Lee Hutchinson – Ars Technica

Ars asks: What was the last CD or DVD you burned?

Lee Hutchinson — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 15:20:06 +0000

Enlarge / This is one method of burning a disc. (credit: 1001slide / Getty Images)

We noted earlier this week that time seems to have run out for Apple's venerable SuperDrive, which was the last (OEM) option available for folks who still needed to read or create optical media on modern Macs. Andrew's write-up got me thinking: When was the last time any Ars staffers actually burned an optical disc?

Lee Hutchinson, Senior Technology Editor

It used to be one of the most common tasks I'd do with a computer. As a child of the '90s, my college years were spent filling and then lugging around giant binders stuffed with home-burned CDs in my car to make sure I had exactly the right music on hand for any possible eventuality. The discs in these binders were all labeled with names like "METAL MIX XVIII" and "ULTRA MIX IV" and "MY MIX XIX," and part of the fun was trying to remember which songs I'd put on which disc. (There was always a bit of danger that I'd put on "CAR RIDE JAMS XV" to set the mood for a Friday night trip to the movies with all the boys, but I should have popped on "CAR RIDE JAMS XIV" because "CAR RIDE JAMS XV" opens with Britney Spears' "Lucky"—look, it's a good song, and she cries in her lonely heart, OK?!—thus setting the stage for an evening of ridicule. Those were just the kinds of risks we took back in those ancient days.)

It took a while to try to figure out what the very last time I burned a disc was, but I've narrowed it down to two possibilities. The first (and less likely) option is that the last disc I burned was a Windows 7 install disc because I've had a Windows 7 install disc sitting in a paper envelope on my shelf for so long that I can't remember how it got there. The label is in my handwriting, and it has a CD key written on it. Some quick searching shows I have the same CD key stored in 1Password with an "MSDN/Technet" label on it, which means I probably downloaded the image from good ol' TechNet, to which I maintained an active subscription for years until MS finally killed the affordable version.

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Hang out with Ars in San Jose and DC this fall for two infrastructure events

Lee Hutchinson — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 12:50:40 +0000

Enlarge / Infrastructure!

Howdy, Arsians! Last year, we partnered with IBM to host an in-person event in the Houston area where we all gathered together, had some cocktails, and talked about resiliency and the future of IT. Location always matters for things like this, and so we hosted it at Space Center Houston and had our cocktails amidst cool space artifacts. In addition to learning a bunch of neat stuff, it was awesome to hang out with all the amazing folks who turned up at the event. Much fun was had!

This year, we're back partnering with IBM again and we're looking to repeat that success with not one, but two in-person gatherings—each featuring a series of panel discussions with experts and capping off with a happy hour for hanging out and mingling. Where last time we went central, this time we're going to the coasts—both east and west. Read on for details!

September: San Jose, California

Our first event will be in San Jose on September 18, and it's titled "Beyond the Buzz: An Infrastructure Future with GenAI and What Comes Next." The idea will be to explore what generative AI means for the future of data management. The topics we'll be discussing include:

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The best summer Prime Day deals we could find for Ars readers

Lee Hutchinson — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 13:00:38 +0000

Enlarge / It's Prime Day—again—which means a whole bunch of these boxes. (credit: NurPhoto / Getty Images)

Good morning, Ars readers! I'll keep this extremely short: Our friends at Wired have been tracking the best deals for Amazon Prime Day, and we are syndicating their work here for anyone at Ars who might want to peruse the deals that are still live today. Enjoy!

Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

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Banish OEM self-signed certs forever and roll your own private LetsEncrypt

Lee Hutchinson — Fri, 15 Mar 2024 10:45:23 +0000

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Previously, on "Weekend Projects for Homelab Admins With Control Issues," we created our own dynamically updating DNS and DHCP setup with bind and dhcpd. We laughed. We cried. We hurled. Bonds were forged, never to be broken. And I hope we all took a little something special away from the journey—namely, a dynamically updating DNS and DHCP setup. Which we're now going to put to use!

