animation humor

At CM's birthday brunch:

CM: My friend was deciding between being an animator on a film versus a game.  He said on a film, he'd just spend a year making Shrek's eyelash.  On a game, he gets to create the whole character!

MB: All 2000 polys of it.

Later:

MB: Lots of games are all mo-cap now.

Me: Are all films totally mo-cap'ed now?  Does anyone hand animate these days?

MB: Of course.  You can't mo-cap a dragon.

OMG he-who-must-not-be-named hilarity

I am newly obsessed with Harry Potter books again.  The characters are so well-written!  I also forgot how funny the books are.

Hermione

I am quite irritated at the Harry Potter movies.

In the book, Hermione is a very strong, interesting character.  She is acknowledged by everyone as the best student in the class.  She stands up for herself.  She's great.

The movie forced her to cry at the end of the Yule Ball, sobbing, "Ron, you spoiled everything!"  Then she plops down dejectedly with her shoulders slumped.  In the book, she shouted at Ron to learn a lesson and "ask me earlier next time before someone else does, instead of as a last resort!"  Then she sweeps off to bed, leaving Ron thunderstruck.

Movie forcing Hermione to be dejected

The movie had her crying on Harry's shoulder when she discovered Ron kissing Lavender, asking Harry, "How does it feel when you see Ginny?" and then weeping at length.  That never happened in the book.  In the book, she sent magical birds after him and then walked out and slammed down the door, with a single sob.

Movie forcing Hermione to weep

The movie inexplicably had Ron pick Lavender over Hermione.  In the book, Ron went to Lavender because he felt jealous and inadequate that Hermione kissed Viktor Krum, and because Hermione insinuated his quidditch win was due to luck potion.  Ego wounded, Ron sought to build up his confidence via Lavender, who adored him like a dolt and never challenged him.  The movie had Hermione being sweet and supportive, but then gets suddenly rejected for no reason by Ron.

Ron and Lavender: movie removed all motive

I'm also irritated by Ron's speech in the first movie about how Harry needs to proceed through the rest of the quest alone, and that the hero has always been fated to be Harry, not Ron, not Hermione.  What the heck.  A central theme in Harry Potter is that we're not doomed or fated for anything.  We make decisions, and those shape our future.  Harry could've been great in Slytherin, but he continually made choices not to go into the dark arts.  The book emphasized and re-emphasized how our choices define us.  But the movie has a monologue about how Harry was the special one, so therefore his friends should just give up now because they're not the Chosen One and he is.

I place the blame at the feet of the movie directors for 1, 4, and 6.  They took an exquisitely written book and character (Hermione), and watered her down to a damsel in distress.  J K Rowling gave us a gift, and then the director dropped it in the dirt a few times.  

nepotism in "Fellowship of the Ring"

Last month, I watched Fellowship of the Ring again.  It is an amazing movie, and I watched all 17 hours of bonus commentary.  However...!



Aragorn is obsessed with the "weakness that runs in his veins" because he is inherited from Isildur.  Three thousand years ago!  Even if his ancestors had children at age 50, that's 60 generations!  He is only 0.000000000000000086% blood from Isildur by this point! [1]  We should be far more concerned whether his more recent ancestors have weakness in their blood or not.

Also, the story makes a huge deal about how Aragorn is the ONLY ONE who can unite Gondor.  At one point, it looks like Aragorn will refuse, and Boromir goes on about how the race of men will fail now, and the White City will come to ruin.  There is no one else in all the tens of thousands in Gondor who can lead?  In 3000 years, not a single other leader emerged?  We have to wait for Aragorn with his 0.000000000000000086% royal blood (blood tainted by weakness, no less)?

Other than these problems, Lord of the Rings has great lessons.  Throughout many pre-launch moments on my software projects when it was "darkest before the dawn", I reminded myself and others that the journey always feels gritty and broken while you're in it.  One does not simply walk into Mordor.  It's only afterwards that the epic elf songs are written and sung throughout centuries.  While you're trekking to Mount Doom, it does not feel epic at all!

