Good and totally reasonable. It’s time we stop the idea that AI companies have carte blanche to do whatever the fuck they want with other people’s works.

Of course he does. He’s a billionaire pedophile and a corporate vulture, and that’s exactly who the Republican Party serves.

Correction: the AI bubble WILL burst. It’s not a matter of if but when…

There’s no way that the economy as it stands today is sustainable. Never before has so much money been invested in a unprofitable industry that has no business null

Unless we all someday learn to eat, sleep, shit and fuck AI, it cannot be the alpha and omega of the future economy.

Internet trolls and edge lords: too angry to live and let live, too cowardly to lash out in person.

All this stuff just isn’t for us anymore.

Lovely

I hereby dub this the “nocontroller” or alternatively the “zeroshock”.

Honestly it better be only first class lie flat seats.

I’m something of an existentialist at heart, so I truly believe that life is what we make it. Nothing more and nothing less.

There are real problems and challenges in the world. Good and evil both exist. Some days you will be happy and at peace and other days you will be consumed by pain and sorrow.

All of these things are part of life, and the universe itself is ambivalent to us.

Figure out what your philosophy on life is and live.

Oh hell yeah! I’m in!

I only got into Galaxy Express 999 a couple of years ago, but I grew to really love it after watching most of the original 70s series as well as the 80s Rintaro films. It’s a fundamentally great story about what it means to be human in a world of technology, and I think that message is really important for modern times.

I’m glad to see that Rintaro is writing the script for this. We don’t seem to know who is directing this, but my dream director for this probably very out-of-left-field and maybe controversial, but I’d love to see Takeshi Koike take a stab at it since I know that he was a huge fan of the original film.

It’s really hard to say… I don’t think I can pick just one to be honest…

I love the romantic beauty and natural charm of Ghibli. I love the realism and details of Otomo, Satoshi Kon. I love the wild, colorful, and chaotic nature of creators like Tsurumaki, Imaishi, Koike, and Yuasa. Then you have shows like CITY, which was an incredible fusion of Arawi’s cute, simple and colorful artstyle backed by the animation prowess of Kyoto Animation. There are just too many great art styles out there to pick just one!

I will say that I mostly feel that anime peaked in the late 80s and 90s. Of course, nice looking stuff is still being made, and today colors are brighter and frames are cleaner, but there is just something textural about painted cels on top of painted backgrounds that we have lost in the transition to digital.

My prediction for the future of high-quality anime is that many creators will want to return to more physical media based pipelines, due to the perceived cheapening of digital art brought about by generative AI. Because ultimately creators want to stand out, and viewers want to be impressed.

Lupin The IIIrd (Fujiko Mine series and subsequent films)

Have you seen Redline?

If not, you really should! Takeshi Koike is a genius animator and Redline is one of my favorite anime movies. :)

As a longtime Linux user I’ve always had a spotty relationship with Native Instruments–they kind of look and act like the Adobe of the audio production world. It has at times been very annoying and frustrating to deal with their software stack through compatibility layers like Wine, and they’ve always seemingly been just too big to care.

Having said that, they got where they are because they make pretty good tools. Kontakt is what it is as a platform because it has been relatively reliable useful for producers and plug-in developers alike. It sucks to see people getting laid off, and it’s still kind of a shock that such a ubiquitous and massive (pun mostly intended) company in the audio space could fail basically out of nowhere.

Whatever happens with NI in the future, my main hope remains that tools like Kontakt are at least as accessible for Linux users like myself, and ideally much more. In a post-Steam Deck world, dare to dream that some ex-NI employees get involved in Wine development/maintenance?

While I think there’s some merit to the idea of talking about the fediverse on corporate legacy social media platforms, I think the best and most effective thing we can do is put in extra effort to engage with the fediverse itself, making posts and comments, building up new communities, and so on.

Reddit is no doubt getting worse and more closed off all the time. They treat their users like shit, or at least, like a resource to be harvested for profit.

But at the same time, Reddit users will sit around complaining about the platform until the cows come up, but when it comes time to do anything about it (like, for example, go check out the fediverse…) they don’t ever take any action. And this problem isn’t unique to Reddit either, people just love to complain about X on X, complain about Facebook on Facebook, complain about Tiktok on Tiktok, etc. It’s hard to tell how much of that is just performative internet shit vs genuine addiction to their particular algorithm of choice, but in my view it’s a real problem…

In other words, the question is “where we should be spending our energy?”

Should we be spending it on Reddit, trying to convince a bunch of people (who frankly range from ambivalent to straight-up addicted) that Reddit sucks? Or should we spend it here on the fediverse building the communities from the ground up?

Thank god for that!

The right loves censorship.

I don’t know if I’m alone in this, but I really don’t like the basic ergonomics of taking photos with my phone. To me there’s no comparison to the weight and layout of a dedicated camera.

Ok top of that, I like to fiddle with settings and focus manually, and I don’t want my images to be automatically filtered through AI or scraped by Google.

I can certainly agree that a big part of photography is being in the right place at the right time and using whatever camera you have to take the photo. And I know that the phone cameras these days are pretty good and more than enough for the casual user, but I like a dedicated camera, even a cheap and old one, if only for the experience of taking photos that way.

I know microtonal music isn’t new, it’s been played across the world for thousands of years. There are other bands that have brought it into a rock/jam context before, like King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard and I’m sure others too.

The point is that Angine de Poitrine are to microtonal jam rock as Daft Punk was to electronic music: not doing something totally unheard of, but very groovy and refreshingly original in their sound, look, format, and vibe.

We’re all rightfully quick to complain about big movies, music and media playing it safe, cashing in on trends and rehashing the same old thing. But I can’t imagine many people looked at Angine de Poitrine and said “boooring… heard and seen all this before!”. I think they at least deserve credit for that. They’re not my favorite band ever, but I’m happy to hear and see something I haven’t heard before.

The fact that it’s like nothing we’ve ever seen or heard before is the point, and in today’s world of unlimited generic AI-produced slop, it’s pretty awesome. You wouldn’t be writing a post like this if they were doing the same thing as everyone else.

I get that it’s not for everyone. They’re not my favorite band or anything. But I appreciate what they’re doing because it’s fun and surprising, and they still somehow make it catchy.

Music should be fun.

Ridiculous… And for what? AI slop that nobody wants?

This whole thing is possibly history’s biggest waste of resources. None of this makes any damn sense.