I spent all of last week in San Diego, attending SIGGRAPH 2007 - the annual conference for computer graphics geeks. I drove there and back instead of flying. Not sure why I thought this was a good idea, particularly since I’d just done the trip up to Oregon the previous weekend; basically doing the length of California within the space of a week. So I found out I-5 between Oakland and Los Angeles is a boring wasteland, interrupted only by the bovine gulag that is Harris Ranch (which I’ve mentioned before). I did want access to the car over the week, but paying for parking at the hotel pretty much negated the savings in not buying a plane ticket.

I’ve come to the realisation that I don’t get much, if anything, from the academic reason for the conference: the papers. I enjoyed the paper fast forward, but my job nowadays rarely involves cutting edge research, just a whole lot of software engineering; one of these years I probably should go to a compiler or perhaps a multi-threading conference and that might have more relevance to what I do. So apart from a sketch and course, I pretty much stayed busy mainly at the Pixar booth meeting RenderMan customers and fending off schwag hounds (”come back later - teapots at 1 pm; posters tomorrow at 9:30 pm”). Every year for the last six years, we’ve given out a little plastic walking teapot, which is symbolic of computer graphics in general and also serves as marketing material. They’re pretty slick packaged - metal box and everything - and somehow hugely popular with the show floor crowds.

A few things:

• At the Disney R&D mixer, I met Turner Whitted, the inventor of CG ray tracing (as alluded to by Mark V). That was cool. We talked briefly about FPGAs, and he graciously downplayed my Verilog shortcomings.
• The RenderMan User’s group meeting went very well. This is our annual RenderMan community get together where Pixar books a hotel ballroom, orders wine and food, invite many of our customers to hear us talk about our software for an hour, and then invite a few other people to talk about obscure, novel and often brilliant RenderMan techniques - the “stupid RenderMan tricks”. It’s about the geekiest user’s group meeting you can possibly imagine, and we’re proud of that. I had to get up and talk about stereo rendering, which was made easier by a generous glass of wine. People happily ignored my bad attempts at humor.
• Didn’t do much in the way of exploring San Diego, since Susan didn’t come this year, and we’d done the touristy things four years ago at SIGGRAPH 2003. I did finally go to Legoland for a few hours. Miniland (the part of the park with buildings rendered in Lego) is very cool, although I was surprised to see the lack of minifig scale stuff.
• I have to admit, after having seen stereo projections of Meet the Robinsons at the Disney booth, and the Muppet Vision thing at California Adventure, I don’t find it all that compelling. Which is horribly ironic, given that I’ve been responsible for the stereo rendering support in PRMan lately. The 3D spinning mirror display at Emerging Tech was pretty cool though.
• Speaking of Emerging Tech, there was a nipkow disk there and I actually knew what it was as soon as I saw it. (I have to thank Mark V for that as well.)
• I’m glad they reduced the number of incomprehensibly French, spirographic or generally blobby amorphous art pieces in the Electronic Theatre this year. On the other hand, the Best of Show (”Ark”) was depressing, and inexplicably followed up by CG shots of the World Trade Center aftermath. Which was awkward: were we supposed to applaud at the CG skill involved, no matter how truly tragic and painful the footage was?

On the way back, as I was driving in the carpool lane 20 miles south of LA, on an impulse I took the exit to Disneyland and spent an hour in California Adventure. (Disney Silver Pass perk, hasn’t proved useful til now; blackout on Disneyland proper though.) Only had time to do one Pixar themed ride - Mike & Sulley to the Rescue - and the aforementioned Muppet thing. It’s very odd to see characters from Monsters done as animatronics, but the factory door floor was pretty impressive. After that, it took me 3 hours plus to get from Disneyland to the LA city limits and another 5 hours to get home after that. Definitely flying down to Los Angeles next year instead.

It’s a new look, mostly inspired by Edward Tufte. The old look, with its ruled elements that drove down the data-ink ratio - or should that be the data-pixel ratio? - is still available as an alternate stylesheet. I shouldn’t dwell on the pain necessary to get this so-called two-column fluid layout all working reasonably with CSS, and particularly with Internet Explorer. I’m just glad I program renderers, not web browsers.