Also Lord of the Rings teaches us that even a hobbit (or two, since Frodo had a cofounder) can contend with the will of Sauron.

But the nepotism is lame!  Some random dude in Gondor should have risen up and said, "Hey, I'm a great leader too, how about we stop waiting decades for Aragorn and just unite under me instead?" and they should have gotten on with it.

[1] computed via (0.5)^60

the 10% that voted for him won a bunch of money

"Moe" was one of the fellow students in my survival school course.  Moe lost 100 pounds in the six months prior to survival school, dropping from nearly 300 pounds into a normal weight range.

On the ride to the airport to attend survival school, Moe's roommate let slip that there was a betting pool on how long Moe would last.  Survival school is tough.  One former Air Force airman previously died on the course, from dehydration.  Moe pried out of his roommate the fact that out of 25 betters, only two bet that Moe would finish out the course.  All the other people bet that he would give up partway through.

Moe was demoralized by this.  He described how bummed he was to find out that 90% of his friends had bet against him.  

In the end, Moe did not quit.  No one in my group quit.  I think this was partly due to me.  I was by far the slowest.  I was always walking at the end, with the person doing the sweep.  And I didn't quit.  If the person struggling the most hasn't quit, why would anyone else quit?  

On the last day, as we prepared to re-enter the real world, Moe said, "My coworkers are going to be surprised.  But they won't care.  Almost all of them bet against me.  They wanted me to fail."

He turned on his phone, and posted an update that he finished.  An hour later, he checked his phone again and looked up in shock.  "Everyone wants to buy me a drink," he said.  "They all want to have lunch or dinner, and congratulate me.  I got so many congratulatory messages."

...

The next morning, I was talking to J, another student.  

J said, "Moe doesn't understand that guys don't encourage each other like women do.  They don't say, 'oh, you're definitely going to make it!'  Instead they say, 'You're going to fail.  You're going to fall on your face.  No way you're going to finish.'"

"Wow," I said.  "But they do congratulate each other sometimes?"

"After it's done," J said.  "Then they said, 'Good job'.  'Nice work'.'"

...

Recently I noticed that a good percentage of posts on PostSecret or forums I read are about people who want to take the leap and start a company or move to a new city or switch careers.  Almost all the comments are positive.  I wonder if it's true that real-world men are trash-talking?  If so, how do men manage to make life changes?  You would think women would be the ones starting all the companies, if they're the only ones with emotional support.

Also, this bodes well if you are making a big change and getting a lot of flak from guys.  When you succeed, they will all turn around to congratulate you, so there is no need to worry that the flak will go on forever.

60-day experiment: sleep

I've decided to embark on a 60-day experiment to get enough sleep.

All my life, I've had a reluctance to go to sleep at night.  In the evenings, I look at the clock every ten minutes, hoping that it's still early, so that I won't need to go to sleep yet.  Then at some point, it crosses over into "I should go to sleep now".  That lasts about 30 minutes.  Then I stay up another two hours, while trying not to look at the clock.

As a result, I'm usually in a sleep-deprived state, where I will fall asleep within one minute as soon as I finally lie down.

I read "The Promise of Sleep" years ago, from the leading sleep researcher on how sleep deprivation leads to worse mental performance and health.  But this just led to me feeling guilty while not changing my habits.

I'm going to do this experiment for 60 days.  Last night I went to bed at 12:30am, which is 1-2 hours earlier than normal for me.  It was painful.  Lying in bed awake for ten minutes before falling asleep was annoying.  Then I had more dreams than usual.  I had a dream about walking into a small conference room where a coworker was crying, and another dream about running around in a frightening maze.  I had been watching Lost just before going to sleep, so that was probably related.

The famous sleep researcher found these results when testing violinists at a music academy.  These are from top to worst performers ("teachers" means they are going to become music teachers after failing to become soloists).

I feel heartened that the best students on average went to sleep around 1am and got up at 9:30am.  I always envisioned that these virtuoso violinists were perfect little androids who went to bed in ironed pajamas at 10pm and woke up smiling at 6:30am. Good to know that their actual sleep pattern is not impossibly out of reach.

