mindbleach

The server needs percussive maintenance every couple months.

Big company stress-tests hyped technology on serious project

Neat!

as crunch

Oh fuck off.

It would be genuinely great for some studio to deliberately commit to a trial by fire for agentic coding. Small team, modest budget, schedule measured in months. Show everyone what’s possible through sincere effort.

This is not that. This is gasoline on a dumpster fire. You’ve mismanaged a project to where ship-now-fix-later isn’t an option, despite being yet another franchise-wank “live service” unlicensed casino. Piling on new tools and workers wouldn’t work at this point even if you hired actual sentient human beings. You need to triage what goes in at launch, and honestly estimate how much more time the team requires… not reassign developers to also train new blood, in the vain hope that a larger crowd will move faster.

The reliance on real P.T. files makes this port more authentic than previous hobbyist efforts to re-create the look and feel of P.T. for a PC audience. And while PS4 emulators recently reached a point where they could run P.T. completely, this native port also sports extra features, like upscaling and frame-generation, a camera mode, experimental third-person and VR support, and a “museum” section where you can look at and listen to in-game assets (including “unused content”).

You pay this much to be told “no?”

Whiskey! Laudanum! Saw.

Ransom note reading “money can be exchanged for goods and services.”

The real question is, why aren’t they in June?

Corridor Digital seems to get it. They’ve dorked with it to fill in for missing frames. They’re using it to relight flat greenscreen shots for their D&D… podcast? Anyway those relit shots look like PS3 cinematics, but they’re putting real dudes in real costumes inside a video game, basically in real time. Nitpicking the quality is missing the point. Getting all the shots they’re doing, but “properly,” would take ten times as long and cost a hundred times as much. It’s the same dudes putting in just as much work as the previous season. Anyone shouting ‘not art!’ doesn’t mean things when they say words.

The same dudes also used neural networks to fix greenscreen. They rendered a bunch of scenes with complex alpha blending, and built a neural network on that synthetic data. Unsurprisingly, the example-based universal approximator is pretty good at approximating from similar examples.

If I had the right GPU, I’d be tempted to go back and use 2023-ass video generators to adapt an original story, just to demonstrate - no tool is immune to human expression. Of fucking course you can convey complex feelings despite visible constraints. Anyone going ‘well why didn’t you just animate it?’ is incorrect, in the same way as if they’d told an animator, ‘well why didn’t you just film it?’

Tool used to do thing it’s for.

Oh no, apparently.

The constant hand-wringing about killing art is especially rich here, since this art presumably could not exist without it. It’s an unauthorized fan work. (Or as unauthorized as Japan’s tightass copyright law permits.) Yet even this video prattles on about how carefully they’ve triple-checked the output… like the haters give a shit. They have a one-drop rule.

All that ultimately matters is, does it look good? And if you’re starting from a decent storyboard - it ought to. I dunno if AI’s gonna raise the ceiling for any creative work, but it should absolutely raise the floor for low-budget productions. If your style is not extreme camera angles and visible keyframes, this is the tech that will do a thousand hours of busywork in a couple minutes.

The trailer at the end of this blatantly has that AI vibe. Which is fine. CGI took ages to become invisible, and mostly got there by hiding what you’re not looking at.

For Lain specifically - I think they’d hew closer to the premise if they went all-in on generated video. Specifically, so they could produce unreasonable quantities of animation, and somehow deliver different versions to different viewers. Change the reason for common events. Change the outcome of things concluded offscreen. Change what really happened, behind a white lie someone tells later. Illustrate the modern problem of the Wired: a loss of shared reality. An epistemic crisis. We’re not disappearing into the network; the real world itself is trapped in hyperreality.

Mickey take the wheel!

Google burned several billion dollars doing this properly, and still, nobody cared. Mainframes are almost never the right approach. Whatever hardware you connect from is usually capable of whatever you’re connecting for.

If we had to revert to PS3 levels of memory and storage, modern rendering and computing would remain obscenely powerful. Even new games on low-powered hardware would be-- wait, that’s not theoretical, just look at the Switch. The first one ran Wolfenstein II on the DOOM (2016) engine, with fantastic texture detail thanks to cell-phone compression. Not even joking. The second one still makes Resident Evil: Requiem look really fucking good.

Developers go where customers are. Anything that’s only possible on niche hardware… will probably form a niche market. So even if the bubble fucks us hard enough that we’re all stuck using battery power, that’s still a better option than a subscription for remote streaming. If everyone in 2036 is somehow stuck with the specs of a 2026 cell phone, I guess we’ll have to put up with games that are only as profitable as Genshin Impact and Balatro.

Two drachma and an unrecognized claim to the throne will get you an amphora of wine.

Wasn’t there a defanged Tesseract fork? It sound like decent software, aside from the main dev being even more of a crank than people thought.

They make you think the wrong thing.

Renamon: “Hey twelve-year-olds! How’d you like some confusing new feelings?”

Getting into the weird shit because AOL filters only covered normal porn.

The Doylist answer is that Eva is a deconstruction of “super robot” tropes. Building-sized mecha having tokusatsu wrestling matches via remote control is a ten-year-old power fantasy. Like somehow only a child has the power, or only a child could be trusted. Taking that seriously gets you Oops, All Trauma.

Basically the “real robots” genre asks, how can we haggle down badass combat robots, to minimize the sci-fi bullshit required for them to be cool? That’s how you get Gundam and especially Battletech. It’s vertical tanks… with swords. War stories for teenage boys, who know ‘I’ll punch him harder’ is not a universal winning strategy, but still think ‘I’ll just move faster’ is. Meanwhile - Eva is Anno asking, what would the world look like if the absurd extreme cliches were just how things worked?

Basically it’s The Boys for Mazinger Z. Ninety percent taking the premise at its word, a few big changes other series honestly should’ve done before, and a sprinkling of edgelord details like the vibro-knife being boxcutters… and that’s how you get episode nineteen.

Which the Quakers did invent, in the form of solitary confinement.

Which nowadays is white torture.

Every effort to fix English just adds more exceptions. Meanwhile everything written beforehand, or elsewhere, still uses the old way, so you often need to learn both versions.

Shut.