Yeah, we were the same way. No rules lawyering at the table, 30 sec max for lookups then best judgement. Keep everything rolling so the laughs and momentum didn't start to lag.

Funny you mentioned Tunnels & Trolls. I'm still using the old grievous injury chart from that set just to spice stuff up and give the folks a little acting fodder for their characters.

I'm still considering going back to 1E right now... the interesting bit is that the wives/kids that get pulled into my games now "get" the talent tree/spec style system that 4E introduced. I like the concept of the eberron-style "dramatic actions" to use. I like the concept of powers for everyone (poor fighters in 1E)... I even like the care that's been taken into balancing everything this time out.

I just don't like a perfectly good story to be made tedious with an hour-long combat session and micromanagement for dots, bloody, focus, challenge, aoe, movement, opportunity... all that stuff. If I want that, I'll play Warhammer or Axis & Allies or any number of perfectly good wargames.

But for D&D, roll initiative, say what your character does with feeling and get your THAC0 on. You're doing something wrong at my table if you aren't trying to chew scenery or crack everyone up when it's your turn.

Poor attempt at a troll, but I'll bite, Mr. AC.

Chainmail (D&D's spiritual daddy) was a tactical wargame, as is Warhammer.

D&D is a Role Playing Game. You know: tell stories, have adventures.

Tactics are all well and good if that's the kind of game you want to play. It's not the kind of game I want to play, and it's not the kind of game most folks at my table want to play, either.

I want to get through an "episode" per 4ish hour session, not a paragraph of story progress and maybe two encounters.

There's a reason I've been holding onto my huge collection of 1st edition books for all these years -- they work, the rules are flexible, and most people at my table have them more or less memorized. I can put a few figures on a mat, not sweat the finer strategery of combat, and kill a few orcs in 10 minutes with almost zero bookkeeping apart from initiative and hit points.

This keeps the story moving and keeps combat fun.

Might come as a shock to you, but I encourage my players to act. Tunnels & Trolls had it right way back when with their grievous injury chart. Roleplaying is about far more than magical hit point numbers.

I've likely been DMing longer than you've been alive, so I'm just gonna laugh at the rest.

It's a pretty cool proof of concept, but I absolutely shudder at the amount of additional setup time something like this would require for campaigns.

I've run a couple of 4E campaigns after finally letting go of my 1E rules, and not to put too fine a point on things... combat takes way the hell too long when you're forced to deal with miniatures and it just bogs everything down -- don't get me started on the amount of stickers and markers that are required for bookkeeping now.

A couple people at my table like the more strategic combat options that minis offer, but the majority prefer that the story advances more than a paragraph per play session. As the DM, I'm one of them. I'd rather roll initiative and talk through fast-paced combat.

WOTC wants to sell their absolutely hideous plastic minis, and lots of them, so it's in their best interest to make the game mini focused. There are so many rules that depend on movement and proximity that you've basically got to remove the entire combat system and house-rule over it if you forego the minis.

I've seen some folks that use an LCD projector and Photoshop in lieu of a battlemat, but that's still an enormous amount of prep time for a campaign.

I work in advertising.

People hate advertising. They're inundated with it. People in advertising hate advertising (at least on the creative side)... but they recognize that it's a necessary evil, and it's one of the most reliable ways for slacker artist types like myself to get gainful career employment. I have no illusions. I'm helping sell shit to people that they don't want or need.

Usually, I work in business to business stuff, so I don't have to do the soul-searching thing as often as folks who market for consumer brands/retail.

Occasionally people might enjoy a Superbowl spot, or the like, but those are generally narratives, and they account for the tiniest fraction of a percent of all advertising.

I appreciate the craft and thought process that goes into making effective marketing in the same way that I can appreciate move recaps of classic chess games. That doesn't mean I want to experience them in real-time. I want to experience them on my own terms... marketers' responses have been to simply scream louder and louder so that the advertising can't be avoided.

My $12 movie ticket buys me 20 minutes of advertorial (not including previews) if I want to get a decent seat. I get congratulated on my free nano or wii 200x a day if I forget to disable Flash. Same thing on a different scale.

