[Oh my Gawd! - Totally unOfficial Pet Peeve Thread.]

6 minutes ago, Da5id Weatherwax said:

Then I think he would be proud of his daughter.

Yeah, but he was also reluctant to admit he'd created the closest thing to a pet peeve he'd ever encountered.

Have I mentioned that I've no interest in having children?

Been there, was that.

[Oh my Gawd! - Totally unOfficial Pet Peeve Thread.]

1 hour ago, Da5id Weatherwax said:

"The true warrior wins without ever drawing his sword." Your dad chose to keep his hands off the stick because he was done with that part of his life. He had no more need to set his hands to something he always saw as a weapon.

True, except for the "always". He learned to fly, for the fun of it, at Kaneohe before the war, during off time while he was in the submarine service across the island at Pearl. When the war broke out, they needed pilots more than submariners, so he switched topside. Flying went from joyous to dreadful very quickly. He went back under after the war, doing recon and research. He'd not associated his prewar time on boats with death, so was able to set sail again without all that dread.

Dad did find much in common between those two worlds. I think he was one of very few to survive both of them.

Speaking of peeves, he found them hard to come by. Life was good.

[Oh my Gawd! - Totally unOfficial Pet Peeve Thread.]

25 minutes ago, Dyna Mole said:

The pseudo-rose thing is slightly right of center and the ribbon flutters over my right shoulder.  Blame the milliner. It's no mod.

Blame the milliner?

I'm gonna keep an eye on you, Dyna.

[Oh my Gawd! - Totally unOfficial Pet Peeve Thread.]

5 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I sort of get that . . . except that a lot of what is on display here is not and has never been in the arsenal of the Canadian Forces. They are most often American imports, with teams coming north for this show, and they are (or were: it's been a while since I actually attended the event) often introduced first by the name and maker of the aircraft. So, something will be introduced as a "Boeing F-15EX Eagle II, flown by the USAF, [unit whatever]."

Interestingly, the most prominent (and maybe even only) display by the Canadian Forces is the "Snowbirds," who are military, but fly unarmed jets demonstrably not outfitted for war. Canada was in Afghanistan, but by far our most important military duties since the Korean War have been peacekeeping.

I do get the "honouring the past" thing. As I said, I enjoy watching vintage aircraft of all sorts, even military.

But as an inveterate peacenik, I personally find the sight of Toronto being stalked by a Stealth Jet a bit . . . not good.

Dad was very sensitive to the line between patriotism and jingoism, and found that airshows often crossed it.

[Oh my Gawd! - Totally unOfficial Pet Peeve Thread.]

18 hours ago, Dyna Mole said:

To clarify ....  the topic of the thread is Pet Peeves.  It's hard to resist responding to a juicy peeve with a bit of discussion.  My gentle reminder was a plea to avoid derailing the thread by turning it into -- hypothetically -- a thread about immortality (which is an excellent peeve, BTW).  Please just remember to veer back on target before it heads off the rails.

Okay Dyna, I have a peeve, or more accurately, a question. Is the decoration on your hat on the right hand side, or in front? I can convince myself it's either, with perhaps a slight bias to the right.

It's sometimes the case that the side on which we wear something has some significance, like the Hanky Code. Without being sure just where your hat's adornment is located, I can’t even begin to know if it peeves me, let alone just what kind of peeve it should elicit.

I impatiently await your response.

[Oh my Gawd! - Totally unOfficial Pet Peeve Thread.]

My father flew a F4U (which he happily and swearily pronounced) Corsair in WWII. That plane was nicknamed the "Whistling Death". I still marvel at the graceful motion of those death machines, in what might be the epitome of irony.

When I learned to fly, and was finally able to take up a passenger, Dad was the first to enlist. I offered him the wheel, but he demurred. There was heartbreak in that for me. A thing he had loved to do had been poisoned by war and could not, for him, be redeemed.

He came along to witness my innocent joy.

[Oh my Gawd! - Totally unOfficial Pet Peeve Thread.]

3 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Pet Peeve: Maddy.

Let this be an invitation to anyone and everyone to air your grievances.

All I ask is that the expression of your complaint mask your intention well enough that there can be significant misunderstanding.

