Static Variable

Be careful what you wish for... credit @TopTruthSeeker

Checking in on the economy

You buy a German anvil. It contains 83 moving parts and requires winding twice a day. It's forged from excellent steel, holds tolerances across all three striking faces to within three microns, includes a beautifully indexed horn-adjustment mechanism nobody asked for, and requires a proprietary 11-point spanner should you need to replace the rebound calibration bushing. It runs flawlessly for years, but one day it starts up in limp mode because the onboard anvil-management system detects that it's overdue for its 50,000-strike inspection. You search AliExpress for a Chinese anvil, and are presented with a multitude of offerings from such household-name brands as DUKXJYIBF, HDBTGMXI, AND UEJQIP. They're all priced to within a few pennies of each other, appear completely identical except for the nameplate, and obviously all came out of the same factory. You text your blacksmith friend to ask if they're legit. He tells you he got one like that from KIXJBU a few years ago, and that it's been great and a terrific deal. You thank him, but KIXJBU seems to have folded so you buy the one from UEJQIP. When it arrives, it feels suspiciously light. You scratch it and realize it's iron-plated aluminum. You buy an American anvil. It's five times the price of the competition, but it comes from a brand that your great-grandfather used to love. It comes boxed with a warranty registration postcard, twenty pages of safety instructions, assay certificate, and a regulatory slip which lists its FCC certification and ITAR registration. It looks just like your friend's KIXJBU. There's a "Made In China" sticker on the bottom. You buy a Russian anvil. It arrives coated in cosmoline, wrapped in newspaper from 1974, and weighing 40% more than advertised. The finish looks like it was machined with a shovel. The face is not flat, but somehow this does not matter. You drop it off a truck, accidentally leave it outside for six winters, and use it to straighten a bulldozer blade. It's fine. You buy a Swedish anvil. It comes flat-packed in a long cardboard box with cheerful Neo-Grotesk lettering and a line drawing of a smiling man assembling it with an Allen key. The instructions contain no words, only pictograms showing the anvil face, horn, waist, feet, and 112 identical-looking fasteners. Halfway through assembly, you discover that the pritchel hole was installed upside down, but only because you used peg B17 where you should have used peg B71. Once assembled, it is clean, stable, and works better than it has any right to. You immediately wonder whether you should have bought two. You buy a Japanese anvil. It arrives wrapped in rice paper inside a paulownia box, accompanied by a certificate bearing three generations of signatures and a photograph of the first production example being presented to the Emperor. The face has been hand-polished by a seventy-eight-year-old master whose family has made striking surfaces since the Muromachi period. You are given detailed instructions for oiling it with a cloth folded in a specific way. It is the most beautiful object you own. You never quite work up the nerve to strike it.

😎

Someone built a fully open-source mocap system that works with any camera. It's called FreeMoCap, a markerless 3d tracking system that runs on ordinary webcams. → 500+ body, hand, and face landmarks per frame → exports to Blender, Unity, Unreal → runs on a normal laptop 100% Open Source. 4.6k stars on GitHub.

Bdelloid Rotifers have been having sex for 50 million years. Except they haven't. Every single one of these microscopic chainsaw mouth creatures you see under a microscope is a female. They clone themselves. Perfect genetic copies, generation after generation, for longer than mammals have existed on Earth. Evolution textbooks will tell you this is impossible. Sexual reproduction exists because it shuffles genes and creates diversity. Without it, harmful mutations accumulate. Populations crash. Extinction follows. Bdelloids missed that memo completely. They survive radiation doses that would liquify a human. They dry out into dust for decades, then resurrect when water returns. They endure temperatures that freeze solid and heat that boils. They've colonized every continent including Antarctica. All while breaking the fundamental rule that sex is required for evolutionary success. The secret lies in their feeding strategy. Those rotating mouth crowns that look like biological chainsaws do more than shred algae. When rotifers eat, they accidentally consume DNA fragments from their prey. Instead of digesting these genetic pieces, they incorporate foreign genes directly into their own genome. They turned eating into horizontal gene transfer. While every other complex animal relies on mating to remix DNA, rotifers steal genetic diversity from their lunch. They've been practicing genetic engineering for 50 million years without realizing it. The implications rewrite what we thought we knew about survival. These creatures prove that life finds ways around rules we assumed were absolute. They've solved the genetic diversity problem without sex, the aging problem without death, and the environmental stress problem without hiding. They're living proof that evolution has backup plans we never imagined.

@FireWoGames Looks cool

If you like Stardew Valley, you'll like our game If you like Cities: Skylines, you'll like our game If you like Mount & Blade, you'll like our game If you like GTA, you'll like our game

A peak career advice:

Spencer Pratt’s LA mayor ads are incredible.

CYBERPUNK-98

oh no, you used the camera to shoot the film. oh no, you used editing software to cut the film. oh no, you used CGI. oh no, you used VFX. oh no, you used dubbing. oh no, you created fake sets. oh no, you used green screens. oh no, you used stunt doubles. oh no, you used makeup and prosthetics. oh no, you color graded the footage. oh no, you used motion capture. oh no, you recorded Foley sounds. oh no, you used background scores. oh no, you used autotune on vocals. oh no, you used wire rigs for action scenes. oh no, you used drones for aerial shots. oh no, you used miniatures instead of real cities. oh no, you used matte paintings. oh no, you used body doubles. oh no, you used teleprompters. oh no, you used render farms. oh no, you used sound mixing. oh no, you used ADR to replace dialogue. oh no, you used stock footage. oh no, you used smoke machines. oh no, you used fake blood. oh no, you used lenses to manipulate perspective. oh no, you used filters to change the mood. oh no, you used playback monitors. oh no, you used digital de-aging. oh no, you used face replacement. oh no, you used animation pipelines. oh no, you used Unreal Engine virtual production. oh no, you used render engines. oh no, you used storyboards. oh no, you used previs animatics. oh no, you used sync sound technology. oh no, you used stabilization rigs. oh no, you used cranes and dollies. oh no, you used subtitles for global audiences. oh no, you compressed the movie for streaming. oh no, you used digital projection instead of film reels. oh no, you used software to simulate explosions. oh no, you used compositing to combine shots. oh no, you used LUTs to create cinematic looks. oh no, you used virtual cameras inside 3D scenes. Traditional cinema mocking AI filmmaking while forgetting it was built on every fake technology before it.

I don't remember where I found this, but its spot on.

Here are five things I learned spending 46 years in the game industry. 1) if they say "we don't need a contract", you NEED a contract. 2) if they say, "don't you trust us?" DON'T trust them. 3) never let an upper-level manager see a game with unfinished art. They won't understand, will make you change things, and throw off your schedule. 4) never, EVER, sign a deal with Electronic Arts. They can and have openly betrayed even the most iron-clad contracts, even when it goes against their own interests. At Satan's command, I assume. 5) focus groups, at least for games, are completely valueless. They're just there for the free sandwiches. I suspect most of these rules apply outside the game industry. AND I suspect you guys can add more useful rules to my short list. Have at it!

@theannalux Proof Left: reviews inside EU, immediately rejected with [ Not published ] Right: reviews outside EU, published fine! Crazy huh?

Palantir but designed by Fisher Price.

Supply and Demand determines the price.

Giving a restaurant a three star review is illegal in Germany.

To achieve success in your profession you just need the right mental disorder: • Finance - ADHD • Computer science - Autism • Engineering - OCD • Law - Narcissism • Journalism - Cynicism • Psychology - Psychopathy • Politics - All the above

Curated list of Blender add-ons, tools, and tutorials github.com/agmmnn/awesome…