Bill Maher

Wait, this is actually really good, and reprinted in it's entirety because even though the are not mine, I want all of these words on this blog.

'Birthers' must be stopped

No matter how dumb, the people who are questioning whether Obama was born in the U.S. could eventually cause real problems.

By Bill Maher
July 31, 2009

Never underestimate the ability of a tiny fringe group of losers to ruin everything.

For the last couple of weeks, we've all been laughing heartily at the wacky antics of the "birthers" -- the far-right goofballs who claim Barack Obama wasn't really born in Hawaii and therefore the job of president goes to the runner-up, former Miss California Carrie Prejean.

Also, when Obama was sworn in as president, he forgot to give his answer in the form of a question.

And yet, every week, the chorus of conservatives demanding to see his birth certificate grows. It's like they're the Cambridge police, Obama's in his house -- the White House -- and they need to see some ID.

And there's nothing anyone can do to convince these folks. You could hand them, in person, the original birth certificate and have a video of Obama emerging from the womb with Don Ho singing in the background ... and they still wouldn't believe it raises the question: Why, in this country, is it always the religious right that won't take anything on faith?

So far, the reaction from Democrats is to laugh this off, and I understand why. If you seriously believe that President Obama is an African sleeper spy, get out of your chat room and have your house tested for lead.

But we live in America, and in America, if you don't immediately kill arrant nonsense, no matter how ridiculous, it can grow and thrive and eventually take over, like crab grass or reality shows about fat people.

This flap might be a deluded right-wing obsession that is a total waste of time, but so was Whitewater, and look where that ended up. A handful of Republican operatives, enraged at Bill Clinton's unprecedented economic growth and budget surpluses, found a woman named Paula Jones, which led to a woman named Monica Lewinsky, which gave me enough material to eventually be able to buy a big house in Bel-Air. Which I'm still conflicted about.

More recently we had the Swift Boat allegations against John Kerry, in which Kerry was accused of volunteering to serve in Vietnam so he could jump in front of a bullet so he could get a medal and then throw it away to satisfy his urge to insult real Americans. This was so stupid that Kerry refused to even discuss it.

And we all know how well that worked out.

And once these stories get out there, they're hard to stamp out because our media do such a lousy job of speaking truth to stupid. Vietnam, Iraq and the Spanish-American War were all sold on lies that were unchallenged or even abetted by the media. Clinton got impeached and Kerry got destroyed in large part because the media didn't have the guts to say, "This is nonsense."

Lou Dobbs has been saying recently that people are asking a lot of questions about the birth certificate. Yes, the same people who want to know where the sun goes at night.

And Lou, you're their new king.

That's why it's so important that we the few, the proud, the reality-based attack this stuff before it has a chance to fester and spread. This isn't a case of Democrats versus Republicans. It's sentient beings versus the lizard people, and it is to them I offer this deal: I'll show you Obama's birth certificate when you show me Sarah Palin's high school diploma.

Bulletproof: I wish my industry was...

Looks like NOBODY is immune in this economy, and it's hitting everyone in the pants. So across the board we have both Sony AND Nintendo getting hit to the tune of about a 33% drop. So much for the myth of the recession proof industry.

Here's the links:

Nintendo's Troubles

Sony's Issues, with color commentary by Sony Realist Bill Harris.

Now to be fair I don't think Q1 releases have been half as strong this year. But we have seen the release of the DSi, the PSP-3000 IS fully compatible with Sony's future online plans, and there have definitely been some green patches in every market with strong new releases.

I suppose at this point we have a couple of things we can do. Read Paul Krugman wonkish posts until the economy picks up again (by use, decay and obsolescence) or just get all Emo about it and wait until the black mascara washes off. We can watch this while we wait:

Blog Update

Well I am working like a dog at the moment but I took out about 45 minutes to restyle my blog today after getting active on twitter again. I thinks I got my "cyber presence" sorted out a little bit better, hopefully it looks a little more like a guy who has been working as an Artist for about 8 years put it together now.

Anyways, big updates should be hitting in the few weeks (wrapping up a PS2 game for India)...

-Josh

Oh Beta!

How can any regular posting habits penetrate the defenses of your grim visage? How are we to bask in the glow of regular posting, and to wit for others, regular reading! if your pale, grim countenance doth cast your pall over all the landscape of the moments of my life?