[Oh my Gawd! - Totally unOfficial Pet Peeve Thread.]

8 minutes ago, Dyna Mole said:

This is just a very gentle reminder .....  Please remember the topic of this thread.  There have been some lovely diversions in it from time to time, but the thread is supposed to be about Pet Peeves, not about discussing immortality or other side topics.  

And if not being able to discuss side topics is a pet peeve?

 

[Oh my Gawd! - Totally unOfficial Pet Peeve Thread.]

2 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

Today is Friday, but it looks so simular to last Thursday, Wednesday and upcoming Saturday and Sunday. Mainly jumping through the same hoops again and again.

I live on the shore of Lake Michigan. Half of my daily view is "just" the Lake Michigan horizon. Most people who visit my place will say "Oh, that's such a beautiful view, but don't you get tired of it?". Meanwhile, I walk out to the bluff almost every day to look at that horizon. Though there are similarities across the thousands of times I've soaked in that view, I always find something interesting to ponder. That might be a cargo ship or a sail out on the horizon, a duck diving for seaweed, or bats scooping up dragonflies (not fireflies, if those poisonous little devils are out, the bats steer clear of them).

I make a point each day to look up at the sky. Again, I always find something interesting to ponder. I watch for variance between the breeze on my skin and the winds aloft, as evidenced by the movement of clouds. I watch contrails to gauge humidity and look for the shadows of clouds in the clouds near sunrise/sunset.

Though two views of the sky, a year apart, might be nearly identical, I always learn something in the intervening year that makes my perception happily different.

[Oh my Gawd! - Totally unOfficial Pet Peeve Thread.]

Just now, Scylla Rhiadra said:

So, it's complicated!

This doesn't need to be an either/or, right? The world is full of amazing and brilliant and beautiful things made by others. Art, literature, music, well-crafted and beautiful instruments and objects and devices.

I like making stuff -- this is why I spend so much of my SL time on photographs, planning them, building backdrops, experimenting with light and shadow, modifying them in Photoshop. I want to make beautiful things too, and sometimes I even come a little close.

But I want also to experience the beauty others produce. I'm never going to write a To the Lighthouse or Paradise Lost. Not if I did have eternity. I'm never going to be able craft a beautiful guitar that is a joy to hold, play, and sound. But I can lose myself in the beauty someone else has created -- and connect through that with the artist and craftsperson, and with all of the others who are also doing so.

I can imagine a very happy eternity doing both of those things. Making and sharing -- they are flip sides of the same very human thing.

It is complicated, and I both create and enjoy the creations of others. I built my outdoor theater with a mix of other's creations (projector, screen, landscape lighting, etc) of my own (pergola) and nature's (landscaping/woods). I'll be showing "Dr. Strangelove", my favorite creation by Stanley Kubrick and a few quirky shorts as a way of sharing my sensibilities with others.

I am something of a perfectionist, so the prospect of infinite time is appealing to me. I would not (I think?) be happy living in a home I did not well understand, and could not modify. I hated renting and wasn't terribly thrilled living in a home with someone who was happy to hire out things we could do ourselves.

Can you imagine living with me, forever? That's a powerful argument for mortality.

[Oh my Gawd! - Totally unOfficial Pet Peeve Thread.]

46 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

1 hour ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

I'd have all the time in the world to make my own things!

You really just don't get it, do you?

I've been thinking about this as I prepare for "movie night" on my patio this evening. My RL home was manageable for the three people that lived in it for decades. With only me remaining, it's become borderline. I contemplate selling it and building something new and smaller, that reflects my current sensibilities. But, I know how long it took to get this place "just so" and I don't know if I want to be taking on a massive start over given my remaining time. If I were immortal, I'd have no qualms about changing things up, as I'd always have infinite time to enjoy the fruits of a finite expenditure of time and effort.

If the only constant is change, I want lots of time for it.

[Oh my Gawd! - Totally unOfficial Pet Peeve Thread.]

And now I'm thinking of Woody Allen...

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.

ETA: If the "wisest" mortals are not afraid of dying, would the wisest immortals not be afraid of living forever? The inevitable is inevitable, why fear it?

[Oh my Gawd! - Totally unOfficial Pet Peeve Thread.]

