Following is a unilateral binding declaration on the content and character of 2011, hereafter referred to as the “New Year”.

Whereas 2010 was a pretty good year, marked by personal and professional growth,

Whereas moving to two blocks away from work has yielded a large amount of time and mental energy,

Whereas the conference SIGGRAPH was attended by self for the first time,

Whereas hobbies in 2010 were particularly fruitful, with photography becoming part of my job,

Whereas several ambitious and productive professional projects were undertaken, including learning Houdini, teaching the Linear Workflow, and learning and teaching Arnold,

Be it acknowledged that 2010 is a tough act to follow.

Notwithstanding, the content and character of the New Year will adhere to the following.

Article 1: Whereas my photography skills have gotten pretty freaking good,

Whereas 1x is the best photography on the web,

Whereas there are some photos on 1x that sort of suck, notwithstanding that those are few and far between,

Be it hereby resolved that in the Near Year 2011 a photo authored by self will be published on 1x.

Article 2: Whereas the Linear Workflow has already been nearly universally adopted at work,

Whereas a second Linear Lecture is already planned for early in the New Year,

Whereas AO is still overused and RGB Light passes are still useless and slow to render,

Whereas the alternative is universally and unambiguously better,

Whereas the advantages of using a LUT workflow have been explained and demonstrated,

Whereas this workflow has not been implemented on any projects since despite interest in it,

Be it hereby resolved that the New Year will see another marked improvement in our lighting and rendering processes.

Article 3: Whereas all but the very best television programs are a total waste of time,

Whereas time is the stuff life is made of,

Whereas time saved is an effective increase of life,

Whereas many of the remaining programs I follow are far past their prime and are no longer worth watching,

Be it hereby resolved the number of TV shows followed in the New Year will see another precipitous decline.

Article 4: Whereas Moore’s law makes it inevitable that Unbiased Stochastic Path Tracing is future of 3D rendering,

Whereas Arnold is the most capable unbiased Path Tracer currently available,

Whereas there is a conspicuous dearth of Arnold shaders,

Whereas Arnold is still fairly exclusive and I have access,

Whereas I have been learning linear algebra but possess little if any calculus,

Whereas I have no programming skills to speak of beyond scripting,

Be it hereby resolved in 2011 I will acquire the prerequisite math and programming knowledge sufficient to write an Arnold shader used in production.

Article 5: Whereas coming in late all the time is a needless drag on the perception of my professionalism,

Whereas I live two blocks away and on time is the extremely easy to achieve 10:30 AM and nobody has a problem with any time before eleven,

Be it hereby resolved I’ll get to fucking work on time because not doing so is just throwing a trivially easy advantage out of the window.

Article 6: Whereas I’ve played Poker successfully and enjoyably in the past,

Whereas it turns out there’s a weekly game at work for a few months now that I somehow didn’t even know about,

Whereas I don’t partake in enough social activities especially ones with coworkers as my lack of knowledge of this weekly game indicates,

Be it hereby resolved that I will take part in more social activities with coworkers in 2011, starting with the weekly Poker game.

Article 7: Whereas I’m almost fucking thirty,

Whereas there exists no important difference between the age of twenty-seven and the age of thirty,

Whereas the final quarter of 2011 will be spent as a twenty-eight year old of which this is even more true,

Whereas denial is not a solution to any problem,

Be it hereby resolved that I shall no longer regard myself a twenty-something, and there are optimistically thirty productive years left and not much more life than that, and so there is no time to waste.

Article 8: Whereas some personal shit I’d rather not get into,

Whereas I’m not convinced these are all bad things about myself,

Be it resolved that some other shit I’d rather not get into.

Article 9: Whereas some boring financial shit,

Whereas the amount I suck at this is actually quite unreasonable,

Whereas being irresponsible here is probably more expensive to me than anything else I do,

Whereas mental energy is a limited resource too so not being totally on top of this shit isn’t entirely unwarranted, notwithstanding that it’s really quite unreasonably bad though,

Be it resolved that I won’t be quite as awful in this category.

We the undersigned do affirm the New Year is required to come into full compliance with all nine articles no later than December 31st, 2011.

-Jonas

It’s a film festival, and as such, they have photo badges.

They request that you make a shakeyface for this badge’s photo.

Sophia helped me take mine. And she just composed all of the reject shots into this gif:

I thought Astronaut was the term for American spacemen. We have Cosmonaut for the Russians and Taikonaut for the Chinese. Why share our term for space travellers with other NATO countries?

And so, I submit that the Canadians should be known as Maplenauts, while the Belgians shall be known as Wafflenauts.

And when they join forces?

That’s just plain delicious.

From #sancho on irc.lunarnet.org.

Hyptosis’s homepage
chrisa’s homepage

(source: this guy)

James:
speaking of bitches

James:
I just found out in the sequel to that talk you sent me that women find different things attractive when ovulating.

