I had a great time meeting many of the voice actors for a bunch of famous Valve games at PAX Seattle. Most them were/are Seattle locals and still work extensively in the area. Here were some of the getting started resources they mentioned during their talks (and some of them teach at these locations too) for those interesting in becoming a voice actor:
Here are 9 titles that Elon Musk has said were most influential to his development in life. Compiled by Blinkist:
Hiring is hard. It seems everyone is trying different kinds of experimental hiring techniques. The STAR method is very common these days for assessing critical soft skills. My guess is a bunch of them are not going to pan out, but I did find the “two-hand” hiring process to be promising.
Elon Musk has been using this technique for a long time. It’s called “two hand” testing because he focuses on candidates’ first hand experience, and hands-on testing.
First Hand Experience means to select candidates with real life, first hand experience with the role/tasks needing to be done. Real world experience is a better teacher than universities or classes. You can sometimes get amazing non-traditional candidates if they demonstrate more first-hand experience than those that just took courses.
Hands-on Testing means to give the candidate real world tasks to demonstrate hands on competence. It’s easy to inflate skills and capabilities, but practical tests related to the role give recruiters an excellent gauge of actual ability. This requires a bit more work from the recruiters to build real-world tests – even to the point of giving an actual task they might get with anonymized data.
Japanese companies are barred both by societal and legal constraints that make it very difficult to fire employees. Historically, that led to the phenomenon of the madogiwazoku – literally, the tribe that sits by the windows. Employees whose services were no longer needed, but that the company could not or did not want to fire, would be given a pleasant spot by the window to while away working hours by reading the newspaper. However, as the Japanese economy has had to deal with years upon years of recession, and the increasingly stiff winds of global competition, many Japanese companies are finding themselves with more redundant staff than could fit at the window seats.
The oidashibeya is in a sense madogiwazoku on steroids. Employees are typically placed in a room, often windowless, where they have nothing to do. In many cases their business cards are taken away, and they are forced to do menial, mind-numbing tasks, or given nothing to do at all. Being excluded from the mainstream is particularly painful for those who have dedicated themselves to the company for many years, especially in the context of Japanese culture where murahachibu (ostracism from the group) is a traditional and strong form of punishment.
The idea of the oidashibeya is that stripped of their status, ties with colleagues, and interesting work, the employees who are placed there will eventually quit out of shame and sheer boredom.
Link:
If you want to read some epic nut-ball theories that put the average tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist to shame, you don’t need to go much further than the average Stanley Kubrick movie analyst.
There’s a lot of modern movie critics out there that believe that movies can mean whatever you want them to mean – and boy do people make some tenuous connections. While relativist interpretations are the most popular logical fallacy in our post-truth world, I would argue that approach is nonsense – and now we have a little more proof from a director most often cited by critics as supporting their nutty interpretations.
Stanley Kubrick’s movies are often multilayered and difficult to comprehend, but it turns out he absolutely did have a message for each of these movies. He does, however, say that he is reluctant to reveal his interpretation: “I tried to avoid doing this ever since the picture came out because when you just say the ideas, they sound foolish, whereas if they’re dramatized, one feels it.” That part I very much get. The experience of something is far different than logically thinking about it.
So what were his intended meanings?
The meaning of the ending of 2001 – This one is NOT hard to interpret. Why? Because Arthur C Clarke wrote the book the movie was made from and very clearly lays out what is going on visually. Personally, I think a lot of the reason the movie 2001 was so confusing was due to effects limitations Kubrick struggled under. I bet we could re-do the gate transport sequence today and make it much more amazing and clear what’s going on. But anyway, here’s what Kubrick said about the ending of 2001:
“The idea was supposed to be that he is taken in by godlike entities — creatures of pure energy and intelligence with no shape or form, and they put him in what I suppose you could describe as a human zoo to study him. And his whole life passes from that point on in that room, and he has no sense of time, it just seems to happen as it does in the film.
“And they choose this room, which is a very inaccurate replica of French architecture, deliberately so inaccurate, because one was suggesting that they had some idea of something that he might think was pretty but weren’t quite sure, just as we aren’t quite sure what to do in zoos, with animals, to try to give them what we think is their natural environment. And anyway, when they get finished with them, as happens in so many myths, of all cultures in the world, he is transformed into some kind of super being sent back to Earth. You know, transformed and made into some sort of superman. And we have to only guess what happens when he goes back. It is a pattern of a great deal of mythology. And that was what we’re trying to suggest.”
The ending of the Shining:
“Well, it was supposed to suggest a kind of evil reincarnation cycle where he is part of the hotel’s history. Just as in the men’s room when he’s talking to the ghost of the former caretaker who says to him, ‘You are the caretaker. You’ve always been the caretaker. I should know. I’ve always been here.’ One is merely suggesting some kind of endless cycle of evil reincarnation, and also — well, that’s it. Again, it’s the sort of thing that I think is better left unexplained, but since you asked me, I’m trying to explain.”
But you don’t have to take my word for it, we have it recorded from Kubrick’s own lips:
Links:
It appears someone has leaked a massive Valve asset repository. This is probably the biggest leak since the 2003 source code leak for Halflife (git). Instead of source code, this time it appears to be a massive package of used, prototype, early, and discarded assets for Team Fortress 2, Portal, Halflife, Counterstrike, and several other big Valve games.
Right now there is a big discussion going on at the VCC (Valve Cut Content) community discord server. They’re finding all kinds of crazy things in there, like prototype Counterstrike maps, female TF2 characters, and even some partially completed levels like this TF2 rocket-jump training map:
Update: It appears folks are now re-packaging the newly discovered maps:
I have my opinions about cryptocurrency. All of which have come true – in spades. Like many, I have a fascination with watching each crypto train wreck after train wreck unfold.
If you like predicting train wrecks, PricePredictions has a little AI bot that tries to predict crypto prices.
HowToGeek has a wonderful little introduction on how to start write your first Stable Diffusion prompts.
Update 02-2023: Here’s 10 really amazing resources to help you to generate really great prompts and art.
They start with some simple AI image generation and move on to more and more complex examples that includes a brief introduction to some key parameters, changing and including broader image sources, and then generating various famous artistic styles.
They finish out the intro with some links to help you learn more:
Links:
Remember old-school movies that were damaged, in black in white, and everyone ran around at 2x speed? With AI processing, they can fix many of those problems. Olden Days youtube channel has a number of great restored videos like this.
Amazing to see that when fixed, this looks just like a snowball fight one might see today – proving that we aren’t all that different from the people of our past as we’d like to think.
These restoration techniques have come a long way in just a few years.
Other links:
The Internet Archive has every issue of the old Nintendo Power magazine online – for now. It appears Nintendo has been issuing lots of takedown notices for even old content like this.
Enjoy while you can