Knew he was a fake. You know, in the late 80's we had a massive conspiracy in the music world as Milli Vanilli were discovered as having faked their performances, and that they didn't even record their own songs. It caused such an uproar in the music industry at the time that it was on the news for months, the duo was stripped of their awards, shamed by the masses and one of the performers committed suicide.

Little did we know that a decade or two later it would be not only with this sort of fraud be common place, it would be the defacto standard in Pop music (and others.. I highly suspect Country because most of those male singers sound identical, they don't write their own songs and many visibly do not play their guitar even though you hear it being played when they are on stage). Big acts like Bieber are made famous because of their charisma and their sex appeal... and yes, that was the intent for his teenybopper audience. Their flat or unpolished singing voices mean nothing when a computer program just fixes their voice digitally and then they go on stage and just pretend to sing. The handful of times they actually sing themselves the performances are horrid.

Justin Bieber can sing a little blurb on a talk show or over the internet and sound half decent.. millions worth of singing lessons will do that. But when it comes right down to it he's the same no talent hack as the vast majority of the 'pop' world. What is even more funny is that the vast majority of websites, news channels, etc that report this don't even MENTION the fact that he somehow keeps 'singing' even while throwing up. The sad fact is most people have either accepted or become blinded to the fact that Mili Vanili were only precursors to a new industry standard.

In the end I feel bad the most for our children. They are growing up with this fake garbage and don't even know it. It's all so focus tested and programmed in that each new hit is the same and they don't care. It's why with my daughter I try and teach her to be eclectic with her musical tastes. I really don't care if I don't like what she listens to, just so long as she know how fake pop music is these days. Thankfully she's got her dads musical genes.

>> ^EvilDeathBee:

>> ^ForgedReality:
Looks kinda lame and unpolished. Typical Unreal Engine ugliness abound. Why won't that stinking pile just go the fuck away and stop snaking its way into games I might otherwise want to play?

Oh please. DNF may use Unreal, but the renderer is a custom rewrite. You would never have noticed "Unreal ugliness" if you didn't know it was Unreal. Are you honestly saying Mortal Kombat 2011 looks ugly? Batman Arkham Asylum looks ugly? Are you saying this looks ugly:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzjsTt_DzCw
Unreal only looks as bad as what the artists are capable of, and the newer versions of the engine are looking... unreal.


Actually, I'm not sure you know what I mean. The way the game looks is what prompted me to check if my assumptions were correct. I didn't know it used UE until I looked it up prior to that post, and the way everything is shiny, like it has plastic wrap on it is one such aspect to which I refer.

I don't like the engine because it tends (in my experience) to not be very robust and has several issues which always seem to nag at me no matter what game it is that uses it. Epic endorses NVIDIA, because they give Epic lots of money to do so, likely. As a result, they aren't as friendly to ATI (AMD) cards. It's possiboe it was the cards I was using, but other games never exhibited the same behaviors on ATI and not NVIDIA as UE games did. One such issue would be vsync seeming to behave incorrectly on ATI.

Oh, and don't even get me started on anti-aliasing... what the fuck modern game these days doesn't support AA? Oh, right. UE games. And if you manage to get it working by forcing it in your drivers, (doesn't always work, especially on ATI), then you get a much higher framerate hit than you should. Other engines handle it just fine, but for some reason, UE has a very hard time with AA, even on extremely powerful cards. Shitty engine.

>> ^ForgedReality:

Looks kinda lame and unpolished. Typical Unreal Engine ugliness abound. Why won't that stinking pile just go the fuck away and stop snaking its way into games I might otherwise want to play?


Oh please. DNF may use Unreal, but the renderer is a custom rewrite. You would never have noticed "Unreal ugliness" if you didn't know it was Unreal. Are you honestly saying Mortal Kombat 2011 looks ugly? Batman Arkham Asylum looks ugly? Are you saying this looks ugly:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzjsTt_DzCw

Unreal only looks as bad as what the artists are capable of, and the newer versions of the engine are looking... unreal.

Looks kinda lame and unpolished. Typical Unreal Engine ugliness abound. Why won't that stinking pile just go the fuck away and stop snaking its way into games I might otherwise want to play?

Great points spoco2! I couldn't agree more.

>> ^spoco2:

>> ^PalmliX:
I agree with the poster that models should be used more often, but CGI is simply not lazy. It's an insane amount of work in and of itself, which makes it even more frustrating that it dominates as much as it does these days

CGI is lazy, well, it can be. CGI, when used properly can be utterly stunning. Avatar, Golem, Benjamin Button and others all attest to the wonders that CGI can bring to a film, as to the countless 'invisible' improvements that CG can be used for.
Now the problem is that in films of the ilk of Species et al, we are talking about low-mid level budget movies. At this level CG tends to be unpolished and lazy and stands out like a sore thumb. And that's because it does take a lot of work to make it REALLY good, but far less work to make it 'ok', and 'enough'. These types of films used to have physical effects, and quite often you would watch them almost solely for these effects because they were creative and imaginative and wonderful. The way they worked with real objects to get around the limitations in budget are fantastic. The way they get around a limitation in budget for a film with CG is just to half cook the CG.