So here is what's up lately in no particular order:

FACT: PSP-3000 is pretty sweet. I got a black DS back in 2007 and even with some truly delightful software: Elite Beat Agents, Zelda's, Mario's, the INSANITY of the Drawn To Life Guys Games (who manage to make my jaw hit the ground about every 18 months or so) it just isn't the system for me. I feel like a pederast every time I try buy a game for it which is to say I can't walk into the DS section of any store without feeling like I am somehow violating an 8 year girls space. Now before I turn up on a watch list let me get back to the point. I am a 30 year old DUDE. Playstation is for US, for better or worse. So as far as I am concerned the candy bar PSP is pretty much the shit. The form factor is great, the analog feels better than PSP-1000's, the screen is delicious, the battery life is favorable and it doesn't lack for sex appeal. I think the PSP Go is going to be a great unit, smaller form factor etc, but there just isn't enough differentiation and I am in India too to fully abandon UMD. The 3000 does feel like the penultimate for this generation, but we'll see so far it's been damn nice. In time I'll probably pick up all the sub games e.g. God of War, Killzone, Resistance, Clank, Daxter.

FACT: I've been at work too much. However the bullet points on my resume are starting look a bit nicer every few month's. GOOD things coming down the pipe; shit I know I can't talk about, a nice little Indian market number for PS2 and PSP called Desi Adda and good looking port of Tumble Bugs heading to the Wii Store (the portal that no actually by games from) to go with Rangy Lil on the PC.

FACT: I have now lived in India almost half as long as I did Fort Vancouver and Elko. After a while even a wacky situation just seems to take on a life of it's own, I am now used to living (high on the hog) in a third world country. If you ever get down about the plight the worlds (many) poor just tell yourself some people love camping so much they want to do it there whole life. Seriously though, I wish the world had as much humanity as it had humans, we're all a little guilty, but that deficit is probably the most dangerous of all.

FACT: Oh shit. You really look at it the world IS in the equivalent of the next great depression. Now, I have been doing my homework, and it's not like even these cycles don't come to an end, but it would be GREAT if the political powers that be would just let the few guys that understand this stuff do there jobs. Stateside it's time to take taxation and regulation back to the 60's and become an industrialized nation when it comes to health care. But enough on that.

FACT: To my Friends and Loved Ones in the States, apologies about the sorry shape of my internet connection and the lack of Skypeing, keep the faith and I love you all, except for Chance Barton, 19 year old kids shouldn't make that kind of money. :)

TTFN

Old Ken

A small corollary to my previous post. Oh yeah this blog is kind of about Art:



Ken from Street Fighter in his 50's.

A Tale Of Three Fours, Part 1

During my last trip to the States I was finally able to get caught on some of the largest game releases of the past year, well that weren't Activision or Nintendo making more money than Tiruphati and the Vatican combined off of Balance Boards and Plastic Guitars. Nope I am talking about Games as intended by our shut-in forebearers. Games meant to resonate deeply in the collective unconciousness of 14-21 year boys. I am talking about the Fours. Here is the first one:

Street Fighter IV- Shoulder Rigging of the Gods -

The year was 1991, the place, anywhere you could Jam an arcade cabinet. The Game was Street Fighter II.

The first Street Fighter was something of an oddity, a truly clunky, awkward, wierd game which was simultaneously difficult to figure out and not very fun to play. Depending on where you put in your quarter you would either play as Ken or Ryu on there quest to fight some wierd dudes all over the world. This game was utter, utter garbage. So naturally in the sucessful wake of Final Fight they determined that the whole problem was that Street Fighter wasn't big enough. It turns out they were right.

With some of the greatest graphics of it's time and ground breaking gameplay Street Fighter II became a definitive title. It tooks the reigns of all brawlers before it and truly defined a genre, the one on one fighter like few entries ever had before.

I remember my first time playing it. I choose Ryu, I flew to Brazil, I got electrocuted and back flip kicked like there was no tomorrow by Blanka. I was mad as hell, but I was also floored, the game was polished and animated like nothing else at the time. And holy hell those were a lot of buttons. I was still fumbling with the damn C button my Genesis.

