Stuff

1) On Monday there was a little pageant about the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Some slightly anachronistic terminology was used. Apparently the colonies seceded, in part, due to regulation creating a hostile environment for business.

Guess who was in the pageant, reading all his lines with a bizarre inflection that he insists is a British accent, but in fact bears no similarity to any dialect known to mankind? Also, kept waving at us in the crowd and making faces while the other actors were talking?

2) Read George R. R. Martin's Dying of the Light. If he sticks to the narrative pattern presented by this book, then Song of Ice and Fire will end with everybody either dead or desirous of that state.

3) The puppy has chewed up all the things. There are no things left.

4) And I don't actually think this is related, but I can't find the elastic strap that holds my bento set together. My life is pretty harrowing.

5) Some idol group put a CG girl into an ad without telling anyone beforehand that she was CG. Some fans of the group apparently worked out that she wasn't real, not because of any evidence in the commercial itself, but because of some hints in the biographical information the group released about her.

Because the animation in the ad is very good; the only giveaway, I think, is that she's a little too close to the Japanese ideal of beauty. If they'd made her a little heavier or her skin a little rougher, I wouldn't have been able to tell which one wasn't real. She's basically a comp of the facial features and movements of several of the other actresses. They just made models of the features in question, then attached little sensors to their faces and recorded them talking.

The comments on that article are pretty hilarious:

Her mouth and head movements were a dead giveaway… looks extremely artificial.

Uh-huh. Again, if I understand the video correctly, the mouth movements were essentially copied directly from one of the other group members.

In the third video, she blinks oddly at the beginning and her head movement looks a little jerky (the wave at the end too, but that could be attributed to nervousness if she were human).

I think an awful lot of people must fail this individual's Turing test. Seriously, I doubt anyone who wasn't alert to the possibility would even suspect that CG had been used there. (And the wave is just how Japanese teenaged girls wave when they're trying to be cute. I can't see anything at all weird about it.)

What's interesting about this to me is that, judging by the making-of video, what was done was about 75% an engineering thing. As in, it looks like the input from artists was mainly just in assembling the comp. Which probably means that in six years, the hardware and software used to make the facial meshes and capture the expressions will be available to consumers for $79.95 at the six-years-from-now-equivalent of Best Buy, for use in rendering your six-years-from-now-equivalent of WoW avatar more expressive. (Six-years-from-now-equivalent of Second Life will still be four years behind.) Teleconferencing may get pretty weird in the future.

Things I was taught in grade school.

1) The eye of the hurricane is the most violent part.

2) "Almost" is an adjective.

3) When you're describing a sequence of events, you must always do so using the words "first," "next," "then," and "finally," in that order. If there are only two events, you just use the first two; if there are only three, I think you skip "then" and go straight on to "finally." I remember asking what to do if there were more than five events and being told that I should try to avoid that sort of situation.

4) When you are writing a "report" (whatever that is), there should be one introductory paragraph, three paragraphs supporting your "point" (whatever that is), and one concluding paragraph. No more, no less. Doubtless these "reports" were intended as a gentle introduction to the classic Eight-Legged Essay form, to prepare us for our lives as civil servants in feudal China.

5) Sometimes in life, you will have to write a "report" about a simple multiplication problem. You will not be given any sort of example showing what the hell that should look like; life is like that. However, it is an uncontested fact that reports about math problems do not contain sarcasm, so please fix those three-fifths of your paragraphs that you fucked up the first time.

6) Every fictional narrative has a moral, even if it is not readily apparent, even it is by Anne McCaffrey. If you're not sure what the moral is, try on each of the following and see which fits best:

• "friendship is important"


• "it's bad to be greedy or mean"


• "you should always apologize when you do something wrong"


• "racism was awful, back when it existed"


• "wear kneepads and a helmet whenever you ride a bike or roller-skate"


• "drugs do not make you cool"

It's that one.

Except sometimes it's "religions that value meditation are basically like worshiping Hostess snack cakes" or "a palindrome is a word that's the same spelled backwards and forwards," which can trip you up.

7) Cursive.