words words words

Let’s talk about Conservatives and Liberals, and let’s talk about those words and what they mean. Take a step back from politics and look at the roots of the words we’re dealing with, then dive back at what those words ought to mean to not sound contradictory. It is then that we can discuss the spectrum of attitudes that we hold and map it to any sort of coordinate grid.

The fact that right now conservatives and liberals are at opposing sides of the political spectrum is a little silly, and a great misnomer. The antithesis of a conservative is a progressive, and one of liberal is a statist. They address different things - one pair contests the shape of society, while the other contests the government involvement.

The word conservative comes from conserve. Conservatism’s main credo is that major changes in society should be enacted as slowly as possible, and those systems which have worked should continue to exist, since new methods are unproven, and society is expensive to experiment with. Their opposite, the progressive, wishes to apply the fruit on man’s thoughts, the latest hot shot theories and fads as quickly as possible, attempting a lot, and hoping some of it sticks for the better.

The word liberal comes from the same family as liberty and liberated. It refers to the government’s attitude towards its people. They are, in fact, liberated from the government - not bound to it by regulations and obligations. Statists prefer the involvement of the state to micromanage society for the better.

On this axis a Lenin would be a Progressive Statist, along with Hitler, FDR, and Obama. Of course their exact degrees would be different. A true libertarian would be a Progressive Liberal. Your democrat is a progressive statist, and your average conservative is a conservative liberal.

As a Republican I opt for a Conservative Liberal approach - I believe in government non-involvement, and that includes its non involvement in progressivism too, to a certain extent. And I believe in caution in the face of new ideas.

We can then apply this sort of thinking to specific issues.

This post, I just want to do a quick roundup of the Red process in terms of the very basics, using what each NLE solution would find the “default” (ie, minimal 3rd party tools).
Final Cut
Recently got a new Log & Transfer plug in with native RAW support for both FCP and Color. This is great news, but a few caveats.
1. Even importing “native” L&T recreates the raws wrapped into a .mov; this means if you wish to transfer in a terabyte of footage, you ought to have a terabyte of free space. Less the space, the time for re-wrapping seems like a waste, since it’s going to be just as processor intensive as ever, because it’s still .R3D you’re working with. That means all the debayering stays.
2. It seems that plotting proxies into the timeline is almost exactly the same as working with the L&T’ed footage. This makes it seem like the best route to pursue. There are some issues here though. Spanned .r3d files seem to bug out in Color, being the most notable one.
But, if your system can handle debayering a 2k proxy for editing, you can output crispy files straight from Final Cut. That, and hopefully the spanning issue is resolved in the next update.
3. For those with weaker computers, we can use L&T to import smaller pro-res files, but the automatic method of relinking for finishing requires us to go through L&T again and conform for native. That means, we import/transcode once into pro-res (time and space), then again into R3D wrapped (time and space), so we can later render out of Color (time and space).

If all this isn’t your cup of tea, there’s still Crimson, and I must say it works like a charm. Edit in whatever you like, pro-res imports, or proxies, with knowledge that you can always take it back to RedCine or RedLine and export at any resolution your picture lock. Crimson is, however, $180.

Avid

This one I’ve started playing around with more recently but here seems to be the gist:
1. Take all your dailies into RedCine or RedRushes, and spit out Avid friend .MOV renders. Time & Space
2. Create an ALE of the clips you’ve just rendered.
3. Put ALE into Avid, and “capture” those clips. Ie, let Avid transcode the Quicktimes you’ve just made into .MXF’s and place them in its own happy file tree. Time &, you guessed it, Space.

Premiere
Have not tried yet, but the idea is to use an intermediate codec like CineForm. Here the thought process is a little different. The idea here is that once you’ve converted to CineForm, you never have to go back to the raws again. Downside? Codec costs a few grand.

But, the Adobe team is hard at work with their own .R3D plug in. It’s delayed, so far, indefinitely. But, that actually makes me feel better; I hope it’s less buggy than the L&T plugin for FCP. Verdict is still out on this one.

I will try to do these “state of the union” updates every once in a while as the information trickles in.

My Apple Auto-Update bounced like a happy puppy this evening telling me the pro apps need updating. It seems that full RedRaw support for FCP and Color is finally here. This is great news for those of us who don’t want to deal with RedCine (that’s, I think, all of us). It’s not so great news though for people who don’t like Apple Pro Apps (that’s, I think, mostly me).

With Adobe’s applications getting their plug-in out of beta sometime too, hopefully we’ll see some good competition. It’s about time FCP had a contender and was forced to actually improve.

According to popular wisdom:

McCain votes with Bush 95% of the time in the last year.
Obama votes with Democratic Congress 98% of the time in the last year.

Bush approval rating ~29%
Democratic Congress approval rating ~13%

Facts of life as I heard from my liberal friends

1) Once again we have an incredible percentage of the country’s wealth in a tiny fraction of the population (the rich). The middle class cries.
2) Those rich are all of them conservative, since that is their party obviously, and hate those progressive do-gooders, and hate Obama’s tax plan for increasing their taxes.

So then, why does Obama have so much more campaign money than McCain?

http://www.amnestyusa.org/document.php?id=ENGNAU200810317934&lang=e

I recently rented and played Fable II, and I’ll be upfront - I was dissapointed.

