Dithering is used quite frequently in PICO-8 projects at the “native” (128x128) resolution. Here’s an example from a few years ago: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=110273#p
The excellent book, “Rites Of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age”—which uses this infamous incident as a jumping-off point from which to explore Modernity as an incipient artistic and social phenomenon that accelerates during the interwar period—concludes that this account of the crowd’s reaction was, at the very least, highly embellished, and not dissimilar to tall tales about crowds fleeing from the Lumière brothers’ image of a train bearing down upon them. But since these stories are contemporary to the events, they do nevertheless tell us something important about the spirit of the age.
The exact number “24” may be a standard for historical reasons, but a frame rate AROUND 24 is not an arbitrary standard. Higher frame rates require more light so that the image is properly exposed for the 1/(2x frame rate) of a second (assuming a 180-degree shutter angle) that the shutter is open. Doubling the frame rate requires doubling the amount of incident light, so going to 120 fps from 24 requires ~5x more light for a given ISO rating and aperture.
If you think about how light falls off in proportion to the square of its distance from the source—and that generally actors don’t stand in one place, but move through large spaces where they must appear to be lit evenly—you start to see that this is not just a question of “efficient LED lighting.” Shooting at high frame rates requires an enormous amount of light that cannot easily (read: cheaply, quickly, without higher expenses) be brought to bear in a normal production outside of controlled studio conditions.
High-CRI LED lighting is about ten times as efficient as the old film-making standard of incandescent lighting. Inverse square law affects incandescent lighting in exactly the same way, but they still managed to shoot indoor scenes at 24fps using it. Switching incandescent lighting for LED, keeping light locations and power use the same, will make every point about 10 times brighter than it was before. Therefore LED lighting is enough to shoot at about 240fps.
I’m guessing you haven’t worked in the film business, as ‘more efficient’ is not the same as ‘brighter’ in real-world conditions on a film set. LED lighting brings efficiencies in power use, weight, and heat, but nowhere near the quoted figure in terms of raw output due to optical loss, color control, diffusion, among other things.
Unless you are James Cameron shooting Avatar III on a soundstage with (close to) a blank-cheque from the studio, you are still limited in terms of space (the constraints of the location given the size of the light and its supporting stand), time (the time to set up and adjust each light properly, including last-minute adjustments), labor (someone’s got to plug all that in, run the cables, etc.), and cost/availability (you don’t always get the lights you want for a given budget).
Beyond that, you’re also considering aperture and ISO from a creative standpoint; maybe you don’t want to shoot wide open for reasons of image control, and so you may spend your lumen budget on ensuring that a particular scene can be exposed at, say, f/5.6 at ISO 100. Or you may want to spend your lumens on lens filtration, which produces a specific effect but further cuts down the incident light.
In short, no, you do not have 10x light available to spend on frame rate, and for any marginal gains in raw output, most cinematographers are thinking about what creative choices it opens up for the film; I would never burn additional lumens to shoot at 120fps just for the sake of A/V fanboys on the internet, unless the scene requires slow-motion or high-speed capture for postproduction reasons. Technical choices in this industry should always be motivated by the need to solve creative problems effectively, quickly, and within budget.
You’re describing something real; I’m a screenwriter and have worked on studio films where this kind of character arc was encouraged. (I wouldn’t call it a distinct structure because it can be mapped onto a very similar, traditional three-part framework.) It is, however, very much not an artistic decision. The reason for the prevalence of this arc in expensive, family-oriented movies is because studio executives (or worse, the CEs at production companies) are uncomfortable with characters who make bad choices, and think audiences will reject them. Maybe they’re not wrong— but this is a relatively recent development and one of the thousand reasons why movies have become so boring.
More satisfying (in my opinion) arcs tend to follow a psychoanalytic path: a character with some unaddressed pathological issue ends up in a serious crisis. The crisis forces them to acknowledge the issue and change slightly. The difference between a comedy and a tragedy is that in a tragedy, the change happens too late. (An interesting variant in tragedy is that the change happens in time, but unexpectedly turns out for the worse—think of the end of The Godfather.)
