She recently evolved into Hatterene, which was… quite a shift in character.
Liko’s pretty imposing now, though, with two humanoid Pokemon taller than her.

I’m not sure I entirely buy that. For cloud gaming to be any good at all, you need a high-speed, low-latency internet connection. Yes, nowadays having an internet connection is pretty much a requirement in the industrialised world and even someone of lesser means will probably have one good enough to watch streaming video at a decent enough quality (unless they live in the middle of nowhere), but that’s not good enough. So with the expensive internet connection and the monthly subscription, cloud gaming doesn’t strike me as a very economical.

We’ve also been living in a period of diminishing returns when it comes to visual fidelity improving as hardware power does for a while now, so you can buy older, more affordable hardware and still have games look great on them. Meanwhile, I don’t think someone who insists on being able to see the surroundings accurately reflected in every window and puddle is going to accept the compression artifacts and latency of cloud gaming.

PNG does not compress photos very well. A photo that is 5 MB when saved as a high-quality JPEG may very well be at least 15 MB as a PNG. Also, a lot of cameras (phone or otherwise) save to JPEG by default.

I do wish more people would use PNG where it makes sense, though. The other day I made an edit to an image containing line art that was purely black and white except for the compression artifacts. I applied a threshold so that all the artifacts became either perfectly black or white and saved it as a monochrome PNG, reducing the file size to less than a third, while containing more information and having a cleaner image. I later remembered that I could reduce the file size even more by using indexed colours. In other words, whoever originally saved it in a lossy format actually made it take up more space than needed while also needlessly reducing image quality.

I fixed the mistake.

It seems unlikely to me that what your legal name is, is what matters. If it did, that would mean you couldn’t kill anyone who is not legally documented anywhere using the Death Note, which seems like an odd restriction for a supernatural notebook to have (there’s also the matter of people who are documented under different names in different jurisdictions or with different spellings etc.).

So I imagine it’s about what either the writer or the writee acknowledges as their name. However, one of the rules of the Death Note is:

This note will not take effect unless the writer has the person’s face in their mind when writing his/her name. Therefore, people sharing the same name will not be affected.

This suggests to me that it’s the writer’s cognition that matters, meaning this wouldn’t work because the writer would still acknowledge someone’s dead name as their actual name.

You mean the places that did the actual research and development on how to effectively build (high speed) trains and rail networks took longer to get where they are than the place that could just use already well-established technology? No way!

Don’t get me wrong, there can absolutely be political barriers to having a good rail network (as evidenced by the US), but let’s not pretend you’re comparing apples to apples here.

Heh, in fact there was a new Urusei Yatsura series recently, there’s a new Ranma 1/2 running right now and there was an anime-original Inuyasha spinoff (Yashahime) a couple of years ago. There’s actually a bunch of 80s IPs being taken out of the storehouse right now, with a new Cat’s Eye series running right now and an upcoming Kimengumi series.

The issue appears to be a lack of original works to adapt, or perhaps more accurately, too many of them. Adapting existing works has always been anime’s bread and butter, but while there are more people than ever reading manga (and light novels) right now, their attention is spread across a larger body of works, so there’s not that much that stands out in terms of popularity.

That said, brining back these old IPs might not be a bad thing in the long run. Back in the early 90s after the real estate bubble popped, a lot fewer shows were being made, so TV stations had to air reruns of older shows. This revived interest in genres that had gone out of fashion, like science-fiction, and led to the mid-to-late 90s period that is often seen as a golden age. Maybe this will be one of the things that will end this current rut of infinite isekai stories. I can hope, at least.

The FLCL sequels were made at Production I.G., Gainax just licensed out the IP. There’s no real overlap in the people who worked on it either; I think just the director, and only in the role of “supervisor”, and the original character designer.

The most recent work by the director (Tsurumaki Kazuya) and writer (Enokido Youji) of FLCL is Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX, at Khara, Anno Hideaki’s studio. Some other prolific people who worked on FLCL, Imaishi Hiroyuki and Ootsuka Masahiko, are now the big cheeses at Studio Trigger. Yoshinari You also mostly works at Trigger.

Kind of weird thing to compare it to, given that most “new urbanism” is just old, pre-WW2 urbanism.

It’s still kind of sad, but at the same time, long overdue. Gainax had been a shell of its former self for quite a while, with basically all the people who made it what it was having gone elsewhere (Khara, Trigger) a long time ago and what was left being a miserable pile of debt, tax evasion and dubious IP management.