The sad thing is that all the problems seem to be in the polish of the game rather than any basic game flaw. Let me try to explain…

From the very first screen the game feels as if it’s interrupting itself. The opening music is nice, but the moment one presses the start button, a voice says “so the story begins.” The sound comes on suddenly and seems like it’s been cut out of a longer sentence, leading the player to believe there was a glitch and he missed something. Why in the world would you want the very first player experience to be startling and unsettling?

The second most glaring problem are stuttering menus. There’s no reason for that, it seems to me, technically. Especially since the menu isn’t overlayed on the game. Especially in an RPG where a menu is perused so often having any lag is an absolutely killer experience.

The more story driven problems have to do more with immersion. Simple things like it’s almost impossible to tell your dog what a good boy he is while actually facing him. Most of the time I ended up crouching and looking at empty ground while my dog ended up sniffing my behind, while getting really excited I was praising it.
The same awkwardness happens in conversations. Conversations seems hardly the word for it, because there seems to be no way for my character to actually say anything. I feel like a retarded mute child in a world of grownups telling me what to do. And when I do get to interact in a conversation it’s through what look like the most exagerated thumbs up or thumbs down, accompanied by a generic “mhmm!” or “nuh-uh.” When my character’s aide talks to me about great responsiblity that comes with my new powers, and my only choice is to wave my thumb around like an idiot, I question my raison d’etre so to speak.

Finally, by increasing breadth I feel like the game sacrificed depth. It’s what I always say about MMORPGs: the more freedom you have in your actions, the less your actions matter. And that is a purely technical limitation. If a player’s actions truly mattered, they would change the game world. But that would mean a ludicrous amount of content creation beyond the scope of modern game making. So by giving me so many choices, Fable 2 made the results of those choices less varied. This is most startling in the dialog of a mission where I was to seduce a young lady. After about 5 different moves, I have heard everything she has in her vocabulary to say, several times over. That would be fine, if I only had to make one romantic gesture. But to get her “love” for me high enough I had to repeat it - and she had to repeat herself. It’s as if the game wants me to expose its limitations for it.

In the end Fable II felt like the Sims in terms of character interaction, and a rather primitive point and click adventure game in terms of its RPGness. The fighting system is fun, but it seems too easy, at least at first. The story is extremely generic. And all the depth is really breadth, with no depth whatsoever.

Perhaps I have not played to the parts of the games where the gems lie. Perhaps I am being too harsh. But a game that does not entice from the beginning failed already - I don’t have time in my schedule to give it 20 hours of chances waiting for something more exciting to happen.

What’s the difference between Sarah Palin getting $150,000 worth of clothing and Barack Obama spending $250 million on ads?

To me - nothing. Except the outfits are easier on the eyes than those political ads.

I’m just going to quote this from The Pittsburgh Channel

PITTSBURGH — A 20-year-old woman who was robbed at an ATM in Bloomfield was also maimed by her attacker, police said.
Pittsburgh police spokeswoman Diane Richard tells Channel 4 Action News that the victim was robbed at knifepoint on Wednesday night outside of a Citizens Bank near Liberty Avenue and Pearl Street just before 9 p.m.
Richard said the robber took $60 from the woman, then became angry when he saw a McCain bumper sticker on the victim’s car. The attacker then punched and kicked the victim, before using the knife to scratch the letter “B” into her face, Richard said.

With friends like that, I don’t think he even NEEDS my vote. But I am glad people are excited about politics.

Update!

Seems like the story is wrong. Looks like my reasons for not voting Obama are going to be confined to… his policy stances.

And to the woman who did this to herself: what is wrong with you and how in the world did you think this would help?

In reference to this article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/us/12hate.html?ref=todayspaper

On the surface, it seems like banning hateful speech might be a good idea. After all, angry words are hurtful, and don’t we all say that changing things has to be done in a constructive manner anyway?
The problem with limiting our first amendment right to free speech (and free speech that is less than polite) is because you never know who is doing the defining of what is hate. The entire point of the first amendment is to be able to freely disagree. When disagreements close in on delicate subjects (religion, race, class, etc) they can easily be misread as “hate speech.” Cases of unfounded criticism and belittlement should be responded with strong retorts that break the offending arguments and win back the hearts and minds of the readers. They should not be banned by a government censorship committee.

From an NYT article:

“It is not clear to me that the Europeans are mistaken,” Jeremy Waldron, a legal philosopher, wrote in The New York Review of Books last month, “when they say that a liberal democracy must take affirmative responsibility for protecting the atmosphere of mutual respect against certain forms of vicious attack.”

Enforcing (sorry, protecting) mutual respect is all well and good when you are the party being respected. But when you have genuine concerns, and find yourself silenced for voicing them, in the name of respect, the merits of 1st amendments strick interpretation are vivid.
America ends up being a country where you have to not only succeed by your own merits, but also stand up for yourself with your own wits. Of course, using some examples the article brings up, a march by the nazi party through a town of holocaust survivors seems terrible, but as long as no property was damaged nor persons attacked, it cannot be deemed illegal. Why not? Not because it’s a good thing that nazis march through Skokie, but because to take voice away from one group sets precedent to take it away from others, including you, if you ever find yourself on the wrong side of the political landscape of the time.

More from NYT:

“Canadians do not have a cast-iron stomach for offensive speech,” Mr. Gratl said in a telephone interview. “We don’t subscribe to a marketplace of ideas. Americans as a whole are more tough-minded and more prepared for verbal combat.”

And hurrah for that!