This sentiment is often repeated by people who should know better (Adam Gopnik, no less) but it’s always seemed to me patently false. PKD was a highly skillful prose writer, but it’s often not entirely appreciated that he wrote to produce a deliberately comic and ironic effect. (Read Lem on PKD’s “transmutation of kitsch into art.”) This is what nearly all of the overly-serious film adaptations of his work miss: he was quite funny, and intended to be.
You can argue that some of his books were written too quickly, or deploy his usual tricks less successfully, but that doesn’t qualify as mediocrity. For that, look to most “hard” sci-fi, Reddit fan-fiction, and LLM-generated slop.
Let me put into personal context: I have loved PKD's work for almost 40 years now, and I think I have read all that I found from him or about him. This said, good prose is different from the one he turned out. Compare him to his friend "ELRON" - now he was a master storyteller. Compare him to - say - Stephen King. He's not playing in the same league, maybe not even the same game. OTOH they did not have what he had - he was. great writer in spite of his often poor prose.
With respect, I have no personal investment in defending the quality of PKD’s prose; I wouldn’t even count him among my favorite authors. I’m a professional writer—and while that doesn’t make my opinion authoritative, as writers disagree on many points large and small, and there are fewer professional rules to observe than your high-school English teacher would have you believe— I’m offering a technical appraisal of his sentences, in the same manner that a mechanic may tell you, “no, your timing belt is fine—you have at least another fifty-thousand miles on it. Whoever told you otherwise was trying to cheat you.”
If by “ELRON” you mean L. Ron Hubbard—well, the shocks are worn out, the muffler’s falling off, and the tires are flat. The car’s totaled, and unless you have some personal attachment to it, I’d have it hauled off to the junkyard. (My opinion on King is more complicated—it’s a fine car, I suppose, if you’re partial to that make, but the brand ain’t what it used to be.)
This isn’t a great venue for sentence analysis, but reading PKD’s early, extremely funny, short story, “Oh, To Be A Blobel!” is instructive. [1] Read it aloud, if you can. Note the little details he throws away, the way he sneaks ironic jokes into seemingly objective descriptions. It’s a Borscht Belt routine masquerading as a science-fiction story, and perfectly constructed. But if this seems like “bad” writing to you, consider that you may not have entirely passed through his veil of irony.
That's an interesting insight, thank you. Are there any good articles about his deliberately comic / ironic approach, or his approach in general? His reliance on cliche story building troupes (like private detectives) can be off-putting at times, would love to understand better what was behind his choices.
A good starting point is Stanislaw Lem, “Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans.” [1] For more recent analysis, read Jonathan Lethem: “My initial responsiveness to Dick’s work was to delight in his mordant surrealist onslaught against the drab prison of consensual reality… It took me a while to grasp how Dick’s novels, those of the early sixties especially, function as a superb lens for critiquing the collective psychological binds of the postwar embrace of consumer capitalism.” [2] You can also read PKD himself; he gave a few lectures that give some insight into his thinking and intentional process. [3]
I’d also suggest that when talking about PKD, it’s especially important to distinguish between “cliché” and “trope,” since these two concepts are often improperly equated in popular TV-Trope-ified discourse. A cliché, e.g. “True love conquers all,” tends to lull the reader; it terminates further thought. But a trope is merely a familiar anchor point, an allusion to a literary tradition, and (potentially) an invitation to a dialogue between the current text and some previous work. (“The hero prepares by putting on his armor,” for example, is a trope that dates back to the Iliad.)
