Great Performance Reviews in History: Lawrence of Arabia

Since employment and the search for employment seems to be on so many people's minds, I wish to share with you what I believe is one of the best "performance reviews" in film.  There are a few others, some more comical than this, but this is perhaps the best of the serious reviews.  It may even have some basis in fact.  That is less clear.

In this sequence, T. E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia, has just come out of the desert and announced that he and the Arab Revolt have taken Aqaba. He is escorted into the presence of his commanding general, General Allenby, who is many levels above Lawrence's nominal chain of command.

Of course, this is from David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962) starring Peter O'Toole as T. E. Lawrence. 

The sequence is here, until Youtube takes it down.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CsUOYazQQU

 The Review

Allenby reviews his file, questions his actions, promotes him, and builds up his morale to motivate him to go back and continue his work. How many of us can say that we have had as well-informed and insightful a review, or one designed to help us do our best work?

Lawrence, who of course realizes he is being manipulated, tells Allenby to his face, "Youre a clever man, sir", and through his presentation makes it clear that he is accusing Allenby of doing something nasty by rewarding Lawrence and making him like it.   I don't know about you, but I think that is pretty funny.  

Allenby manipulates his employee by telling him he has done a good job, promoting him and buying him a drink.  What a tricky, low down thing to do!

As background on the film, many of the key plot points in the movie are historical.   Which is appalling when you think about it.   Of course any detail or dialogue or colorful incident at an oasis or whatnot is certainly fiction, at least to some degree.   I am not sure if Lawrence ever met Allenby or if Allenby invited him for a drink at the Officer's club.  I would tend to doubt it, but I do not know.  But I think that we can be certain that if they did meet, whatever they said to each other was different than what we see here.

The performance review:

Allenby: (reading from a file) Undisciplined .... Unpunctual ... Untidy ... Several languages,

knowledge of music, literature, knowledge of ... , knowledge of ... You're an interesting

man, there is no doubt about it. Who told you to take Aqaba?

Lawrence: Nobody.

Allenby: Sir.

Lawrence: Sir.

Allenby: Then why did you?

Lawrence: Aqaba is important.

Allenby: Why is it important?

Lawrence: Its the Turkish route to the canal.

Allenby: Not anymore, they're coming through Bathsheba.

Lawrence: But we've gone forward to Gaza.

Alleny: So?

Lawrence: So, that left Aqaba behind your right.

Allenby: True.

Lawrence: And it will be further behind your right when you go for Jerusalem.

Allenby: Am I going for Jerusalem?

Lawrence: Yes.

Allenby: Very well, Aqaba behind my right.

Lawrence: It threatened El Harish and Gaza.

Allenby: Anything else?

Lawrence: Yes, Aqaba is linked with Medina.

Allenby: Do you think we should shift them out of Medina now?

Lawrence: No, I think you should leave them there.

Allenby: You acted without orders you know.

Lawrence: Shouldn't officers use their initiative at all times?

Allenby: Not really. Its awfully dangerous, Lawrence.

Lawrence: Yes, I know.

Allenby: Already?

Lawrence: Yes.

Allenby: I'm promoting you Major.

Lawrence: I don't think that's a very good idea.

Allenby: I didn't ask you. I want you to go back and carry on the good work.

Lawrence: No, thank you, sir.

For those who are interested, the scene where Allenby announces Lawrence's promotion at the Officer's club is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=0VGBDYeEAVk

See also:

The Arab Revolt

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Revolt

General Allenby, 1st Viscount Allenby

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Allenby,_1st_Viscount_Allenby

Thomas Edward Lawrence

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._E._Lawrence

Lawrence of Arabia (1962) on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056172/

Real Time Programmable Shaders and Me

[or is it "... and I" ?]

As part of my Solari Sign simulation, I am working through more of the learning curve on Open GL shader language, e.g. GLSL or programmable shaders.

It is pretty cool but it sure is awkward.