If you're joining us fresh, without having gone through the previous part and wanting to follow this tutorial, howdy! There might be some parts that are more difficult to complete without a local instance of bind (or other authoritative resolver compatible with nsupdate). We'll talk more about this when we get there, but just know that if you want to pause and go do part one first, you may have an easier time following along.

The quick version: A LetsEncrypt of our own

This article will walk through the process of installing step-ca, a standalone certificate authority-in-a-box. We'll then configure step-ca with an ACME provisioner—that's Automatic Certificate Management Environment, the technology that underpins LetsEncrypt and facilitates the automatic provisioning, renewal, and revocation of SSL/TLS certificates.

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Doing DNS and DHCP for your LAN the old way—the way that works

Lee Hutchinson — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 11:30:16 +0000

Enlarge / All shall tremble before your fully functional forward and reverse lookups! (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Here's a short summary of the next 7,000-ish words for folks who hate the thing recipe sites do where the authors babble about their personal lives for pages and pages before getting to the cooking: This article is about how to install bind and dhcpd and tie them together into a functional dynamic DNS setup for your LAN so that DHCP clients self-register with DNS, and you always have working forward and reverse DNS lookups. This article is intended to be part one of a two-part series, and in part two, we'll combine our bind DNS instance with an ACME-enabled LAN certificate authority and set up LetsEncrypt-style auto-renewing certificates for LAN services.

If that sounds like a fun couple of weekend projects, you're in the right place! If you want to fast-forward to where we start installing stuff, skip down a couple of subheds to the tutorial-y bits. Now, excuse me while I babble about my personal life.

My name is Lee, and I have a problem

(Hi, Lee.)

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Masters of the Air: Imagine a bunch of people throwing up, including me

Lee Hutchinson — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 18:10:57 +0000

Enlarge / Our two main heroes so far, Buck and Bucky. Or possibly Bucky and Buck. I forget which is which. (credit: Apple)

I'm writing this article under duress because it's not going to create anything new or try to make the world a better place—instead, I'm going to do the thing where a critic tears down the work of others rather than offering up their own creation to balance the scales. So here we go: I didn't like the first two episodes of Masters of the Air, and I don't think I'll be back for episode three.

The feeling that the show might not turn out to be what I was hoping for has been growing in my dark heart since catching the first trailer a month or so ago—it looked both distressingly digital and also maunderingly maudlin, with Austin Butler's color-graded babyface peering out through a hazy, desaturated cloud of cigarette smoke and 1940s World War II pilot tropes. Unfortunately, the show at release made me feel exactly how I feared it might—rather than recapturing the magic of Band of Brothers or the horror of The Pacific, Masters so far has the depth and maturity of a Call of Duty cutscene.

Does this man look old enough to be allowed to fly that plane? (credit: Apple)

World War Blech

After two episodes, I feel I've seen everything Masters has to offer: a dead-serious window into the world of B-17 Flying Fortress pilots, wholly lacking any irony or sense of self-awareness. There's no winking and nodding to the audience, no joking around, no historic interviews with salt-and-pepper veterans to humanize the cast. The only thing allowed here is wall-to-wall jingoistic patriotism—the kind where there's no room for anything except God, the United States of America, and bombing the crap out of the enemy. And pining wistfully for that special girl waiting at home.

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I abandoned OpenLiteSpeed and went back to good ol’ Nginx

Lee Hutchinson — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 15:29:04 +0000

Enlarge / Ish is on fire, yo. (credit: Tim Macpherson / Getty Images)

Since 2017, in what spare time I have (ha!), I help my colleague Eric Berger host his Houston-area weather forecasting site, Space City Weather. It’s an interesting hosting challenge—on a typical day, SCW does maybe 20,000–30,000 page views to 10,000–15,000 unique visitors, which is a relatively easy load to handle with minimal work. But when severe weather events happen—especially in the summer, when hurricanes lurk in the Gulf of Mexico—the site’s traffic can spike to more than a million page views in 12 hours. That level of traffic requires a bit more prep to handle.