Dick often begins with a character or situation anchored in a familiar setting (possibly for more mercenary than aesthetic reasons—he was after all scraping together a living in the context of pulp paperback novels) but step by step strips away the anchors, leaving the reader untethered to settled meaning or “consensual reality.” The undercover narcotics cop turns out to be a schismatic, unaware that he’s surveilling himself. The noir-like investigator gets arrested by another investigator who seems to be his double, pulled into another precinct identical to his own… etc.
If the lack-of-respectability of his materials bothers you (as it seemed to bother Gopnik), it may be helpful to see PKD in the tradition of Kafka, and as a precursor to the post-modernists like Robert Coover, who gleefully and intentionally play games within familiar texts to comic and profound effect. But PKD really isn’t so far away from the most interesting of his much-maligned SF pulp colleagues. See A.E. van Vogt’s “The Weapon Shops of Isher,” where the author plays games with doubles, shifting narrators, and familiar pulp characters to intentionally strange and dislocating effect—although in his case, the kitsch never quite makes the transmuting leap into art.
Ubik was intentionally hilarious, with the never-fully-explained-but-there-you-go eye-eater, and the briefcase psychiatrist intended to drive you insane! (Or maybe that was from 3 Stigmata?)
Mark Weiser told me that Ubik was the inspiration of the term he coined, "Ubiquitous Computing"!
Sure—in order of mention, that would be “A Scanner Darkly” and “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”
The slyly comic tone of the latter may surprise those who’ve only seen its rather dour film adaptation (“Blade Runner”), which the original novel resembles only slightly.
Ah okay, thank you. I feel a bit lame as they are pretty recognizable titles. I never got into the blade runner movies outside of cultural knowledge of the plot and know nothing of "A Scanner Darkly". Going to add them to my reading list so thank you.
A simple technique not listed here for drawing contour edges:
1) Create an array storing all unique edges of the faces (each edge being composed of a vertex pair V0, V1), as well as the two normals of the faces joined by that edge (N0 and N1).
2) For each edge, after transformation into view space: draw the edge if sign(dot(V0, N0)) != sign(dot(V0, N1)).
I work in Hollywood. Like USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, the UCLA Center for Scholars & Storytellers is just another example of a political advocacy group using a university as cover for ideological messaging, under the auspices of “research.”
Note that both Annenberg and S&S rarely, if ever, publish the raw data used to draw these suspiciously blunt conclusions about media representation (in this case, about supposedly “dated and unrelatable romantic tropes”); they merely crank out glossy press releases designed to be regurgitated by overworked trade-magazine bloggers. Underneath these are lousy “self-reporting” surveys with data carefully massaged to fulfill an intended purpose.
There’s a lot of snake oil peddled in town, but this stuff irritates me the most, as it is often reported uncritically and discussed without any reflection on why these “studies” are conducted, or who funds them.
I do some light hacking in iDOS for fun as well. Might as well go straight to Borland C++ 3.1 [0] (the "professional" version) over Turbo C++ these days.
When you eventually hit the Great Wall of 16-bit real mode, I recommend switching to OpenWatcom [1], aka "the compiler that built Doom," which comes with something closer (relatively speaking) to a modern toolchain. DJGPP [2] has been recommended as well, although I found it more trouble to set up.
It’s great. I’ve been running iDOS regularly on a 3rd-gen iPad Pro, at 26800 cycles (roughly a 486DX4 100Mhz). I can run every DOS game well supported by DOSBox, write in WordPerfect 6.2, install and run Windows 3.1 at full speed, and compile and debug code via Borland C++ 3.1/4.6, or OpenWatcom 2.0. The file system is easily accessible through the Files app, so I can transfer files in and out without tedious mounting of images.
My only (and very minor) complaint is that it relies on the ancient DOSBox-0.74-3, rather than one of the forks with broader support and better emulation of exotic hardware, like DOSBox-X.
With regard to UTM SE, I’ve had mixed results as well. For best results, I recommend installing Windows 95, which was very performant. (Otherwise, keep in mind that the SE stands for ‘Slow Edition’ — really.)
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