Poor Chris, Old Chris, Go Away Chris

So I have a reasonable discussion with my former friend Chris C.   I am very fond of Chris.  He has contributed many things to my life.  But he tends to have what I think of as "psychotic breaks" directed at me.  We talk, he stews, and next morning he lets fly his mighty hammer.  "What a bad person you are", he says to me. "You must go away and never talk to me again".

I am not sure what causes this but I suspect it has to do with his obsession with psychotherapy and the fact that I reject it as pseudoscience.  So he takes something I say to mean that I renounce my old beliefs and accept psychotherapy as the true path and then is infuriated when he discovers that this is not the case.

I just dont like being zapped by lightning bolts after listening to him complain all night.

We must do a better job of choosing friends.

People tell me that the visual effects industry is filled with weird and competitive assholes.  Maybe that is true, or maybe it is just an unfortunate sample from a larger group of nice(r) people.

Another Old Friend Needs to Be Abandoned

Perhaps I would prefer not to know too much about old friends.  About 1988, NAME REDACTED lent Brad and I a Mitchell Camera for our test for the Abyss.  This was the famous YFS camera.  He went off to work with Rene Daalder, blessed be his name, who was an incredibly talented and self-destructive director who somehow acquired the rights to a variety of Beatles songs and attempted to make a film called "Strawberry Fields".  Lots of time was wasted and no movie got made, and I lost track of my friend. He reappeared just recently because I wanted material to do a memorial web page about Rene.  

 

And that is the problem because now I learn that REDACTED is a supporter of RFK, JR and a believer in a variety of vaccine conspiracy theories.  On top of that he is in business with Steve Churchill of "The Minds Eye" fame.  Well, the Minds Eye stole the Symbolics work and rescored it and did all this without a shred of permission from the creators of that work. 

 

And so, I have blocked my former friend and it makes me sad to know that he has lost his mind and keeps bad company.   The irony is that my former friend made a living for 18 years doing science visualization and yet he is one of the anti-science nuts.

 

I am not sure what the point of this is, beyond the idea that we have all changed by the last 20 years of politics in this country and not all friends from the past make the cut.

Its Nice to Know Where You Stand

draft

An old friend is taking the day off work to go walk the precinct for someone he claims is the first openly bisexual candidate in the history of the American Republic, which I doubt.  I think that is great, but do I really care if someone is openly bisexual? 

He has not had the time to visit me, or for me to visit him, once in the last 10 or is it 12, or more, years.

Its nice to know how much our friendship counts.

Most Excellent Career Advice from Friends

There was a time, years ago, when one's friends and professional colleagues were an important part of one's career path. There are a variety of trendy-and-sometimes-stupid terms to describe this phenomenon, but back then the world was not seen as a zero-sum game where if you win I lose and vice versa.

In my years of wandering through the wilderness, I have been given some good advice and some very bad advice. Sadly, I have learned the hard lesson more than once that no one can figure out what I should do but myself and that the process of trying to achieve whatever this new goal / plan / whatever is likely to annoy people, friends and colleagues, and be achieved over their dead body or at least without their knowledge and consent.

Like everyone else, I have successful friends and I have very smart friends. Some of the smart friends are successful, and some less so, but nevertheless I know a lot of talented people. These people are pretty much all very busy with their own problems, families, issues and so forth. They are not in any way obligated or should be obligated to help me or advise me or anything else. When they do, it is a gift, they are certainly not getting paid for it. They are just trying to help.

Obviously I am a victim of first-world underemployment and globalization and like so many others I am at a loss for what to do to make a living. Lets be honest here, I have also made some mistakes in the past. For example, I failed to get a trust fund. What was I thinking? Furthermore, it was I who chose to go into computer animation.  Me bad. And so I have reached out to friends to see if they have any ideas about how to best make use of the rest of my life, if you call this living.

For a moment we are going to ignore such fabulous advice as "do good work and dont worry about money". Although this is no doubt a good sentiment, I think it needs a little more elaboration before it can be implemented.