There is a list of things you have to get through that are arcane in the extreme before you can do basic programmable shaders: compiling, linking and running shaders, creating and setting uniform variables, creating and using texture maps, figuring out the relationship between traditional Open GL and the new programmable shader paradigm, and so forth. As with so many things in Open GL, going from the documentation to real applications is not well documented or self-explantory. The list goes on and on, and when you need to add a new feature, you have to be prepared to dive into the bits for days before you emerge.

But once you build up an infrastructure to make these things manageable, then it is a lot like writing shaders in Renderman circa 1988, but in real time.

And real time is fun.

For example, out of frustration with an object that was relentlessly invisible no matter what I did, I mapped a texture map variable I had been calculating left over from a previous test. To my amazement, I picked up the texture map from the last digit of a digital clock I had running on the display. Only in this case it was mapped on an object that filled the screen, and it was changing every second.

Its soft because the preloaded texture maps are 128x128 but that could be easily fixed. 

Anyway, I think NVIDIA or someone should do the following:

1. Document the relationship between Open GL and GLSL with modern examples.

2. Write and document a toolkit, maybe libglsl, that lets one do basic GLSL functionality at a slightly higher level.  If no one else has done it, I may do it.

         Such things as: read shaders from disk and compile into a program, defining and setting

         uniform variables, loading and enabling texture maps, etc.

3. Create a good implementation of noise, classic or simplex, and make it available.

        There is an implementation of noise that looks very good online, but it is 10 pages of

        code and its days of work to transfer it to your program. That is less work than it would

        be if you had to write it from scratch.

As for using real time graphics for work directly in motion picture filmmaking, in other words, as final footage, that will only work for certain kinds of graphics.  For visual effects and most final animation such things as advanced filtering, motion blur and global illumination is either required or highly desirable.

For a very low budget film of course, anything is possible.

Villains! Enemies of the People! Stop Driving Blue Pickup Trucks!

[2.12.2013  We do not know at this point how crazy Dorner is and how unjust, if it was unjust at all, was the procedure that got him fired from the LAPD.   But on the surface of things, it looks like another example of the LAPD punishing someone who tries to make them live up to their promise to clean up their overt racism and violence.  If my post is unfair, should we decide that to be true later when we know the facts, trust me when I say that the history of the LAPD makes it a perfectly good conclusion to jump to.  The LAPD has earned its reputation.]

We want to loudly and firmly announce support for our LAPD in these bleak hours when, in our defense, these stern defenders of the peace go on another rampage shooting anyone in a blue pickup truck.

If I were you, I would park that blue pickup truck right now, and walk away. Otherwise, you might be shot, and so you should be, you wretched blue-pickup-truck-driving villain!

The enemy

One of the pillars of Los Angeles is the Los Angeles Police Department, the LAPD, whose motto is "To Protect and Serve".  These selfless and upright public servants protect Los Angeles from the forces of crime and racial equality, placing themselves bodily between us good folk and the nasty bad people out there.

Today they are under immense pressure because of a challenge made by a former member of the LAPD who has sworn revenge against the noble LAPD.

The hunt to destroy blue pickup trucks began when a former LAPD officer was fired for the gross offense of reporting that a superior had brutally and sadistically beaten an innocent and mentally-challenged person. Of course he was fired!   How dare he denounce a member of our famously humane LAPD? This is Los Angeles after all, and in Los Angeles, the LAPD can beat the shit out of anyone with impunity as has been demonstrated time and again.

Our former officer, who is suspected of murdering his ex-girl friend and her fiancee, has sworn to get even, and drives a blue pickup truck. The LAPD has sensibly and reasonably responded to this challenge by going on a rampage and is even now shooting wildly with assault weapons (2) at anyone with a blue pickup truck.

Lets remember what Los Angeles stands for. It stands for crime, criminality, hypocrisy and the exploitation of the poor in the service of the rich. Los Angeles and crime go hand and hand.

With the possible exception of the Aerospace industry, all the major industries in Los Angeles were founded on crime. (1)

Consider a few highpoints of this notable history. The motion picture industry moving here to be able to more easily evade the Edison patents. The agricultural and garment industries based on illegal labor. The theft of water and political fraud for real estate development. The music industry (need I say more). The Construction industry. Import-export and the turn-of-the-century opium trade. Chinese slave labor and the building of the railroads. The destruction of the mass transit system. The oil industry. The porn industry. The consistent rumor that the Heidi Fleiss affair was caused by Sony Columbia refusing to pay their annual $1M bribe to the head of the LAPD. The Rodney King riots which were caused by the video of the LAPD beating the shit out of Mr. King as he lay prostrate on the ground, defenseless.

These are the things that Los Angeles stands for.

We at Global Wahrman support the LAPD in its efforts to suppress crime and call upon on all evil-doers to stop driving their blue pickup trucks at once!

Los Angeles Police Department Home Page

http://www.lapdonline.org/
________________________________________

1. The author wishes to acknowledge that many cities may have been founded by criminals.  Also that criminality is sometimes a matter of point of view.  After all, New Amsterdam became New York because the British Navy stole it from the Dutch, to give one example.

2. A friend gave me a hard time over my use of the term "assault rifle".  He is correct to do so, as assault rifle is really a marketing term, not a technical one.   But the fact is that the only people who make that distinction today are people who are opposed to any kind of gun control.  So, to hell with you, we need gun control in this country.  I think "assault rifle" is a fine term to use in this case.

Eric Cantor, the One Ring of Power, and my Virginian High School

Part One

Once upon a time, I attended the The Collegiate Schools in Richmond, Virginia, a somewhat prestigious private high school in the region. We had a number of people from Virginia society in our school, or their children at least, as well as some well-established outsiders. I propose to describe something about this High School because it affects all of us as citizens of this country.

You may ask, why would Michael's High School be important to all of us as citizens?

Because Eric Cantor is now the Majority Leader of the House of Representatives in Congress and Eric went to Collegiate. 

And Collegiate is a somewhat amusing, somewhat peculiar place. It definitely has a culture all its own, and its place in Virginia society.

But first I want to review with you how our imperialist superpower works because you need to understand this to understand why Eric Cantor matters. Although the president gets the helicopters and the airplanes, and gets to say who gets a drone missile up his ass on a day-to-day basis, it is in fact Congress that allocates the money for those missiles and helicopters. And in general, the executive branch abides by the law, most of the time at least, we hope, and those laws must be passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the President.

But to bring a bill up to a vote is not a trivial matter, and it requires the machinations and scheming of the two political parties to do so. Every time there is an election, the House and the Senate reorganizes itself into a majority and minority coalition, and each of those coalitions has representatives on the important committees that are preparing the legislation and the budgets. So if the Republicans have a majority of the House, as they do, their representative is the chair of, for example, the House Armed Services Committee. Seniority in the House and Senate also plays a role in determining who can get things done.  The standing committees take the lead in preparing legislation for their branch of Congress, House and Senate, and when passed by the committee it goes to the floor of the House or the Senate for a vote by all the members. (1)  (2) 

the smoke filled room

So the House and the Senate are each a complicated network of smoke-filled rooms, each filled with power, self-entitlement, influence, obligations, history, villianry, idealism, and hypocrisy and having been driven mad by power, push each other around with their large software packages, working with great vigor to get nothing done.

But one stands above these smoke-filled rooms whose job it is to coordinate their actions and bring it to a vote on the floor of the House of Representatives.

One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.

Eric Cantor is the Majority Leader for the House of Representatives, and Eric went to Collegiate.  The mind reels.

End of Part One

Eric Cantor on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Cantor

The smoke filled room on Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke-filled_room

The One Ring on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Ring

______________________________________

1. The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences works in a similar way. The various subsections nominate films in their respective categories, e.g. acting, screenwriting, costume design, film editing, cinematography, etc, but then the entire Academy membership votes on who receives the award that year.

2. If you think about each of those representatives and senators having constituents, each with their own strongly held beliefs, and multiply out the different agendas, then it becomes clear that most bills in Congress must be wild compromises almost by definition to "get out of committee".   Thus, having a major party that does not compromise throws a wrench into the system like you would not believe.