Space City Weather!" src="https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Screenshot-2024-01-24-at-9.02.05%E2%80%AFAM.jpg" srcset="https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Screenshot-2024-01-24-at-9.02.05 AM.jpg 2x">

Hey, it's Space City Weather! (credit: Lee Hutchinson)

For a very long time, I ran SCW on a backend stack made up of HAProxy for SSL termination, Varnish Cache for on-box caching, and Nginx for the actual web server application—all fronted by Cloudflare to absorb the majority of the load. (I wrote about this setup at length on Ars a few years ago for folks who want some more in-depth details.) This stack was fully battle-tested and ready to devour whatever traffic we threw at it, but it was also annoyingly complex, with multiple cache layers to contend with, and that complexity made troubleshooting issues more difficult than I would have liked.

So during some winter downtime two years ago, I took the opportunity to jettison some complexity and reduce the hosting stack down to a single monolithic web server application: OpenLiteSpeed.

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RIP to my 8-port Unifi switch after years and years of Texas outdoor temps

Lee Hutchinson — Fri, 20 Oct 2023 13:17:34 +0000

Enlarge / My original US-8-150W shortly before being replaced. Don't judge my zip-tie mounting job—it held for eight years! (credit: Lee Hutchinson)

This morning, I'd like to pour one out for a truly awesome piece of gear that did everything I asked of it without complaint and died before its time: my Unifi 8-port POE switch, model US-8-150W. Farewell, dear switch. You were a real one, and a lightning strike took you from us too soon.

I picked up this switch back in January 2016 when I was ramping up my quest to replace my shaky home Wi-Fi with something a little more enterprise-y. The results were, on the whole, positive (you can read about how that quest turned out in this piece right here, which contains much reflection on the consequences—good and bad—of going overboard on home networking), and this little 8-port switch proved to be a major enabler of the design I settled on.

Happier times—the old US-8-150W right out of the box, when it was brand new. Note those two SFP slots at right.

Why? Well, it's a nice enough device—having 802.3af/at and Ubiquiti's 24-volt passive PoE option made it universally compatible with just about anything I wanted to hook up to it. But the key feature was the two SFP slots, which technically make this a 10-port switch. I have a detached garage, and I wanted to hook up some PoE-powered security cameras out there, along with an additional wireless access point. The simplest solution would have been to run Ethernet between the house and the garage, but that's not actually a simple solution at all—running Ethernet underground between two buildings can be electrically problematic unless it's done by professionals with professional tools, and I am definitely not a professional. A couple of estimates from local companies told me that trenching conduit between my house and the garage was going to cost several hundred dollars, which was more than I wanted to spend.

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Ars is hosting an IT event in Houston on November 1, and you should come

Lee Hutchinson — Fri, 20 Oct 2023 12:00:52 +0000

Enlarge / Space Center Houston's Shuttle Independence sits atop one of the two Shuttle Carrier Aircraft 747s. (credit: Lee Hutchinson)

Are you an Ars Technica reader? (I hope so, because otherwise, how are you reading these words?) Are you somewhere in or around the greater Houston area, or maybe even somewhere reasonably Houston-adjacent, like Austin or San Antonio? Are you free on the afternoon of November 1, from about 2 pm to about 6 pm? And, if so, would you like to hang out?

If the answers to these questions are mostly "yes," then you could do much worse with your time than attending the event we're hosting on November 1! Ars Technica has partnered up with IBM to bring you a set of panel discussions lasting a half-day, titled "Harnessing Big Data: Resiliency, AI, and the future of IT." On the menu for the day is a talk about modern strategies for fighting ransomware and other disasters; a discussion on managing machine-learning data flows; and a talk about what the future of big distributed hybrid app development might look like.

Because this is Houston, we opted for just about the most location-specific event venue that we could find: Space Center Houston, right next door to NASA's Johnson Space Center and the headquarters of Mission Control. Holding the event at SCH gives us access to some really cool stuff!

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How we host Ars, the finale and the 64-bit future

Lee Hutchinson — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 13:00:21 +0000

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Greetings, dear readers, and congratulations—we've reached the end of our four-part series on how Ars Technica is hosted in the cloud, and it has been a journey. We've gone through our infrastructure, our application stack, and our CI/CD strategy (that's "continuous integration and continuous deployment"—the process by which we manage and maintain our site's code).