Ben:
yeah

James:
not ovulating: nice guys
ovulating: muscly aggressive guy

James:
those whoresome whoring whores

Ben:
whoremones.

James:
fuck you evolution!

of course we carry that genetic code too, in hopes that our daughters will act in such a terrible way as well!

…those hypowhorical whores

it’s like, that’s it!

I’m a creationist now

this kind of thing cannot be tolerated

…

…hey Anna is online, sweet.

Ben:
“Sophia: You are both a nice and aggressive guy! I am satisfied!”

James:
Awww. She’s not ovulating, how adorable.

Ben:
I can be macho if needed and I can be sweet if needed.

James:
You should get a pheremone sniffing dog to tell you which to be.

Ben:
“What’s that, Lassie? She wants it rough? ”

It’s all just a manefestation of the whole “girls like to be manhandled sometimes” thing.

Ben:
When they’re being saucy, you start asserting yourself and they love you for it.

James:
> grow muscly set of arms with which to manhandle girl

Ben:
Surely you can overpower a girl, even with your spindly arms.

James:
Yes, of course I can.

…I just feel like they’re used to being overpowered more easily.

Kevin
Nothing illegal about it.

Kevin
Slightly immoral, perhaps, but what ISN’T these days.

Kevin
…Other than feeding the poor.

Benjamin
I feed the poor to other, less poor people.

(Sick still. Doused in NyQuil.)

HOW CAN SOMEONE BE NUDER OR NUDEST? Isn’t “No clothing” a goddamn boolean state?

A nude person is nuder than a non-nude person. If he is the only nude person, he is also the nudest.

Back in 2004 I wrote

Nobody understood this properly when I wrote it originally, so then in my comments I wrote some psuedocode to explain the logic flow of that sentence and it cleared it up.

(Aside: Comparison of the previous two sentences shows that in five years I’ve not stopped ending my sentence in prepositions. I, like most of you, run english in quirks mode.)

The conclusion

Code is far less ambiguous than english because people are not used to strictly interpreting english. (The previous sentence implies that math majors are not people; I’m willing to defend that.)

So I revisited the psuedocode in the post and found it amazingly brittle and unreusable! And there was a bug in the final clause. Oh, the perils of not test-driving your emotionally charged statements. So, in the interests of avoiding arrogance-rot, I refactored and generalized it a bit!

An Exemption

I’m not sure if I believe this anymore at all. It’s been a while since I re-evaluated my political stances. I think I’ve gone from a hardline libertarian to a broken, beaten, shattered shell of a libertarian.

So, the contentious arguments here aren’t so applicable anymore. I just wanted to point illustrate that the opening statement is hyper-charged and people fail to interpret it correctly, whereas the code is much easier to interpret to those who have been trained in the Way of the Computer.

/// Takes a Person object, and sets it's member variables accordingly for
/// it's 1::1 relation with Grue in respect to Grue's respect for that
/// Person.
///
/// @param you The person to judge.
/// @see Person::ProcessReaction()
/// @see _BattlegroundStateCalculator()
/// @todo implement all of the various non-election-related ways a person
///       can be a total douche in my eyes.
/// @todo exemption clauses for 'lesser of two evils'?
/// @todo set dead_to_me flag if '3rd party'/'wasted vote' argument comes
///       up.
void Grue::CalculateRespect( Person you )
{

    PoliticalOffice* p_office;
    p_office = PoliticalService.getCurrentOfficeUpForGrabs();

    if(
        // if you think the current system is Shitty...
        you.opinion_on_US_govt == E_FUNDAMENTALLY_FLAWED &&

        // ...and if you *dont* live in a battleground state...
        // (calls a helper function)
        !_BattlegroundStateCalculator(you.state_of_residence) &&

        (
          you.vote[TimeService.getCurYear()][p_office] ==
              PoliticalService.getCandidateForOffice(p_office,'GOP')
          ||
          you.vote[TimeService.getCurYear()][p_office] ==
              PoliticalService.getCandidateForOffice(p_office,'DNC')
        )
    ) {
        you.hypocrite = true;
        you.sentient = false;

        // set all possible forms of respect as false.
        for( int i=0; i<MAX_RESPECT; i++ )
            you.grue_respect[i] = false;
    }
    else // only do this if they were not deemed Horrible.
    {

        // Now see if the person was offended by the process we just judged
        // them against...
        you.ProcessReaction();

        // if somehow you're offended during this evaluation for any
        // reason, mainly for not understanding the hierarchy of judgement,
        // then you're dumbstuffs for being offended, but I cannot judge
        // you otherwise.
        if( you.offended_flag )
        {
            you.grue_respect[i] = REPECT_INTELLECTUALLY;
        }
    }
} //Grue::CalculateRespect()