Authors
Neal Stephenson doesn't think the Facebook Metaverse is the one he talks about. He believes it will come from videogames, and be about them.
George RR Martin isn't a very good writer. He has to wait for the muse, and rarely likes what he wrote.
Movies
Ant Man suffers worst second week drop in MCU history.
Mario Bros Voice actors troll.
Theme Parks
New Mattel theme park.
I show this because Disney once had a barbie themed park that lasted a few days.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo28D8R9hIs
Videogames
This is a stretch, but a new pinball table based on the Foo Fighters is coming out. Rock band pinball games has been happening a lot in the last 10 years, because the people buying the machines had their heyday 20+ years ago. So Foo Fighters is recent in comparison.
Ever read an article and knew the writer is friends with the subject? This article talks about a crazy taxi clone with interview of the creator as if it's going to be the latest indie hit.
The switch bans controversial words as avatar names. New words being banned are Groomer and Salv8dor.
Atomic Heart was made by dudes for dudes. Twitter user points this out, and it's hard to tell if there is sarcasm or not. Comments and others are also interesting. I got this from someone complaining about it.
Silent Hill 2 now runs at 60 FPS and has better controls.
A high school in Japan is for dedicated gamers.
Sonic Cosmo Fighter is translated and released to fans.
EA wants to know if players want a dead space 2 or 3 remake.
Mario Fan creates strategy game based on Super Mario Bros 2
Hogwarts game has denuvo removed by hacker.
VR
Someone tried different body types at his house to try out VR equipment.
VR has blurriness issue. It's being caused by HDR response on right screens.
Science
Cannabis use causes heart disease.
The author of this article doesn't know what Graupel is. She has to write about it. So she mentions the word, and changes the subject. It looks like hail, but is soft as snow.
Science: Power
If processors continue as they are, they will be nuclear powered to keep at the rate it's going. Power efficiency has been ignored for other abilities, so the consumption and use has raised a lot.
Power Plasma with Gigajoule power was created for 8 minutes.
Using a laser microscope, scientists have been able to watch combustion happen.
Politics
The UK will be without basic foods for months.
Judge tosses out disciplinary action against lawyer who helped Trump.
Animals in the Korean DMZ are still cute.
This article feels like they're telling Russia where to hit next.
Republican party may demand loyalty oath.
Office Culture
Remote workers mock office Culture
Crypto mining facility found at high school.
Google wants people in Hybrid set up to share desks.
AI
Andrew Ng says AI has an Instagram problem. Too many people are showing off flashy stuff so people think their work sucks.
A better inference system for imaging has been created. This means images can have better outlines, and predictable 3D space.
ControlNet is being pushed some more. Honestly I kind of hate it. The outlines aren't the greatest, and regular Diffusion connected to Photoshop is better.
A new AI called multidiffusion is now out. I haven't used it, so I can't comment. It looks promising though.
An introduction to NeRF to AI image people. No you can't NeRF an AI image. At least you can't yet.
Companies are already replacing workers with ChatGPT
Tech
China promises to destroy Starlink. They plan to send 13,0000 satellites to stop it.
Picade review. A pi powered mini arcade that demands you get the roms on your own.
Stupidity
Woman rents out her house and lives in a smaller house in her backyard. She claims to not pay rent to herself.
Man who deported people found out he was undocumented. One of those NPR stories that is really bad propaganda.
Someone covered up their Harry Potter tattoo with a Gravity Falls tattoo.
Super Pigs coming into US from Canada.
Court Case over Metaverse.
Propaganda
State lawmaker promises to filibuster laws against LGBTQ bills.
Long Covid shows problems of bureaucracy for socialism medicine.
Woke dies in Florida
Florida Governor has list of people he wants to remove. Let's meet one of them.
For people following VR along, the one that guy used, the Katwalk, is pretty lacking. It can only track forward walking. Strafe and back need "poses" with your feet. Very much a compromise, especially at about a grand.
