Wow.. so.. a lot of good.. a lot of bad. Actor performances and writing were all over the board. The seasoned actors were all awesome, and sean young who at first seamed out of place turned out a wonderful performance as Dr Lucien and a hopeful character. The space sequences were numerous and well done with great ship models. Pyrotechnics were kept minimal as those are still hard to do in style in CG so its best to keep it good or keep it out.

The bad how ever. The klaxon mining facility was just all kinds of horribleness. The bad layering, the over the top and ridiculous amounts of shooting flames, and the cherry on the top is the introduction to the main bad guy race with their mask straight out of planet of the apes. I seriously can't believe someone though those were a go for filming. Also most of the planet intro scenes are more of a neo electro artistic style rather than something that looks real. This is a bit surprising since I would think the "animated paintings" from enterprise and voyager era would have been pretty low cost. The worst of the performances is by Crystal Conway, chekovs great great grand daughter.

Writing was also up and down. I think the story was ok with 2 general sins being committed. #1 a little to much backstory stuffed into the first 30 minutes. Icheb's borg roots were uncomfortably recited in a full scene in front of his own crew who would have already known this, and should have instead been a few lines to say he was a borg and then leaving his origin story for a later date. And #2, a lot of plot points like the doorway placed on earth ahead of time and being able to transport through the time distortion seem awfully convenient and tries to absolve the episode from going any farther in complexity. This is a pretty big sin when you consider these need to be %90 self contained episodes. Also it seems no matter how bad you are or how much of an outlaw you are, finding you in the star trek universe is one scene away. I do have to give props to Corin Nemec as the captain of the other ship. His crew is actually pretty bad but I liked him. I was sad to see his script called for more shooting and less investigating. Also I feel bad for the horrible looking bridge set they built him.

Still in the end, I am a big supporter for more star trek. I loved voyager and I think the renegade crew is actually in good shape. Lexxa, is not BAD but needs more work. Like another comment I read, she doesn't seem very smart about anything, no hidden talents. Her fighting is pretty horrible and scripted, and while she pulls the bad girl image off, she lacks the muscle or fancy footwork to look like she could actually hold her own physically.

Ronara was largely forgettable and suffered from the same origin scene stuffing scene sin as Icheb. Chekovs 2 girls on the other hand look like good additions and I think they pulled the female andorian well. Nothing dramatic in their acting but at this point, not sucking is a good thing.

Unfortunately who knows how many years till we see eps 2. I seem to recall this one finished its kickstarter long ago but delayed heavily.

That would've been suicide. It'd be like starting the movies for the Harry Potter series on book 4. Sure, you'd have a fanbase that knows the source material and would understand what's going on, but it would alienate everyone who hasn't read the books, and now they don't wanna go see it.

At least this way with it being (somewhat relatively close to) orcs vs humans, we establish the general base for what happens, so if it's a success they can continue down the story.

There's foreshadowing in the trailer anyway, the orc that sends the baby down the river, I'm guessing the baby is Thrall.

Which already kinda mucks up the storyline.. because that more involves parts of warcraft II.. Either way, I thought it looked pretty decent. I'm hoping a bit more work goes into making the orcs look a little more.. not CGI in a couple of those scenes, but I'll probably go see it.

Cyriak has just uploaded a new high res widescreen version of this

*backup=[...snipped...]

He says:

Here's the epic saga of cows vs aliens, in higher resolution and widescreen.

When I first uploaded it in 2007, youtube had a maximum video quality of 240p, and the compression looked like someone had chewed up the video and spat it out. That has always bothered me with this video, so here it is again with more pixels. I also went to the trouble of extending it to 16:9 and fixed a few bits, which was a lot more work than I anticipated.

Enjoy

Theres a lot of those "sleepers" in Germany. But they are mostly very unreliable and those guys have to put more work hours in them than they are able to drive them. A new engine every year is nothing unusual for these guys, but they get them cheap.

I'm sure in many instances you're correct about his garden. It can be incredibly hard to grow things outside their native areas/environment. I try to do it myself, and it does take longer and more work to get them to fruit (I have some loquats and Asian pears growing here in N Cali, outside their preferred zones. The loquats fruited for the first time this year, after 8-10 years in the ground. The Asian pears are even older, and have yet to bloom. I hope I have better luck with my new nectarine tree.)

I just thought that finding out about these odd plants, finding where they might be, and collecting the seeds would be incredibly difficult for him, even with help. Also, he seemed to have quite a collection of seeds, I'm guessing some of them haven't been planted yet.