It was disheartening to learn that the bottom bucket of failed soloists still slept 7.7 hours on average.  Fitbit tells me that I sleep 6.2 hours on average.

This afternoon, I will try to take a nap around 2pm.  

masterful writing

Yesterday I finished "Ender in Exile" by Orson Scott Card.  I have some issues with the middle third having a contrived plot.  And I always felt Ender Wiggin is a wooden character -- as opposed to Bean, whom I love like a real person.

But one thing cannot be denied.  Orson Scott Card is a masterful writer.

Sometimes I read writing that is exquisite, like the Ender's Shadow series, or J K Rowling at her prime in Harry Potter 7, or Middlesex, and I feel overwhelmed by how beautifully it is executed.  Their mastery is breathtaking.



And then a vain little hope stirs in my secret heart that maybe one day, decades from now, I would be able to write a novel or short story that I would consider beautiful.  Not as beautiful as those books, since those are three of the top authors living in the world, but just a novel that I would be proud of, that I could look at and see as beautiful.

It seems a lot to hope for though.  I already am blessed to have an amazing calling-in-life, and to have work that I find deeply fulfilling.  So it seems too much to ask, to also be able to write fiction beautifully on top of that.

But when I read books by these masterful artists, hope leaps up in my heart of hearts.  

how to stand out above the din?

I read a story recently in a screenwriting book "The Story Book".  It goes something like this:

Writing is like mining for gold hidden in the hillsides of your mind.  The young writer goes to the publisher and points at the hillsides, shouting, "Give me money and I will return you pots of gold!"

The publisher wants gold, but he's heard it all before from thousands of prospectors.  They never have the gold they claim.

Two years later, the writer returns to the publisher with a bucket of muddy nuggets.  "You have to acknowledge me now!  I have spent years digging nuggets out of the hills for you.  Look at this gold, gold, GOLD, I tell you!"

The publisher unblinkingly indicates to either side of the writer, who realizes he is in a line of a thousand other weather-beaten obsessives, who have similar weighty buckets and are shouting the same imploring mantra at the man who must decide.

...

Who from the thousands of writers proffering gold-filled buckets in the line and stridently proclaiming their value, will the publisher select?  Look along the line.  The writer he will deal with is easy to spot, because he's not holding a bucket full of hard-won nuggets.  He is holding up a cut and polished, solid gold necklace.

And he's not shouting at all.

I thought this was brilliant.  I get emails from strangers asking questions such as "How do I land an interview with company X?  My resume isn't great because I haven't done many challenging projects, so instead I've been persistently emailing company X every week but they ignore me" or "I'm not doing very well in school and I have few projects, but I really want to work for Google.  How can I write my resume in a striking way that gets noticed?"

There are entrepreneurs who are convinced the secret to success is not to focus on making their product high-growth but rather to maneuver their way into meeting with a venture capitalist.  There are people who are convinced the best way to further their career is go every week to a networking event, and finagle their way into meeting the highest-profile people in attendance.

These are all focused on how to shout more loudly.  Occasionally someone might shout loudly at just the right moment that they get lucky and get heard.  But that's short-lived if they don't back it up with real skills.  Shouting loudly is not reliable.  The far more reliable path is to make a solid gold necklace.

Sometimes people don't want to hear that, because it takes years.  It takes 10,000 hours to become an expert.  They want to hear that if they just format their resume in this super-special way and add these particular buzzwords, they'll get an interview and a job and can go back to not caring much about computer science but now with glory and money while relaxing.

But that's not real.  The real task is making your skills most useful to the world.

meditation retreat

I went for a 5-day meditation retreat at Esalen.  It is a meditation center in California on the coast between San Francisco and LA.  It used to be a tribal ground for a tribe named Esalen, and has been this meditation center since 1962.


I ate all meals at Esalen.  The meals are not vegetarian, which I enjoyed!  They grow their own vegetables.  The squash and red lettuce taste amazing!