I would play Street Fighter II Sporadically in the arcades, usually getting beat down by the local arcade heroes. When the "near perfect port" hit the SNES I played the crap out of it with friends. They were usually playing the balls off of Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat and Killer Instinct while I was blasting away at random non-sense like Rampart. I was oft-schooled.

The incarnations of Street Fighting rolled out at a pretty consistent pace with both the Alpha Series and Marvel vs. Capcom filling in with many great entries to the Genre. With each successive alpha I actually played more and more. The fusion of the Final Fight characters into the Street Fighter world to me was just too awesome and one of my favorite things about the Alpha series. It's balls to the wall take on everything from Shell to GUI has inspired a tremendous amount of what I feel constitutes good game design. Interesting, Informative, Incindierary and Fun, it was simulataneously over the top and amazingly literal all at once.

Finally in 1998 the cat was out of the bag on Street Fighter 3. The first two iterations of the beast were not right, but you know what they say, the third time is the charm. Street Fighter 3: Third Strike proved to be a hit out of the park. I honestly don't think that there is a single fighting game that I have played more. I played each iteration of the series a little bit more each time and by the time that SF3:TS hit I was a certifiable Street Fighting junkie.

SF3:TS is the vehicle of perhaps what I think is the greatest moment in the history of competetive gaming:


Parrying is awesome. But that is GODLY

So the first 15 years of Street Fighting have been very good to us gamers. Capcom tried it's hand at 3D Street Fighting back in the PlayStation 1 days with the EX series, but suffice to say they didn't work there way into the hearts and the Street Fighting Lexicon the way the 2D entries had, you know, because it wasn't any GOOD.

So after an almost decade long hiatus we got Street Fighter IV. It's almost perfect. From a developer perspective they did the smartest thing I think they could have ever done. This won't be readily apparent to users, but underneath the hood is the same 2D engine driving the game. It feels like all of the timing works perfectly like there is no over simulated weirdness, BECAUSE THERE ISN'T.

The evolution of the series has left Capcom with a masterpiece of user interaction design, that makes up the guts of the Street Fighter games. So rather than radically disrupt the core of the game they kept it in the old style, it just brings tears to my nostalgia gaming eyes. It also just works wonders.

With a lot of the people I work with here in India I keep trying to stress that inside of games their are two worlds, the world of what you interact with and the world of what you see. They are rarely ever the same. For various reasons it is very easy to get confused about games and how they are made. As a long term developer I can assure it has more in common with perception tricks and stage magic than spectactular feats of processing.

It is good to see that the designers knew that they shouldn't mess with the underpinnings and left it alone. But on top they put on a coating of modern gloss that is truly breathtaking. The intro movie is a psichedelic work of art, the characters are super ridiculously detailed, their animations are nothing short of awesome, the particle systems are just beautiful and the backgrounds are amazing, the animation in the secondary is much more lush too. Even multiplayer works much better than I would have ever expected.

On to the gripes. The End Boss, Seth is more ridiculous than the End Boss of SF3, Gill, which is really saying something, at least Bison felt evil enough. Gouken is in no way as ridiculous as Gouki, which is kind of Sad. Of the new characters Able is basically Alex from SF3, Viper is interesting, but feels like a worse version of Rolento from SFA3, El Fuerte is much more caliente than good (he just runs around everywhere while you punch him, seriously) and finally you have Rufus. Rufus is a bit of a space oddity, on the one hand he is fat bowl of goo, which usually means he is a punching bag in SF vernacular, but they really broke the mold with him. He is actually incredibly fast, versatile and funny to play as. He is kind of like Dan Hibiki on steroids, and whether in Japanese or English he has the funniest voice lines ever in a Street Fighter.

On the environs side all of the fight locales are pretty interesting, but, somehow not being as strongly associated with each of the individual characters they don't have the punch of some of the previous games. It is all too possible that SFII will continue to the best roster of the most iconic backdrops. Really outside of that everything is just fanboy hate.

I have played through a pretty significant chunk of the game and all can say is wow, what a great entry. Shame they took out parring but still, what an amazing game.

Next Week:
Grand Theft Auto IV - A Damn Big Urban Wasteland -

zBrush

When I was first starting out modeling back in the late 90's it was a very different environment. The number of applications around was very small, there was nothing like bittorrent and it could be cripplingly expensive just to get your hands on educational versions of software.

