Halo’s biggest problem, especially post-Bungie, is that it has no artistic vision. Each game is a radical departure from the last. There’s no “Halo aesthetic”. Everything from the Halos to guns to enemies to armour to Cortana to the ships – everything changes from game to game
The most manipulative but effective thing I’ve ever done in my life was when I read an article about how children moderate their behavior to protect their self-identity, so if a child believes he’s smart, for example, he’ll intentionally study and try to do well to protect his image of himself.
Anyway, I would pull kids aside with behavioral issues at church and tell them, “David (obviously fake name), you’re such a kind person and such a good listener. I can see that in you. Thank you for always listening.” “Little Annie, thank you for taking such good care of the babies around you. You’re going to be such a good big sister. Can you be in charge of watching Sally?”
They would ALWAYS behave afterward. ALWAYS. Worked like a charm. Morally questionable because it wasn’t initially true, but I kind of willed it into existence. Tbf, I did think that they had that in them or I wouldn’t have tried.
Will publish longitudinal results of this method once my kid is old enough to report back.
After "Shrek" original Xbox shipped in late 2001, I went to work for Blue Shift, a small game company with offices next to the Stanford campus in Palo Alto. I was excited to work in Silicon Valley. The DICE people (Digital Illusions - Battlefield) were angry at my departure to another firm, and sent ominous emails. The then-CTO of Blue Shift (John Brooks, now at Visual Concepts) was amused by this, and we hatched a plan.
After we shipped World Series Baseball 2k3 for the original Xbox/PS2, in late 2002 I wrote a Shrek-style renderer that used G-buffer attribute compression. This worked around Shrek's very expensive need to render the scene twice.
The C (albedo) and N (normal) buffers (along with 1 or 2 other bits) were all packed into a single 32-bit render target, and the depth buffer was aliased to a texture. It was everything needed for a deferred shaded engine, and it only needed to render the entire scene once. The NV2A combiner settings were hair raising, but it all worked.
This tech was shown in the "Gladiator" Xbox tech demo at E3. Unfortunately the engine never shipped in a product and Microsoft was moving on to the next console, however pieces of this tech were licensed by Microsoft and used later on Halo Wars 1 for Xbox 360.
https://t.co/XhdOignIkI
Today I found out Kane Pixels’ dad was a VFX artist at Telltale Games and he posted on LinkedIn back in 2021 about his son wanting to be a film director.
Robert Pattinson talks about whether he understands Tenet:
“I remember saying to John David on pretty much the last week of the shoot, I’m like, ‘I think I’m dead. I think I’ve always been dead.’ And John David’s like, ‘You’re not dead. What are you talking about?’”
Time travelling back to 2007 to show Kanye the Nazi he becomes and see how he reacts but he just says "nah that's AI" and I say "how the fuck do you know about that"
Wine is just wine to most Americans, and Grana Padano is as good as parmesan is as good as pecorino. But just see what happens when you say that Coke Zero is the same as Diet Coke. Like Robert Conquest said, everyone is an Italian about what they know best.
Never heard so many standout infra engineers + AI infra eng actively wanting to leave Meta than now.
A month ago they were building cutting-edge infra and then got assigned to AI data labelling
Most of them went “WTH” and now I’m the middle of interviewing
Madness from Meta