TLDR: Don't think you know too many folks who create advertising... just ones who sell it. There's a difference.

I doubt it. I've had negative reviews published on Newegg, and their reviews are absolutely essential for some of the cheapie parts you can score... for example, making sure a SATA external chassis actually supports 1gb drives, etc (which is often not in the specs).

In fact, I'd go a step further. Newegg leaves up flames and reviews by 'tards who don't know what they're talking about -- as long as you don't post competitive store URLs or prices, and they let manufacturers (or distributors) reply to reviews directly.

I think their system works about as well as Amazon, personally, and I'm generally confident when I buy from there that I know what I'm getting (again, pretty useful with no-name knockoffs).

They're the evil empire. I don't think they'll ever be seen as cool without being split into smaller companies that can develop their own personalities. And no, having the XBox team dabble in UI doesn't really help. Give me back a programs menu that works!

Honestly, the DoJ would have been doing them a favor to split them up like Ma Bell way back when. I'm not sure they'd have been doing the consumer any favors over the long run, though.

From a marketing standpoint, they need their own messaging: not kneejerk responses to Apple and Google. Speak with confidence on their strengths, but set yourself apart from the competition. Speak on your own terms.

It's really marketing 101. A leader in the industry with that kind of marketshare shouldn't even acknowledge the other guys, let alone focus neurotically on Apple who has like 12% market share (on a good day).

When you're that big, you lead -- not follow. It's just so weird to me that they're determined to acknowledge barbarians at the gate at every opportunity.

People who aren't cool enough for a Mac. Haven't you seen laptop hunters?

In fact, they're marketing to people who have enormous chips on their shoulders about being so entirely uncool (or poor) for Macs.

I jest. They're talking to themselves. Microsoft's insecurities have been laid utterly bare in all their marketing attempts for a decade.

There was a joint interview with Jobs and Gates not too long ago that I'm too lazy to dig up, and a question was asked "what do you envy about the other" -- Gates' answer came off as snide, yet honest: "I wish I had your taste"

They've been at this since the Zune came out and they started marketing to the Wal-Mart demographic. Because Wal-Mart folks like brown things that work almost sorta as well as an iPod at the same price. Because you're not cool enough for an iPod, and you've got a chip on your shoulder about it.

The weird part is... that demographic's pretty much stuck with MS out of ignorance, and MS is tilting at windmills whenever they go against apple. They inevitably end up looking as insane (and sad) as Don Quixote himself.

They're trying so hard to astroturf these days, build a viral movement. I'm not sure they understand that apart from a handful of lunatics/idiots/middle managers out there, there is nobody on earth who actually likes Microsoft. Maybe they do understand, and they're trying to overcompensate?

Their messaging isn't helping any.

So, as a career advertising guy (15 years & counting) I don't get it either.

Round about Vista/Zune, MS and their various agencies of record starting shooting themselves in the foot. I'm here to tell you Crispin/Porter is a great, kooky agency... but they just can't speak to the Wal-Mart moms that MS thinks they're in danger of losing.

Microsoft's achilles heels are Office (in the near term) and Mobile (in the long term). If they lose control over file formats and Exchange lock-in, Microsoft as we know it gets pushed over their tipping point. Over the long term, so many of our common tasks will be moving to mobiles or embedded devices instead of PCs -- and MS let Mobile languish as a steaming pile for the better part of a decade.

But now they're just shitting out me-too copies of consumer electronics.

Maybe the whole thing is misdirection? I don't think so, but there has to be a few smart folks at that company who can see the forest for the trees.

Actually, Mental Ray satellite (as craptastically buggy as it is) still had a 8-thread limit under Maya 2009 sp1a (patch notes say they removed the restriction, but watch your CPU usage with a dual Nehalem and tell me it's not locked to 8 cores still)....

But it's not so much that... I mean if you've got the budget for Renderman Pro or Mental Ray standalone, you've got the budget to build a farm properly, and yeah an i7 is most definitely worth every penny, Nehalem Xeons are great too if someone else is paying the tab. If you're buying Renderman Pro, you're likely getting Xeons.

