vaguerant

Return all the Alarmos to the sea from whence they came.

Even calling Trump’s election fraud claims “unproven” is lending them far too much weight. “Unsupported” is probably the most charitable way to describe them.

She doesn’t even go here!

I know not everybody contemplates the messages found in their preferred media, but it’s hard to imagine someone who thinks like that finding anything to like about Star Trek.

It makes sense when you realize they take “women’s health” to mean literally one thing only: access to abortions.

The implication I got was that Agatha was giving Rio bodies in a sort of unspoken deal to keep Nicky alive–hence her coming and taking him when Nicky backed out. Going a step further, maybe Rio knew that Nicky was no longer going to go along with the plan after this one time that he refused, so he no longer served her needs.

The idea there would be that Agatha can’t face him because of the deal she made him an unwitting party to. Based on his nature and how Agatha described him, it seems like if he had known why they were out killing witches constantly (trading their entire lives for an extension of his own), he would not approve.

I take your point but I wouldn’t class nuns as the ideal opposing example to Nazis, either.

EDIT: And yes, I know I’m doing the thing.

Yoshi’s Woolly World probably still counts. It got a 3DS port, but it’s a game whose visual identity is a huge part of the appeal, most of which is lost when running at 240p. In terms of games that probably should be on Switch, I think the Zelda remakes and Yoshi are the last ones. Kirby and the Rainbow Curse and Nintendo Land would both be hurt by porting to a system with “normal” controls, to the extent that they probably won’t bother.

There’s not really any one reason the Dreamcast failed, but the library being larger doesn’t necessarily map to the library being better. The Dreamcast didn’t have any heavy hitters on the level of a Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, GoldenEye or Ocarina of Time. In terms of games that are still in the mainstream consciousness, it’s probably Sonic Adventure and Shenmue.

The library also had another thing that I think held it back from greater success: ports. Releasing so early, basically in the middle of the lifespan of the PS1 and N64, meant that a lot of the games were cross-platform with one or more previous-generation consoles. It’s hard to demonstrate the power of a next-gen console when so many of the exact same games also worked fine on the consoles people already owned.

The other big source of ports in the Dreamcast library were arcade games. Sega was offering the ultimate in home ports of arcade games at exactly the time in the games industry when arcades were collapsing. The Dreamcast was the best way to play basically any cross-platform game that came out in that period, whether it was ported from arcade or lesser consoles, but ultimately they were games you could already play or that you specifically didn’t want to.

I don’t want to give the impression that the Dreamcast didn’t have good or original games, it had both, just not “I must upgrade my console mid-gen”-quality games. It’s a library that’s aged very well but at the time, not enough people wanted what they were selling.

I get the argument, but email is also very different to the kind of open-web network that the fediverse resides in. There are problems the fediverse faces which email doesn’t like discoverability. The emails either come to you or they don’t. With federated social media, you have to find the content you’re looking for first. Maybe you use a search engine, or somebody gives you a business card with their handle and instance, whatever. Then you have to figure out how to view those posts from your home instance if you want to actually interact in any way. There’s browser extensions and stuff which try to make this easier, but that’s another thing that has to be explained and set up, plus not everyone is visiting from a web browser with extension support, or a web browser at all for that matter.

It’s not fundamentally impossible to understand the fediverse, but there’s more of a barrier than email, which can be explained in a single sentence like “Your email provider gives you a unique address that anybody else can send emails to and vice versa.” I don’t think convincing ourselves that the fediverse is actually very simple is going to convince people outside the bubble that that’s true.

Usually I’d say if we don’t see the body there is a chance, but I think her going back to the start (of her training) means her time is over.

I agree, but also given Lilia’s experience of time, she’s only really dead chronologically. Maybe now she gets to enjoy her youth.

I absolutely was not expecting the Lilia reveal to be so incredibly satisfying. A couple of days ago, I wondered if anybody had listed all of her various outbursts in an attempt to put them in some meaningful order, but even though I was on the right track, this was much better than what I was imagining (I was guessing some kind of latent prescient ability locked away in a separate personality). I love Patti LuPone and they really did both her and Lilia justice here. Perhaps more than anything else, this will be the hook for a rewatch, seeing Lilia again in her true context.

I simultaneously want the series to be done so I can start again and want it to keep going forever.

Even though there is some network effect just in terms of there being much less content on the threadiverse than Reddit, I do feel like this is something we’re somewhat shielded from. For the most part, we’re not here to follow specific people: my friends aren’t on Lemmy/Mbin, or maybe they are, I don’t actually know or care. I have a Mastodon, but a lot of the people I’d theoretically be interested to follow are still on Twitter, or BlueSky, or Threads or something. It’s not enough of a pull factor to make me join any of those, but it’s probably why I barely use Mastodon.