But of those ideas that have been suggested that are specific enough to consider, these are my three favorite: 

1. A NY filmmaker and pioneer of computer animation also had a line of original pornography in the BDSM genre.  He suggested that I might be able to help him market this creative work to various distributors. I have no trouble if consenting adults want to enjoy themselves by tying each other up and whacking each other but I dont really know too much about this subgenre of human behavior and would not be able to contribute much in the way of aesthetics or guidance, so I declined.

2. A good friend who has used computers and done computer animation for the last 30 years knows zero about computers and regularly would self destruct and lose all her work.  I would spend a lot of time helping her and trying to recover her data because I am a "nice guy".  She noticed how helpful I was at this and suggested that I make a career of selling my services as a PC repairman door to door. What a great idea.

3. A very successful friend of mine who has the burden of managing a giant research facility in the field of entertainment related technologies, suggests that trying to get a job in my field was too ambitious.  He recommends that I sell my programming services on the Internet through an anonymous jobbing service. Some sort of lowest-common-denominator programming exchange. He figures I might be able to make $6.00 an hour and that it is "easy money". 

I want to thank all my friends for thinking of me.

They really do mean well.

But what is really, really scary is that these are my friends.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished in Computer Animation

In the following discussion, the primary Antagonist is someone many of you know, but not all of you. He will not be named in this post. He is a well-known computer graphics pioneer who lives in California. The Company is not well known except to a few, but is a well-regarded “special services” technical design company who is known for its Dept of Defense clientele. Its two founders are each of them charismatic, brilliant, and successful. They are also located in California. The person is someone I would have called a good friend. The company, a desirable company to work for.

About 10 years ago, my friend calls me up to help him out on a project that is about 6 weeks from delivery. But they do not have anything working yet. What he wants me to do is to use GPU programming to take two stereo images and deduce a depth map from them. I have just started learning the GPU which my friend well knows, and I have never tried to do depth correlation from stereo before, although I am aware that it has been done and that it is well known to have problems.

It also turns out that my friend, who is working for the above mentioned company, does not have much money, so it will not be a real consulting rate. So I tell him that I will look at the problem and get back to him. In the mean time they send me a contract which I put aside because I am not going to commit to this project if I can not do it well, nor am I going to charge him.

I wish to emphasize that at no time did I commit to this project and that from the very beginning I doubted it was possible. The only thing that might have made it possible, given that any program written would then have to be integrated into their larger system, would be a program that was already written, and just needed a little refinement. Otherwise, there is no way the larger deadline could be made. (See Note 1).

Now I of course am very disappointed. I would love to work with my friend, this is the first time he has asked me, and I would love to work with this company. But for that to work, obviously, our first project would have to be successful, and I see very little odds of success here.

So I look at the problem and discover that programming the GPU back in the pre-CUDA days is much worse than I thought, I could spend weeks just figuring out how to get floating point data in and out of the GPU. So, I call my friend and tell him I can not do it. Maybe two weeks has passed since he first called me, if that. Not only that, but I have been talking to him every day or maybe every other day during this period so he knew how things were going, which is to day, not well. They do not pay me anything, nor should they, no obligations were made on either side and no contracts signed.

But as we all know, no good deed goes unpunished.  The question is only when and in what form the universal cosmic "reward" for trying to help my friend gets paid back.

Fast forward to today.

My friend, who works thereafter at every blue chip company in silicon valley you can think of, never once offers to help me get an interview or find a job for me, even though he knows I am looking. So, finally I ask him why and he explains that it was because I failed so badly on the above project, the project that I did not commit to do and which had very little chance of success. And furthermore, to add insult to injury, he says that company thought I was crazy. Why? Because I did not sign a contract committing to a project I did not think I could do and for which they had very little money?

And so, it appears that my friend has held a grudge all these years, God only knows who he told, and how many jobs or projects I have lost because of it. In fact, I wonder if the whole thing was just a play to blame the problem on the consultant. Both my friend and the company could say that they relied on a contractor but he failed to deliver what he promised even though I did not promise anything.