SIGGRAPH happened at the beginning of the month. It was a reasonable diversion this year, mainly because it took place in Boston instead of the city on the Hellmouth that is Los Angeles. Traffic was notably bad. Actually, it was worst than bad: it was random. No reasonable guess could be made as to whether a taxi or the shuttle bus would beat out walking to the convention centre on any given morning. As for the new bracelets that got us onto the shuttle buses, they were touted by a coworker as our way of showing support for Floyd Landis, and not say some scheme to deprive student SIGGRAPH attendees not staying at the conference hotels the luxury of travelling by coach.

The technical content was more of the usual. Everyone is doing fur, and doing it the same way (except for Blue Sky). Fulfilled my annual geometry tolerance by learning about geodesics and physically impossible soap bubbles. Finally caught a Denis Zorin course. Missed the must-see 3D laser plasma display in the Emerging Technologies section - instead I vacuumed ghost shadows. The usual. As for the show floor, the surprise this year was the lack of demand for posters. It took us almost an hour each morning to get rid of three thousand tubes, and that just isn’t the norm. The real chaos manifested when this year’s model of teapot was given away, but I’m not really sure people knew what it was they were lining up for.

Non conference activities: I met up with Gloria, who is doing very well in Boston. She’s the friend I’ve known the longest - we had the same piano teacher before we ended up attending the same high school. I’ve always been slightly envious of how much she’s managed to do in life: learn multiple instruments (and learn them well); spend lots of time working and travelling abroad; go dragon boating, etc. We all had a nice dinner in the Italian district of North End and reminisced about old times. When we got away from the conference on other days, we took the Old Town Trolley Tour around Boston. I managed to lure everyone on to the U.S.S Constitution (I am reading the Aubrey-Maturin series, after all) and geeked out at the rigging. Alas, we were too late to go below decks. On our last trolley go-around, it was our tour driver’s last day, so we ended up being trolleyed off the beaten path.

SIGGRAPH is in San Diego next year. I’m looking forward to Legoland.

SIGGRAPH came and went last week. It was in Los Angeles again this year. Next year in Boston hopefully marks the return to the alternating coast format. Certainly, seeing the smog and urban sprawl that is L.A. from the plane early on Sunday put me immediately in a resigned mood.

I spent most of the time at the Pixar booth again. I did make it to George Lucas’ keynote. It wasn’t much to speak of, someone obviously noted that Lucas isn’t a great speaker and instead put him on a comfy couch with a moderator, so it ended up being an interview - mostly a rehash of things you’ve read in Cinefex or other trade rags. I will admit that I’m enough of a fanboy to have said “Cool!” at the sight of the full size X-Wing sitting in the lobby of the L.A. convention centre. At the booth I avoided handing out bronze teapots (no posters this year!) by talking about RenderMan for Maya (which is looking great) or in the inner sanctum attending meetings. All in all it was a very busy week.

The user’s group meeting went well. Hal Bertram got a well deserved standing ovation for his Stupid Rat Trick (which can be seen here). Release 13 was announced, which means I can mention one of the things I’ve been working on lately has been multithreading. Along with the SSE work I’ve been doing on and off this year it’s kind of interesting to find myself programming at a level I haven’t been before; right next to the metal, so to speak.

Electronic Theatre was in an exhibit hall again. I think I will be happy to live the rest of my life without having to watch another weird French animated short ever again, although I did disturb others with my laughter at Fallen Art.

The Friday after, Susan and I spent two hours at the Tutankhamun exhibit at LACMA. It was ok. I didn’t think it was worth the $25, although to be fair our ticket probably got us into the rest of LACMA and we didn’t bother. It was still cool to be two feet away from things that I’d seem in National Geographic as a kid. My chief complaint was that the flow through the exhibit sucked. The signs were too small and generally only on one side of the glass, even though you could quite easily have had people on all sides of the exhibits. As well, the sarcophagi and burial masks weren’t there, replaced by a sarcophagus of Tut’s grandmother-in-law (!), and some artifacts buried next to him: a golden dagger, a diadem, chestpieces, etc. Cool nonetheless, but not really what captures the imagination about King Tut. I kind of hoped for a linen wrapped mummy and had to settle for a metal cast of his skull.

We wrapped up the week with a short jaunt on Santa Monica beach. A latent cold manifested on the way home and I’ve spent the last week coughing and hacking. Apart from one party, a couple of reunions, and a dinner with He Who Shall Not Be Googled and friends, I think that covers SIGGRAPH 2005.