I bought the educational edition of Max back in 1998 and was basically kind of angry at the good money I had tossed at there crippleware. After a few month's and with Max being the reigning champion on PC's I then got my grubby mitts on a copy of Max 2. I spent a hell of lot of time with that app. I would have spent it more productively had I known or been able to easily discover the keyboard shortcuts, but it was time well spent.

I had already gained a modicum of proficiency in Photoshop and then Max. Eventually I got my hands on Maya and it literally changed my life. I think I would have to say that Maya 3.0 was better for me than my first Girlfriend, somewhere in the stratospheric heights of first bicycles and the first time I saw Akira. I had been learning the hard way for years on Max, by the time Maya rolled around I was able to take the focus concentration and understanding and really apply it in such a more replete way. I have used Maya for almost 9 years, I know how about half of it works pretty well, and it can still do more than most people can imagine.

My first version of Maya was "second hand". I had it on good advice that you could still get hired having done most of your work on cracks, it's promotional and not for direct profit. As a rule I think you should buy every piece of software you use, for a lot of reasons. But here is a quote I can attribute to Dylan Jobe, "I buy every piece of software I use, unless it's too expensive."

Since the old days I have had wealthy benefactors keeping me in legit copies of Maya and Photoshop. I have purchased Art Rage, and Silo, and few other apps along the way that can help me get things done. They aren't replacements for the first loves, but you know, it's fun and there are some tremendously good things about them.

Now with all of the Apps I comfortable with I have very deep understanding of their underlying concepts, optimal workflows and how to just get to an end result with them. There is a comfortable well well groove of an old saddle or the seat of a car that you have owned for a long time. You know what to expect, and you know where to go.

Then an app came along that changed that. It was wierd and new, and funky and powerful. It was disruptive and different and fresh. It could do things in ways that no one could have expected, and as such it changed the way the world looked at things.

It was called zBrush.

And for most of this decade I have been able to get a grip on it.

In 2003 I started using zBrush. Sort of.

In 2005 I started using zBrush again, 2.0 had been out for a while. But not really, once again I couldn't really deal.

In 2007, Pixologic released zBrush 3.0. Once again I tried but I just didn't have the tenacity to really learn it.

It's 2009. I don't make resolutions, but it is time to be resolute. It was obvious back in 2005 that I needed to gird up and learn zBrush. But, it was so easy to fall back into a settled groove, to fool around and too forget. It was easy to stay in a comfortable place and not change. It was easy to keep running over the same over ground. It was so simple to rest on my laurels and not keep growing.

I don't have the same energy I did when I was learning 3D, but's thats fine. ZBrush is program that is going to take a lot of effort to learn as well as I have learned Maya and Photoshop. But there is a missing piece in my creative life. I am starting to see the vast, crazy and innumerable possiblities of this bizzare and completely different app. I am realizing that what needs to change is my mind. This isn't going to diminish me, but augment me, and who knows I think something really good can come out of it.

So I have gotten serious. I can afford ZBrush, so I forked over my $600 and now I have it.

I am methodically downloading each plugin, each alpha, each matcap material, each texture. I am going to read through every inch of the Practical Guide in time. I am going to learn how to integrate each thing in turn. I am going to learn this like I know Maya modeling. I am going to post on the forums.

I only have one grudge I carry into all of this.

I can't stand the "Gears of War" style art. I can't understand why you would want to take some really talented guys and make them produce in essence a Bad Rob Liefeld video game. I am tired of space marines. I am tired of World War II. I am tired of rifles. I am tired of huge swaths of the gaming industry. I want to get to back to fun. I want some bounce. I want some bright colors, green fields, blue mountains, and red sunsets. I want to expresss something very different. I want us to be artists again, chasing wild dreams and crippled by the stultifying sameness of building the ultimate G.I. Joe.

I believe in zBrush. I think it can do more than alien cyborgs and old men. I believe that a tired out Games Industry vet might be a good match for pushing things beyond where they are now. I hope that I can learn a lot. I hope that I can make a change, and can't wait to see what I can do with this. Here's dogs, cats, rainbows, sturgeons, unicycles, Dali and the infinite expanse of the human mind. Here is to the canvas that get me there.

Cheers to zBrush.