Now that I'm back in the regular world, vegetables taste boring by comparison.


Lodgings at Esalen were fully booked during the week I was there, so I had to stay nearby at an inn.  The inn has no locks on the doors!  You take out your valuables during the day, and latch the door with a little metal hook when you're inside.  I did not feel fully safe.

I spent 1.5 hours to get the fire roaring.  Tending a fire is very enjoyable!


The meditation class had 60 students.  We learned mindful self-compassion meditation each day.

This was not a silent meditation retreat.  We would do meditation exercises for 20 to 30 minutes, and then talk in small groups and then together as a class.

On the first day of class, the teacher showed a study performed on a former set of workshop participants, as compared to waiting-list people who did not get into the class.  After one year, the workshop participants tested higher for optimism and happiness.  When I heard this, I thought it was improbable!  How can a one-week class have an effect one year later?

Now that I've taken the class, I believe it.  Mindful practice is very effective!

someone in the world is complaining about water but thankful he at least receives texts properly

CM: [complaining about how his iPhone doesn't receive text messages when he's in Mexico]

Me: "I think you just need to call the phone company."

CM: "This is a first-world problem.  I shouldn't be complaining.  There are people in the world without running water."

Me: "Those people have phones."

CM: "True. They have better phones than I do."

(Proof: "More People have Cell Phones than Clean Water")

super bowl commercial I've watched 10 times

I love this 2-minute commercial made by personal injury lawyer Jamie Casino.  He lives in Savannah, Georgia.  He personally wrote, directed, and acted in this video as a tribute to his brother, and then bought up the entire local airtime during Super Bowl to air it.  It was only shown to Savannah residents.

One article says:

Though it aired on the small affiliate the video has now been seen by millions as the commercial went viral - a concept Casino admits he doesn't understand. 

"I can't believe it," he said. "I don't know how any of this social media works. My wife does our Facebook page. … I had heard of videos going viral but I thought they paid people to do it."

In another article, he says he spent under $100,000 for creating the video and then buying the Super Bowl airtime.  He started Christmas Eve, filmed for 3 days, and edited for 3 weeks.

I admire that he went over-the-top to create an artistic piece that would satisfy himself. It wasn't done purely as an advertisement (he never mentions the phone number or website of his law firm). It wasn't for fame, since he didn't realize it would be seen by millions. It was a labor of love.

It's hard not to be won over by competently-executed labors of love.

New favorite book: Ready Player One

CM recommended a book to me: "Ready Player One".  After I got halfway through, I told him that it may as well be renamed "Book for Niniane".

This is now the best book I've read.

It is about a post-apocalyptic world where people live in stacks of trailers.  All fossil fuels have been exhausted.  People live in poverty, and spend all their time plugged into a virtual world.  They use visors and haptic gloves to interface with this world.

It has everything I would want in a book.  A virtual world with avatars.  Character development and self-actualization along Maslow's hierarchy.  Having admin abilities in a massive game / simulation used by billions of people.  Playing a perfect game of Ms Pac Man.  Educational games that teach math in an entertaining fashion to schoolchildren.  Fighting off an enemy until the fight makes you re-evaluate your goals and take bold risks which sacrifice your own self-interest.

I talked to CM about the book for an hour.  Other friends kept coming by and saying, "What are you guys talking about so intently?  STILL the same book?"

respecting the user

Of all the qualities required in the leader of a product, there is one that I think is most important.  This quality is more important than people management or communication or fundraising ability or technical knowledge.

The quality is a deep understanding of the user.  The leader should have an intuitive knowledge of how the user thinks, what they read or watch, how they make decisions.

Therefore, the worst sign is when a leader makes fun of their users.  For example, on some games, the most hardcore users will spend 30, 40 hours per week playing the game.  Some leaders will actually mock these users.  They'll say "these users have no social life".  Or in enterprise software, the leader mocks the hardcore purchasers for being bureaucratic, like the manager in Office Space.  For a flash shopping site, I've heard the leader refer to their power users as "housewives with too much time on their hands".

