New Work in the Wild! Specialized

Looks like some more stuff we did is coming online at Specialized. Some lifestyle, some high end product, some have renders in them as well. Check it out and buy some nice bikes ;)

Houdini Doodle

Some more water explorations going on and playing with displacement.

North American purgatory, Glen Rubsamen

Very cool photography here by Glen Rubsamen. Sorry for the insta link, it’s all I can find. Might do some CG based on these…

Was the 401(k) a Mistake?

“The first generation to be fully reliant on 401(k) plans is now starting to retire. As that happens, it is becoming clear just how broken the system is.”

The amount of jobs I have had that even offered a 401k is like 20%.

Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

Ah, crap….. and this is why we can’t have nice things.

Investor statement.

Hacker News discussion on it.

Private Equity has not completely killed bandcamp yet, so maybe it will be OK. But they are gonna wanna make back that, checks notes, 6 billion? WTF?! From the Hacker News discussions:

“I hear that PE destroys products and culture to make money at all costs, but i don’t get how that can net them back the >$6 billion they paid for a company with <$300 million yearly revenue and negative profit.”

I Went To China And Drove A Dozen Electric Cars. Western Automakers Are Cooked

Now that the tariffs are in place, I thought it would be interesting to post this piece about how American automakers are not really trying to innovate anymore compared to China.

I’d later learn that the auto show had more than 100 new model debuts and concepts. That’s a far cry from the Detroit Auto Show last September, which only featured one fully new model. Two other models were refreshed versions of current cars already on sale. None were electric.

…

In China, the showroom floor was filled to the gills with new electrified models from every single domestic automaker. They all had something to prove, and by god, they were trying. There were hundreds of models on the floor from dozens of brands, most of them just as compelling as what I had seen the day before from Geely.

…

The first stand I stumbled upon was Buick’s. It unveiled two GM Ultium-based concepts, the Electra L and Electra LT. It had also unveiled a PHEV version of its popular GL8 van. But where the hell was everyone? It was barely 10 a.m., on the first day of the Beijing Auto show; two concepts were just revealed sometime earlier that morning, yet there were only a handful of spectators at the Buick stand. There was no information on either concept. No one seemed to care.

I was embarrassed. Here I was in China, trying to empathize with Western brands, thinking they were being pushed out of China due to politics and things that were no fault of their own.

…

In reality, it felt like it was the late 1980s again, when American manufacturers felt like they could sell whatever underdeveloped models its accounting department had cooked up to the public, and we’d just have to deal with it. Now that I’ve seen a glimpse of what’s going on in China, the Western manufacturers, particularly the American ones, don’t seem like they’re trying at all.

Instead of competing, they’d rather just shut out competition entirely. The concerns about cybersecurity don’t address the elephant in the room here: Your product sucks, compared to what China is putting out now. It doesn’t go as far. It’s not as well-made. It’s not as nice. It’s not as connected.

…

If the U.S. and Europe get what they want—a crackdown on Chinese imports—it doesn’t feel like it would result in better cars. It feels like it would keep buyers of those markets locked to cars that aren’t executed as well. It’s nakedly protectionist because deep down, all of the Western auto executives and some hawkish China pundits understand that Chinese EV and PHEV models are more compelling than what European, other Asian, and American brands have come up with.


Remove AI Assistant from Adobe Acrobat.

If you are like me and are kinda anti AI AND dislike horrible UI design and want to get rid of the big ass colorful “AI ASSISTANT!!!!!” button in Adobe Acrobat I found this on the forums that works.

On Macs, go to the View menu and select Disable New Acrobat. (I'm not on Mac, so I cannot test).

On Windows, to the hamburger menu in the upper left corner (where the old File menu used to be) and select Disable New Acrobat, it's about 2/3 down the menu (this worked for me).

Lops Lighting Quickstart

Great post from Reddit about trying to get into USD and Solaris in Houdini. I keep bouncing off of Solaris and Karma so hard. I see the advantages but I can’t crack it. Hoping reading these things will help. This page seems particularly interesting.

