mindbleach

It’s definitely not the first problematic aspect people think of.

Not Thomas Riker - the clone from “Up The Long Ladder.”

Riker kills a guy for looking like him.

In 1573 the Spanish navy besieged the lakes and rivers around Haarlem, eventually routing the Dutch independence movement in a prolonged sea battle.

Today it’s the location of Schilpol airport.

This place has its own OC.

Strategery is self-defeating when every idiot’s doing their own bullshit. With enough people the honest answers just kinda happen. So long as nobody’s out there doing Ranked Choice bullshit - putting Adolf Beezlebub ahead of their second-favorite guy because they pretend that means their vote will count twice - the aggregate reflects everybody’s top N candidates.

The worst possible failure mode for Approval Voting is what we’re already doing.

And all we’d have to do is let people check multiple names. Same ballots - one less rule - basically matches Condorcet results.

The medium itself is not innocent.

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.

Shut.