(Picture by Dakan. A member of Crimson Creations.)

This picture is particularly impressive. But not for its appearance in absolute terms. There are prettier paintings and photographs out there.

But this wasn't made with a graphics program, or with paint. Rather, it was done with the Warcraft 3 level editor.

The way the editor works is you can assign various tiles (terrain types like grass, ice, snow, dirt) to vertices on the map (which is a square grid). You can place units (monsters, heroes, items, buildings), and doodads (scenary, gates, bridges). And you can do programming stuff.

There's also cliffs (including adding water) and raise/lower. Raise/lower changes the height of vertices on the map. Cliffs are generally kinda ugly and you can't have a sheer face more than 2 cliff levels high. If you try for more you'll get a pyramid (you can have cliffs on cliffs, just not more than 2 levels right on the edge). Pyramids don't make impressive mountains.

So the point is the warcraft editor is very limited in what it can do. To make something pretty you can basically put down a landscape, change the height of the vertices (which, btw, you have to hack if you want slopes over 50 degrees), and place some doodads from the maybe 700 or so premade models. That's it.

(Keep in mind those models include the ones for snowy areas, for grassy areas, for tropical areas, for castles, for cities, for dungeons, for caverns, and for deserts ... so for any given type of location only a small fraction are appropriate.)

The result is that most maps are kinda ugly. No offense to the creators, but they look like large patches of dirt with a few rocks placed on them, then a patch of grass with some trees on it, etc... Which is just what you'd expect given the way map creation works.

However, there are a few maps that don't look that way. So that's the first reason the picture is impressive: it makes superb use of a highly limited set of tools.

Changing focus, imagine playing a computer game that looked as pretty as the picture everywhere you went. And imagine it wasn't just like that with one pre-made story. But rather, anyone could create more scenes with different art of equal quality, without having to be any good at art.

It's (relatively) easy to draw one pretty picture. And it's (relatively) easy to draw some simple, reusable pictures. But pretty pictures tend not to be very reusable. Like this picture for example. It could be the background artwork in one scene in a game, but if you just had the image, there'd be no way to reuse it well. Its beauty is it's entirely made up of reusable pieces.

It's not just a picture. As a picture it's OK. It's a warcraft map with specifications for where different warcraft components should go, and from the specifications emerges a picture.

And the last impressive part is that the picture represents a playable area of a map. Warcraft heroes could walk around in it as is.

read this including comments if you're interested in TCS stuffz

it's true!

most parents in the US seem to think if they simply allow children to have nice foods (including buying the foods child asks for), child will become fat.

but it actually takes a huge effort including beating children and making them cry to make them fat. ... well that or appropriate mind-fucking.

curi42 (7:14:17 PM): well i think pet projects shouldn't be allowed if author doesn't know how many ball bearings we used last year.

curi42 (7:14:47 PM): how does he know we need his pet project more than extra ball bearing production?

curi42 (7:15:04 PM): his project being *good* isn't enough. it needs to be better than alternate uses of the funding.

this is a major reason taxes suck. if they just left us our money, we'd get the stuff we thought was important. and all our combined knowledge about what was important would go into money distribution. but instead a few people who've only even heard of a few ways to spend money get to spend giant sums on their pet projects.

i think people get persuaded of stuff all the time, but generally not by design. also they tend to hide it. also people tend to discuss certain major key issues, which they are inconsistent and irrational and entrenched about. they then don't persuade each other on those issues, and fail to notice all the progress on varied other stuff.

here's a nice post

lets start with unschooling. is it any good? will it fail to be negligent? front and center on unschooling.com we find:

leave child to self. add water. mix. instant better child.

but that's not all. being outside causes people to be smarter. so does handcrafts instead of technology. we must oppose anything artificial!

ok next is AP. front and center we find:

So first off children are tools for a political end. Next they are supposed to grow up ignorant -- this must be preserved at all costs. If they grow up ignorant, we won't have to struggle with them, they won't know anything but what we told them, so they'll act just like we always wanted. PS it's all about peace and love! (PPS if you've ever seen Trigun... lol)

But ok that's not quite as damning as the other one. Let's find another. Off to the What is AP? page written by the founders.

so let's see. they hate our culture. they think if we just "listen to our hearts" everything will be ok. now, you're supposed to listen to child too. ... unless you're heart overrides him. hell, even the most abusive parent will listen to child unless he doesn't feel like it. also the main problem with parenting today is failing to hug, "nurture", and love children enough. so do that. also don't stress out. if you're too stressed we have forums where people will say you're doing a good job and mean people are banned. and if you're really stressed, we recommend you just take a break for a while, to nurture yourself. as long as your heart says it's ok.

in conclusion i maintain left-wing parenting sucks. and although right-wing parenting also sucks, i think it's slightly better. mainly because i hate negligence so much.

source

same source as last entry.

curi42 (1:23:54 PM): "We got very badly criticised by the Hutton report. Whether that's fair or not is for another time. But if you are that badly criticised it is right for the director general to go."
curi42 (1:24:15 PM): oh dear. no wonder they think bush should go. he's been criticised. whether the criticism is true can wait until after he resigns.

read this

a few things to note:

casual mention that in Egypt nearly everyone knows someone who was illegally arrested. arrested means they disappear, get tortured, threatened, killed, whatever

fire at a girl's school. girls try to escape. religious police get in the way. send some back into burning building to get their fucking abaya's (black dress/robe kinda thing that covers their body completely). girls sent back in mostly burned to death.

this one city needed a sewage system. so the govt gives this guy a bunch of money to do it. he keeps it and builds himself a palace instead. gets away with it. so then this city has no sewage system. then to make matters worse some prince wants to tax sewage trucks that collect sewage. and the companies try to force their drivers to pay the tax, but many drivers can't or don't. so no sewage gets collected for a while! people's houses get flooded. disease, mosquitos, etc the beaches aren't safe. fish dying. and there is this lake full of sewage above the city on a fault line. one earthquake of magnitude like 5 on richter scale and city will be 1.5 feet deep in sewage.

free press? haha. NO

westerners get assassinated.

religious police go around terrorising people. and get paid for each arrest!

omg the segregation of the sexes!

so there's a hajj festival thing and 400 people die. some of natural causes, some (30 or 50 or something) get trampled to death, one swallowed by sand while sleeping, etc etc and this is *no big deal*. so routine not to be noticed.

and it goes on and on and on