2 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

it would make it easier to be patient and accepting of being unable to get into really busy events to buy stuff, though.

I'd have all the time in the world to make my own things!

[Oh my Gawd! - Totally unOfficial Pet Peeve Thread.]

1 minute ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

After a while it would get boring I feel. I mean imagine outliving your future generations, and then they are all gone. I don't know why immortality is cool. I mean yeah I used to like it, when I feared death. But I don't fear death anymore, and when it is my time. It is my time, bury me and let the earth turn me into earth. Without uploading my conscienceness to a computer. But I mean there is more to the whole immortality dilemma than you just listed. The one biggest thing, being around when the earth ends. 

I've been alive for 52 years and can't recall a boring moment. If everyone's immortal, nobody outlives anybody. If we all just keep learning (that's a huge "if"), I think we could keep boredom at bay. Yeah, we'd all be looking into the abyss of the heat death of the universe, but is that any different than a 20 year old looking at death in 60 years?

I enjoy hypothesizing as much as the next person, but I find most of the immortality tropes hopelessly limited by our mortal imaginations. I'm now thinking of a favorite line from Laurie' Anderson's song "Language is a Virus".

Paradise is exactly like where you are right now, only much, much better.

[Oh my Gawd! - Totally unOfficial Pet Peeve Thread.]

54 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

Are there really people out there who want to live forever?
I mean, life is a great gift, but forever is awfully long.

I wonder. Stuck with mortality, do we find ways to make immortality unappealing so we won't miss it? Like the child who exclaims "I hate ice-cream!" after dropping their cone on the sidewalk?

I have been able to learn something new seemingly every day since my birth. If that could continue forever and as free of pain as I have been so far, count me in! This is, of course, a terribly complex hypothetical. If immortality were possible, I'd not be the only one seeking it. That's a problem!

I once heard the head of the CDC (IIRC) claiming that the first person to become 200 years old was alive today. He waxed ebullient about that prospect, but I immediately saw some problems...

China's one-child policy re-implemented world wide, to reduce overcrowding.
Politicians running for their 135th term in office.
Applying for a job in competition with someone with 120 years of seniority.
Losing your job to a 30 year old "kid" who's steeped in the current state-of-the-art.
Having to earn continuing education credits for over 100 years.
Eight generations of one family living under the same roof, with only the 50 year old generation earning good money.
Trying to remember 200 years of life experience with a brain that evolved to hold 60.

I'm sure you can imagine more downside.

So, would I want to live forever?
Under the right circumstances? Yep!
Under the wrong? Nope!

 

[Second Life Puppetry]

9 hours ago, animats said:

I don't think "collision bones" actually collide in SL. To collide, you need some kind of model wrapped around the collision bone, to say how big the "meat" attached to it is. Those models collides. That's what I was discussing earlier - a minimal definition of limb dimensions so the IK system can prevent body parts going through each other. VRchat has something like that.

I don't think SL has the concept of "collision bones" as I've described them (a definition I learned 30 years ago when in grad school, and which might no longer be in use). As I learned it, "bones" are lines (coded by two end points), representing the simplest description of a solid link in the animation armature/skeleton. In recognition of the physical limits of joints in a real body, the virtual joints have some limits on their motion. That prevents obviously impossible bone positions (backwards knee bends) but doesn't prevent collisions. I think this is the current state of the SL avatar skeleton. It's a collection of lines, connected by hinges having motion limits. (I know there are limits in the various posing systems we use. I don't know if there are limits in the SL animation system that reads the pose data.)

The first step in collision prevention is to give the bones some crude, rigid shape. Those were (and maybe still are) called "collision bones". They're approximations, but require only modest computation to prevent the most egregious self clipping. A physical realization of a collision bone system would be the wooden 3-D mannequin you showed earlier in the thread.

The next step above that was "collision mesh/skin". Instead of collision bones, the animation system uses a simple rigged mesh wrapped around the skeleton, to more accurately reflect the visible shape of the avatar and the soft tissue deformations that occur as a result of joint movement, but ignoring deformation due to collision. Such systems do a better job of preventing clipping, but don't model the skin deformations that actually occur during a collision, such as dimpling of fleshy areas when poked by a finger or a rigid object.

