No, I'm all in favor of Morons--

However, I'm not in favor of the amazing people in SAR putting their lives on the line to recover the smears lefts on rocks that used to be these people. Living in WA, we have a lot of "really wants to kill you" wilderness here, including North Cascades Nat'l Park and Olympic Nat'l Park. Every single year, someone's predated body needs to be pulled out of the middle of one of these places by either a helo crew or the poor bastards who have to hike a bazillion miles to pack out what's left of Chuckles.

The number of SAR people who've died here is sobering. Every single one of them could have just walked away, but they went into danger's way to save people too stupid to save themselves. Sometimes their reward is to be spit on, like the ranger at Yellowstone who was berated by the father of a kid who dived into a hot spring after his dog (by "kid", I mean adult kid, not Timmy). The father wanted his kid's body recovered, no matter what. The ranger had to explain that the kid completely dissolved about five minutes after he fell in. The father then refused to speak to the ranger any further.

This shit doesn't happen in a vacuum. Someone's going to have to look at these human bird droppings and see that shit in their sleep for the rest of their lives.

The FAA is up there with the TSA, DHS and the NSA as far as TLAs you should NEVER piss-off.

I got pulled over by DHS while I was driving through North Cascades National Park a few years ago. They weren't even marked trucks. One pulled ahead of me, the second one was right on my rear bumper and the "PULL OVER NOW!" was like the voice of God.

I was going camping and they made me pull every fucking thing out of my Subie. Then they went through it all. They confiscated my two pre-rolls and my pipe ("you're on Federal land"), then they called "backup". I sat on the side of the road at Newhalem for about two hours while they dug through all my stuff like a half-dozen times and kept asking me the same stupid-ass questions ("why are you here", "do you know anyone in this area?", "have you ever been arrested for a crime in the US or abroad?") over and over. People where driving by and looking at me and my wife like we were the whitest ISIS fighters ever.

They gave me the ol' "You're free to go" and drove off.

Fuckers took my dope!!

They do that.

There's talk here in WA about re-introducing Grizzly Bears into North Cascades National Park and Olympic National Park, but the eastern Washington cattle associations get their tits in a wringer anytime this topic, or the similar one involving the re-introduction of wolves, comes up.

Incidentally, if you're ever in Winthrop, Twisp or Mazama and feel like getting your ass kicked, just tell a local you like wolves. Those fucking people...

"The guys try durian(...)"

Someone brought one of those fucking things into our office once and the evacuation of the workspace and people's stomachs was epic. You can smell that shit all the way to the ISS and it's probably the reason aliens haven't invaded us yet. It's sorta like that movie 'Signs', only instead of making no fucking sense what-so-ever, the aliens show up, smell a durian, mutter "are you fucking kidding me?!" and then get back on their spaceship and fuck off to somewhere less malodorous. This is also what keeps Tacoma mostly vacated. Seriously, the reason WaDoT lowered the speed limit to 50 on the part of I-5 that has the misfortune of passing through Tacoma is that they hate everyone west of the Cascades and this is how they get back at us. Yeah, FUCK YOU -- Tacoma may stink, but Biden's still president!

Cunts, the whole fucking lot of 'em.

I'm waiting for other memes to start memeing this meme and the resulting meme cascade. Hitler reacts should be pretty good.

Space junk. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spacexs-starlink-could-cause-cascades-of-space-junk/

That got me. I was chuckling, then cascaded into laughter when I realized the same thing was happening to you.

Learned something new today... never knew that heavy (wet?) snow could move so slowly, like a viscous fluid. Had always figured on the more violent, rapid cascades down hillsides and mountain slopes. Thanks for the post.

*explosive sounds of anal misery cascade across the bathroom stalls*

Foodie: "WHY DID I DO THIS TO MY STOMACH AND MY ANUS?"

Reporter: "Congratulations, sir, you are now the foodie ninja warrior. What are you going to do?"

Foodie: "I'm going to Disneyland so I can ride the teacups to acid reflux!"