Obviously I wasn't very clear, but I wasn't referring to the video. I was just imagining doing the animation myself and it offends my sensibilities for wasted time.

It makes me anxious thinking about how much time I'd waste in the day working on this video making each of those tiny, tiny movements. I don't know why the idea of doing this bothers me more than claymation or legonimation or normal drawn animation, but I guess it seems like more work, more trivial, and less worthwhile.

Aesthetically looks nice and is more appealing in that way.

Personally usability/navigating is what i think is an issue.
Navigating is more difficult(as in more work)
Cant just click on 'discussion' to get to recent comments like you can now(clicking on comments). Have to use the sub menu. Also 'Watch' has to use sub menu to get to a front page(although i do like 'hot' and 'just published' in the menu). Sift talk also more difficult to access. The more difficult to get to the less traffic it will see. Current drop down is much easier then having to navigate to the left hand side to get to the sub menu.

I found myself using my back browser button cos its easier when changing between front page and a video ive clicked on. Right now i don't need to do that(can just click video button)

Also change stresses me out. You know, cos i'm old

Maybe i just need a couple beers.

Why would it have to track the dancers to be considered realtime? All my games are real time 3d, they certainly don't track me dancing, or doing much of anything really.

I think the term we want to use is pre-calculated. The particle movements were chosen before hand much like a motion capture, but the rendering is still realtime and thus thing like camera angles can be changed.

I was disappointed because I noticed the lack of true interaction, and when somethings the performers did would effect the particle effects while others wouldn't. That annoyed me even. We have years of tech to monitor actors in real time space, it may have taken a bit more work but this could all have been done with realtime interactions.

I'm not sure the failure of the news to construct a narrative is necessarily a bad thing. Surely we should embrace confusion as necessary if we want to work at understanding anything? It would be very easy to subscribe to a particular story of the world, to sacrifice reality for the sake of not feeling bewildered.

I also think the deliberate attempt to confuse your opposition by taking contradictory actions, or a deliberate attempt to keep your population feeling as though they are besieged through fighting false flag wars is quite different from what occurs in UK politics. Here we have complex systems where I think it is very hard to really determine cause and effect. That is not a deliberate ploy, I just think that is the nature of reality. Not that understanding is impossible, just that it takes more work than being told it by a politic or by the news (who, lets be honest, probably don't know either).

Yes, it is, but it's not designed to make themselves more work. That's silly.
"Decided not to"...because a family court judge can't vacate a state fee, only the support order. He has to see another judge. Family court is not superior court, and should not interfere with superior court issues. There are numerous reasons why these courts are separate.
It's not about 'making the charge stick', it's about following the same rules everyone else follows, rules designed to make a process work properly, if not faster. It's about getting the right thing done by the right people with the authority to fix it, based on the right evidence, not randomly doing what you think is right for a single defendant in a single extremely odd case based on what someone feels.

...and apparently one can use a built in simple editor to modify the publicly available stock wire frame models to match them exactly to the item in the photo, movie, painting, etc. I see that it's likely more work that they imply, but far less work than previous editors or other ways of doing photo realistic CG. I give a tentative thumbs up.

Schuko all the way, best plug on the planet (at the moment). Ground always attaches first, the socket forms a protective casing and pins can not be touched long before contact happens, is protected from elements better, latched inlets (both pins need to push on them to allow the plug thru), can be plugged in two orientations.. Seems counterintuitive that it would be the safest to have neutral and live be allowed to switch places but it prevents highly dangerous practice of connecting earth and neutral inside the appliance, 50% of the time that would short and trip the fuses. Appliance manufacturers HAS to follow basic safety quidelines. Also means onnecting a plug is easy, just breen-yellow to ground, rest is up to you which way you want them. In fact, most of use can't remembers which color is neutral and which is live as they are BOTH treated as live.

Also they don't have fuses in the plug. Again, seems counterintuitive but the fuse is meant to protect individual parts of the circuit. The fuse in the appliances them selves protect the appliance, not it's cord. The fuses on the wall sockets have to be built to protect all cabling, both in and out of the wall.

Small details but it forces buildings to be built with higher standards, less shortcuts can be made.