Now, to wrap things up, we have a bit of a grab bag of topics to go through. In this final part, we'll discuss some leftover configuration details I didn't get a chance to dive into in earlier parts—including how our battle-tested liveblogging system works (it's surprisingly simple, and yet it has withstood millions of readers hammering at it during Apple events). We'll also peek at how we handle authoritative DNS.

Finally, we'll close on something that I've been wanting to look at for a while: AWS's cloud-based 64-bit ARM service offerings. How much of our infrastructure could we shift over onto ARM64-based systems, how much work will that be, and what might the long-term benefits be, both in terms of performance and costs?

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Hosting Ars, part three: CI/CD, or how I learned to stop worrying and love DevOps

Lee Hutchinson — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 13:00:51 +0000

Enlarge / DevOps, DevOps, DevOps! (credit: ArtemisDiana / Getty Images)

One of the most important things to happen in the evolution of development over the past many years is the widespread adoption of continuous integration and continuous deployment, or CI/CD. (Sometimes the "CD" stands for "continuous delivery," depending on who you're talking to.)

It's a concept that jettisons a lot of older ideas about how systems should be managed and instead gives you a way to update code and integrate changes as live rolling deployments while ensuring that the new code is tested and slots in smoothly with stuff that's already running. A properly architected CI/CD pipeline means you can get code changes into production faster and with fewer errors. But what does that look like in practice?

It looks like Ars Technica, because we've adopted a CI/CD workflow to take full advantage of the flexibility afforded us by serverless cloud hosting. Welcome to part three of our four-part series on how we host Ars—here, we’re going to swing away from the "ops" side of "DevOps" and peer more closely at the "dev" part instead. Join us for a look behind the curtain at how Ars uses CI/CD in both our deployed applications and our infrastructure management!

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How we host Ars Technica in the cloud, part two: The software

Lee Hutchinson — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 13:00:58 +0000

Enlarge / Welcome aboard the orbital HQ, readers! (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Welcome back to our series on how Ars Technica is hosted and run! Last week, in part one, we cracked open the (virtual) doors to peek inside the Ars (virtual) data center. We talked about our Amazon Web Services setup, which is primarily built around ECS containers being spun up as needed to handle web traffic, and we walked through the ways that all of our hosting services hook together and function as a whole.

This week, we shift our focus to a different layer in the stack—the applications we run on those services and how they work in the cloud. Those applications, after all, are what you come to the site for; you’re not here to marvel at a smoothly functioning infrastructure but rather to actually read the site. (I mean, I’m guessing that’s why you come here. It’s either that or everyone is showing up hoping I’m going to pour ketchup on myself and launch myself down a Slip-'N-Slide, but that was a one-time thing I did a long time ago when I was young and needed the money.)

How traditional WordPress hosting works

Although I am, at best, a casual sysadmin, having hung up my pro spurs a decade and change ago, I do have some relevant practical experience hosting WordPress. I’m currently the volunteer admin for a half-dozen WordPress sites, including Houston-area weather forecast destination Space City Weather (along with its Spanish-language counterpart Tiempo Ciudad Espacial), the Atlantic hurricane-focused blog The Eyewall, my personal blog, and a few other odds and ends.

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Behind the scenes: How we host Ars Technica, part one

Lee Hutchinson — Wed, 19 Jul 2023 13:00:05 +0000

Enlarge / Take a peek inside the Ars vault with us! (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

A bit over three years ago, just before COVID hit, we ran a long piece on the tools and tricks that make Ars function without a physical office. Ars has spent decades perfecting how to get things done as a distributed remote workforce, and as it turns out, we were even more fortunate than we realized because that distributed nature made working through the pandemic more or less a non-event for us. While other companies were scrambling to get work-from-home arranged for their employees, we kept on trucking without needing to do anything different.

However, there was a significant change that Ars went through right around the time that article was published. January 2020 marked our transition away from physical infrastructure and into a wholly cloud-based hosting environment. After years of great service from the folks at Server Central (now Deft), the time had come for a leap into the clouds—and leap we did.