Comments on the Daily Variety Article about Rhythm and Hues

There is an interesting article in the Daily Variety about the cash crisis and related issues at Rhythm & Hues. You can read it here:  VFX House Rhythm and Hues Endures Cash Crunch

There are a number of amusing things about this article that someone who has not had the pleasure of working in this business might not realize.  The situation probably sounds worse than it is, although companies do go out of business as a result of things like this, they probably won't.   Here is some background information: 

1. R&H has done this sort of thing before and always survived.

Running what is essentially an unfinanced, work-for-hire, production service facility is a juggling act that requires immense skill and stamina. Every two years or so, in the early days of R&H, I would be told something like "R&H is in trouble, they are on half salary, maybe they will go out of business".  

But the reality is that when the work is not there, a good production company will have to reduce payroll. They can either lay people off, or find a way to help people stay on but at a lower salary. And then eventually the work comes in and people go back on full salary. Don't worry, I would say, they will be fine.  

2. The visual effects facilities business is a very low margin business.

The visual effects facilities business is incredibly labor intensive, skill intensive, capital intensive, R&D intensive, risky and competitive.

In the days when commercial (e.g. advertising) production was the primary work, a facility like R&H would completely recreate itself every 12 weeks or so. Motion picture projects last longer than advertising projects and are often much bigger, but they are then by definition more risky. If a project is delayed, it has a much larger impact on the cash and work flow of the studio.

3. The Studios do not care about your cash flow.

Projects start when it is convenient for them to start, and end when it is convenient for them to end. The facility has no (or very little) say in the matter. But a company like R&H has an astounding payroll to make every two weeks. They either have to have the projects that make that payroll, or they have to lay people off. If they lay people off, they may or may not be able to hire them back if your project finally decides to start.   (1)

4. The Studios are adversarial.

The studios could not care less if a facility goes out of business. If anyone tells you differently, laugh at them and call them stupid. I can give you example after example where a vfx facility saved a screwed up production from itself and got slandered for doing the studios a favor. (See for example, ILM and Paramount on Hunt for Red October, which will be the subject of a later post). (2)

5. Any situation like this will be manipulated by the competition.

Your competition will do everything in their power to manipulate the situation to reduce confidence in the troubled facility, and thus cause all their clients to pull the work, forcing the company out of business.

6. Notice this happens as they await the word on their Academy Award.

R&H has been nominated for an academy award for Life of Pi.  Actually, a facility can not be nominated, but they did the work and people from R&H are listed.   Notice that doing good work, which everyone says about Life of Pi, doesn't seem to help that much in the short run.  (The proper way to say that is "... that and three dollars and fifty cents will get you a decaf espresso in this town").

I want to finish this incomplete analysis (there is much more that could be said) with the following thought: Although this is probably a very difficult situation for R&H, or we would not be reading about it in Daily Variety, this is the kind of weirdness that a production company like R&H is expected to be able to deal with.   And deal with it they probably will.    They may have to restructure and / or downsize, but that would be par for the course.   The only reason why R&H would not be fine is if the founders, John and Pauline, decided they wanted to do something else.

_________________________________

1. A production company will of course have a cash reserve that they have carefully built up to tide them over the unevenness of payments and down periods.  But that reserve will go very quickly indeed.  It is one of the reasons it was healthier when a studio could balance their production across several different industry areas (e.g. advertising vs motion picture vs special venue) to maintain some income when one area was depressed.

2. Boss Film Corporation (BFC) was doing the visual effects for Hunt for Red October and was being treated very harshly by the studio and the director of the film.   There are many potential reasons for this, but I doubt it was because Boss was completely screwing up.  There were (past tense, Boss Film Corporation is no longer in business) many excellent people at BFC and Dave Stewart certainly knew how to shoot "dry for wet", as it is called.   Mike Fink was called in to help supervise, and ultimately the production was pulled from BFC and given to ILM with a change in schedule (more time) and budget (much more money).  ILM did a very good job, of course and they charged Paramount a lot of money to come in at the end and do this production.  Paramount, being cowards, used ILM to manage their difficult director, e.g. they let ILM be the bad guy when Peter Hyams wanted changes.   Ok, fine. The movie comes out and it does well, even if it is a silly story, and for years and years and years I heard Paramount complaining about how ILM had "reamed them a new asshole" for doing the work under those circumstances.  I am sure ILM charged a premium, why not?