SIGGRAPH last week was rather boring. We were excited about the youth and hipness of the attendees this year until we realised they were actually the X-Games spectators heading to the Staples center next door. The cutbacks were annoying; no buses were running in the middle of the day making lunch difficult or undigestable, and the Electronic Theatre was in Exhibit Hall K - not a movie theatre experience by any stretch of the imagination.

I didn’t go to many technical presentations; the Weta course was an exception, and it was very good. I spent a lot of time at the booth where RenderMan for Maya got a lot of interest. While there I was able to catch up with random acquaintances or meet people I’d communicated with only via e-mail - for some reason, a lot more than in years past. The higher attendance this year probably helped a lot. And the User’s Group meeting seemed to go very well despite ourselves.

The CirculaFloor and the LumiSight Table were probably the coolest things I saw, both in the Emerging Technologies exhibit. The latter was being demoed with a video poker application. I can already see this being adopted by Las Vegas real soon now.

After Thursday we visited Jeff and his now-fiancée Cathy in the OC. We went to the Body Worlds exhibit at the California Science Center and ogled plastinated human bodies. The pregnant woman and the guy holding his own skin ala Michelangelo were particularly disturbing. After a walk on Long Beach and dinner at Roscoe’s, the week was over and we were soon back to work.

It’s been quiet this week. Greg and Agi visited Tuesday on their way to Disneyland, Lohengrin was at the opera on Wednesday, complete with animatronic swan and mystical Grail knight references. Off to Vancouver today to visit family this weekend, and pay respect to the General (uncle) who is not doing very well with cancer.

Unlike previous years, this year’s SIGGRAPH flew by quickly. The shortened schedule helped, and since I didn’t have to work the booth I was forced to schedule things carefully in order to figure out what I wanted to see.

The trip started earlier than usual. I flew down to LA two Fridays ago (July 25) where I met up with Jeff and his girlfriend Cathy. After the annual In-N-Out feeding ritual that evening, the next day we went to Disneyland where we spent most of the day lining up for rides. On Sunday we met up with Susan, her friend Anne, and Jamie, and spent the day at SeaWorld. The highlight of the day was the dolphin show, although the river rapids ride was fun - if only because we all got soaked. SIGGRAPH proper started in earnest that evening when I tried to check in at the Marriott next to the convention centre and discovered my reservation hadn’t been made.

Monday to Wednesday was a blur of sketches, courses, and paper sessions. Highlights included: a the hair course, especially Steve Worley’s talk about a new illumination model which captures colored secondary highlights; the ILM special session, where animators showed off homebrew animations from their youths; two Lord of the Rings shading sketches by Weta (highlighting PRMan!); the entire paper session on shadows; and the high dynamic range monitor by Sunnybrook technologies.

Somewhere in between I managed to sneak in some time to join the Pixar team in volleyball against PDI. Despite playing for only one and a half games, my legs hurt for days afterwards. I felt old.

As has been the case for the last couple of years, the parties in the evening weren’t great. This year’s annoying twist: the facilities threw the partiers out early - by midnight, or even by eleven in one case, security guards would descend and ask us to leave, even if it was pretty clear we were all willing to continue to pay to consume alcohol.

Wednesday evening was the RenderMan User’s Group meeting. I was required to talk for a minute or two, and Mach’s sketch was marred by machine issues, so I was in minor panic mode for part of the evening. In the end though everything went as well as could be expected.

By Thursday I was bored of the technical side of things and decided to work the booth, and was surprised to find myself enjoying interacting with the exhibition goers. Our booth looked great with very large Finding Nemo images, the shiny walking teapot and poster giveaways this year were hits, and people this year were for the most part surprisingly well behaved about picking up posters in the morning (although we also enacted crowd control measures this year). And the PRMan on the G5 demo was very popular - I’ve never seen people so excited just to watch buckets render. By the afternoon though, the incessant pleas for teapots grew wearisome and we were glad to pack it in.

SIGGRAPH was over a day short, so on Friday Susan and I just tried to relax. We took the ferry over to Coronado and lounged on the beach for a while. Saturday was spent at the zoo with Susan and Anne. It was a bit rushed since I had an early evening flight, but it was definitely a worthwhile experience - although I should mention that the Seattle zoo does compare favourably with San Diego’s.