So what is the truth here? What is the lesson? The first is that no good deed goes unpunished, I should have just said no, up front, not I will look at it. And second, that I wonder whether I actually do have any friends in this industry.   And the third is to wonder whether I am really a victim or not?  How much of this is my fault, how much is no fault of my own? To offer to look into a problem, is that a bad idea?  Perhaps.

I so deeply regret getting involved in Computer Animation, and I wish I had never left RAND. It was a mistake for me to do so and I pay the price of that mistake every day.

_______________________________________

1. Furthermore, in the following years as GPU work has become more and more practical and desirable, I still advise people to not think that they can tack on the GPU part at the last minute. A GPU is not a panacea, it has its own strengths and weaknesses, all of which are much better understood today than then, but even so, exist. I am a big fan of using the GPU but not in all cases, and it has to be used with sophistication and insight, and most of all, you have to have time to make it all work together with the main program, at least in many cases.

A Sympathy App

What I need is an app that gives me sympathy when I am sick with the flu. My friends can not be counted on for that.  They are too busy managing their trust funds and flying to Europe or China first class.  They think that just because I was not tortured in the Congo that I should be grateful. Its good to know who your friends are.

I can feel sorry for myself better than anyone else I know.

When I get my new smartphone I plan to write an app that gives me (and others) sympathy. We all need a little sympathy now and then, even if we have not been tortured in Kinhasa.

Politics and Friendship

So I have a great friend in NY or I used to. We have known each other for decades but just in the last 5 years or so starting talking almost daily. A talented outsider artist, IMHO, we would discuss all sorts of important matters such as the stupidity of modern computer graphics and the failure of that movement, the importance of the Hollow Earth, Lovecraft, the Illuminati's role in modern society, Keats, Blake, Bulwer-Lytton and so forth.

My friend is well known for helping other people who are down. No one can figure out how he supports himself but among other things he is very frugal (but that is not enough). He has had some adversity in life but does not seem to notice. Like all my artist friends who are successful in some sense of that word, he works extremely hard, and is very productive. He has stood by friends in need on several different occasions that I am aware of even when it was not convenient (a test of character, in Southern terminology). Since I am impoverished because of my work and commitment to computer animation he helped me find a place to stay in NYC so that I could visit, which otherwise I could not afford. He spent a billion hours with me when I visited NY and really helped to make that trip great. His daily chats and emails would often cheer me up, and since I am currently ostracized and living in abject poverty, I enjoyed hearing from him. It helped to break the near total isolation.

And he is a die hard Republican.

Loved Romney, thought he would make a great president. Hates Obama more than he would hate Hitler. Benghazi this and Hillary that. Obamacare blah blah blah. Jews controlling the media, how much the Jews are hated, etc. I would hear this stuff daily, more or less, in chats on Google mail and by email. It was occasionally annoying but I enjoyed talking to him, he had high entertainment value. I presumed he was being occasionally sincere but often just provocative.

But he kept assuming he knew what I thought and that I was a typical lefty liberal, whatever that may mean. I kept telling him that he did not know what I thought, really. He did not realize that my third generation elitist Virginian reform Jewish atheist roots and the history of Orthodox and Hasidic rabbis in my family in the Eighteenth century or so, as well as my time at the RAND Corporation left me with somewhat eccentric and non-mainstream beliefs.

So one day, after reading about an hour of rants about Democratic villainy from his point of view I told him .0001 percent of what I believe. Just one time, after hearing this stuff from him literally every other day (if not every day) for years.

I told him what I believed on just one issue just one time.

That the Supreme Court pissed on the constitution in public in November 2000 when they installed their goon, Bush Jr, as president in a classic coup d'etat. That the NY Times was just a right-wing rag when it rolled over and did not even slightly object to this gross injustice thus revealing its true colors. That everything Bush did was therefore illegal. That every decision that the Supreme Court made since that black day needed to be reevaluated in light of this crime to see which of their decisions were legal and which needed to be overturned.

And he never talked to me again.

