Too Long In Graphics

You've been in graphics too long if...
by Chris Thornborrow

• Most of your friends can pronounce Gouraud first time.
• When you fist heard that some people used 16 million colours you wondered whatever for and continued to write colour-map tables for correct highlights on objects.
• You remember comp.graphics when there weren't enough articles for you to read, none of them included the word PC and nobody ever asked the difference between raytracing and rendering.
• You insist that DOOM does not use raycasting. (Technically, as it was first introduced, and anyway, who plays games at your age?)
• Your partner knows the difference between scientific visualisation and photorealistic rendering, even though they wouldn't know a polygon from a camel.
• You think an SGI Indy is OK for a quick hack but not a real graphics machine.
• You remember discussing how one day there would be graphics hardware to support rendering in desktop machines and people laughed.
• You watched the Last Starfighter in an empty theatre and marvelled thinking it was even better than TRON.
• You remember thinking that parallel computers would solve your graphics problems.
• You remember when you thought X was a high level graphics language.
• You get drunk and suddenly get really excited examining the light reflected through the whisky.
• You get despondent while walking in the woods and think "I'll never be able to render this in real time."
• You once sat up all night watching your home computer calculate the mandlebrot set with 16 colours and a resolution of 200x200.
• You sat up the next night with colleagues watching your home computer calculate the mandlebrot set with 16 colours and a resolution of 200x200.
• Your address book has email entries for Benoit, James F, and Prof David R and Eric.
• You think being a computer geek is only half way there.
• You wonder how nature processes all those photons so quickly.
• When people mention the word graphics you really insist they are more accurate in their terminology.
• You get irritated by people who say, "Oh, graphics, that's a solved problem" (even if they then go on to be precise about what they mean by the term "graphics").
• You own one or more of the following: a glass sphere, a prism, more then two copies of Foley and Van Dam, a computer which cost more than your car, a computer which cost more than your house, a pet named Phong, a graphics board from a defunct supercomputer (properly framed) or a Rubics Cube (original).

You get 75% or more of these jokes.