making a collection
literally the marshmallow test sounds like such a scam. "oh yeah we'll give you two marshmallows later" no you won't! you'll forget the whole thing and get annoyed when I expect my marshmallows and then I will have eaten No Marshmallows
yeah I've heard this suggested as a possible explanation for people's choice to eat the marshmallows immediately. It suggests that in principle we could control for that aspect of the scenario if only we found a way to precommit to giving the second marshmallow if the first wasn't eaten. What I'm thinking, and this isn't completely fleshed out yet so bear with me, is: what if we we implemented the marshmallow rules as an immutable smart contract on the Solana blockchain
It is simultaneously true that
- You cannot be an effective moral thinker or agent entirely by yourself, because you need the insight that comes from other perspectives and the ability to measure your principles against the whole of humanity; and,
- You cannot be an effective moral thinker or agent unless you are willing to hold positions that are widely viewed as immoral, because the moral consensus will always be unprincipled and wrong about many important things.
There is no resolution to this dilemma. On the upside, no one is keeping score, so don't worry too much about it!
Shout out to the ten primate species, four bat species, elephant shrews, and the Cairo spiny mouse. Nobody else gets it
here you are sweetie
EMT: what the hell happened to him? what did he take?
[pan to guy laying motionless on floor, hands twitching a bit]
24yo with perfectly shaped menswear beard: He just had like one juicy hazy IPA, man
EMT: Get real. If you want to save your friends life, you better start talking straight with me.
24yo: Ok! Ok! He had 3.
EMT: *muttering under his breath and snapping on a latex glove* Stupid fuckin kids...
TIL that the infamous sealed record widely interpreted as absolving Geoffrey Chaucer for the rape of his servant was discovered last year to actually refer to an ongoing legal dispute between Chaucer, his servant, and her former employer over the terms of their contracts. (Apparently, it was very common in those days for people to poach each other’s servants-- Chaucer had entered into a contract with his servant before her term with her former employer had ended, and in the course of the ongoing legal dispute it was helpful to make a statement to the effect that Chaucer had not coerced her to leave her prior employer, using the legal term ‘raptus’, which can also mean ‘abduction’ or ‘rape’.)
Fun fact: We know the size of the Pokémon world because Scarlet and Violet has framerate issues
Video games tend to do this thing called "culling," where they don't render things that aren't in use. In Breath of the Wild, there's no reason for Link to be able to see how many apples are on a tree in Hateno when he's all the way in Tarrey Town, or know how many Bokoblins are running around Hebra Mountain. Link has a radius around himself that spawns in people, enemies, items, etc, so that the player gets the full experience of a rendered world without the game having to keep track of 850 Hearty Radishes sparkling.
This is good.
Scarlet and Violet has really AGGRESSIVE culling. The devs knew the game was framey and did everything they could up until the last possible second to save on resources.
The player has a single square that's always rendered around them, which takes about 10 seconds to run across. Besides that, all that's visible is whatever the camera is facing; if the camera can't see it, it does not exist.
You might think that this would be good for performance, since the game isn't calling as many assets constantly. And you would be right, if the things culled were ALL that the game was trying to render.
We all know at this point about the memory leak problem the game has, where it won't toss garbage data it's not using. This is supposed to account for the framerate drop; however, if it was ONLY the memory leak, it should start out smoothly, then decay over time until it's unplayable.
So what gives?
This is the ocean.
It's pretty. It's got a tiny bit of reflection, some gentle waves, a nice gradient. A beautifully made ocean without repetitive textures is always nice.
THIS IS THE OCEAN.
IT IS NOT CULLED.
Look at the SIZE of this thing! Paldea is an ANT in the middle of this puddle. It's rendering ALL of this, ALL its sparkles and waves, ALL the time.
Now, this is usually the part of the post where I'm like "and because we know the size of the ocean, based on the coastlines and wind direction, we can figure out how big the rest of the planet is by comparison!" like I did with Breath of the Wild over a year ago.
No.