There were a few big reasons to make the change, but the ones that mattered most were feature- and cost-related. Ars fiercely believes in running its own tech stack, mainly because we can iterate new features faster that way, and our community platform is unique among other Condé Nast brands. So when the rest of the company was either moving to or already on Amazon Web Services (AWS), we could hop on the bandwagon and take advantage of Condé’s enterprise pricing. That—combined with no longer having to maintain physical reserve infrastructure to absorb big traffic spikes and being able to rely on scaling—fundamentally changed the equation for us.

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Ars Frontiers recap: What happens to developers when AI can code?

Lee Hutchinson — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 12:52:23 +0000

Our second AI panel of the day, featuring Georgetown University's Drew Lohn (center) and Luta Security CEO Katie Moussouris (right). Skip to 3:01:12 if the link doesn't take you directly there. Click here for a transcript of the session.

The final panel of the day at our Frontiers conference this year was hosted by me—though it was going to be tough to follow Ars AI expert Benj Edwards' panel because I didn't have a cute intro planned. The topic we were covering was what might happen to developers when generative AI gets good enough to consistently create good code—and, fortunately, our panelists didn't think we had much to worry about. Not in the near term, at least.

Joined by Luta Security founder and CEO Katie Moussouris and Georgetown University Senior Fellow Drew Lohn, the general consensus was that, although large language models can do some extremely impressive things, turning them loose to create production code is a terrible idea. While generative AI has demonstrated the ability to create code, even cursory examination proves that today's large language models (LLMs) often do the same thing when coding that they do when spinning stories: they just make a whole bunch of stuff up. (The term of art here is "hallucination," but Benj tends to prefer the term "confabulation" instead, as it more accurately reflects what it feels like the models are doing.)

So, while LLMs can be relied upon today to do simple things, like creating a regex, trusting them with your production code is way dicier.

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Ars Frontiers is here: Come (virtually) hang out with the experts

Lee Hutchinson — Mon, 22 May 2023 13:00:56 +0000

The Frontiers livestream. Your favorite Ars writers will appear inside of this magic box starting at 1:30 pm US Eastern Daylight Time!

It's Frontiers Day at Ars Technica! Between the hours of 13:30 and 17:00 (all times US Eastern Daylight, UTC-4:00), we'll be carrying our livestreamed discussion with a half-dozen expert-packed panels on topics that range from IT to health care to space innovation. Each session will last approximately 30 minutes, with the last 10 minutes reserved for questions and answers from the audience. If you want to weigh in, leave your questions as comments on the YouTube stream. (You can also leave questions in the comments of this article, but YouTube is the preferred place because the moderators gathering questions will be focusing their efforts there.)

Schedule and sessions

The event kicks off at 13:30 EDT, with a quick intro from Ars Editor-in-Chief Ken Fisher and me. Even though this is a virtual event, Ken and I will be at the Ars studio at the Condé Nast Manhattan office to act as hosts. Ken will welcome everyone in and say some opening remarks, and we'll roll from there directly into the sessions. Each session will also be bookended by a short recap by Ken and me.

Session 1: TikTok—banned or not, it's probably here to stay (13:30 EDT)

Ars senior policy reporter Ashley Belanger gets to be up first with an especially relevant topic: While Congress and various states are vowing action against TikTok, will "banning" the app (whatever "banning" actually means) really come to anything? What are the policy implications around this kind of regulation, and how did we get here? We'll feature EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry among the panel's guests, along with Columbia University's Ioana Literat and former White House lawyer and CPRI Executive Director Bryan Cunningham.

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Ars Frontiers is Monday, May 22: Top minds talk AI, mRNA, and TikTok bans

Lee Hutchinson — Fri, 19 May 2023 11:45:19 +0000

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Updated: We're almost there! Ars Frontiers is next Monday, May 22, and the show gets started at 13:30 US Eastern Daylight Time (UTC-4:00). We'll be streaming via Youtube and embedding the stream in a story on the Ars homepage. See you soon!

Ars Technica is pleased to announce the return of Ars Frontiers, our single-day event that explores tech's most vexing and fascinating issues. This year's event will be held on May 22, and everyone is invited! Attendance this year is virtual, so we'll be streaming all six sessions over the course of three and a half hours.