All in all, a better SIGGRAPH than last year. The venue helped a lot: San Diego has a much better climate than San Antonio, and seems like a much more livable city in general. Being able to spend free time with Susan for a week also helped greatly. As for the organization itself: attendance this year was higher, and I’ve heard it turned a profit, thanks to cost cutting measures (no panels, one apparently very bad reception) as well as last minute exhibition registrations. Since we’re stuck in the hellhole that is LA for the next two years, this SIGGRAPH may have to last us for a while until it returns to San Diego in 2006.

SIGGRAPH was pretty lame. I’ve heard attendance figures were only around 17,000 or so - even worse than the numbers for last year. In general I ended up hanging around the booth more than I really wanted to, though admittedly there wasn’t really much that I was interested in at the rest of the conference. I saw some excellent technical sketches on Stuart Little 2, some terrible sketches about Ice Age, a good paper on perspective shadow maps, and really not much else. (Okay, there were several papers and courses on rendering techniques I really was interested in, but due to timing issues at the booth, I couldn’t make them.) The art gallery was abysmal, the Electronic Theatre wasn’t memorable, and there were no cool giveaways on the show floor to be had.

Monday I worked on setup at the booth, and ended up staying til 11 pm stuck with the task of editing the network configuration of over 50 machines by hand - one by one. (Jamie switched keyboard cables between machines on the rack, I ran netconf.)

The press release about Pixar and Exluna finally came out on Tuesday. Exluna was bought by NVIDIA, and Exluna has withdrawn Entropy from the market. And that’s all you’ll hear from me. However misinformed speculation started almost immediately (it still continues on the newsgroup today), and there was some reaction over the rest of the week - although not as much vitriol as I braced myself for.

The Pixar user’s group meeting actually turned out one of the more exciting episodes of the week, if only because I nearly derailed the whole thing. An hour before the meeting I was desperately trying to render some images and integrate movies to the Powerpoint presentation on my laptop (the presentation was a conglomeration of nearly everyone’s talks). Half an hour before the meeting started I left the hotel and locked my wallet and card keys in my hotel room; discovered the only connection in the ballroom was a VGA adapter, and that I had forgotten to pack the ADC to VGA adapter for the laptop; ran back to the show floor to grab Wayne’s G3 laptop; discovered after transferring the presentation to his laptop that I had inadvertently created references to embedded movies that were still on a CD-ROM (did I mention how much I hate Powerpoint?) and I had forgotten the disk; and ran back for the CD-ROM with 15 minutes to spare before the presentation started. The presentation itself went fine (except for a few minor glitches - David fell off the stage being the most memorable) until Per’s talk, where he discovered that one of the embedded movies I added at the last moment was too large to fit in the G3’s memory and ended up hanging the machine. Oddly enough my talk itself went okay.

Thursday morning we wandered through the Alamo, where I bought a “Remember The Alamo” t-shirt - made in Mexico. How’s that for Santa Anna’s last revenge? That evening was the only real group gathering I went to - the technical reception, held at a ranch with even an equestrian drill team in attendance (which was cool). I missed out on all other parties this time around, but there weren’t that many to be had in the first place.

Friday I gave up on SIGGRAPH after spending a couple of hours in the animation theatre and wandered over to the Buckhorn Saloon where I stared bemusedly at the “World’s Biggest Collection of Horns and Antlers”. It was certainly the grandest collection of stuffed animals I’d ever seen gathered in one place. And the fact that this quaint museum was the best part of my trip leads to the conclusion: “Worst. SIGGRAPH. Ever”.

They seem to have canceled plans for SIGGRAPH in Atlanta in 2004. I wonder if I’ll even care by that point.

David summed it up best: it was the Prozac SIGGRAPH. No lows, no highs, just sort of boring. To summarize the conference:

• Sunday: Things started out badly: had to haul a “diskpack” along with my luggage onto the plane. It turned out not to be a smallish hard drive, but a set of them in a box the size of a large stereo system, and the damn thing was twice as heavy and probably fragile too (which didn’t stop me from kicking it a few times). In short, not the sort of thing one wants to haul through the length and breadth of LAX.

  Got into LA around noon, checked in, hauled the diskpack to the conference, then stayed around til the evening first setting up the computers for the booth, and then testing software. And right on cue, the programs started breaking down late in the evening, which was not a good thing. We finally gave up around 8 and went back to the hotel for some (good) Korean barbecue.