So what is the moral of our little story? I guess the moral is that you should never tell someone what you believe unless you are perfectly ok with them never talking to you again. It doesn't have to be fair, and it doesn't have to be reciprocal, that is the way it is.   We might also conclude something about how Republicans relate to opinions outside their cult, but we already knew that.

How to Help The Unemployed Even Though They Are Worthless Scum

Most of us have friends who are in serious financial / employment / career meltdown.  I have at least six such friends, seven including myself, at various levels of distress.

Most of the working elite are apparently not aware that there are things they can do to alleviate their friend's plight, should they wish to do so (and for an essay on whether or not they should help, see this.)

Yes, most people are not aware of the techniques described below.  Why?  Perhaps this esoteric knowledge has been hidden by our government who is plotting to force everyone to have health care and give up their automatic weapons.  Or it might just be that the labor market is subdivided into those who work nearly all the time and those who do not. The former do not relate to the latter, and do not give it much thought.  Or maybe people just don't give a fuck. Yes, I suppose that is a possibility too.

In general, people who are out of work can be subdivided into the following broad categories (a) out of work for less than six months, (b) out of work for more than six months but less than a year, and (c) those who have been out of work for substantially more than a year. As time passes, the situation gets worse and worse, and (c) seques into (d), those who may never work again.

The longer your friend goes without a job or a serious project, the more the following ideas can probably help him.

The ideas/topics/whatever are: 

1. Access to current tools and processes.

2. Information and Guidance about Corporate America

3. Affiliation with a player in the field.

4. Recent work credential, even if it is minor.

5. Positive spin, Reccomendations, etc

6. Information about meetings, conferences, events, parties and activities.

7. Transportation, housing, and other.

1. Access to current tools and processes

The longer the subject is out of work, the further they are from what the field is using currently. Many of those things, software, hardware, whatever, are not available to an individual in normal circumstances. If you can arrange for a way for your colleague to have access to some of these tools and processes, and/or watch people work, there is a lot they can pick up to keep them current. (1)

2. Information and Guidance about Corporate America

As the various fields that we all helped invent morph over time, they seem to converge on a small number of very large corporate players, a few medium sized players, and numerous, but fragile, small players. Whereever you are working, you know more than anyone outside how your company works, what kind of people they are looking for, what projects are going to need help. By acting as an intermediary between management, human resources, and your friend, you may be able to help your friend present him or herself at the right time to be considered. Or you might do nothing more than report back on whether a listed open position is real. I have never found that getting this sort of information has any potential negative implications. The worst that happens is that nothing works out.

3. Affiliation with a player in the field

Even the simplest affiliation with a player in the field, even one that does not receive money, can help tremendously towards showing current participation. Lets say you make your friend a $1.00 / year consultant to advise your company in new technologies in some area. Well, that gives your friend something to say at trade shows ("I am a consultant to so and so at this company, trying to figure out where some of this stuff is going. It is very minor"). It gives the subject something to do that looks and sounds good, and who knows, maybe they will have good advice about something.

4. Recent work credential, even if it is minor

Use your imagination, it doesn't have to be much, and there does not have to be any money involved. It just has to sound plausible and it doesn't hurt if you actually need something done and have some money to pay for it, but that is extra credit.

5. Positive Spin, Reccomendations, etc.

By definition, your friend can not be there to defend themselves. Nor can they be there to promote themselves. So if you say something nice about this person, or in other ways create positive spin that keeps the name alive, you may indeed be helping your friend. If you know of a job or a position, or a little project, and your friend can do it, recommend him. Or call your friend and tell him who to call to ask about it. Generally if your friend is having trouble getting work, there is usually some sort of image disconnect (this is what he does but this is what we need) even though in fact your friend can probably do a lot of things. Recommending him, reassuring people that he/she can do the work, can help a lot.

6. Information about meetings, conferences, events, parties and activities.

By definition, your friend is not in the loop. He/she doesn't hear about or is not invited to events that might be of interest and which, by showing up, will help them to be considered part of the mix.

7. Transportation, housing, and other.

Many of the people I know in this situation are seriously hurting for money. Some are physically trapped where they are. If you are driving somewhere and can give them a lift, consider doing so. If they do not snore too badly and you are not meeting your mistress at a conference and you can offer him a bed or a place on the floor, consider doing so.