Readers who stop by the front page every day already know that Ars is a leader in bringing smart people together to talk about important topics—whether that means interviewing experts about current events or watching our highly skilled readers dissect an issue in the comments. In that same spirit of fostering brilliant discussions, this year we've curated a list of topics that explore the modern interconnectedness of innovation, with panels led by our subject matter authorities like Eric Berger and Dr. Beth Mole. All sessions will be streamed live on the Ars YouTube channel.

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The audacious rescue plan that might have saved space shuttle Columbia

Lee Hutchinson — Wed, 01 Feb 2023 12:00:09 +0000

Enlarge / What might have been. (credit: Lee Hutchinson / NASA / NOAA)

February 1, 2023: One of the most tragic events in the history of space exploration is the loss of the space shuttle Columbia and all seven of her crew on February 1, 2003—a tragedy made worse because it didn’t have to happen. But just as it is human nature to look to the future and wonder what might be, so too is it in our nature to look at the past and wonder, “what if?” Today, on the twentieth anniversary of the event, Ars is re-publishing our detailed 2014 examination of the biggest Columbia "what if" of all: what if NASA had recognized the damage to the orbiter while the mission was still in progress? Could anything have been done to save the crew?

If we die, we want people to accept it. We are in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us, it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.

—Astronaut Gus Grissom, 1965

It is important to note at the outset that Columbia broke up during a phase of flight that, given the current design of the Orbiter, offered no possibility of crew survival.

—Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report

At 10:39 Eastern Standard Time on January 16, 2003, space shuttle Columbia lifted off from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Just under a minute and a half later, at 81.7 seconds after launch, a chunk of insulating foam tore free from the orange external tank and smashed into the leading edge of the orbiter's left wing at a relative velocity of at least 400 miles per hour (640 km/h). Columbia continued to climb toward orbit.

The foam strike was not observed live. Only after the shuttle was orbiting Earth did NASA's launch imagery review reveal that the wing had been hit. Foam strikes during launch were not uncommon events, and shuttle program managers elected not to take on-orbit images of Columbia to visually assess any potential damage. Instead, NASA's Debris Assessment Team mathematically modeled the foam strike but could not reach any definitive conclusions about the state of the shuttle's wing. The mission continued.

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Bringing horrible space monsters to life with performance capture tech

Lee Hutchinson — Tue, 29 Nov 2022 17:05:55 +0000

Directed by Sean Dacanay. Produced by Justin Wolfson. Edited by Jeremy Smolnik, with Billy Ward. Click here for transcript. (video link)

We've watched the gameplay. We've heard the terrifying noises. We've seen the scary sights. Now, in the final part of our peek behind the scenes of Glen Schofield's upcoming horror sci-fi adventure The Callisto Protocol, we're examining how the characters move—and how the more motion capture you can do, the better your characters will look on-screen.

As Glen notes in the video, Callisto Protocol heavily uses "motion capture" technology—actors dressed in special reflective suits act out the motions you want your characters to make, and computer-controlled cameras capture hundreds of frames per second as the actors do their thing. When done well, "mo-cap," as it's called, can drastically reduce the time it takes to animate a game's characters. Rather than having skilled animators meticulously hand-animate every frame of a character's movements, the raw performance data and movements from the actors are mapped over digital models. While hand-animating can lead to beautiful results, it's impossible to beat the performance one gets from motion capture—since it's an actor actually pantomiming, the resulting movements come with all the grace and subtle nuances with which living beings imbue their motions, nuances that animators have to create manually (and often at considerable time and expense).

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Light, shadow, reflections, and terror: How a scary game does scary lighting

Lee Hutchinson — Tue, 22 Nov 2022 17:05:09 +0000

Directed by Sean Dacanay. Produced by Justin Wolfson. Edited by Jeremy Smolnik, with Billy Ward. Click here for transcript. (video link)

A couple of weeks back, we joined up with Glen Schofield of Striking Distance Studios to have him walk us through some behind-the-scenes previews of his studio's upcoming game, The Callisto Protocol. In our series so far, we've explored Callisto's gameplay and its audio design, and this week we're continuing our sneak peek with a look at the look of the game—the lighting and visuals.