• Monday: The software inexplicably started working again, but we still spent the day testing as well as checking demos. In the evening, we headed out to the Electronic Theatre, where we got the first indication this was going to be a humdrum conference by sitting through humdrum material - the immediate consensus was that while there was no terrible material (like last year’s glut of PlayStation 2 FMVs), nothing really stood out either. And I hope never to see another mouse and cheese entry in the Theatre. The biggest audience reaction was for Blue Sky’s trailer for Ice Age, which I thought was odd since I didn’t find it that compelling (I did, however, find it more so than our clip from Monsters, and I guess so did the audience).

  We spent the late evening in the bar of the hotel, where I had the quintessential LA experience: a striking blonde woman wearing shades and a tube top sat down at the counter, and glancing over at our geeky selves asked us if we were webmasters. Upon finding out we weren’t, she looked relieved and introduced herself as “the owner of fifty adult web sites”, and then started a fascinating conversation about how the dotcom bust was affecting her business. Unlike a few years ago, she was now having no difficulty getting resumés, all from dotcom refugees willing to settle for 40K a year; on the other hand, she was now finding it difficult to filter through the glut of (in her words) useless dotcom people in order to find someone who wasn’t lying about knowing something about - you guessed it - video compression techniques. It was completely surreal yet somehow also completely normal to be having that discussion with someone who fit the image of an ex-porn-industry-worker, somewhat beyond her prime (if only by being over the age of 30), and who at the same time was one of the most level-headed, no-nonsense persons I’ve ever talked to. Unfortunately she left fairly early and the evening got boring after that.

• Tuesday: We were only giving out 500 posters a day this year, and so the poster crush at 10 am each morning resembled 5 minutes of an angry soccer mob. But if you looked beyond that, the main indicator of the lack of energy at SIGGRAPH this year was that probably less than half the time slots for the internal booth demos were filled up. It seemed a lot of companies just didn’t show up at all - too busy with productions to bother. We also heard news of layoffs at the large companies (at Disney, ILM, and SGI, with the last happening on Thursday - some of the people on the exhibition floor no longer had jobs!), and that probably didn’t help the atmosphere much either.

  Went to the “Ex-Pixar” party by the pool of the Figuoeroa Hotel in the evening. It turned out to be depressing, in part due to the presence of people reminding me of the unfortunate competitive situation we were in, and it was enough for me to eventually skip the DD party to which I had been lucky enough to be granted a couple of tickets. Heading back to the hotel I bumped into my boss in a rather squiffy condition. He herded me toward the bar, where over the course of a couple of hours we were eventually joined by more of the Seattle office (also leaving the Fig). Then at some point the evening again turned entertainingly surreal when a weird chap decided to buy us a round of drinks while giving a virtuoso yet incoherent monologue. It started out as declaration of Irish patriotism, then turned into anger directed at me for not grokking some subtle Cantonese nuances I was supposed to understand (”Are you from up the hill or down the hill?” “What does Fei Loong mean?”), took a meander through some ramblings about his life as a paratrooper in Lourdes and some other mutterings about not trusting a heart surgeon because her name was Wendy Su, and then ended up in some tantalizing bits about being a cryptographer, before declining into some belligerent interplay between him and one of my coworkers. In short, it took another weird LA denizen to salvage the day and turn it into something memorable.

• Wednesday: The lack of internal booth demos didn’t stop me from being on the show floor 9 to 6, doing external demos on the Linux machine. I made sure my accidentally granted full conference badge didn’t go to waste by trading it with another coworker.

  The evening was occupied with the Pixar user’s group meeting. I was stuck having to get up in front of the 450+ attendees and introduce the winners of the Stupid RenderMan Tricks contest (for which I was nominally responsible), but other than a bad case of nerves, it was a great evening - all of the speakers put a great deal of effort into their talks, showed off some genuinely useful tips and tricks while being entertaining, and made the meeting a highlight of the week. Tal (of renderman.org, among other things) will be arranging for the presented material to appear on his website.

  Oh - I guess it was nice to get a round of applause when I introduced myself to everyone as the tech support guy. It’s nice to be appreciated.