Even worse though is that because CG is so hard to do 'right' you get even films with insanely huge budgets containing CG that stands out like a sore thumb, where a physical effect would have been better.

>> ^PalmliX:

I agree with the poster that models should be used more often, but CGI is simply not lazy. It's an insane amount of work in and of itself, which makes it even more frustrating that it dominates as much as it does these days


CGI is lazy, well, it can be. CGI, when used properly can be utterly stunning. Avatar, Golem, Benjamin Button and others all attest to the wonders that CGI can bring to a film, as to the countless 'invisible' improvements that CG can be used for.

Now the problem is that in films of the ilk of Species et al, we are talking about low-mid level budget movies. At this level CG tends to be unpolished and lazy and stands out like a sore thumb. And that's because it does take a lot of work to make it REALLY good, but far less work to make it 'ok', and 'enough'. These types of films used to have physical effects, and quite often you would watch them almost solely for these effects because they were creative and imaginative and wonderful. The way they worked with real objects to get around the limitations in budget are fantastic. The way they get around a limitation in budget for a film with CG is just to half cook the CG.


Even worse though is that because CG is so hard to do 'right' you get even films with insanely huge budgets containing CG that stands out like a sore thumb, where a physical effect would have been better.

what.

Someone edgefinds or sponge filters or whatever this is, and it gets sifted?

I think www.smashingmagazine.com has a tute for the scanner darkly effect.

Like, THIS monstrosity is a photoshop filter that was included back in 97 and no one used it because it was so ugly.

Back in 92 you could get away with this effect if you where a grunge alternative band on a low budget who needed something rough and unpolished for MTV.

This is the video version of drawing spider man using the grafitti tool in MS Paint.

This is the video version of playing the audio from the trailer with a "sci-fi" filter on it.

And it got sifted.

what.

For a game that's been roughly 10 years in the making (or more) Duke looks ridiculously unpolished. I still think the whole game is a lie they've been telling people as some kind of sick joke on the gaming community.

I actually like that kind of 'unpolished' wavering quality about her. It's charming.

In reply to this comment by HollywoodBob:
Yeah, she's a little off key at times, almost seem to me like she's nervous about the song, plus she's got that deer in the headlights look in her lovely eyes.

Different song, better performance. She seems a lot more comfortable, if a tad cold.

I wasn't a big fan of Ju-On, to be honest. I feel as though J-Horror opts for the shock instead of the story a lot of times. Their stories feel lazy even if the concept is attention grabbing, such as in Ringu where the concept is a VHS tape that can kill you.

Ringu wasn't nearly as good as The Ring. I've analyzed the US version forwards and backwards, and it is about as damn perfect as a horror story can be. I can write my dissertation on it, but I'll save everyone from sheer boredom. Let me say this, however. In the US version, The Director, Gore Verbinski, did a great job of crafting a great pace and tone for the story, and the screenwriter(s) did an excellent job of taking the lazier and unpolished Japanese version of the story and creating something a touch more in-depth. For instance, in Ringu it is suggested that the mother of Sadako might have had sex with a sea monster or something like that, but in the US version the father of Samara was a horse breeder, and because Samara's mother was incapable of giving birth, well, you can probably see where it went from there. They imply that Samara was birthed in a horse. What makes this significant over the Japanese version, in my opinion, is that the the US theme can easily be summed up as demonstrating the price of "crimes against nature" and we recognize it as something cautionary which is where the great horror mythologies begin.

The Japanese version isn't insinuating a cautionary tale, but rather just displaying a series of supernatural or metaphysical evils, because if the mother of Sadako was to have sex with a sea monster or the sea itself (or whatever is being implied there), then it's not grounded within our reality and therefore it's impossible for us to glean a cautionary tale from their story. It becomes fantasy horror at that point, and without a solid theme for us to relate with on a subconscious Joseph Campbell sort of way, then (for me) the story doesn't succeed as well. I've kind of glossed over the differences in the interest of not writing a diatribe. These are broad strokes here, but I think I did a decent job illustrating my point.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Dylan, Harmonica, Unpolished, early genius' to 'Dylan, Harmonica, Unpolished, early genius, 60s' - edited by Zifnab

i agree. he's unpolished, and the fact that he is disabled causes me to pay more attention. he's kinda cute and charming, and has a nice presence on stage, and the humor was a bit of a one-trick pony. regardless, i am sure it marks a major personal triumph for him -- and i am sure much of his support was from the sympathy vote.