Official Off-Topic Thread

[Lawrence]

I believe it was SplatPixel.

[Dusty]

Lol, that's him, I remember now
So did he create the whole dancing banana trend or was he just following it? His animation was the first time I ever saw it, so I was never sure, and I didn't get around much on the internet back then.
If so, kudos to SplatPixel!

[Fingerfoods]

as far as the 10 year old storylines, I agree, it would be nice to have mature themes (in a literary sense) addressed on a more regular basis (and not just the run-of-the-mill "shock of death" and "who am I and what is my purpose?" conflicts, I mean really fleshed out storylines that take on complicated issues the way great films do.)

Eek. That sounds like Wolf's Rain. The ending was completely horrible.

As a side note, my dad watches Bleach. And I'm not the bastard child of a ten-year-old.

Bleach is pretty much my only Shounen anime, besides FMA.

[The B.O.B.]

@Dusty: I believe splat was just following the ongoing trend. Where the fork is that guy, any way? He hardly ever visits us anymore.

In more OT chatter: Do we really need both the letter "k" and "c"? Why not one or the other? I think there was once talk of abandoning one of the letters, but I forgot which articles they were. I'm sure they were bull-crap, though. And isn't it mind blowing, that humans can only make sounds associated with the alphabet? The first time I realized this, I felt so...limited.

[robalan]

... humans can only make sounds associated with the alphabet ...

This statement is only vaguely true.  German has several more vowels than English, and Chinese has a bunch more consonants (some of which I have trouble pronouncing, but that's a matter of practice).  There are lots of sounds that the English alphabet does not cover, and I'm sure there are other sounds that aren't covered in any alphabet.  The human voice is an amazing instrument, and can produce more sounds than you may think

[Ai]

I think this post might be OT (that is OT for this thread).
'Content Aware Image Resizing"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qadw0BRKeMk

Extremely cool; One of the reasons I say this is it shrinks the picture by removing seams -- there is no decimation, so no intermediate colors are added, and this method tends to discern the important features of the image rather well. It breaks for some images that are just too 'full' already.
It seems to perform decently on pixel art, certainly well enough to save time. I chose some of the 'overworld' art from Flink and Lionheart as a stress test cause it's so detailed, and I must say it is pretty good even then at keeping the relevant detail and discarding the rest. (I did my tests using Carlo Baldassi's implementation of CAIR for Gimp)
You should be aware that the more you shrink it, the more it's liable to effect the composition; after all, it works by gradually removing the 'insignificant spaces' in the picture.

My tests so far suggest that it's most useful for aspect ratio changes -- for example, resizing a wallpaper made for a laptop's wide screen to be suitable for a classic 4:3 display.
I haven't tried it for upscaling yet.... (update) have now. Doesn't appear very useful at all; maybe only for sparse photographs, not art.

EDIT: Probably it's best application is in texturing, to maximize the amount of 'meaningful' texture so the texture can be smaller.

[ndchristie]

the trouble I see with this is that it creates blasphemous perspective in it's current form.  The only way to preserve that is for it to generate a three-dimensional understanding of the forms as it moves them (you'd need at least 2 photographs and radar/sonar detection, or a very capable way of faking it), and we are a long way form that being available to the public

English is one of the more foolish alphabets in that it includes several letter that make identical sounds and contains several letters responsible for multiple sounds.  There are any number of sounds that are not represented by our consonants, as well as a number of non-sounds (^c,", etc)

[Faceless]

@Dusty: I believe splat was just following the ongoing trend. Where the fork is that guy, any way? He hardly ever visits us anymore.

In more OT chatter: Do we really need both the letter "k" and "c"? Why not one or the other? I think there was once talk of abandoning one of the letters, but I forgot which articles they were. I'm sure they were bull-crap, though. And isn't it mind blowing, that humans can only make sounds associated with the alphabet? The first time I realized this, I felt so...limited.

Yes, we do need them.

K always makes a hard sound whereas C does not always.
Cake vs. Cace. You would pronounce the second "case".
There's also the "Ch" sound.

I find it extremely unlikely that there was any talk of removing one of those letters. For starters, nobody has the authority to do that, and second it's totally impracticle.

[The B.O.B.]

@Robalan, and Adarias: Are you sure about the whole foolish alphabet thing? I'm not just talking about sounds in a literary point of view, I mean ALL sounds in general. When you hear a car crash, you hear sounds learned from the alphabet(at least what is supposedly created/translated by it's creators from the alphabet's very beginning). It's not exactly omneomonopea, but just sound recognition in general. You can't escape that we've covered the sounds. Seriously, try making a sound, without attaching letters to it(again, as this is what humans are taught to understand, but doesn't necessarily make it completely right....). It's kind of hard. Thats kind of where I feel limited....it's stupid, I know, but I find it extremely fascinating...

[ndchristie]

trumpet training taught me at least one letterless sound (for the non-horn-players pull your lips tight and blow so that they buzz)

there are all sorts of humms and whirrs that sound nothing like those noises, or indeed any sorts of letter.

a crane pulling on a load of clanging metal sounds nothing like letters.

"beep beep" can just as easily be heard "doik doik" or any other combination of letters if you listen for it, and therefor is not bound to any particular sound that our brain recognizes.

You may be the type of learner who immediately cognizes sounds as letters, but i don't think that means that all humans percieve things as such.