I've got 3 identical i7s, a core 2 quad and a core 2 duo for rendering here, and whenever I'm doing hair (shave in particular) or some dynamics plug-in work, I get significantly better render time using the core 2 duo due to the nature of multithreading. If you're only using 1 thread on a hyperthreaded quad, you're only using 12% of the available processing power, and it's more efficient to use a slower processor that you can utilize more of, if that makes sense. Same goes for a few repeat offending after effects plug ins (cinelook and magic bullet come to mind here). I mean you could go a step further and run 8 single core VMs on an i7 to saturate the CPU doing a hair scene (actually works pretty well with linux VMs in a pinch).

I do love the i7s from the very bottom of my heart, though. I'm getting almost a 50% gain in frames rendered between q4400s and i7 920s using Mental Ray in most cases.

I'm a big fan of imaging my boxes, as you mentioned. Particularly with a small shop it can be an absolutely maddening time sink to troubleshoot faulty nodes.

I can't think of the last time I ran into the video card issue... might have been lightwave way back when, but I've seen it. The real point here is "make sure the stuff you're buying is suitable for the work you're doing". If the bulk of your software is single threaded still, an i7 box really might not be the best choice. For most folks doing this professionally, it's an awesome choice though. If you're editing HD or 2k/4k over a network, you need to spend a little extra cash to make sure your disk reads and net throughput are up to snuff.

With that goes: if you're using enormous float textures and displacement maps out the ass, you're going to lose a substantial amount of time on disk & network throughput. Go gigabit ethernet at a minimum (it's cheap) and get a nice, fast raid 5 or 6 for your primary storage (and get another big disk to back it up with, at a minimum). Just because you don't need much storage on those render doesn't mean you can cheap out on the drives (ie 5400 rpm throwaways). Disk and network throughput matter and the matter more as you add more render slaves.

Regarding Vista: it depends on your hardware. Up through SP1, I still had a couple of mainboards with unstable (*cough*nforce*cough) drivers in Vista 64, as well as a few pieces of software that required UAC off (eww). Gave up on Vista then and I've had really good, rock solid stability in XP64. Win 7 seems to be shaping up nicely on my 2 oldish Athlon x2 test sandboxes. I think this really depends on preference and available hardware, personally, but it's going to be a non-issue come October anyhow (and thankfully).

All fair points, but I must say that the Mental Ray workflow that's so prevalent among pro-sumer/small studio CG (now that Autodesk owns most everything and bundles MR) is terribly hard on memory usage, displacement or no, 32-bit float or no, physically accurate shading/lighting or no. Renderman is far far more efficient, however due to the licensing costs, not many of the little shops are using it.

The article suggests buying a crapload of boxes with 4GB RAM mainboards, and my argument is that if you find yourself in need of building a render farm of more than a box or two, you're doing yourself a huge disservice by following that advice.

I can tell you first hand that it's a nightmare best avoided to assemble a bunch of assets into layout only to find that you're throwing memory exceptions right & left on deadline.

I stand by that advice: if you're actually to the point of investing a fair bit of cash for some render boxes, spend just a couple more bucks on the mainboard and RAM so you don't build yourself into a corner. I'm talking about a $50 difference (including ram and mainboard) per machine to safeguard against blowing deadlines.

Sure, there are lots and lots of workarounds for memory/detail/physics/computation issues, but on deadline you don't always have the luxury of using those cheats... and sometimes you've just got to brute-force your way through a sequence. Dynamics and rendering in Maya with Shave & a Haircut come to mind. Incredibly powerful, but single-threaded. You'd be better off rendering hair and contact shadow passes on a single P4 than an i7 unless you're using Renderman in this case.

I think you misunderstood me on the crap GPU issue: there are some apps that literally won't launch at all without a certain level of hardware acceleration under Windows. Most pro-level apps have a CLI-only render interface that's commonly invoked by farm management software -- but not all do. The point I was making is: if you're buying a ton of anything, make sure it's going to do what you want it to do ahead of time. It would suck to get a bunch of motherboards in 1U cases that can't even take an AGP/PCI-E video card, and that was preventing you from using the software that you built the farm for.

