Time Immortal

Vox Day points out a trend I admit I never noticed before. But his analysis makes sense.

Isn’t it interesting how the secularists always seem to do whatever they claim to be afraid of conservatives and Christians doing? It looks as if secular Europeans are far more puritanical than the American religious right would ever dream of being. Some time ago I wrote that women’s rights were a disease… it’s clear that cancer would have been the most apt comparison. Perhaps by the time men are banned from smoking, drinking, having sex, playing video games, watching football, or leaving the house without express written consent from a woman, people will begin to realize that my warning was dead-on.

This is in response to news that the EU is considering implementing new guidelines to eliminate sexist content, including portrayals of “gender roles,” from television advertising. Which means: no more Eva Herzigova lingeré commercials, and no more bare-chested male construction workers selling soda pop.

Not that we need such things in advertising, I’ll grant. It’s still a good point: I thought it was supposed to be us uptight, Christian folk that were the prudes and puritans in the world? And yet, more often than not, it seems to be the case that it is secular politicians who are the ones calling for restrictions on television content and the consumption of “vice” products like alcohol and tobacco.

Okay, we can grant the exception of those Christian fringe groups in America that lobby against Grand Theft Auto. They lobby for policy change…but one can’t help but notice that they never really get anywhere. This situation is different.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

You can read about it here, O Reader.

Extraordinarily lifelike characters are to begin appearing in films and computer games thanks to a new type of animation technology.

Emily — the woman in the above animation — was produced using a new modelling technology that enables the most minute details of a facial expression to be captured and recreated.

She is considered to be one of the first animations to have overleapt a long-standing barrier known as ‘uncanny valley‘ — which refers to the perception that animation looks less realistic as it approaches human likeness.

Researchers at a Californian company which makes computer-generated imagery for Hollywood films started with a video of an employee talking. They then broke down down the facial movements down into dozens of smaller movements, each of which was given a ‘control system’.

The team at Image Metrics — which produced the animation for the Grand Theft Auto computer game — then recreated the gestures, movement by movement, in a model. The aim was to overcome the traditional difficulties of animating a human face, for instance that the skin looks too shiny, or that the movements are too symmetrical.

“Ninety per cent of the work is convincing people that the eyes are real,” Mike Starkenburg, chief operating officer of Image Metrics, said.

The video is a tad blocky, as is almost always the case with YouTube content, but the technology on display is insane. Image Metrics has done something amazing here — pushed further, this will be an amazing breakthrough in digital character animation.