So far I've seen a correlation between leaders who make fun of their most hardcore users and decreasing userbase over time.  Any time I heard a leader say that their most fervent user "has no life", I assume the product is doomed.  If you don't deeply respect your user, how can you build a great product for them?

The saddest is when a founder who understood their user is replaced in later years by a CEO who mocks the user.

Amazing CG of Bruce Lee

Marveling at this CG video featuring Bruce Lee.

I showed it to CM, who said "Holy crap.  I watched and my first thought was, where was the CG?"

The subtitles don't do justice to the original words.

Bruce Lee died at age 32.  He accomplished so much in his short life!

So many extreme close-ups in this video!  The creator really had guts to take on this many close-ups, lip syncing, emotional facial expressions.  Hats off to the animator.

four views of the same photo

Several years ago, I read this NYTimes account of four journalists taking photos of the same event.

It's interesting how each of them views it.  From journalist Charlie Cole:

I think his action captured peoples’ hearts everywhere, and when the moment came, his character defined the moment, rather than the moment defining him. He made the image. I was just one of the photographers. And I felt honored to be there.

... This tends to overshadow all the other tremendous work that other photographers did up to and during the crackdown. Some journalists were killed during this coverage and almost all risked being shot at one time or another. Jacques Langevin, Peter and David Turnley, Peter Charlesworth, Robin Moyer, David Berkwitz, Rei Ohara, Alon Reininger, Ken Jarecke and a host of others contributed to the fuller historical record of what occurred during this tragedy and we should not be lured into a simplistic, one-shot view of this amazingly complex event.

A different journalist:

For some reason, the editor in the office did not pick the frame of the man blocking the tanks. Instead, they picked the frame of the man climbing up the tank. The next day, A.P.’s version was widely played. They called me up at the hotel and I told them to have a close look again. So my photo of the man blocking the tank was released more than 12 hours later than my competitor’s.

Neither of them had the photo that was most widely used. That distinction belonged to the A.P. photographer, whose photo fronted many newspapers worldwide. But what these two journalists wrote in response was so different. One was frustrated at his colleague for making him "lose" to his competitor journalist. The other was awestruck at what he had experienced, and shared his spotlight by giving credit to others.

I think we each have these sides within us: the petty competitive aspect, and the awestruck grateful side.  I re-read this article every year or two.

4-leaf potato

Going to London and Dublin next week!

Over IM:

Potamus: in my mind, dublin is a frozen land with icy potatoes stuck in the ground

me: ha ha

me: icy potatoes!

me: omg

me: are there a lot of potatoes there?

Potamus: i think so

Potamus: ireland in our history book was all about potatoes

Potamus: and then when they didn't have potatoes, it was the potato famine

me: in my mind, dublin is a green shamrock field with a big castle, pubs inside the castle, friendly singing with an irish accent, big bear hugs between big burly men, and little singing leprechauns

Potamus: wow

...

We will see who is closer!

thanks

In life, there are some things where no matter how hard you try, it may or may not work out the way you want. I went through this once before, when I was 24. My mom was very ill, and I thought for many months that I was going to lose her. She went into the ER a couple weeks before Google's IPO. People sometimes ask with a touch of envy what it was like to be at Google pre-IPO and during the IPO. The answer is that I don't really remember the atmosphere during that period, because it was so overshadowed by my fervent wish that my mom could recover. Things felt very bleak at the time.

I made a vow back then. I vowed that if she recovered, I would be completely grateful. It felt like a stretch to even ask for that in my mind. It felt like I was overreaching. It was hard to see a way through the darkness.

But she recovered, pretty much fully. 96%. Some doctor threw out that number, and it's what I've been using. That's more than good enough. For a year after the whole ordeal, I was grateful all the time. I was probably really pleasant to be around, because I was continually happy. After a year, the gratitude gradually started to fade. I wrote myself emails to be delivered on a future date using a special service, reminding myself to be grateful. I just received one of the emails a few months ago.

