I keep thinking “tomorrow/next week/someday realsoonnow I should get one of these out.” Today’s that day! The excitement, it is palpable.

• SIGGRAPH 2024: I missed it this year, for the first time since I started going in 1984 (no, I’m fine, and plan to be back next year). But, there’s always Stephen Hill’s wonderful list of SIGGRAPH 2024 Links. Just like being at SIGGRAPH, except for not seeing old friends and meeting new people, learning things through serendipity, and… OK, I’ll stop. If you’re reading this, you should go to SIGGRAPH, but that links page will keep you busy until then.
• Stephen’s page reminded me to update our Portal Page, adding new links and fixing those that broke. And, yes, no one calls these sorts of things “portal pages” anymore, which is why I do. Be happy the font doesn’t also look like 1993.
• One person at SIGGRAPH that I did hear about was Acerola (aka Garrett Gunnell), 222k (!) YouTube subscribers. He was at SIGGRAPH for the first time, evidently. He makes videos on various elements of computer graphics. Saying “various elements of computer graphics” – gah, that sounds dull. So, “these vids are lit, dog – no cap.” Well, I’ve watched only two of them so far: Your Colors Suck (it’s not your fault), which was solid technically (and it was nice to see a few of our “fair use” gallery images get reused) and What is a Graphics Programmer?, which had bits I knew little about, such as various positions in the games industry. This second video was a bit painful to me, in that it’s sad to see that learning computer graphics programming is not easy for most people to access. Offsetting that, it was a pleasant surprise that he recommends the RTR book, but I wouldn’t particularly choose ours as your first book o’ graphics. Is there a good general basics guide at this point? (Maybe these? Most are a decade old.) Well, Acerola did recommend the Unity tutorials, particularly on rendering, and the Rastertek tutorials for APIs.
• Once you’ve caught up with the 282 technical talks at SIGGRAPH and all the rest, there are other smaller conferences out there. Beyond the EGSR resources I recently pointed at, HPG (colocated with SIGGRAPH in even years) and I3D also have YouTube channels of all talks and keynotes. Amazing. And now I’ll wander away from computer graphics, since this all is way more than you’ll ever digest.
• One vaguely-related-to-computer-graphics books I finished last month is An Immense World, about animals’ many senses, and a bit on tetrachromacy. It’s a great bathroom book, where you read three pages and learn something new (which you’ll soon forget, but will tell a long-suffering spouse or friend or three about in the meantime). Scallops have eyes?!
• That book ends on a sad note, pointing out how light and sound pollution affects animals. One thing that amazes me is how massively the price of lighting has dropped over past few hundred years. Four thousand years ago, a day’s wages could buy you maybe 10 minutes of light for a room. As recent as 1743 it took two days for the President of Harvard’s household to make a half year’s worth of candles (78 pounds of them). Compare that to a study done in the 1990’s, where a day’s work bought you 20,000 hours of (safer, non-smelly) light. LEDs are cheaper yet. The cost of light has fallen by a factor of 500,000 (from a great podcast series, BTW).
• Unrelated fun fact: our brains like fractals. Begone, boring architecture! But what boring is, is still a matter of opinion. Brain scientists, help us out here… In the meantime, below are some fractally things for you to stare at, part of Safdie Architects‘ building, near where I live. Click that last link for places they’ve designed that look from a sci-fi film but are real (I love this one).
  
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