All of these techniques mentioned above cost nothing out of pocket, should not take much of your time, and yet can be extremely helpful in helping your friend sell out to corporate america in his or her search for a living wage.

No doubt you will be rewarded in a future life.

________________________________________________

1. It goes without saying that the subject will sign a nondisclosure to keep your proprietary information and client information confidential. There may be minor insurance and other issues, there may need to be a release form, etc, etc.

Pearls Before Swine or the Potential Downside of Helping Someone Find Work

In future posts we are going to discuss ways that you, the working elite, can help your friends, the unemployed scum, find gainful employment.   But before we do so, we are going to have to discuss the possible downside of helping someone. Is there a possible downside?  Is it true that no good deed goes unpunished?

Mark Twain once told the following "joke":   Q. What is the difference between a starving man and a starving dog?   A. When you feed a starving dog he does not turn around and bite you.

At various times I have had the pleasure, or misfortune, of helping many, many people find gainful employment.   I think I have been so effective at it for several reasons including (a) the economy was different then, (b) the people I helped were earlier in their career, (c) there were less good people around who knew this kind of stuff (computers and media) back then, and (d) I am good at helping people find work.  But I stand before you today to testify that I have had cause to regret helping people get employment.

I think this is sad.  In all of the cases where this has happened, I had confidence in the individuals involved and wanted to help them get along in life and their career.   What were they thinking when they then turned on the person who helped them?   I believe that there are a variety of answers to this question including insanity, venality, and stupidity.

I also feel that there may be special problems in the field of computer animation and visual effects, particularly since it went 3D and digital in the early 1990s.   Some outside observers have noticed that the field does seem to be particularly made up of ambitious and narcissistic scumbags to an unusual degree.   This is of course rather different from the people who, for the most part, founded this field who both knew what a "zero-sum game" was and did not believe that they were playing one.  I once had an attorney tell me "Michael, we have to get you working with a better class of people ..."

But whatever the reasons may be, a thoughtful individual must ask themselves, what can one do to protect oneself against the behavior of these disloyal scum?  Along those lines, here is a lesson I learned from reading about the so-called Mafia in New York City.  The article was an interview with an anonymous FBI Agent about why the head of the Genovese family in NY, a fellow named Gigante, had not been convicted of a crime.   The FBI agent said that it was because "he had an amazing talent for picking loyal friends".

Gigante aka "Chin" was considered very talented at judging the character of his potential co-workers

So what can I learn from my experiences that I can pass on to you to help make you more successful and avoid some of the irritations and problems that I have caused myself through my own desire to help the downtrodden?

1. Ask yourself how well you know the potential recipient of your beneficence.   If not very well, then be sure to take hostages.  Usually a close family member or two will do.   First born son, favorite pet, that sort of thing.

2. If your management wants you to hire people, or to recommend them to be hired, agree to do so, but only if you have the right to fire them again if they do not work out in your sole judgment. Get this in writing.

3. If you start noticing aberrant or delusional behavior in the recipient of your goodwill, have the right to have them seek professional help, offsite, for several years, in a comfortable "therapy center".  A few years in a disease infected swamp in a country torn by civil strife and revolution would probably help the recipient of our good will build character.

4. Finally, if and when they try and stab you in the back, execute the hostages and have your friend conveniently disappear while you are home at dinner with your family. Be sure to remember the famous rules of thumb for such things: "no weapon, no motive, no body".

I would hope that anyone you helped would be loyal and not be like some of the crazy assholes I have had the misfortune of helping from time to time.  All of this and more leads to the following conclusion: helping someone is a tricky matter, discretion may be the better part of valor.

For more in formation on Vincent "Chin" Gigante, see: his wikipedia page.

Revised 7/2/2013
Revised 4/2/2014

What the Bin Laden Family Taught Me About the Nature of Friendship

A few years ago I was discussing with a therapist why I felt so sad and abandoned by my friends. I used as an example a story from a book about the Bin Laden family by Steven Coll.