Speaking of IP, I wonder what’s going to happen to the Daicon Film IP. It’s impossible to make money out of, so I guess it’ll end up at Khara, given Anno is there?

Most countries don’t do the absurd funding the local public school using the district’s property taxes thing, but they still have property taxes.

I think there’s a 50% chance we went to the same theater, because I also went to see The Colors Within yesterday. I agree, great film. It’s interesting to me how Japanese entertainment tends to do a better job at telling a story where Christianity plays a role without being utterly obnoxious about it. Or maybe I’m just less suspicious about a Japanese creator’s intentions when it comes to this. Anyway, I did notice a slight plot hole, maybe?

But well, it’s not that big of an issue.

I already went to see Chainsaw Man a couple of weeks ago, which was great fun. I did like the first season quite a lot, but I enjoyed this different approach as well. Still a weird experience to go to the mainstream cinema and see an anime film in a packed house, though. That would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

I do think there’s a meaningful distinction to be made between something being attributed to a real person and a fictional character being loosely based on real people, though. Like, I think we can be pretty confident that the events in the Epic of Gilgamesh didn’t really happen (at least not literally), but if Gilgamesh was, like is generally accepted, a real person, the Gilgamesh in the Epic is most likely supposed to be that guy. Whereas Robin Hood was probably never meant to be any particular person.

That said, do we actually know whether all the stories in the Bible about Jesus were originally about the same individual? The new testament was written decades and centuries after the death of historical Jesus, by people who didn’t even live in the region, right? So all the stories the authors heard would have come from traders and missionaries of Christian cults with vocal traditions. That alone is very long game of telephone, but I imagine every town at the time would have at least one person claiming to be messiah, and if one of them became a big enough deal that rumours around him spread beyond town, there would also be bunch of copycats. So a lot of room for mix-ups.

“I am Jesus, your king!” “I heard Jesus was buried like three days ago!” “I uh- I have come back from the dead!” And then he skipped town ASAP.

Seems to me that the “market performance ratio” should weigh a lot heavier. The whole thing that makes something a bubble is that a lot of money is being put into it while very little is coming is coming out and there being very few prospects of that changing in the near enough future outside of religious conviction, yet this metric is the only one suggesting that investments creating real value should matter and it only accounts for 7.5% of the whole score. Then again, the site doesn’t actually properly define what “market performance ratio” means and doesn’t state its sources beyond a vague description.

Also, the person who made this, Mert Demirdelen, is “head of growth and product” at Mobiversite, an AI app maker. His skills listed on LinkedIn include “AI” and “Blockchain”. So maybe not someone who is completely devoid of the desire to invoke a particular impression of the state of the AI economy.

There are valuable uses of learning models, but I’d say they all have the following constraints:

• The relation between input and output is at most 1:1. So the output does not contain any information that cannot be derived from the input.
• The scope is sufficiently constrained so that the error rate can be meaningfully quantified.
• Dealing with the errors (including verifying that there are errors, if needed) takes less effort than just doing everything manually.

I think I’ve solved the main conundrum of this show. Hinako wants Shiori to eat her, but Shiori first wants Hinako to want to live, so that she’s more delicious. But if that happens, Hinako won’t want to be eaten anymore. Also, she’s worried about leaving Miko behind without a friend. Then the solution is simple: all Hinako has to do once she wants to live again is eat Shiori so that she becomes immortal (because of eating mermaid flesh). After that, she’s pretty much a youkai herself, so Miko probably won’t want to eat her anymore (at least not in that way).

MikoHina lives on forever, Shiori has become a beautiful martyr for the cause, it all works out!

If you go to the official Japanese website of a show and look up where you can watch it, almost every time you’re presented with a list of close to two dozen streaming services. The exception is when one particular service (always an American one like Netflix or Amazon Prime) has exclusivity rights to it, but they’re the minority.

Exclusivity deals aside, this seems to me like a much better setup, at least from a consumer perspective. Shows are for the most part not dotted across different services, but there’s no market consolidation. And even if something isn’t on the service you’re subscribed to, it will probably be available on a service where you can just rent an individual show or episode instead of having yet another subscription. And I imagine that if they’re not competing on hostage-taking, that would mean they’re competing more on price and quality of service instead.

Studios don’t have that power, they don’t usually own the distribution rights of the shows they animated.

Most animation studios do contract work; they get hired by a production company to do a job, and get paid for it irrespective of whether the product does well on the market. The problems here are more structural, which are actually explained in the article.