Humans are primarily visual creatures, and clever game designers take advantage of that by using a game's visuals as not just a way to show the player what's happening, but also as an opportunity to extend and express the game's style—games, like so many other forms of art, can communicate themes and emotions to a player through constrained use of color or through the emphasis of specific imagery or through the use of light and shadow to emphasize and hide aspects of a scene. And Glen and his crew at Striking Distance—folks like art director Demetrius Leal and lighting director and Dead Space veteran Atsushi Seo—are definitely clever game designers. During the preproduction phase of the game, the team deluged Glen with images showing both visual examples of how they wanted the game's architecture and monsters to look, and also of interesting and effective lighting techniques.

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Callisto Protocol shows how audio design elevates a game from scary to terrifying

Lee Hutchinson — Tue, 15 Nov 2022 17:05:48 +0000

Directed by Sean Dacanay. Produced by Justin Wolfson. Edited by Jeremy Smolnik, with Billy Ward. Click here for transcript. (video link)

In part one of our exclusive Callisto Protocol behind-the-scenes sneak peek, we hung out with Dead Space designer and Striking Distance Studio head Glen Schofield and got him to spill some details about his next shambling horror title, The Callisto Protocol. This week, in part two, we're focusing on a sometimes underrated but never unimportant aspect of game design: the audio.

For a horror game like Callisto Protocol, audio has to shoulder a tremendous amount of responsibility for setting the stage. As audio director Nassim Ait-Kaci explains, "Music is maybe the effective tool, from an audio perspective, to apply tension, foreshadowing, lead-up, build-up, and [to] craft special moments." Accordingly, much of the soundscape that players will encounter in the game is hand-tuned—particularly in big moments. Glen weighs in on his feelings about the specific timing and volume of the musical cues and sound effects that will accompany jump scares or big reveals or really anything. The goal is to tell a compelling and scary story, and in horror, nailing the timing can make the difference between jolting the audience out of their seats—or not.

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Lee Hutchinson – Ars Technica

Ars asks: What was the last CD or DVD you burned?

Lee Hutchinson, Senior Technology Editor

Hang out with Ars in San Jose and DC this fall for two infrastructure events

September: San Jose, California

The best summer Prime Day deals we could find for Ars readers

Laptop deals

Keyboard deals

Gaming deals

TV deals

Networking deals

Streaming gear deals

Mobile and tablet deals

Headphone and earbud deals

Vacuum deals

Amazon device deals

Smart watch and fitness tracker deals

Home office deals

Security camera deals

Home deals

Storage deals

Soundbar and speakers deals

Monitor deals

CPU and motherboard deals

Power bank and charging deals

Travel adapter deals

Camera deals

Banish OEM self-signed certs forever and roll your own private LetsEncrypt

The quick version: A LetsEncrypt of our own

Doing DNS and DHCP for your LAN the old way—the way that works

My name is Lee, and I have a problem

Masters of the Air: Imagine a bunch of people throwing up, including me

World War Blech

I abandoned OpenLiteSpeed and went back to good ol’ Nginx

RIP to my 8-port Unifi switch after years and years of Texas outdoor temps

Ars is hosting an IT event in Houston on November 1, and you should come

How we host Ars, the finale and the 64-bit future

Hosting Ars, part three: CI/CD, or how I learned to stop worrying and love DevOps

How we host Ars Technica in the cloud, part two: The software

How traditional WordPress hosting works

Behind the scenes: How we host Ars Technica, part one

Ars Frontiers recap: What happens to developers when AI can code?

Ars Frontiers is here: Come (virtually) hang out with the experts

Schedule and sessions

Session 1: TikTok—banned or not, it's probably here to stay (13:30 EDT)

Ars Frontiers is Monday, May 22: Top minds talk AI, mRNA, and TikTok bans

The audacious rescue plan that might have saved space shuttle Columbia

Bringing horrible space monsters to life with performance capture tech

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