Das drip.

How does he have that much natural hair and still look bald?

The weirdest version of this I’ve ever experienced is ‘you must be jealous that I praised this nazi.’

I still get flashbacks to a dentist with Magical Quest on Super Nintendo.

How pre- is it, if Russia’s fucking about in NATO airspace? It seems pretty emptive. Responding to probing escalation is not itself escalation.

David Graeber described this as the triangular dynamic of bullying: “a moral drama in which the manner of the victim’s reaction to an act of aggression can be used as retrospective justification for the original act of aggression itself.” As if Poland responding in kind to Russian incursions would somehow be Poland’s fault.

Or anything Ukraine does against Russia’s invasion would be out-of-pocket and unexpected.

Yeah, maybe with some kind of filter so a few people can sound like a whole cast of distinct characters, without necessarily mimicking any particular human being.

… wait.

Oh damn, we’re back to custom Windows 95 boot screen bitmaps. I had one that did the Matrix digital rain effect.

Does that seem likely? Pointing a camera at actors is not inherently difficult or expensive. Even when AI is involved, it’s best at turning whatever you have into whatever you describe - so you film real people in real costumes, and let CGI-for-dummies make up elaborate sets. Or you hire three great actors to play a dozen characters.

Even for CGI films, ‘have’ into ‘describe’ just means you can half-ass the animation and rendering. Productions can focus on writing, character design, and cinematography, then feed in some footage of actors in VR Chat, to get out a scene approaching Pixar quality. Is Pixar itself going to use that process? Probably not. But it’s a million miles from typing ‘funny scene high quality’ and crossing your fingers.

Well good news, it’ll probably run locally by next year.

I’d love to be able to watch any show from any language on like a one-minute delay, with the robot faking the original voices. But I’d also like a fully in-character version of Revenge Of The Sith with the infamously bad Chinese subtitles.

Man, remember when CGI replaced animation, after animation replaced actors? It’s a real shame we don’t have actors anymore, since the moment they weren’t strictly necessary. It would’ve been so much cooler if technology simply allowed new things to exist when they’d otherwise be implausible or unfundable.

It really is the shallowest teenage scribble of a franchise. You can picture him sitting in his dorm room, listening to Tarkus and Olias of Sunhillow until the grooves wore out, doodling weird furry giantess smut, imagining all the claymation he was gonna do to make the bestest sci-fi film since Dark Star.

This man’s accent absorbs all the Rs that Jonathon Ross can’t say.

If you stare long enough, it may blink.

Her hand touches the base.

You have to remind your brain that all the “hanging” elements are also solid rock. It’s an illusion.

Huh, I thought Bart the bear was nominated and lost.

Time to rewatch The Art Of Bear Acting.

Careful, you’ll summon Smartman Apps (with emojis) to insist mathematics has exactly one perfect unambiguous syntax, where 2*(1+3) is somehow different from 2(1+3), and also reverse Polish notation does-too have parentheses.

why would any studio choose not to release on Steam?

Epic gave Remedy a shitload of money, up-front. All exclusivity these days works like that. Nobody wants to reach fewer customers. Some of them are convinced to - some of them are forced to. Alan Wake exemplifies the former, and there’s a good chance Remedy regrets the decision.

One company restricting access to most customers is a different thing.

And it becomes a problem for everyone.

If Valve bumped their cut from 30% to 40%, do you imagine publishers would rush to EGS? Epic’s cut is already 15 points lower than Valve’s. It hasn’t moved the needle.

Valve kills studios by saying ‘no thank you.’ They have immense power. They just don’t use it in any way that freaks people out. The mere possibility shapes the entire industry. Only niche studios try weird shit, because large studios don’t risk poking the bear. Games want to feature nudity and intimacy, but most are so self-censored, they could be televised. The cultural prevalence of nude mods is proof of demand that has been frustrated.

If you’d rather blame Mastercard and Visa openly dictating what art can and can’t be sold, by all means, we can talk about their joint control of online payment. But it might get blunt if you insist one store taking Bitcoin means that’s not a duopoly.

Apparently there is. But you can’t access enough of it unless you’re on the one store that really counts.

If only there were words for one company arbitrarily restricting who gets to reach customers.