Hoping the Omni One delivers on it's promises and isn't too much more from that. The idea of actually walking across alien landscapes in No Mans Sky is a fantasy I hope to experience some day.
Rock band pinball machines have been a thing since forever. I seem to vaguely recall playing on a KISS one back in the day.
I'm mildly surprised pinball machines are still a thing at all.
It's a collectors market for rich people. There are games that cost $50,000, and people buy it. Arcades usually have the cheaper editions that cost $6,000-$10,000.
There are about 2-3 companies that make them. Stern is the bigger name, while Jersey Jack works with less licenses. Also some designers make a one off and go back to the company.
Arcades in general are like this. It's a huge market with tons of companies and growth, while the console crowd is told it's dead. Arcade owners get pretty pissed about this because they're doing great, and have frequent guests. Everyday someone tells them their market is dead.
To give an idea, I've been told there are no arcades in Orlando, when it's actually 15. Arcade Monsters alone should let people know the market is doing great. Speaking of which, their front door area is pinball. I played the new Godzilla game last time I was there.
So the perceived market and reality are so different it's actually a shock.
It's good to hear. One thing I do remember about being a teenager, is that there wasn't much else for teenagers to go out and do; too old for kids' stuff, and too young for adult stuff. We had a roller skating rink (long gone, victim of a bingo craze that the smoking laws killed) and the arcade (also long gone, but I recently saw that someone was opening a new one.) Otherwise, you just joined scouts or cadets for something to do.
Reading this made me realize that most teens are new to having unstructured play time. The cool fun stuff is fairly organized like scouts. Going to an arcade has to be an actual choice, and it's difficult to do that when it's new.
That's probably why we have kids in so many organized things. Karate is both a skill, and a babysitter. Just letting the kid go do whatever, when they have no idea is kind of scary.
As a teen in the 90's, Seattle was amazing. I had my 14th birthday party at a Discover Zone, and my 17th was finding out all the hills were a deathwish if I wanted to rollerblade. It had tons of arcades, and weird things to find. There were still times where I felt like there was nothing to do. That sense of indecision was being a teen, and not anything to do with the world around me.
I think you are really underselling ControlNet. I was able to get it making exactly what I wanted extremely fast through the Automatic1111 interface. And that's after only making AI art for a week before installing it. The best part is that it doesn't require any proprietary software like Photoshop.
ControlNet solved the composition problem, the pose problem, and if you have a 3d modeling program to pose the hand, the hand problem. The key is to use 2-3 controlnets at once for the initial image, and then inpaint where there are problems.
I might be. It's really good if the outline works better. I'm trying to get multiple angles of the same AI image so I have to use more advanced trickery. It's actually frustrating because I don't have a video card to do NeRF, and that's my next big step.
As far as I know, the only way to get the same character is to first train a Textual Inversion embedding or LoRA. And to get that far you need a collection of images already. On Civitai, I've seen LoRAs that used as few as 2 images, but that still is gonna take a good GPU and plenty of training time. And I cannot attest to their quality.
It seemed like you could get Stable Diffusion to draw the same character by feeding it a screenshot of a 3d model and giving it enough freedom and instructions to redraw the base image. I don't know if that works as well as advertised.
That's what I am doing.
What controlnets do you recommend?
Keep in mind i'v only been playing with SD for a week or so, but scribble+Openpose seems to do really well. If I just want to re imagine a scene, depth does good.
There is a further extension for the extension if you are using automatic1111 that allows you to manipulate an openpose stickfigure in the browser. It doesn't have hands yet though.
Atomic Heart company's CEO is a woman? Fuck. Please let Microsoft give me a refund. I have to do more digging on what I buy. Second time I've bought from the enemy by accident in six months.
Start labeling what you get funding from on the damn box, you evil fucks.
Most game funding is kept nebulous, and has been like that for years. It's why so many companies started from the mob. Nintendo made so much they left a lot of the Yakuza stuff alone, but still worked with companies that were still laundering fronts.