In other words, the studios are spoiled children who want it all for free, and don't want to invest their own money to have the capability in house.  They want to be able to buy the service cheaply when they want it and not pay for the R&D or maintaining the infrastructure.  And they are able to get away with this because they are, after all, the only game in town.

Simulation of Classic Solari / Split Flap Sign Technology

[Update: 2/4/2013 The Solari company is online, one just needed to know their correct name.  "Solari di Udine".]

As we slam headlong into the chaos of our future, and embrace whatever stupid idea someone has for new media or a smart phone, we also have the opportunity to recall some pretty wonderful "old media", or "receding media technology".

One of my favorites of old media, was something called a "Solari sign", or a (don't blame me) split-flap sign, so named because the letters were on metal plates that were split down the middle. The sign would use an actuator to pick which letter was visible, and as it moved through the different letters, it made a very distinctive "chattering" sound.

The sign at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia, PA

You would see these signs in about 100 places in the world, mostly train stations in places like Paris, New York, Milan, London, Frankfurt and so forth. The signs were made by an Italian company called "Solari". Solari has no presence on the Internet.   Stop the presses, we have found them.  Ok, so this will be more interesting.

See http://www.solari.it/.

The Wikipedia page on "split flap" displays:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-flap_display

The Museum of Modern Art in NYC on "Hacking the Solari"
http://wp.moma.org/talk_to_me/2011/09/hacking-the-solari/

A Youtube video of a real Solari sign (for Amtrak) 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1SAjGfYPI0

And finally, my simulation of the Solari sign, written without any documentation or operating guide of the sign itself.  Clearly my simulation has a ways to go.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLjdEeGq8HA

I am trying to find someone to use this simulation (suitably art directed) for some public sign, maybe a render farm queue display or something.

Farsi.  

English.

The zither music is just for atmosphere and was ripped from the sountrack of The Third Man (1949).

The Esoteric Knowledge and the Hollow Earth

At Global Wahrman, we plan to reveal the hidden knowledge, sometimes known by the elect as the esoteric knowledge.

Of course, not everyone is ready to receive the wisdom and those of you who are not yet ready should go away until you are. Go beat on some drums and burn incense or read Blavatsky or something, and then, when you are ready, come back and the knowledge will be revealed.

Today's esoteric knowledge primer will be on the hollow earth, or as I like to say, the Hollow Earth.

Of course, we all know that the earth is hollow, and that vast subterranean caverns exist beneath the surface, filled with utopias, civilizations , and statuesque women in tight clothes that stagger the imagination. How could it be otherwise? How could it not be true with all the fiction that has been written about it? In fact, were it not true, that would cast doubt on all sorts of things that we know are true, like Nazi UFOs and Atlantean Crystal Wisdom, so I think we can be certain that it is true.

The apparent reason for this post is to record notes from a book about the Hollow Earth, by David Standish. You can find that book here.

The following may seem a little cryptic, but that is to be expected about esoteric knowledge, don't you think?

0. What is the relationship between the feminist utopian fantasies and the Hollow Earth?  Why are women authors compelled to use the Hollow Earth as a setting for their anti-male diatribes?  Is there, dare we say it, some subtle phallic or vaginal symbolism associated with the Symmes' holes?  (See illustration below)

1.Clearly, the relationship between Baudelaire and Poe needs to be further investigated.  For those of you who may not know this (and I did not), Baudelaire single handedly rehabilitated Edgar Allen Poe in the eyes of literary criticism with his translations of Poe into French.  Here is the first paragraph of a scholarly paper on the topic: 

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/40617398?uid=2&uid=4&sid=21101734791137

2. Poe's novel about the hollow earth, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" is available online here.

3. Poe's "Ms. found in a Bottle" is a great title and could be repurposed into a film or story about a young woman who drinks, for example. The title has been unintentionally updated, of course, "Ms." used to mean "manuscript".

