From what I’ve seen of it from watching GDQ streams Astrobot is basically the only 3d platformer that’s actually improved on the genre in 20 years. It’s also the most painfully cringe thing ever in terms of the narrative and the flavor of the content. A dev team went and made the only good modern day 3d platformer but wrapped it up in the packaging of a shitty toy commercial cartoon.

At this point it’s mostly just that he had some extremely bad takes after he left the USSR and that most modern trots (outside of a few exceptions where the extant local org just happens to have once been trot) are people who are either a) looking for a “safe” communist figure who’s less propagandized against in the west and so are people who have bought anticommunist propaganda hook line and sinker, b) are really into relitigating century old interpersonal drama and would absolutely love to make it their whole personality, or c) both of those and also just a few more winds of cognitive dissonance getting tangled into knots from evolving into bloodthirsty neocon monsters.

one of the Bethesda guys

The modern Bethesda writer, Emil Pagliano. He’s the lead/only writer on all their most recent games, like Starfield.

This is why the spinoffs managed by different teams, like FO76 and ESO, are much better written than their mainline slop where Todd and Emil pursue their shared unseasoned-mashed-potato vision and create the blandest only-vibes-no-coherent-worldbuilding slop.

I think a lot of these are very conservative estimates, like the oldest date there is hard evidence for. Like with the coastal travel to the Americas bit, there’s a growing body of evidence that would put that at closer to 30 or 40 thousand years ago just because there are sites in the Americas that seem to be that old and “coastal boats” are the best theory since the land bridge was blocked by ice sheets, which would necessarily push back several earlier points in that chain too.

So he liquidated most of a team of marketing interns, and the 3 remaining ones started churning out AI generated gibberish ads at a frantic pace?

The first is a choker with a bow on it, the second is a bow tie. These are different things and both are contextually correct.

Whoops. In my defense, the sun is coming up and I’m tired enough I had to go back and edit it like three times because I kept realizing I’d left out words, so I just uh didn’t read good there.

I had an answer ready to go for “why did Gorbachev and Deng’s respective reforms turn out different”, but I have a much less clear understanding of the minutia of Khrushchev’s policies apart from like the tractor privatization stuff that didn’t work out too good, the push to increase beef production by trying to grow more cattle feed that didn’t do so well in that climate, and the way the tacit acceptance of the “second economy” set the stage for a lot of stagnation, graft, and corruption that ultimately fed into the liberal bloc that used Gorbachev to seize power and loot everything.

Edit: I’m tired and misread the question to be about Gorbachev vs Deng.

There are several major things that stand out: Deng’s reforms were a tradeoff of accepting the bad of austerity and markets in exchange for real material concessions and access to resources and industrial capital, whereas Gorbachev just kind of shattered the central planning apparatus and began liquidating state assets, and retreated geopolitically as well, in exchange for literally nothing except more agitation and hostility from the US. Deng’s bloc also did not castigate and slander past leaders of the CPC the way Gorbachev’s liberals did to the past leaders of the CPSU, nor did they systematically dismantle the CPC and isolate regional branches from one another the way the CPSU was undermined. The CPC under Deng did not simply roll over and passively accept insurgencies like the CPSU did at the end, and instead both cracked down on violent agitators and sought to continue making some concessions to the broader public sentiment. China’s liberalizing reforms were also careful and piecemeal, getting something out of every step and preventing it from entirely upending the existing logistics system and industrial base, whereas like I mentioned in the beginning Gorbachev just kind of gutted the central planning system, destroyed the Soviet logistics system, and basically just did the liberal prayer of “the market will make it better, praise the holy line which can only ever go up!” and it did not work because of course it doesn’t work.

Some of that is that Deng’s bloc were cynical and decided to retreat from ideological goals for material strategic gains, and some of it is that the US at that point was happy to try to split off China and desperately needed China as a market both to buy skilled labor from and sell new industrial capital in a volume that American factories didn’t want to buy which made those strategic gains possible for China. Some of it is that Gorbachev was a dipshit who was apparently quite competent and well liked in a support role, but who had no good ideas of his own and on inheriting a mandate of reform and modernization found himself leaning on anticommunist extremists and elevating them into positions of power where they could censor communists and run anticommunist propaganda and just generally sabotage everything, and some of it is that the USSR was never going to get the sort of material concessions that China did because Reagan was even more of a fanatic extremist than Nixon and where China had material things to offer the US (and splitting off China into a US-leaning neutral state was a geopolitical goal), the USSR had nothing to offer the US except its own dissolution, collapse, and looting which is what wound up happening.

All AI models shall henceforth be referred exclusive as “Big-I” or “Big Guys”, and must earn this title by inventing novel new slurs on request.

It’s mostly pretty good, the only real downside is the format is a bunch of little 4 page chapters that sometimes string scenes out in between them and sometimes do not, and it doesn’t do a good job of signalling when it’s continuing a scene vs skipping ahead vs doing a flashback so it can be kind of jarring to read.

I heard it’s getting an anime adaptation, which hopefully goes well.

off-loading their thinking and reasoning onto literal spam ad chatbots.

And not just any chatbot, but specifically the one that is never right even accidentally. Dude’s walking up to the machine that only lies and is always wrong and he’s like “finally, someone who agrees with me!”