Another video game term you might not be familiar with is a "skybox." Basically, to give the illusion of faraway objects, clouds, mountains, etc, and to hide the black void most 3D games are built in, games will have a texture wrapped around either the level or where the player is standing. For example:
This is a level from Twilight Princess called Sacred Grove. You normally can't see the bottom parts of this, hence why it turns into a gray plane, but the parts you CAN theoretically see by looking through the trees are colored so you think you're looking at a sky. You can see the edge of the void down in the bottom right corner.
Here's another one from Twilight Princess. You can see the different textures that stack on top of each other, as well as the blue skybox that's centered around Link when he's in the area. You, as the player, FEEL like you're in a small part of a larger world, because the devs cleverly structured together elements you CAN see in other areas into the background.
More complicated versions of skyboxes, typically semi-circular, are called skydomes.
They tend to look kind of like snowglobes, because you do not need to render anything that can't be seen. There's no situation in which the player should be able to fall lower than the level, so there's no reason to render the dome into a sphere in the event that that happens.
In Scarlet and Violet, it would make sense for the skydome to end where the ocean does. There's no situation in which the player manages to go past or underneath the ocean, so even if you wanted a gigantic ocean size like they have, you don't need to use more sky to encompass that.
They did not get this memo.
You might be thinking to yourself "wow, that looks like the curvature of the Earth!"
AND YOU WOULD BE RIGHT!!!!!
Why is this here. Why is it so big. I can't even see Paldea anymore. What exactly was planned for this.
Clever readers might have noticed that I labeled this "Skysphere" and not "Skydome."
That's because it for some reason is a sphere. Paldea is sitting in the middle of a fully rendered gigantic sphere in space. For some reason.
Look at Earth. Look at Spain, which Paldea is supposed to mimic.
I overlaid Spain over Paldea and made them roughly the same size. Assuming the two to be 1:1, the OCEAN is bigger than Earth.
If I then take that size and apply it to the skysphere:
HI. WHY IS THIS A THING.
The skysphere is bigger than the PROPORTION OF THE SUN TO THE EARTH:
I will be taking this as canon sizing until the Pokémon Company comes out and either CULLS this monstrosity and stops forcing our Switches to render THE SUN, or until the Pokémon Company comes out and gives us a canon planet size.
imagining a world where Homestuck and Almost Nowhere swap places and there's an entire active community of people who roleplay as distinct Annesonas and do collaborative roleplay by writing in each other's notebooks it gets to the point where this becomes the main cultural impact of the work and a group of unrelated people team up to write a visual novel just about inter-Anne relationships
a little obsessed with these I won’t lie
Artwork by Kristina Bustamente from 2014, she was a storyboard artist on Family Guy at the time!
Babe unmute yourself. Babe please unmute. Babe. I want to pick a fight with your boss. Sweetie. Just hit the button and unmute yourself for two seconds so I can start shit with your boss. Baby please
LTFF grant proposal for a research program in which i macrodose amphetamines + LSD and read off all one trillion parameters in GPT4. i run the forward pass in my head and tell you how aligned it feels. to me.
“act natural my RA is at the door”
18 year old girl who just smoked the cheapest joint ever constructed after escaping a lifetime of Christian fundamentalism just 2 months prior:
unknown target making eye contact. engage casual stranger greeting protocol. enable white person smile, intensity 30%. processing options... hit em with the bro nod. signal sent... nod response received, time=431ms. encounter successful.
constraints on Chinese artists and effects on culture
When the campy Korean music video called “Gangnam Style” became a surprise hit—the most watched clip in the history of the Internet—Chinese artists complained that they could never have created it because the culture officials that preside over their work would never have permitted a silly spoof of Beijing’s high-living elite and would, instead, have insisted that a music video for export be grand and impressive. The artists circulated a bitter comic strip called Shanghai Style, in which the creator of a Gangnam-style dance move is not showered in fortune but is, instead, incarcerated for “running crazily all over the place.”
Cultural figures were increasingly bitter. The film director Lu Chuan once agreed to produce a short film for the Beijing Olympics, but he was inundated with so many official “directions and orders” that he simply abandoned the project and coined a new term: the Kung Fu Panda problem. This describes the fact that the most successful film ever made about two of China’s national symbols, kung fu and pandas, had to be made by a foreign studio (DreamWorks), because no Chinese filmmaker would ever have been allowed to have fun with such solemn subjects