Nerd Nite NoHo

November 13th at the World War II Club

7:00pm  |  $5 general admission

Socialism, the Radical Future of Capitalism: How we can stake our claim to a radical future by guaranteeing health care, child care, and employment to all.
– by Sanjiv Gupta

This Skeleton is Full of Bugs: Learning about character rigging in video games by looking at the ways it goes wrong.
– by Connie Hildreth

DETAILS

“Socialism, the Radical Future of Capitalism”
The 2016 election revealed astonishing support for Bernie Sanders’ “democratic socialism.” But what is socialism? Karl Marx conceived it as the radical future of capitalism and democracy, one in which we enjoy our individual and collective capacities to the fullest. Capitalism works especially harshly in the U.S. But capitalism is also creating the means for a radically democratic society, one in which all of us participate consciously in making the future. In this talk I introduce Marx’s description of socialism. I also argue that we can stake our claim to this radical future by guaranteeing the following to everyone in the U.S.: health care, child care, and gainful employment.

Dr. Sanjiv Gupta is an Associate Professor of Sociology at UMass Amherst.

***************

“This Skeleton is Full of Bugs”
In animation and games, rigging is the step in creating a character where you define how a character can move. It’s done once you already have a 3D model but before you animate it. It is a mix of technical and tedious that depends on what kind of movement a character needs to be capable, and is difficult to explain to your dentist when they ask you what you do for a living and why it’s not animating.

The importance of rigging and how it makes the media we enjoy is really apparent when it goes wrong. In animation, you only see this in blooper reel, but in games it results in eyeballs floating out of a character’s head, faces that look like knifes and running jauntily along with their arms at 90 degree angles. We’ll talk about why those things happen so much and in the way they do.

Connie Hildreth is a web developer who previously worked on rigging and tool development at a local animation studio.

Comments are closed.