“Overview

You have a scene that you're just about to start rendering in Redshift/Mantra/Arnold, but you're keen to give Karma a try? Don't wanna learn all that prim/reference/sublayer/delegate stuff all the USD nerds talk about?

Hopefully this will get you started. USD jargon is unavoidable at some point, but I think its possible to dive in without getting too caught in the weeds. The aim here is to take a /obj, /mat, /rop setup, and port it to Lops as painlessly as possible, while picking up some basic USD concepts on the way.

This whole thing should be 20 mins at the max. Lets gooooo!“

Expectations Versus Reality

Interesting read from Edward Zitron of “Better Offline” called, “Expectations Versus Reality” that is about AI in film making that is wort a read.

“These stories only serve to help Sam Altman, who desperately needs you to believe that Hollywood is scared of Sora and generative AI, because the more you talk about fear and lost jobs and the machines taking over, the less you ask a very simple question: does any of this shit actually work?“

“The answer, it turns out, is “not very well.” In a piece for FXGuide, Mike Seymour sat down with Shy Kids, the people behind Air Head, and revealed how Sora is, in many ways, totally useless for making films. Sora takes 10-20 minutes to generate a single 3 to 20 second shot, something that isn’t really a problem until you realize that until the shot is rendered, you really have absolutely no idea what the hell it’s going to spit out.”

This part from the linked article sums it up really well. 300-1 usable shot ration is insane and they had to do a ton of post to clean up strings, stabilize and all sorts of other crap.

“While all the imagery was generated in SORA, the balloon still required a lot of post-work. In addition to isolating the balloon so it could be re-coloured, it would sometimes have a face on Sonny, as if his face was drawn on with a marker, and this would be removed in AfterEffects. similar other artifacts were often removed.

For the minute and a half of footage that ended up in the film, Patrick estimated that they generated “hundreds of generations at 10 to 20 seconds a piece”. Adding, “My math is bad, but I would guess probably 300:1 in terms of the amount of source material to what ended up in the final.”

That is not a actual production ready tool with this info. This is kinda the usmmery of Ed’s piece.

“That’s ultimately the problem with the current AI bubble — that so much of its success requires us to tolerate and applaud half-finished tools that only sort of, kind of do the things they’re meant to do, nodding approvingly and saying “great job!” like we’re talking to a child rather than a startup with $13 billion in funding with a CEO that has the backing of fucking Microsoft. “

The Life and Death of Hollywood

A rather sad tale on how the one of my favorite boogy men, Private Equity, has ruined the film industry just like it’s ruined the gaming industry, real estate and pretty much everything else it touches. To quote “Better Offline”, “The rotten demands of eternal growth.”

“In fact, they weren’t. The streaming model was based on bringing in subscribers—grabbing as much of the market as possible—rather than on earning revenue from individual shows. And big swings brought in new viewers. “It’s like a whole world of intellectuals and artists got a multibillion-dollar grant from the tech world,” Smith said. “But we mistook that, and were frankly actively gaslit into thinking that that was because they cared about art.”

“It was communicated to me,” Smith said, “that my only choice to keep the show alive was to begin all over again and write a whole new season without a green-light guarantee. So I was expected to take on that risk, when the entities that stood to profit the most from the success of my creative labor, the platform and studio, would not risk a dime.” “It was also on me,” she went on, “to kind of fluff everybody involved in the entire making of the show, from the stars to the line producer to the costume designer, etcetera, to make them believe that we’d be coming back again and prevent them, sometimes unsuccessfully, from taking other jobs.”

The film and TV industry is now controlled by only four major companies, and it is shot through with incentives to devalue the actual production of film and television. What is to be done? The most direct solution would be government intervention. If it wanted to, a presidential administration could enforce existing antitrust law, break up the conglomerates, and begin to pull entertainment companies loose from asset-management firms. It could regulate the use of financial tools, as deWaard has suggested; it could rein in private equity. The government could also increase competition directly by funding more public film and television. It could establish a universal basic income for artists and writers.

