Cost of doing business.

Ban the entire business model.

Everyone who is “old” is a boomer now.

And “millennial” just means “child.” People born in 1990 have sneered the word at 12-year-olds with zero self-recognition.

Everything about that movie is a fever dream.

Fuzzing.

Mike: “You guys watch Joe Don Baker movies?”

Nothing good is allowed to happen ever again.

I had not. There’s a variety of demos for guessing what comes between frames, or what fills in between lines… because those are dead easy to train from. This technology will obviously be integrated into the process of animation, so anything predictable Just Works, and anything fucky is only as hard as it used to be.

What doesn’t exist yet, but is obviously possible, is automatic tweening. Human animators spend a lot of time drawing the drawings between other drawings. If they could just sketch out what’s going on, about once per second, they could probably do a minute in an hour. This bullshit makes that feasible.

We have the technology to fill in crisp motion at whatever framerate the creator wants. If they’re unhappy with the machine’s guesswork, they can insert another frame somewhere in-between, and the robot will reroute to include that instead.

We have the technology to let someone ink and color one sketch in a scribbly animatic, and fill that in throughout a whole shot. And then possibly do it automatically for all labeled appearances of the same character throughout the project.

We have the technology to animate any art style you could demonstrate, as easily as ink-on-celluloid outlines or Phong-shaded CGI.

Please ignore the idiot money robots who are rendering eye-contact-mouth-open crowd scenes in mundane settings in order to sell you branded commodities.

Video generators are going to eat Hollywood alive. A desktop computer can render anything, just by feeding in a rough sketch and describing what it’s supposed to be. The input could be some kind of animatic, or yourself and a friend in dollar-store costumes, or literal white noise. And it’ll make that look like a Pixar movie. Or a photorealistic period piece starring a dead actor. Or, given enough examples, how you personally draw shapes using chalk. Anything. Anything you can describe to the point where the machine can say it’s more [thing] or less [thing], it can make every frame more [thing].

Boring people will use this to churn out boring fluff. Do you remember Terragen? It’s landscape rendering software, and it was great for evocative images of imaginary mountains against alien skies. Image sites banned it, by name, because a million dorks went ‘look what I made!’ and spammed their no-effort hey-neat renders. Technically unique - altogether dull. Infinite bowls of porridge.

Creative people will use this to film their pet projects without actors or sets or budgets or anyone else’s permission. It’ll be better with any of those - but they have become optional. You can do it from text alone, as a feral demo that people think is the whole point. The results are massively better from even clumsy effort to do things the hard way. Get the right shapes moving around the screen, and the robot will probably figure out which ones are which, and remove all the pixels that don’t look like your description.

The idiots in LA think they’re gonna fire all the people who write stories. But this gives those weirdos all the power they need to put the wild shit inside their heads onto a screen in front of your eyeballs. They’ve got drawers full of scripts they couldn’t hassle other people into making. Now a finished movie will be as hard to pull off as a decent webcomic. It’s gonna get wild.

And this’ll be great for actors, in ways they don’t know yet.

Audio tools mean every voice actor can be a Billy West. You don’t need to sound like anything, for your performance to be mapped to some character. Pointedly not: “mapped to some actor.” Why would an animated character have to sound like any specific person? Do they look like any specific person? Does a particular human being play Naruto, onscreen? No. So a game might star Nolan North, exclusively, without any two characters really sounding alike. And if the devs need to add a throwaway line later, then any schmuck can half-ass the tone Nolan picked for little Suzy, and the audience won’t know the difference. At no point will it be “licensing Nolan North’s voice.” You might have no idea what he sounds like. He just does a very convincing… everybody.

Video tools will work the same way for actors. You will not need to look like anything, to play a particular character. Stage actors already understand this - but it’ll come to movies and shows in the form of deep fakes for nonexistent faces. Again: why would a character have to look like any specific person? They might move like a particular actor, but what you’ll see is somewhere between motion-capture and rotoscoping. It’s CGI… ish. And it thinks perfect photorealism is just another artistic style.

Ah, so assholes trying to stomp the meaning out of an important term.

Oh hey, it’s Richard O’Brien.

Jesus, people, they’re not asking ChatGPT to guess who wins.

This is rollback netcode. This is literally just rollback netcode, plus a buzzword.

Neural networks are sixty years old. All that changed recently is how hard we can train them.

And this application is where neural networks should be downright magical: given complex events, you need a simple answer, and approximate guesses work okay. If the network is wrong… you roll back. Just like we already fucking do, with the lag-reducing prediction written by human beings.

The real thing to get worked-up over is - fuck software patents.

Fuck off, bigot.

Recommendations:

• DKC Tropical Freeze is everything GDQ is about: it looks fast, it’s a little broken, and everyone onstage has a great time.

• Ocarina of Time is a no-logic randomizer, so all the items are shuffled without concern for whether the game is beatable. Sometimes getting to a boss takes three separate glitches, and then hitting them takes five.

• Super Sheffy World is the best of four-ish Kaizo / Mario Maker games this year. Fast-paced and comically difficult. But I’d say Kaizo Mario World 3 was the better run, if only for the final boss.

• Vice City’s hard-mode mod is a delightful trainwreck. The game actively does not want to be in a speedrun.

• Tetris showcases are always fun. This year they did Grandmaster 3 in Shirase and Grandmaster 2 in Death difficulty.

• Elden Ring was a lockout bingo race - two runners trying to check off random goals.

• Super Metroid races are the finale for a reason.

Wat.

HTML tends to absorb all its best kludges. I put off learning JQuery for so long that the features I wanted became standard.

Sony’s white-knuckle grip on their platform is an exciting hint of things to come.

They’ve been cosplaying the PS2 era since about 2005. That’s when it became evident to everyone that games can just exist, and be for every platform, so long as the studio has a bit more money and time. Previously your game was for one gizmo, and you might hire some third party to follow up and coerce it onto another gizmo. Nowadays everything’s a computer and all computers work basically the same way. There’s details. There’s exceptions. But anything that doesn’t work the normal way becomes irrelevant.

This nonsense is the only thing Sony can do to pretend Playstation is anything more than a brand name. Microsoft has stopped pretending and it’s weirding people out. Nintendo had a unique feature for their gizmo, as they do, but now they’re competing with Valve - on hardware - and their follow-up is probably a merely numeric upgrade.

There are no platforms anymore. To consumers, there is nothing but software and obstacles.

Or you can get a different kind of weird.

1 + 1 = “11”.

Debatable.