Today I am sitting in my childhood bedroom in my parents' home in Las Vegas. They have lived in the same house for 22 years. My mom cooked me dumplings last night, and noodles.

I have forgotten how to be grateful. I tried. I kept a gratitude journal last year where I wrote down 3 things daily that I was grateful for. I made dozens of entries. It felt forced.

It's different to logically think up something to be grateful for and write it down, vs feel it intuitively deep into your bones, 24-7. I think sometimes life threatens to take things away, so that you appreciate what you have.

"careless" employees

Recently a friend said to me, "My remote engineer contractors aren't committed enough.  They say they'll get a feature finished by the end of the week, but they don't finish in time!  How can I get them to be more committed?"

Another friend said, "My engineers in China are not invested.  They're not detail-oriented.  Our error rate on the site is insanely high.  The engineers just do a half-assed job.  I wish I could hire engineers who care more."

A third person said, "My engineer is too young and isn't careful.  He doesn't check his work.  He lets serious bugs get onto the site."

In all 3 cases, after hearing about how these engineers are careless, I had this exchange:

Me: "Do you do code reviews?"

Friend: "No."  (except first friend who does them retroactively after the code is already checked in)

Me: "Do you send out technical designs for review, before you start coding?"

Friend: "No."

Me: "Do you have unittests to catch the regressions?"

Friend: "No, we barely have time to develop the features.  We don't have time to write automated tests."

Me: "Do you have manual QA?"

Friend: "No.  I try to test the site when I have time."

Me: "Do you have a standup every morning, so that you know about schedule delays after at most one day?"

Friend: "No.  We're such a small team.  It seems overkill."


Why, why, why would people expect to get great results if they flout all the best-practices that have developed over the past 20 years?  And then blame the poor engineer?

Let's say I ask an architect to build a house.  But because his hourly rate is expensive, he's not allowed to make a blueprint first, or build a small-scale replica, or to spend time holding discussions with subcontractors.  Every minute needs to be spent doing hands-on work on the house.  The house ends up being completed late due to re-work, and after being finished, it has all sorts of problems.  Do I blame the architect?

Meditation

I started taking meditation classes at SF Insight.  Meditation is amazing!  I've been taking weekend classes that go from 10am to 5pm.  The first time I look at my watch, it's already 4-5 hours into the class.

This is not the case with yoga.  With yoga, the first time I look at my watch is about 10 minutes into the class.  Then I look at my watch every 2-3 minutes until the interminable thing finally ends.


The chapel where my first meditation class was held.

The meditation class touches on questions I've struggled with for years, like how to care a lot about something (e.g. work, parents, a relationship) without getting worked up about it, and becoming obsessed with the outcome.  The meditation teacher had an interesting answer about stepping away a little and watching myself behave in an obsessed way, as though I'm observing another person.


Courtyard where we did walking meditations.

Another question that has haunted me for years is how to be around other people, without taking on their material desires.  For example, I used to have no desire to fly in business class in an airplane.  I had opportunities to do so at Google, and I ignored them because it did not seem important.  Last year, I spent a week in Shanghai visiting a dear friend W who loves flying business class.  At the time, she was traveling every month, flying 10-12 hours each way.  Every day during my visit, it would come up in conversation.  Now I've had a desire to fly business class since that time.

This was an innocent example, but there are more pervasive desires that I think are not inherent to me, but just picked up via osmosis from others.

The meditation teacher said that if someone is really affecting me strongly in a way that's hard for me, I can avoid them, like I would avoid a wild elephant.  If it's just a minor influence, then I can first make sure to emotionally feel my own preferences throughout my body.  If I'm only thinking logically about my preferences, that's not very strong, and I would be easily swayed by others.  If I make sure to truly feel my inner wisdom on an emotional level, then I would be less impressionable.

Next I am going to visit Spirit Rock and then the Green Gulch Zen Farm in Marin.

Gourmet tacos from a truck!

Today I had these two tacos from a food truck. Both use organic local ingredients. The food truck has Zagat rating 25.

I love California.