuromancer that I read, it was occasionally missing the letter f. For the most part I just added it back mentally without really thinking about it, but then sometimes I hit a passage like this: "He turned, pulled his jacket on, and licked the cobra to full extension." That one took a moment.

Your link doesn't appear to be working on Android Chrome. It goes to a "Something is not working" page, from there I can click on the about button, and then "ready to smile" button, and that works.

However, it had a really hard time detecting my smile even when I smiled as big as I could. Have you tested it with beards? My beard is fairly short but I thought it might be the issue.

Wow, this was really interesting, I had no idea there was a pre-Farnsworth television industry.

As I was reading it I was really expecting it to end with him being immediately destroyed by the introduction of CRT, but it was pretty inspiring to see that he embraced the new technology, learned from it, and built upon it.

Quaternions recently made me look pretty smart.

I was consulting at a company that's developing a VR real estate app, and the first thing I did was check to see whether they were calculating their rotations with quaternions.

It was easy to do, I just looked straight up and then turned my head to the right. My view rotated to the left, and I almost vomited. I immediately ripped the headset off and said, "You're using euler angles to calculate rotations, you need to use quaternions."

I felt pretty good about finding the biggest flaw in their system in 3 seconds.

There's one there that's a parking lot that ripples and the store is under the ripples, and it's only shown as a model. I'm guessing that one was never built, because it looks really dangerous and confusing for drivers.

Wow, I really like some of those. I'm surprised that I've never even heard of that company.

There are more pictures available at the source: http://www.siteenvirodesign.com/content/best-products

You're never going to know that for sure, the more important part is that if you're going to try being clever make sure it can't be misinterpreted as you being an asshole.

While I agree that the failure mode of being clever can be asshole, I really don't think that's the default failure mode most of the time. I wish he had provided some examples so I could have a clearer grasp on exactly what he means by clever and asshole.

I feel like the advice should be more like, "If you're going to be clever, make sure it's the right tone for the audience, and that the failure mode of your joke isn't asshole".

They closed my offices and moved them from downtown to the far side of the suburbs.

I live near downtown, and specifically chose my job and house to be a nice bike commute. My nice 30 minutes by bike turned into 2 hours by bus and train. So I quit.

You can set the boundaries of your VR space to be really small, so you're always activating the boundary grid. This would give you a frame of reference for the real world, and probably reduce your motion sickness.

There are actually a bunch of VR games that have comfort options which basically put a static cage around you. Also, similarly, cockpit games are a popular way to allow free movement with reduced motion sickness.

"Inside these restaurants, it’s evident that the forces making this one of the most expensive cities in America are subtly altering the economics of everything. Commercial rents have gone up. Labor costs have soared. And restaurant workers, many of them priced out by the expense of housing, have been moving away."

I feel like so much of this could be fixed if we had a highly regulated housing market, with a goal of affordable housing for everyone. It's hard to imagine that this housing bubble can last much longer, it's distorting everything to such an extreme already.

The cost of housing doesn't have to keep increasing, just look at Germany: https://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnfingleton/2014/02/02/in-w...

The title is total clickbait.

From the article: "Then we tracked everyone’s actual performance on the tasks. Here we found that on average, having meditated neither benefited nor detracted from a participant’s quality of work."

They found that people who meditated were more calm and serene, reported less motivation, but performed similarly to people who had done non-meditative activities.

It seems to me that having a calm, relaxed workforce who performs just as well as your normal stressed workers is a pretty big positive. I'd find the study more interesting if it studied the long term effects, like do the two groups tend to diverge in productivity over time? Does it prevent burn out? Increase job satisfaction?

I don't know, in my experience having high expectations seems to set you up for a higher fall and a lower upside, thus leading to less happiness.

I used to feel this way, but I no longer think that optimism and expectation have to be that closely linked. To me optimism is about having hope, not expectations. Similarly, my pessimism isn't about what I expect to happen, it's about what I fear happening.

So, I choose to balance my fear and hope.

I recently realized that when I have negative thoughts about myself or the future I feel like I'm listening to my logic and reason, but when the thoughts are positive I just brush it off as wishful thinking. Which has lead me to a life where I dread imaginary events that never happen, and don't let myself look forward to anything or fantasize about possibilities.

I think it started as a measure of self protection after a long string of broken promises when I was a kid, but it's a shitty way to live. My biggest realization was just that pessimism is no more logical than optimism.

My solution has been to give equal time to positive thoughts. So, if I find myself thinking for a couple minutes about how something might go horribly wrong, I spend the next couple minutes imagining what the best case scenario would be like.

I'm basically forcing hope back into my life.

My uncle is on the other side of the country, and is about as old school as the steam locomotive he's building. So unfortunately I'd have to call him, convince him to take photos (with film), develop them, and (snail) mail them to me.