I guess "believable" is the wrong word. They were one-dimensional and boring. The book is a terrible description of a way of life masked as a story, and in my opinion, that's all it is.
That is very well put. It is a shame that JS got its scoping so very upside-down, because it means that tiny changes in code can cause incredibly confusing and initially undetectable bugs. `with` is basically an infected bandaid on a broken system. It seems like it's helping until you notice the smell.
Sure there are - why are so many Crockford pronouncements taken as a signal to stop thinking?
Notice that his "with is bad" examples (which are usually bad examples and bad usages [1]) always involve contrived examples of potentially ambiguous assignment - one of the more useful ways to use `with` is with objects whose properties are DSL-like functions, named in such a way that there's no mistaking their origin and with no ambiguous assignment involved.
> Agencies don’t hire writers just because they know the rules of grammar. We hire them because they’re eloquent, lucid, imaginative wordsmiths. We hire them because of their practised ability to lovingly craft words into things that work. Things that make people feel.
Yes, I read that passage too and was actually quite disappointed about it, because it doesn't help you to become an expert. If you think, you learned something out of that phrase, that means you actually "understood" something, but you are still not an "expert" writer.
The thing is, that knowing and understanding the features that discriminate experts from nonexperts doesn't help you much in your desire to become an expert. If you understand these features you can tell more accurately, if you are an expert yourself or not. At best this helps indirectly with telling you how much your learning task is achieved. At worst it just destroys your motivation. The question of how to become an expert is still open, though.
They do show her in front of a green screen in the behind the scenes video....so technically, they did use the tech, but not for the actual video, of course. But great effort.
I agree wholeheartedly with his point. If the populus of HN in general isn't into shamelessly improving productivity in everything, then I am suprised. Aren't we all busy people?
(I watched the first 20 seconds of the clip and realised I only cared because the chick was hot, and the jelly beans could have been cgi for all I care)
When in the making-of video they call it a labor of love, they meant it.
When you do something you love, streamlining the process -- removing stuff you love from your life -- is counterproductive.
Consider that people climb mountains they could hire helicopters to get to the top of. They train for months to run marathons they could drive in a car in under an hour. They change their children's diapers they could hire a nanny to do.
I am reminded of oscar wilde: "All art is useless."
This is one of the only useful definitions of "art," which is otherwise a concept very tricky to pin down, it is that which serves no purpose other than to delight.
Well, one thing they could have done that wouldn't have changed their stop-motion commitment would have been to use more than a frames worth of jelly beans. Instead they could have made one long movable landscape. Then they could have adjusted the "viewport" by moving the camera or the landscape. As it is, it looks like they moved each "pixel" for each frame.
I think that behind the scenes video doesn't give that information. Although they did shot last frame last, they didn't say that they shot them in order.
Also they only shot 2300 whereas the clip at 24 fps would have taken 4920 though the 'real' frame seems to be lower. Finally moving around jelly beans is a lot easier than setting up the scene from scratch, as mentioned, a frame took 5 minutes to 3 hours to setup.
tl dr: I would like to see more technical behind-the-sceens.
A lot of animation is shot at 12fps and they double each frame. I would imagine that is why there are only 2300. Animation seems to be able to get away with a lot more in terms of persistence of vision than live action can.
They _could_ have inserted out-of-order frames as they were completed, and she could have been commenting on witnessing the video moving from flat vector gfx to jelly bean gfx.
They could have, but I have a feeling they didn't. There's also the fact that in the last frame they shot, she's wearing the space suit that is, in fact, what she's wearing at the end of the video.
They did. If you watch the second video (the making of) they commemorate the last "Kina shot" where she is dressed as an astronaut which does not match the last sequence with her of the movie.
They recorded the girl with green screen. Why not use these frames instead of placing her on top of glass and spending minutes per frame trying to replicate that same shot?
And yes, they could've have created a simple animation (which they did anyway), and then convert it to jelly beans with a relatively simple code in Processing.
This video would be pretty uninteresting had they used artificial jelly beans. I think everyone is aware that it’s trivial to convert a simple animation to a jelly bean animation. That’s not the point. Art works by different rules. (Hey, and if you like to be a cynic about it you can also say that viral videos work by different rules. OK Go owes their fame to never taking shortcuts when creating their music videos†.)
(I think that placing the singer directly on the jelly beans allowed them to do certain tricks that would be harder to accomplish otherwise: pay attention to the lighting or the costume changes. It’s not clear to me whether using a green screen would really have saved time.)
'Art works by different rules' is such a cop out for hippies to excuse time-wasting. What added wealth to the world is created by doing it the hard way?
The day which we are all yoked to the silicon valley drive towards ultimate productivity and the whole of society is locked in one wild-eyed, redbull swigging death march towards launching their amazing consumer products unto each other is the day I slit my throat live on TV. As I slump, bubbling and frothing to the floor of the reality tv startup contest studio, the terrified panic on the faces of the VC judges shall serve as an incoherent and meaningless howl into the void of endless efficiency and unlimited, exponential, never-ending, self-justifying wealth-creation. My own futile demise shall be my ultimate MVP.
What is wrong with these people who think that the world would be a better place if everyone was exactly like them? There seems to be an increasing concentration of them here.
There is more than one kind of wealth in the world.
With modern day technology, shooting a ball in a hoop consistently or building a pyramid is easy. So why are Pro Sports and the Pyramids so amazing? Because they did it the hard way. I guess they could achieve the same thing if they lied, but if someone finds out, you are sol. See: Milli Vanilli
That's how I assumed it was made until I saw the behind-the-scenes video, i.e. a production company makes a generic video that takes several months to complete. They then pitch it to a music label for some up-and-coming artist who is added to the video (using some sort of low frame rate effect in front of a projector or green screen).