None of this is likely to happen.”

And I dug up an old illustration I did when I lived in L.A. to go with this post.

The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound

It is cool how The Grateful Dead pretty much invented modern stadium sound systems. Cool little write up on some of the history of that.

“A vision during an LSD trip is what inspired Owsley “Bear” Stanley, the Grateful Dead’s sound engineer’s mammoth feat of technical engineering, “The Wall of Sound”, irreversibly changing live sound and engineering for the better.

It was a time when live sound problems plagued engineers, bands, and audiences equally. While rock concerts grew in size and scope throughout the 60s, audiences grew larger and louder, without the technical sophistication of amplification ever changing to meet this scenario. Screaming fans meant that low-wattage guitar amps could hardly be heard and without the help of monitoring systems, bands could barely hear themselves play. Things were so bad that the Beatles quit touring in 1966 because they couldn’t hear themselves over the audience. It was after this era that the band, the Grateful Dead, became obsessed with their sound, largely thanks to their eccentric and dedicated sound engineer. Though incredibly frustrated with the noisy, feedback-laden, underpowered situation, they did not want to give up playing live, and the Dead had Owsley on board to help solve the sound situation.”

Dear Tim Cook: Be a Decent Human Being and Delete this Revolting Apple Ad

This is a disturbing, shocking ad, not just because of what it shows but because of its seeming obliviousness to the subtext that it turns into text, as well as the message it sends to every artist alive: the tech industry will crush you, destroy you; suddenly, violently, all at once.

…

The ad arrives amid a continued furor over the ethical, moral and copyright implications of "Generative AI," which is a cool-sounding name for plagiarism software. This so-called "intelligence" is not intelligent but crudely imitative. Contrary to what its industry boosters (and their simps) keep trying to tell us, its relationship to the history of human creativity is not at all like the relationship between a flesh-and-blood art student studying a book of Rembrandt paintings or a budding trumpeter playing along with Miles Davis. It's more like the relationship between the tripods in Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" and the people that they suck up into their bellies, shred into gory paste, and spray onto their crops, as a kind of mulch. 

…

Rich Idiots Are Killing The Media To Please The Tech Industry

The Better Offline podcast is perhaps my favorite podcast so far this year and I listen to A LOT of podcasts, Here is a banger for you. The death of Vice and Sports Illustrated are pretty damn sad.

Practically speaking, this meant that outlets were forced by the idiotic executives to chase the dragon of social media and search traffic, and they'd optimize their content not for a person or a living being of any kind, but to please algorithms that they didn't control, run by companies like Meta and Google who didn't give a shit about them. As a result, it's been a fairly apocalyptic decade in journalism...

As private equity and venture capital money is flown into the media industry, so of the rotten demands for eternal growth.

…

Corey Hike is an example of the media world's failure to police itself. She is a career failure. This is now the second publication she's driven into the ground because she does not understand what she is doing, and that op ed I previously mentioned the twenty seventeen Vox one she claimed that we were in the early stages of a visual revolution in journalism. To be clear, Corey Hike is not a journalist. She's not an editor. She's not a creator. She's not a creative. She doesn't write things, she doesn't speak things, she doesn't take photos, and she doesn't draw things. She is a parasite. And these walking stains on the earth. They got rich. They got rich as hundreds of people lost their jobs.

Steve Albini, Storied Producer and Icon of the Rock Underground, Dies at 61

Steve Albini, an icon of indie rock as both a producer and performer, died on Tuesday, May 7, of a heart attack, staff at his recording studio, Electrical Audio, confirmed to Pitchfork. As well as fronting underground rock lynchpins including Shellac and Big Black, Albini was a legend of the recording studio, though he preferred the term “engineer” to “producer.” He recorded Nirvana’s In Utero, Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me, and countless more classic albums, and remained an outspoken critic of exploitative music industry practices until his final years. Shellac were preparing to tour their first album in a decade, To All Trains, which is scheduled for release next week. Steve Albini was 61 years old.