4. Some documents by David Symmes here.

Subliminal Anti-Phallic Symbolism, Perhaps?

5. Alexander Dumas wrote a novel about a "wandering jew" who goes to the hollow earth. This novel has never been translated into English. It is called Isaac Laquedem: The Wandering Jew. This sounds pretty damn weird, there must be a reason it has not been translated.  Weird.

6. Standish rattles off a whole litany of Hollow Earth titles that I had never heard of before.  A later post will list some of them.   They will be assigned reading.

Ancient Computer Animation Artifacts and Homer Simpson

In this post we discuss a very early use of computer animation in the mainstream, before the tsunami of computer animation we are all suffering from today, back when it was a novel and expensive choice. And we discuss how to appreciate the ancient motifs of those early days of animation.  In other words, the particular piece we describe is filled with computer animation in jokes, as you will see.

It is part of the ancient history of computer animation, back when it was an experimental and impractical medium for entertainment and art, that the best way to see computer animation was to attend the annual ACM SIGGRAPH conference and see the Electronic Theatre, which was originally shown on a few nights of the conference only. Not only was this the best way, it was usually the only way, as this is in the days before Youtube when computer animation was an acquired taste of eclectic researchers and artists only.

Since the audience on those two or three nights of SIGGRAPH was essentially the entire audience for computer animation in the world and everyone who attended, or almost everyone, was very knowledgeable about computer animation, there had developed a series of motifs that were either funny, or silly, or just mistakes, that we all knew. For example, an early computer animation model was a teapot that someone at the Univ of Utah cobbled together out of patches to make a surface with a certain complexity. He modelled the teapot by hand by typing in numbers into a text file, and that teapot, that very same teapot, was used in a lot of papers and films.

So then, when some outsider from the motion picture industry would slum with us and attend the Electronic Theatre, to find a way to exploit the medium for their corrupt ends, they would walk away puzzled. Why, they would ask, would a glass teapot dropping on a table and shattering in slow motion be the cause of a standing ovation?   "Why can't they do more films like the one with the lamp, you know, a funny film that doesn't have any ideas?"

But we were living in a fool's paradise. Computer animation became more practical and more accepted, and that led inevitably to the corruption and decay that you see today.

The transition period between R&D and mainstream production when 3D became both more practical and controllable, as well as accepted by the motion picture and television industries, and by the audience, was, arguably between 1991 and 1995. Terminator 2 (1991) and Jurassic Park (1993) established computer animation's respectability in visual effects and Toy Story (1995) in animated features.

The piece we are going to discuss premiered roughly three weeks before Toy Story, and thus was produced before computer animation was considered to be real and respectable in animation.

It was called "Homer 3", where 3 is a superscript, which means Homer to the 3rd power. It was for the seventh season of The Simpsons and their sixth episode of the "Treehouse of Horror" Halloween special. In this episode, Homer tries to escape from being subjected to his wife's relatives and escapes behind a bookcase into a mysterious dimension, the 3rd dimension. After being lost, and causing the destruction of that universe, he is saved by Bart at the last minute and returned safely to the 2nd dimension.

Homer notices his new 3D physique

Boy, this place looks expensive.

The computer animation was done at Pacific Data Images (PDI) before they were acquired by Dreamworks Feature Animation.

You can see a very bad dub of this piece here:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2enyl_homer-3d_shortfilms#.UQjG2h2w-Gk

Of the many homages to the SIGGRAPH Electronics Theatre in this piece, here are the ones that stand out to me:

1. The crazy, artificial, and unrealistic camera move that goes nowhere.

2. The signpost that has an X, Y and Z direction.

3. The use of the cone (and other primitive objects, e.g. sphere and cube), a simple geometric object used a lot in the early days of computer animation for all sorts of things. The III logo (1) was a sphere, a cone, and a cube.

4. The emphasis on simple water and fluid, fluid being a hard problem in computer animation and a lot of various tests made it into the film show.