The next step above that is to compute deformations of the collision mesh by contact with other portions of the mesh (or other meshes). At this point, computation complexity soars, but soft tissues will dimple under "pressure" from a colliding object.

As the realism of the collision modeling system improves, it becomes increasingly important to incorporate avatar specific modifications, such as the full character skin mesh and the geometry of clothing and attachments. Ultimately, collision systems understand the behavior of skin, clothing, hair, worn objects, and the entirety of the world the avatar moves through (solid objects, flexible objects, clouds of smoke, ad infinitum).

I'm not familiar with VRchat, but you've described something that's at least at the "collision bone" level.

I think SL would benefit from a system as simple as "collision bones". Given the wide variety of even just human avatar shapes, the system might want to query at least the shape slider settings to adjust the geometry of collision bones. The further an avatar deviates from human proportions, the worse this will work. I'm more excited about puppeteering bringing some form of collision handling than I am about live mocap control of avatars. We'll all benefit from some collision handling.

 

[Open Questions Survey for my academic thesis]

4 minutes ago, animats said:

For "fully represented", I'm not sure what they're getting at. Avatars not having enough detail, or rendering badly, or moving badly? That's the classic  "uncanny valley" problem: close enough to human looking to look slightly creepy. It does bother some users.

Or do they mean the special "woke" meaning of the term?

I thought Helen's use "representation of Self" was pretty clear. What leads you to think she was referring to the uncanny valley effect? How do you imagine that would affect our behavior?

I spend a significant portion of my in-world time as a little devil, or a particle cloud of decaying morality. I don't think there's much the SL rendering system could do to make those representations any more cannily uncanny than they already are.

I think a lot of people use SL to present aspects of their self image they are unable to show in RL, for various reasons. I'm one of them.

 

[Do you use your own RL social media in SL?]

11 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

..dumps a large bag of daddy long legs out by the snacks..

 

[Do you use your own RL social media in SL?]

38 minutes ago, Charalyne Blackwood said:

*runs away and hides in a rather impressive pillow an blankie fort munchin popcorns and pretending I have force fields for stoppin da bad guys*

...starts a little campfire outside your fort, leaves a bag of marshmallows and some long sticks, then hides behind a tree until you let your guard down and come out*

 

 

*little devils eat force fields for breakfast

[Is Lara "done"?]

5 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

It's the " I've put on a few pounds but refuse to buy a bigger size bra" look.  I'm familiar with the look.  😁

I'd put on a few pounds if I thought it would help me fill a bra. That look is way on the far side of anything I've ever wanted.

[Is Lara "done"?]

12 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Well . . . does it come with a vacuum cleaner attachment?

I'd want to use it as a Zamboni.

[Is Lara "done"?]

32 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Thanks @Rowan Amore!

Not my look, really, but as I said, I can see it maybe coming in handy for Georgian/Regency era gowns?

Well then, may I presume that this is really not your look?

 

[Second Life Puppetry]

I forgot the main point I wanted to make in my previous post. I very much look forward to handling of collisions, even if only in the animation of individual avatars. I can't tell whether this is something that will be handled within SL, or if the expectation is that the external capture systems will clean up collisions before sending the data to the system. I'd love to see (if it's even remotely possible) the ability to massage existing poses and animations in a way that eliminates the "voodoo surgery"* we all do on ourselves.

I've less hope of LL addressing the surgery we do on each other.

 

 

*the removal of internal organs, simply by reaching a hand into the body cavity

[Second Life Puppetry]

8 hours ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

The SL skeleton already has collision bones - they're what allow fitted mesh to work. Animations didn't recognize them before, but the information is already part of your avatar.

Recognizing collisions is step one. Doing something visually acceptable to address them is step two.

The LL announcement Nalate's linked doesn't get into much detail, so I don't know if/how collisions will be handled. It does seem that the focus is on real-time mocap, which I am not personally interested in. It might also be that collisions are to be handled by the external mocap system, which could mean that body sliders do not affect animations (and therefore can't be used to prevent collisions), or would have to be exported from SL to inform the external mocap system.

We'll see how it goes when we see how it goes.

[Do you use your own RL social media in SL?]

SL is my social media.