For reference: flows at the their highest out of the spillways were exceeding the flows at Niagra Falls---

And---in 2005, 3 environmental groups tried to get the State to concrete armor the emergency spillway---they protested it would be too expensive and not necessary...And of course, with the main spillway out of action, the emergency spillway has started to erode as well---and 200,000 people have been evacuated. To my understanding---and I'm not a hydraulic engineer---the risk with the emergency spillway is that the water flowing over the concrete "cap" or "curb" has started to...duh...erode the earth below the cap. If it erodes too far, the concrete cap will tumble off, a 30 foot wall of water will cascade over the edge, the the dam will start to erode...

Ha!
I'm just going by my limited experience from the 80's when I spent 2 weeks there. At one point we went to a public hot spring that had cement pools that the water cascaded down, making what looked like a giant set of stairs going down a hillside. Some kids were there, playing in a few by throwing small rocks back and forth. At one point, a 14+- year old boy stood up, and in a calm measured tone said "Excuse me. I would appreciate it if you would stop throwing stones."...and they did. We fell over laughing, knowing that an American teen has never once in all recorded history been so polite and adult when dealing with other kids, nor would American kids respond by stopping.
We didn't meet a single rude kiwi.

As an aside, I've often thought the US Power Grid is overly unstable and an overly easy target for terrorist groups. Knock out a few sub stations (okay, more than a few, one or two in major cities) with a small blast, and no need to lose lives with said blast, and the grid would fall apart from there in a chain reaction. Things would be hampered further by the fact we don't have a good number of backups of transformers and other equipment to replace many of them that would be damaged directly and via cascade failure. That's why I never understood Republican calls for the Keystone XL, aside from oil lobby money, when fixing the grid would create far more jobs, both short term and long term, and increase our safety as well. A major outage would cause far more panic and damage than the 9/11 attacks thanks to how much we rely on electricity, and if enough damage was done to the system, it could take weeks to months for the system to be patched back up. The electrical grid NEEDS fixed, and soon.

The short answer is "It depends!"

I know it's a crappy answer, but there are way too many parameters at play. There are many games today that have scripted scenes in them that are pretty cinematic. Think of GTA III, from 2001. The cut scenes in that game still outshine the actual gameplay of GTA V today.

If the scene is scripted, then all the animation, and camera movement can be fine tuned and all compute resources are pooled into the viewport of the camera. This allows the artists to focus all of the trickery on the shot itself, but not the rest of the world. From a PVS or scene-graph stand point, you have pretty much reduced the complexity to just what you are seeing.

I do not know how they made this demo and cannot comment on it with any authoritative capital. I've written 3D engines before (not for videogames though) and can comment on the technology I think I'm seeing here. My comments are just an opinion based on what I know. I do not have access to Unity and have never used it before. But here it goes:

For a scene like this, there should be reduced/canned computation in:

• Collision detection and response
  
• AI
  
• Animation / IK
  
• PVS
  
• Texture Atlasing
  

The shaders, unless they are geometry (the ripping of the skin/flesh in the Adam scene) could or could not be reduced in scope and complexity. I am not sure if they are scripted or dynamic. By scripted, I mean a geometry shader that reads vertex data from a VBO stream or some memory buffer instead of computing the vertices on the fly. It's still real-time, just not dynamic.

Most of the graphics you see here are standard applications of technology that's been around for a while:

• PBR shader
  
• Motion Blur Shader
  
• Depth of Field Shader
  
• Cascaded Shadow Maps Shader
  

The particle system seems pretty standard as well.

This is a great demo and I am extremely impressed with the art direction, but the engine itself is, after all, Unity with PBR for the characters, and maybe Global Illumation for the indoor scenes, which I believe they licensed from Geomerics.

This video was taken near the Central Oregon Cascades. Full story: http://www.bendbulletin.com/localstate/3095112-151/lost-lake-shrinking-down-a-hole?referrer=carousel1

4:08---the cascading crane collapse---was sort of terrifying.
Fails are sort of funny horrifying---because they can be at the edge of snuff flicks with the weights and objects involved in some of these...