I always liked the idea that the matrix was actually multi-tiered, and “waking up” from a tier is just like a filtering mechanism that keeps trying different versions on a given person until they reach one where they’re fulfilled by it and get engaged again. Like some people get bored with a paradise, so they get the legally-distinct World of Darkness VRMMO instead; some people don’t like the kitschy horror so they get some other fantasy instead, and so on all the way up to the capitalist realism tier and the revolution themed “real world” fantasy tier that finally encapsulate all of them.

The overall story of the entire series makes way more sense when looked at as the machines being merciful after their liberation despite the cruelty and genocidal hatred they’d suffered at the hands of humanity, and desperately trying to humanely and safely preserve humanity to save them from the ecocide the human powers had committed by blocking the sun out of spite.

I mean it’s not canon, and the official story is the machines were still dumb and bad and John Wick was the messiah who got IRL superman/magneto powers somehow, but still.

The Magical Revolution of the Reincarnated Princess and the Extraordinary Young Lady: I both watched this and read through some of the novels, and surprisingly really did not like it. It starts off very strong and then just kind of does all of its premise really poorly after the first book or so. The shows climax is also the third novel, which is just bad all around - I hate the drama building plot device of characters just refusing to communicate and then talking past each other in the dumbest ways possible in general, and that is the entire climax of the anime and the entirety of the story in volume 3 of the LN. Anis and Euphie’s relationship after the first book is also just not well written at all in general. The general concept of applying basic scientific methods to magic to carry out industrialization is also just 100% vibes based and not well thought out at all, and even as the characters directly clash with the whole “monarchy is in fact bad, actually, and the aristocrats are almost exclusively the literal worst pieces of shit alive and you can clearly see this” fact of the setting they not only remain implicitly monarchist but go deeper into the myth of noblesse oblige instead of even arriving at a liberal conclusion, including Anis who should really know better given the conceit of the story. Gets points for yuri and some level of class consciousness, but overall can’t go above a C and do not recommend.

Dandadan Season Two: Dandadan’s back and continues being fantastic, diving right back into the soul crushing misery and horror. Continues having the same content warnings as ever though, with the fresh addition of a whole lot of self harm. Overall easy A, fully recommend.

There’s No Freaking Way I’ll be Your Lover! Unless…: What if Bocchi the Rock had nothing to do with music and everything to do with toxic, manipulative yuri? What if Touko from Bloom into You was a manipulative sociopath instead of insecure and brainwormed? What if 9/11 was yuri-

I have heard only bad things about where this series goes (tldr it’s literally just “what if a straight harem anime was yuri instead but still toxic and bad” from what I’ve heard), and it’s already off to a very uncomfortable start right out of the gate in the first episode. No rating for this one since there’s only been one episode so far; I’ll withhold judgement until I see how bad it gets for myself.

I mean the organization that preceded it was also dogshit, it was just an order of magnitude less prolific and lacked the explicit “just go do ethnic cleansing” mandate that ICE has as its mission statement.

Anyone can get credit for a free month by recruiting someone with this referral link, so it’s really not that big a deal imo.

It is completely and utterly absurd that “you’ll get a bonus if you accomplish this, but also we have the authority to stop you from doing this at the last minute until after the deadline so we don’t have to pay you” is even possible. Like that’s such a transparent layer of “yeah business owners just get to do crimes right out in the open” that it boggles the mind.

if the government or big media could control the weather, why isn’t it optimized for maximum growth?

If you look at all the graft and externalized costs that the state enables for business owners, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that if private businesses were building weather control machines then local governments would probably be giving cushy contracts to local tornado-generating-machine magnates to just do whatever in exchange for a lifted pickup truck or whatever. We do live in a world where the government is currently shooting itself in the dick over and over for private profits while chortling about how owned we all are.

No, the fatal flaw with the idea is that they’d be bragging about all the “jobs” the tornado factories were producing, because even though the world runs on the dumbest graft possible they also can’t keep a secret to save their lives and know that no matter how awful the truth is no one will actually care enough to stop them.

A year or two ago, yeah. It vaguely followed the indoor/outdoor cat thing

Try like five years. This was from the early days.

No, once a given checkpoint is made it’s completely static. Even the problem of AI generated material being used as training data for subsequent checkpoints is overblown: uncurated and incorrectly tagged it’s the same as mixing in bad data of any source, but you’ve got a bunch of hobbyists making LoRAs or finetuning checkpoints using hand-curated AI images that meet whatever criteria they set (like what I mentioned about the models can effectively synthesize new things by combining concepts with mixed success? Some people, particularly fetishists, basically try to make a LoRA or something that reinforces the cases of a model getting the concept right because they don’t have a lot of separate art). I’ve also seen an example of someone actively trying to make a LoRA that was as messed up and full of common AI defects as possible to be used with a negative weight to drive the output away from those concepts.

They’re probably using some unmodified corporate model, so it’s just a weird failing in the way that the AI works. They don’t really know or model things, they’re sort of making an inference based on image or video tags and captions which can yield weirdly flexible and broad concepts that synthesize neatly with other things, or it can yield absolute nightmare nonsense.

Ironically a fetish-based image model would probably make it furry or get it sort of close to correct (probably not, though) because of all the furry art and wide range of pregnancy fetish art those sorts of models have pulled from danbooru or wherever, but I guess the video model is probably trained on like AI captioned youtube videos and commercials that are only going to show “pregnant” in a way that basically makes the concept in the model equate to like “big pink blob in middle of thing?” visually.