The main message was really: these guys give you a low-end, once-size-fits-all recipe for building a 16U farm, basically, and at that level of game, I think their advice is pretty poor hardware-wise. You'd be insane to fork over the cash for that much kit and stick 4GB mainboards in there. Imagine someone who had a need for that kind of horsepower but were limiting themselves to the low end of the capability spectrum on such a major purchase when the price difference in the grand scheme of things to future-proof is so small. Not that there's such a thing as future-proofing, but if you're trying to render anything using mental ray with a 4GB system, I can guarantee you that you'll hit a memory wall after playing with ZBrush or mia* physically accurate materials for a few weeks. Or real global illumination etc etc. Particularly under Win32. Sure there are cheats for everything, but they take time too, and sometimes you just need to hit render and know that 1200 frames will be done by Monday AM without spending a huge amount of time tuning cheats.

If you're a small shop, in the vast majority of cases an Autodesk product (or XSI) with Mental Ray bundled, and it's an engine that is not at all comfortable with a 4GB RAM limit.

The article neatly sums up how to build a render box from about 5 years ago, or for a hobbyist who doesn't really push the hardware.

In the last few years, with the prevalence of displacement mapping and linear workflow, file sizes and memory usage to get renders at the quality folks expect of CG work have skyrocketed.

As someone working as a freelance CG/VFX artist, I can tell you a few practical truths:

1. You may not need XP 64 but you need 64-bit if you hope to do high-resolution, or detailed renders in a single pass. An addendum to this is: don't even consider a motherboard that supports less than 8 gigs of ram, and max the thing out. If you are rendering under Windows, you're shooting yourself in the foot if you're stuck on 32-bit, in particular. You will hit a memory wall with a 4gb RAM system very very quickly. Linux 64 is fine. XP 64 (and even my tests with Win7 64 are good). Avoid Vista 64 like the plague.

2. Depending on your primary rendering usage, a Core i7 may actually be working against you with hyperthreading. Quite a few of the big boys (Renderman, Mental Ray) are still licensed per thread. With hyperthreading enabled on the motherboard, an i7 looks like 8 cores to many rendering apps. Relevant example: A dual quad Xeon Mac pro can only use half of the machine's processing power as a Mental Ray satellite node with Maya, because it's licensed to only use 8 threads total. In addition, a lot of compositing apps -- and LOTS of plug-ins -- are single-threaded (I'm looking at you, random After Effects plug-in, and just about any dynamics plug-in for a 3d app). The short of it: if you're going to be rendering with something that's actually capable of saturating a multi-threaded CPU, go for it. But do some research and tests first.

3. You might be able to get away with a crap mainboard video card -- but make sure of it. A few CG apps don't have command-line rendering available, and it'll suck to learn after the fact that the app you're trying to launch on your pile of new 1U servers won't launch because you don't have a decent video card. Linux & Mac OS (even Hackintoshes) are far superior to Windows in this regard -- you'll rarely find an app that refuses to run due to the card. Crap interactivity is fine as long as you can initiate a render.

4. Standardize your render boxes AND WORKSTATIONS on a single platform (ie Linux 64, Win 64, MacOS X 10.5 intel). Lots of apps require shaders to be recompiled per platform, and small studios generally use share/freeware stuff that might not be available on all platforms -- it's much better to work around this issue when you're creating your assets, versus when you've got a delivery deadline looming and you realize that your fancy layered shader looked great on your Win64 previews, but the code isn't available for Linux 64 to render within your lifetime.

Do I get a medal for reading that thing?

At any rate, railing against FTP is kinda quaint seeing as how there are lots and lots of other ways to intercept the data if you've been pwned.

If you've got a keylogger (or registry scraping malware in the case of Win), it doesn't matter if you're got some outlandish quantum encryption link between machines.

