Yes, that’s what tariffs are.

You know, India solves this with a bit of purple ink.

After Obama Victory, Shrieking White-Hot Sphere Of Pure Rage Early GOP Front-Runner For 2016.

And that’s what cartoons can be, now. This is the medium.

It’ll be more interesting once creative types stop performatively gagging at it and just use the tool for the thing it does. You can do as much work as you like, the hard way, and then use this tech to make up the difference. It’s powerful enough to go straight to a finished shot from a description. Of course it’ll work on real actors and half-assed sets.

The Motion Picture Association (MPA), the Hollywood trade association, accused ByteDance of “unauthorised use of US copyrighted works on a massive scale”.

Fuck 'em.

Anyway, I’m pleasantly surprised to see people in the industry sit up and take notice. This was always the most promising use-case for video models: obviating the insane cost of putting a good script onscreen. A lot of trunk projects that would otherwise never get made - for better or for worse - will become actual movies. At least insofar as the deluge of streaming exclusives are “actual movies.”

The trick is not doing what this specific clip did. If you don’t need real actors then they don’t need to be fake real people. Your characters do not have to look or sound like anyone living. If some fanfiction author coaxes Mission Impossible 12 out of an online model, Ethan Hunt should look like nobody in particular. The franchise is just an idea, but Tom Cruise is a real human being, probably.

That’s a fair distinction. Later printings of Asimov’s “Childhood’s End” begin with an apology, because even he thought an infectious hivemind was merely speculative fiction.

Nonetheless: it’s unlike bigfoot and UFOs, where only the proliferation of cameras made “I seent it!” grossly insufficient evidence. This was always kind of stupid. People bought it based on vibes, took it quite seriously for some damn reason, and apparently clung to it through the turn of the millennium. Psychic nonsense in particular coincides with the popularity of stage magic, hypnotism, and seances - all supposedly distinguished as demonstrable events within a rationalist worldview. They were gently legitimized by Zener cards and spirit phones, which were vague enough to bicker about, instead of being an obvious hoax like the Cottingley Fairies.

Meanwhile, young-earth creationists remain convinced science will vindicate them. Any day now.

I still feel like, if ChatGPT was a thing in the 90s, there’d be people convinced the government secretly had fully sentient superintelligences they kept to themselves. It would be a constant undercurrent referenced on talk radio and seeping into public discourse. Really, 9/11 conspiracy theories might’ve been the final peak for such amorphous claims. Even COVID denialism was just “nuh uh” followed by wishful thinking. Idiots chugged horse dewormer and mumbled about laboratories, but any grand wackadoodle narratives were confined to political cartoons that read like parody. Both cases were surely tempered by the fact a lot of people died. You can freely yap about bigfoot at the local dive bar. You could start a screaming row by suggesting anything happened besides what the entire country watched in real-time.

We watched a lot of CSI over dinner. It is weird how well we separate fiction, especially in a social context. The more modern expression is how scary games don’t work if there’s someone on the couch beside you.

It was only a product of the zeitgeist. This was the era of Unsolved Mysteries jumbling missing-person cold cases with urban legends. All the wild shit referenced in Deus Ex was presented as though it should be taken seriously. Plus UFOs, crop circles, cryptids… what sticks out in my mind was a segment about footage of a cave entrance, and freeze-frames of ‘snake-like flying insects unknown to science.’ It was a long exposure of a moth. The camcorder’s light was on and its shutter angle was wide open. My dad said as much, at the time, and I could not figure out how to square that with the serious tone of the program. If it was that simple, why would they go on television and lie about it?

I think American culture used to be much more credulous toward paranormal bullshit. Uri Gellar and whatnot. Psychic powers, telekinesis, dowsing rods… Miss Cleo. Religious cranks doing their think-of-the-children routine about Ouija boards and crystal energy as if the woo-woo nonsense might work. There’s still a quarter of the population that’s gullible as shit, but now they’re fixated on right-wing propaganda specifically. They’re antivax climate denialists, not free-form cranks who think the moon landing was fake and wrestling is real.

All of that contrarian energy has been co-opted by fascists.

If you think Democrats should be the worst we can do, we have to stop doing so much worse.

Whoever is behind those projects is the sort of kid who’d retell the same joke over and over expecting it to be as funny as the first time.

But her e-mails.

Is it shallow populism?

Again?

If he were alive today, who knows how old he would be.

‘Don’t break laws.’

‘You can’t say that, that’s a crime!’

In its original formatting, AFAIK.

Advertising shits in your brain.

Let’s get rid of it.

Your business model is not my problem.

Especially when plenty of profitable services add this shit anyway.

Those are the windows.

Read: Discord is de-anonymizing all users.

Leeeave.

“Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement.