vaguerant

I’m sure you know this, but as an addendum, the majority of films shot digitally have been filmed with 2K/1080p cameras. Obviously there are exceptions and also modern, effects-heavy films might have their compositing done in 4K, so I’m not saying there’s no benefit to going over 2K. However, in many cases you’re already getting the intended picture at 2K and upscaling is not bringing you any closer to the filmmakers’ ideal presentation.

That’s a pretty normal part of the fediverse. Somebody from your instance has to be subbed to a community for your instance to start pulling in its posts. Anything that was posted while nobody was subbed doesn’t exist on your end.

Wasn’t sure if this was real or just for the memes, but it’s legit: Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum - Wikipedia

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.

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.

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.”

Somebody has fed you or you have invented bad information. Neither Yuzu nor Ryujinx, the two Switch emulators which recently ceased development due to intervention from Nintendo, included Nintendo’s code. The Yuzu settlement required those developers to acknowledge that

because our projects can circumvent Nintendo’s technological protection measures and allow users to play games outside of authorized hardware, they have led to extensive piracy.

There was never any mention of them stealing Nintendo code.

Ryujinx, we know even less about, because the agreement went down privately, but there’s literally zero indication of any stolen code. We know that Nintendo contacted the developer proposing that they cease offering Ryujinx and they did.

Obviously, Nintendo was bothered in both of these cases because the emulators do facilitate piracy, but that’s not the same as them having infringed on Nintendo’s copyright by using their code which you are claiming. Both of these emulators were developed open-source; if they were built using stolen Nintendo code there would be receipts all over the place. That was never the problem.

I’m not going to check the whole archive, but going back to at least 2005, Nintendo was asking users to …

report ROM sites, emulators, Game Copiers, Counterfeit manufacturing, or other illegal activities

https://web.archive.org/web/20051124194318/http://www.nintendo.com/corp/faqs/legal.html

Here’s some more quotes from the same page where Nintendo is viciously anti-emulation:

The introduction of video game emulators represents the greatest threat to date to the intellectual property rights of video game developers. As is the case with any business or industry, when its products become available for free, the revenue stream supporting that industry is threatened. Such emulators have the potential to significantly damage a worldwide entertainment software industry which generates over $15 billion annually, and tens of thousands of jobs.

Distribution of a Nintendo emulator trades off of Nintendo’s goodwill and the millions of dollars invested in research & development and marketing by Nintendo and its licensees. Substantial damages are caused to Nintendo and its licensees. It is irrelevant whether or not someone profits from the distribution of an emulator. The emulator promotes the play of illegal ROMs , NOT authentic games. Thus, not only does it not lead to more sales, it has the opposite effect and purpose.

Personal Websites and/or Internet Content Providers sites That link to Nintendo ROMs, Nintendo emulators and/or illegal copying devices can be held liable for copyright and trademark violations, regardless of whether the illegal software and/or devices are on their site or whether they are linking to the sites where the illegal items are found.

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.

Despite being told regularly not to tease the animals, it is believed that Hannah taunted the tiger, which lunged at her, pulled its fixing from the wall and “tore her to pieces”.

I gotta squint at this last part. Did this explanation come from management? “No, you don’t understand, it was really the woman’s fault that the caged wild animal we kept in a pub attacked. We’re actually good and normal for doing this.”

Something very sketch is definitely going on. I’m not sure how much of the episode to believe really happened. Agatha’s comportment completely shifting and her sudden awareness of who Teen is, the casual way Lilia responded to Alice’s death and Teen’s outburst, nobody was behaving in-character for the last scene. Maybe we just saw the beginning of a trial for Teen?

They’re laughing with me, Michael!

It’s real in the sense that the established policy is to retire ccTLDs within five years of a country code ceasing to exist. But there are multiple provisos there:

• we don’t know with any certainty that the IO country code will be disestablished; it doesn’t necessarily follow that Mauritius regaining control of the British Indian Ocean Territory will mean the end of the IO country code (and associated .io ccTLD), for a variety of historical and administrative reasons
• we don’t know with any certainty that IANA will unequivocally shut down the domain, vs. converting it to a generic top level domain like many other existing special-interest and novelty gTLDs (e.g. .cloud, .gay, .info, .tech)

Obviously it’s worth keeping an eye on what IANA does with this situation, but personally I suspect one or the other of the above will happen. It’s probably in the interests of Mauritius to retain the domain as a source of income, but if they don’t then somebody else will likely want to take ownership, and there’s plenty of moneyed interests in retaining .io since a number of large business customers (the largest likely being Alphabet/Google) are already using it.

Yeah, this is pretty standard. Between the low production numbers and the fact that assembly is probably occurring in a country with stronger labor laws than wherever mass-producted hardware is made (mostly China), it’s going to cost more than something you can pick up on Amazon or AliExpress.

There have been a few cases where open-source hardware like this has enough demand to get picked up by a Chinese manufacturer who makes a cheaper version through some combo of unethical labor practices, production scale, employing cheaper or cloned parts and/or dropping features, so it’s not out of the question that a cheaper version comes along, as long as you don’t mind the compromises to get it.

US$249.99 ready-built, for anybody curious. Not saying it’s not worth that, but that will price a lot of people out of it.