Rotschy, which routinely hired teenage workers amid recent labor shortages, violated the law when supervisors assigned tasks known to be dangerous and prohibited for minors to perform.

L&I later issued significant fines against Rotschy for the incident, but has for years approved special “variances” for the company to hire minors despite its history of serious safety violations.

For their part, Derrik and his parents say they do not hold Rotschy responsible. It was a fluke, an unlucky break — not the company being neglectful, they said.

“I don’t think Rotschy failed my son in any way,” Derrik’s dad said. “All these events culminated into this accident.”

I hope they were paid very, very handsomely to say that.

Super neat concept. I really enjoy the melding of (micro)blogs and threads, which is what I like about Kbin/Mbin; I can follow interesting people from Mastodon without needing to visit a separate app or site. In a way, this scratches that same itch for Lemmy.

This is a bit of an oversimplification. Generally, they would use the laughter from the actual audience in attendance. The stands were mic’d but the nature of filming anything is that it will often take multiple takes. Ideally, you get a perfect performance and response on the first take, but that’s not reality. Maybe you got a great laugh, but Jerry clinked a glass loudly over Jason’s line. So they cut and reset, Jerry does the joke again and there’s no mistakes, but the audience response is more muted because they just heard that joke.

The solution here is pretty obvious: grab the laugh from the first take and dub that over the performance from the second take. Technically, you’re misleading the audience at home because that laughter came from a different take, but it would also be misleading to show the home audience the tenth take and you hear the audience murmur awkwardly as if they hated it, when that’s just the response you’ll get from an audience ten takes deep into hearing the same joke.

There’s even the reverse case, where maybe some audience audio just isn’t usable. Nobody notices it on the day, but there was one take you got perfectly the first time, but in editing you hear some guy sneezing loudly while the rest of the crowd is giggling. You could just lose that scene or mute the audience for it, or crossfade into some similar audio you got from the previous scene, or whatever. Other times, your actors might continue a scene but the audience laughs over the next couple of lines, so you fade the crowd. In this way, the audience response is only as fake as the show itself is. Maybe Julia gave a funnier line read in take 3 but Jason hit a run on take 5, so you edit those together, making the best of the stuff you got on the day. Sometimes it was necessary to do the same for the laughs.

It was always preferable to get the real audience response to the actual current take, because if Michael does some physical bit to play off the crowd, you should hear them respond at the appropriate time, even in the middle of a longer laugh. But sometimes the pure documentary fact of what happened in the take that made it to air just isn’t the best version of the show. Ultimately, it’s not a scheme to trick people into thinking the audience responded differently. If anything, a joke that the audience didn’t respond to would get changed on-set rather than fixed in editing. You’d huddle with the writers and go “They don’t like this, what else have you got?” Then you’d feed your actors the new lines and see if they got a better reaction.

tl;dr: Crowd sound in any sitcom that is filmed before a live studio audience is mostly genuine.

For a post-script, even pre-taped outdoor scenes and stuff would be shown to the audience on large monitors so that a) they could follow the story and b) so their reactions could be recorded in the same session, with the same crowd, including the same guy with the staccato laugh so everything sounds consistent across the entire episode.

Sorry this is so long.

I definitely hope we get more backstory to William/Billy. I think the big question hanging over the series now besides Tommy is …

Nice to get the payoff to the call-forward “A lot happened to me at 13, too.”

I’d say it started on at least Nintendo 64. The original Japan-only Animal Crossing game for N64 had playable, emulated Famicom (NES) games. Nintendo even ran a special offer to get an N64 Controller Pak with Ice Climber pre-loaded which you could plug into your controller like a game cartridge and play inside Animal Crossing.

I do wonder whether the algorithm understands sarcasm. A while back, I watched a video about some movie bombing, something objectively bad like Morbius, and they joked that the movie wasn’t actually failing for all of the obvious reasons, but because it was “too woke”. They didn’t really believe that, they were just making fun of people who say that about movies. Still, for the next couple of weeks I had to keep marking channels as “Don’t recommend” because they were all unironic right-wing rage-bait about the woke agenda. I don’t know for certain that that’s why I suddenly got all those recommendations, but that was my best guess.

For years I thought Mickey Rooney (1920-2014) and Mickey Rourke (1952-present) were the same guy. I’d see Mickey Rooney in a movie and be like “Wow, he’s looking pretty good for his age,” thinking he was a man 32 years his senior and/or dead.

I finally twigged when I eventually saw Iron Man 2 (2009) and was like “How is he doing this?!” and actually looked him up.