One feature on Schuko is that when pulled from the cable, the plug leaves the socket first. In UK plugs, you can have a situation where someone trips on a wire and the wire will leave the plug, plug stays in the wall (or wall socket is damaged too) Making the weak point the plug-socket connection, the wire will stay firmly screwed inside the plug, socket and plug will be undamaged. There are L shape plugs too with Shcuko so this is not always the case but most often, those are incased and molded: your appliance will take the hit instead and fly off the desk. Also stops dangerous cable pulling with long cables with extensions for ex in construction sites. You have to actually go and move it yourself. Safer, more work but safer (yes, there are few cases where we knot the wires to stop it happening but when done by a professional, we know how to knot them so that the force is not pulling or bending the plugs at all, otherwise they can disconnect by them selves, often modus operandi when rigging lights)

Also, the pins are round, making bent pins something that just wont happen unless you drive a truck over them. Damaged, bent pins will be destroyed in the process, preventing someone to just bend them back in shape: the tube will not be round again.. It's a genius design.

Only thing that it is horrible at is transformers, small PSUs that takes up sometimes three sockets as Shcuko is more compact, the extensions are smaller then too.. So sometimes two wall sockets can take one PSU and we end up with lots of extensions chained with half of the sockets filled (i got 600 led lights in my living room, takes 4 extensions to get them all running, half of the sockets are used....)

I agree that humans are influencing climate change, but this comment completely misstates the result of the Cook report.

Quoted from the abstract:

" examining 11 944 climate abstracts from 1991–2011 matching the topics 'global climate change' or 'global warming'. We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming"

32.6% of the 11,944 - that's where they indicated that 97% of the papers said that humans were either 1) responsible for 50+ % of the observed warming (a small %) or 2) influencing the climate (most of the papers). Yes, humans are influencing the climate. Are they the primary driver? Maybe, but maybe not. More work is needed.

Great. I tried Crossfit and I thought it was actually quite cool for a bit. However I had specific goals and Crossfits main problem is its unwillingness to adapt.

Here's the idea, you go in and you're given a notebook to track your progress (at the place I went to at least). You tell them your goals and write them down, then you record the workouts you do and the time you do them in ect.

Time: They time how fast you can go through various workouts which seems fine. Until you are doing things badly because you are trying to speed through them, and there's not a lot of reason to try and be FASTER every time. It makes sense to me to limit a workout to say 20 mins, it does not to try and beat your time of doing the same workout by 30 seconds or so. It just leads to sloppy reps and injuries.

Goals: Your goals btw don't matter. It's just a bunch of "I wanna be fitter" usually. My goals were very specific though because they had to do with my chosen profession (soccer referee) and the fact that I really don't care how much I can lift or what I look like.

Looks: They try to make this about fitness, it's all about being able to do MORE WORK. Being fit is it's own reward and being an athlete throughout life is what's cool. On this idea they refuse to have mirrors. I remember having mirrors growing up having Tae Kwon Do classes. Why were their mirrors? So you can look at what you are doing and adjust your form accordingly, they're a great took. The same goes for high school in weightlifting. You can look at yourself lift in the mirror and adjust how you are doing it. Instead they have people there correcting your form, often I found doing a bad job of it and in my case even debating with each other how I ,with heavy weights on my shoulders, should be lifting things. Yeah they don't want you admiring your body or something, the principle is stupid because SOME PEOPLE are there just for vanity and they have mirrors at home. I am there so I can do these things right like I know how, a mirror helps me with that.

Crossfit is a good idea, but I would like it to be less like the rigid religion I found and more flexible to what those paying would like. I'm not paying to join a cult, it's a club of fitness and I can do more leg lifts while you're using the kettlebells.

So who's gonna help me start a gym that'll be an answer to those Crossfit gyms. That are a bit less intense and a bit more focussed on making the gym fun and productive on your terms rather than theirs? Kickstart It!

Keep on dismantling regulations, destroying unions. Collective bargaining power is a curseword that needs to stop, right? It hurts profit.

Walmart is doing this, because it can. Profit driven corporate logically sees all costs hurting the company. Less wages, more work hours equals better profit. That system does not have a word for caring about humans wellbeing. Keeping the workforce barely in working condition is the goal, giving them a cent too much is a travesty. If only they would work for free...

No one that worships free market as savior don't seem to understand that economy does not work on human level, on human logic and morality. It is working on totally different set of rules and it should be our responsibility to regulate that system to work for us. Now we work for it and on it's rules and a dollar from a dead mans back is equal to a dollar from a happy mans hand. Economy does not see the difference between fair and unfair. All it sees is numbers.