5. The implausible architecture and Tron-like environment.

Professor Frink explains "The Third Dimension" and also demonstrates why translating 2D characters to 3D is a very tough problem.  Imagine translating the Professor to 3D naively from this image, it would be grotesque.

6. Homer Simpson says "Boy, this place looks expensive. I feel like I am spending a lot of money just standing here". Which he was, computer animation used to charge by the second (sometimes it still does), and it was both difficult and expensive to just have a character on screen scratching his butt.

7. There are also some shading artifacts on Homer's face that probably came from the simple shading model. This may or may not have been intentional, and the artifacts may or may not have been because Homer was modelled from polygons (I am pretty sure he wasn't, but I am not positive). But it looked like the artifacts we used to see all the time in the early days. If it was intentional, it was a homage. But it was probably just happenstance.

8. Homer asks if anyone back in the 2nd dimension saw the movie Tron.  All but one say no, and he changes his story so as not to admit of seeing Tron.

I think PDI did an excellent job on something that was at the time a very prestigious piece indeed.

But the best thing that this piece has going for it was not standard at the Electronic Theatre but is very common for the The Simpsons: it is very well written.

Treehouse of Horror VI on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treehouse_of_Horror_VI

_______________________________________________

1. III is Information International, Inc.   This large company which is still in business and thriving, had an early computer animation group that used their film recorder technology, and worked on Tron.  Many famous and important people either founded or worked at III.  We will discuss III's adventure in "digital scene simulation" in another post.

Early 18th Century British Underworld Slang

The Thieves Cant (or language) is a work written sometime between 1690 and 1720 by one B.E. Gent in London. It purports to be a dictionary of terms of art of the various "underworld" groups of the time: thieves, gypsies, beggars and so forth.

Its full title is:

A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient & Modern of the Canting Crew, in its several tribes, gypsies, beggars, thieves, cheats, &c.

In other words, this is underworld slang from what historians call the Early Modern Period in England..

The term "canting crew" is itself completely obscure to me, but it may refer to beggars, and their "cant", or speech, or possibly their begging rap.

When looking up the meaning of "canting crew", I came across the following review in The Nation:
http://www.thenation.com/article/161410/canting-crew#

It is the case that subgroups of this type, e.g. outsiders, have always had their own "language", usually a vocabulary used by members of this group and the people they interact with. We have them all the time to this day, particularly with various groups of outcasts from polite society such as economists, philosophers, astrophysicists and so-called visual effects practitioners, who must disguise their anti-social and disagreeable beliefs behind a cloud of mysterious jargon known only to the elect.

Exactly how correctly this work describes the actual language used by these groups is not clear to me. But it is amusing in its own right whatever its historical accuracy.

Entry in online library:

http://archive.org/details/newdictionaryoft00begeuoft

Scan of The Thieves Cant in PDF form:

http://ia600504.us.archive.org/7/items/newdictionaryoft00begeuoft/newdictionaryoft00begeuoft.pdf

Text of The Thieves Cant

http://archive.org/stream/newdictionaryoft00begeuoft/newdictionaryoft00begeuoft_djvu.txt

Photograph Demonstrating the Permanence of High School

New York Magazine has an excellent essay on the subject of whether or not we ever really leave High School.   Its a topic of great interest to most of us, but may be slightly misdirected, as it seems that so many of our peers have the emotional maturity of someone stuck in Jr. High School, not High School.

But nevertheless, its an interesting article and it can be found here.

But the real reason I am mentioning it is because I thought that they introduced their article with a truly great picture.

Does the "Happy Face" button and haircuts identify the year of the original photograph?

Notice the attention to detail.   They are wearing very similar clothes, if not identical ones, and are trying to duplicate their facial expressions, slumping body positions, the sense of a group of friends on the loose in New York City (presumably), etc.   Its the same t-shirt that the guy 2nd from the left is wearing, or an amazing replica.   Notice the vacant grin on the guy sitting down.   Its beautiful.

What makes it great is not the technique: the goal of the technique was to duplicate the cheesy feel of the original.   Technique is important in anything, but it is not the only thing.  These pictures could be out of focus and they would still be great.