The real story here is:

- Wordpress is insecure, news at 11. Lots of injection attacks happen, interestingly they're disproportionately successful on newer versions of Wordpress.
- Substitute "Wordpress" for your favorite off the shelf blog/forum/cms script.
- If you're on a shared hosting plan and one box/instance/etc at the facility has been pwned, it's likely able to capture data going to other machines/VMs on the same subnet, particularly if you're using a ghetto-tastic shared Win server (there are no other kinds... all shared Win-based hosts suck ass on all fronts due to incompetent administration and terrible cpanels).
- If your workstation has been pwned, your FTP passwords are the least of your concerns. Trust me.

I mean, it's nice that the author decided that the world needs a little bit of edumacation, but the big picture is more important than "FTP bad"

To clarify: I'm not talking about using a single sticker to activate a ton of PCs, which is certainly possible under the current OEM activation structure.

To be sure, I have had no moral issues whatsoever pirating Windows in the past, but I consider paying $129-ish per machine to keep version and config parity on my modest home office render farm a bargain in comparison to any alternative (apart from Linux, but we're talking Windows at the moment). I built the machines, and paid to get XP64 OEM for each of them (legitimately under the license terms). I'll be paying to install a Windows 7 OEM on those same Core i7 boxes later this year, and the day that Microsoft refuses activation of an OEM copy on an honest to God homebuild is the day that their platform gets abandoned entirely. An upgrade from XP64 or Vista 64 is most certainly not worth the price from a SOHO point of view when you're dealing with 5-6 machines.

I guess my primary point was that a full, non-upgrade, OEM copy of Windows is both cheaper and more convenient to own in the long run (and even the short term) than an "upgrade" retail box... and the upgrade boxes are retailing for pennies on the dollar less than a full install. There's no compelling reason whatsoever to pay for an "upgrade" box because it's incredibly inconvenient to have to reinstall from one in the long run.

There is no good reason to ever purchase an upgrade copy from Microsoft given pricing, convenience and licensing terms. If your personal moral code objects to sticking an OEM copy of Windows (or education copy for even cheaper) on a machine that isn't technically brand-spanking-new, then fine... but for God's sake don't buy the upgrade copy. Just spring for the full retail install.

You save about $20 off retail (which costs twice as much or more than OEM) to buy yourself about 3 additional hours on every reinstall, and that's the part that chafes me. Or you can buy the OEM copy that's far cheaper and is the exact same as the retail box, minus superfluous packaging and which serial number it accepts.

Until it's as convenient to be 100% EULA-compliant as it is to fudge a little on the OEM terms I'm gonna continue saving money at upgrade time and not lose any sleep over it.

So, Microsoft: make upgrade boxes less of a pain in the ass over the long term -- or make the price on par with the additional hassle -- and I'll consider doing things your way. I don't trust you, I don't respect you, but I'm stuck with you for certain apps. You'd do well to learn a little about customer loyalty from Apple.

But in reality, I buy an OEM copy of Windows Ultimate Whatever from Newegg for $129. I don't have to deal with the utterly retarded upgrade process every time I have to nuke & pave, and I've got an ugly little sticker to refer to when nuke & pave time rolls around.

You're assuming I give two shits about honoring the finer points of Microsoft's licensing, which I don't. Is MS going to come after me? Are they going to deactivate my Windows randomly? They deactivate retail copies randomly.

To be honest, It's more convenient for me to get a legit serial number that doesn't self-destruct than to deal with suspect WGA patches & cracks that work like an arms race and require constant vigilance.

As long as you don't reinstall more often than quarterly, activation goes through without the need for a dreaded phone call. In the case that it fails, I make the phone call and say (and I quote): "I had to replace the motherboard" and get an activation key in about five minutes. If you do this once a week, the phone drones sound vaguely annoyed with you, but you still end up with the number.

So, really, what's the downside here (apart from paying for it at all)? I'm curious.

In a nod to the global economic downturn, it is interesting to note that upgrade prices are still more expensive than a non-upgrade OEM copy with far more reinstallation hassles.

Oy, I hit submit before I added all the confirmed films:

The Bear and the Bow (2011)

Newt (2012)

Also worth noting is that the last I checked, Andrew Stanton was attached to John Carter of Mars, however it wasn't confirmed that Pixar/Disney would be distributing. There has been conflicting info on the matter, and it's ambiguous at the moment.