  After that, some Seattle office people and I met up with Wayne and his friend Heather. She drove us over to Hollywood for the Blur party (the tickets to that were labeled “admits one guy and three girls” - how typical) but that turned out to be the hip party, with a very large crowd of people lining up for a long time trying to get into what appeared to be a way too small venue (the Hollywood Olympic Gym, or something of that sort). We gave up on that and headed back to the scary Flower district for the Nothing Real party, which seemed much more low key, although I vaguely recall that it was marked by once-per-hour pretentious art events involving naked gymnasts, playing with fire in some way. And that turned out to be THE one real party I attended this year at Siggraph.

• Thursday: The last exhibition day. I was relieved when the bagpipes started blasting through the speakers at 5 pm, signifying the end of the exhibition, although I must say all of the demos we did were very well received, and we got some good dialogues with the customers. Most seemed to be excited about the stuff going into the next releases, which is a good thing.

  After tearing down the booth a bunch of us headed out for for Mexican food and margaritas - apparently an annual tradition which I somehow missed the last two times (I was probably at the Papers reception those years). We went to Olivera Street, which is the oldest district in LA - it’s runs for all of two very quaint blocks near the Union train station. Despite my dislike of Mexican fare, it turned out to be pretty good, and the atmosphere was cheerful. Afterwards I packed it in for the night and caught up on sleep.

So that was SIGGRAPH, and yes, for a second year, I didn’t attend a single paper or sketch. I apparently did miss a few good ones - oh well. I found out later attendance was around 34K, 9K less than the last LA conference in 1999 - this in part explains how dead it felt. Fortunately, the weekend made up for it and more, but I’ll write that up tomorrow: it doesn’t help that as I type this, I have all the early symptoms of some sort of cold or flu.

Got back from New Orleans late Friday and have spent the last two days chilling out, doing not much of anything besides playing Tachyon.

The last week was fun despite having to spend 9 to 6 on the SIGGRAPH show floor every day, and despite being across from some company who is doing a TV show called “VeggieTales” featuring 3D rendered vegetables spouting wholesome Christian family values and singing inane songs which drove me insane. To summarize the week:

• Saturday: Got into New Orleans in the afternoon, spent the day doing nothing. Wandered around French Quarter in the evening, including a stroll along Bourbon Street which was definitely an eyeopener - lots of places offering sleazy entertainment mixed in with good live music of all sorts and tonnes of people in a festive atmosphere milling around.
• Sunday: Spent the day setting up the booth, including a few hours assembling furniture (joy) and fiddling with miscellaneous computer bits. Went out for dinner with some coworkers and industry folks at “Cafe Sbisa”, which turned out to be monstrously overpriced and not that good.
• Monday: More booth set up, went over demos. Dinner at House of Blues which turned out to be an ugly chain establishment. Highlight of the evening: eating a habanero pepper for the first time - did it in one go, and providing great entertainment for coworkers from Seattle - the waitress took pity and brought a glass of milk and water over. Afterwards attempted to find a happening bar with same coworkers from Seattle - “Let’s go find that bar where that bigoted racist but astoundingly rich midget abducted us yesterday!” - but failed.
• Tuesday: Booth duty - demos. Managed to score a ticket to the Digital Domain Party, also at the House of Blues. Very good music - some R&B, “Five Blind Guys from Alabama”, & zydeco - plus open bar with very stiff drinks - blurry recollections of evening.
• Wednesday: Booth duty. RenderMan user’s group meeting at 6:30 - good, as far user’s group meetings go. After that I had a ticket to the Disney party at Generations Hall (I received an invitation the week before and lorded this status over the rest of the Pixar people who hadn’t and had to beg for theirs during the exhibition - ha!). Good nibbling food, open bar, more excellent music - gospel singers, voodoo drummers, weird entertainment as well (fortune tellers, fake body piercing).
• Thursday: More booth duty, then booth tear down. I didn’t bother to look around the exhibition floor much this year - wasn’t really motivated. In the evening, I was given a ticket to the papers reception at the Aquarium of the Americas, which was very cool. Didn’t see anyone I knew outside of work though, besides some denizens of Vertigo.
• Friday: Wasted the day, except for lunch at Cafe Mulate’s which was probably the best meal I had all week - blackened catfish covered in crawfish etoufee.

Yes - I completely avoided the academic/research point of SIGGRAPH - did not attend a single paper!