There are a number of things to learn from this book, which is very entertaining and worth reading (see link below) but perhaps the most compelling thing I learned was something about the true nature of friendship.

As background, before we get to the specific story, here are a few other things to know about the Bin Laden family. First, they are not Saudi Arabians, nor are they related to one of the important families from Saudi Arabia. They are Yemeni immigrants who went to Saudi Arabia and fit the stereotype of the classic Yemeni immigrant in Saudi Arabia: the hard-working, dirt-poor immigrant brothers who through pluck and hard work become millionaires. The next thing to know is that there are hundreds of Bin Ladens, they take many wives, divorce them, but keep them around, and marry new ones and have children by all of them. (1) The next thing to know is that of those hundreds of Bin Ladens, most of them seem to love America and spend a lot of time here. And finally, although the Bin Laden family was and is very wealthy, there was nothing like the wealth that would have permitted a 3rd generation Bin Laden such as Osama, who was not much involved in the family business, to have anything like the $180M in personal wealth that was reported in the American news media (in other words, our press got it wrong, again, not even close to accurate.)

Some of the Bin Laden Family in Europe probably in the 1970s.

Their are many colorful anecdotes, including the one about how after 911, the Bin Ladens chartered a jet and become one of the very few planes allowed to fly, as they picked up their various relatives at various parts of the country and flew them to Europe. Recall that air traffic was prohibited for three days after 911 with only a few exceptions. It seemed safest to the Bin Ladens, our State Department, and the Saudi Arabian government to just get the rest of the Bin Laden's out of the way for a while than to have them scattered all over the country and have to provide security for them (or fail to provide security for them as the case may be).

The specific story which is significant for this post and the cause of so much emotional unhappiness is the story of the time one of the Bin Laden's of the second generation was living in Florida and planning a party in Pakistan. Recall this is before 911, before the war in Afghanistan, and Pakistan was and may still be a favorite vacation place for people from Saudi Arabia, famous for its falcon hunting. Anyway, this Bin Laden was also a fan of ultralight airplanes and planned to charter a jet to fly to Pakistan taking with him many friends and ultralights for the event. Being a colorful and generous man, he also invited along many of his neighbors from Florida including his local ultralight dealer.

This is a typical ultralight without either a Bin Laden or a suitcase filled with cash.

Now we get to the signifcant part of this story. This is the part that really made me wonder what kind of friends I had and about the true nature of friendship.

You see, this Bin Laden, being a careful and generous host, also brought along a briefcase stuffed with cash in order to pay for any little extras along the way. Not a lot of money, just about $250K in various denominations, which is enough to buy a Range Rover or two, or hire a band at the last minute, or rent another floor of the hotel, take the gals shopping, whatever. The point is, he so trusted his friend with the ultralight dealership that he was given the briefcase and asked to carry it around.

Obviously, this is an indication that Bin Laden had both trust and confidence in the ultralight dealer. You can't just leave the briefcase with anyone, and you can't just put it in a safe, because you need it around if you need anything. So you appoint someone to keep it with them, someone you like and trust with the money.

 This photograph is for educational purposes only.

This really made me think. Whats the matter with me that I never get invited on the chartered jet to fly ultralights in a foreign country?  Why don't my friends let me carry the briefcase stuffed with cash? Why am I never invited to join the various Academy committees that have my friends and peers as members and who later win important awards because they served on those committees? Whats the matter with me that my friends treat me like shit?

The bottom line is that if they really liked me, they would let me carry the briefcase stuffed with cash from time to time, but they don't.

That's why this story makes me feel very sad and depressed.

_____________________________________________

The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century by Steven Coll

http://www.amazon.com/The-Bin-Ladens-Arabian-American/dp/1594201641

1.  There is a restriction in Islam that says you can only have four wives at a time and then only if you can afford them. However, there is no restriction on marrying, then divorcing, and keeping good relations with your ex-wives. In this way, one can with persistance and good financial means, extend the number of wives that you have in some long-term sense of the word indefinitely and the Bin Ladens seem to have in general used this technique.