6 billion dollar crap
This promo pic for Musk's stupid "new" pneumatic tube was clearly built in Poser. Same program I always use to make pictures of Polistra and friends. The people in the promo are well done. They're standard figures in Poser, which is aimed exactly at this sort of commercial promo or tutorial art. It's not quite automatic, but a fairly good digital craftsman can pick up Poser, load up the people, and pose them in convincing ways, without a lot of from-scratch work.

Aside from the people, the picture is blazingly stupid. Where are the tubes? Nowhere. And if you could find the tubes, how would you put the pods into them? You'd have to roll them across the carpet with passengers inside, or maybe pick them up with a forklift and carry them to the ends of the tubes.

Irritating, dammit.

When I do a promo pic for my own pointless moneyless models, I pay attention to functionality. For instance,

this Signal House was based on a crude drawing found in an 1827 magazine. I expanded it (with a little steam-punkish imagination) into a structure that would work if you built it. The model itself does everything it should do. When you press the A key on the controls, the proper valves are pulled and the proper lamps are lit to signal the pattern for A. And so on.

Oh well. I'm not part of a 6 billion dollar project. If I were part of a 6 billion dollar project, I'd have to work hard to create hyper-loopy products that are blatantly and obviously nonfunctional and illogical. As it is, just pissing around with hobby crafts, I can get away with sloppy stuff that only works and only makes sense.

This is one tiny instance of a large and worrisome trend. In the world of software, as in journalism and science and most 'intellectual' pursuits, the paid professionals are producing crazy and murderous ratshit, while the unpaid amateurs are producing useful programs or interesting experiments or valid observations.

  ¶ 7:38 PM