• Princess Tutu
• Legend of the Galactic Heroes (the original, though the newer Die Neue These is decent too)
• Mahoujin Guru Guru (1994 and 2017)
• King of Braves GaoGaiGar
• Slayers

“But the plans were on display…” “On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.” “That’s the display department.” “With a flashlight.” “Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.” “So had the stairs.” “But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?” “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”

Despite the quality of their results going down in recent years and getting worse because of AI slop, the search engines I would miss the most in terms of type of service. Most alternative search engine still use the indices of Google and/or Bing and the ones that don’t, don’t have a very big index. I’m old enough to remember a time when search engines were plentiful, but terrible, and back then I actually made use of web directories, like Yahoo! at the time, more. A still-existant example would be Curlie, an heir to dmoz, and there are also more local sites like the Dutch Startpagina. Being more dependent on things like that would probably make my web usage more exploratory and less about trying to find a specific piece of information quickly. And I would also go directly to specific websites more often when I do need specific information. But there are also a few companies working on making a European search index and this happening would undoubted accelerate their efforts, so depending on how that works out, not much might change at all.

Streaming-wise, there are local streaming services for films and TV shows and they would undoubtedly expand their offerings with the loss of competition from American giants, but also, I never stopped buying BDs and DVDs (in fact I have a backlog). I never understood the appeal of music streaming, so I still buy music, sometimes even on CD. As for something like YouTube, Nebula is America-based, but it’s not “big tech”, so I would watch more of that. Niconico Douga isn’t what it used to be, but that might change without YouTube. And there would probably also be some movement towards federated video streaming.

I don’t actually make use of any of the big social media platforms. Technically, I have a LinkedIn account, but I don’t really use it and wouldn’t miss it. It’s not really social media, but I do use WhatsApp, but that being gone would just make it easier to convince friends and family to switch to something better.

It does have a USB port, but it’s better not to connect any weird devices to your PC. But if you have an old laptop or Raspberry Pi or something that you’re willing to potentially sacrifice (making sure it’s free of any personal data and not connected to any network), you could maybe find out what it’s describing itself as.

You can use a hammer to build a cupboard, or to bash someone’s skull in, but you can’t use it to make cupcakes with (well, not very effectively, anyway, or hygienically). My point is that each tool has a limited set of purposes it can really be used for and there’s no law of nature that states that all things considered “tools” always have more good purposes than bad, or that the benefits of the good purposes always outweigh the problems caused by the bad.

So it’s not good enough to flatten “AI” to the broader category of “tools” and say because something is considered to be generally true about the category as a whole, that means it’s also true for this specific case; you actually have to look critically at the specific case: who does it empower, in what way, to what extent? And frankly, the ability of the current paradigms of generative AI to empower good people to do good has been minimal to non-existent, whereas bad people have been greatly empowered to do bad. People who do not value truth and to whom the end justifies the means now have an infinite propaganda machine, those who do value truth do not. So the intentions of the people who made the AI isn’t even the biggest problem (though it does make things worse), it’s the intentions of the users. A community-made hammer is just as effective at bashing skulls in as one made by a greedy corporation.

I imagine his thinking went something like this: “If they build cycling infrastructure, it would attract casual cyclists. But I’d be zooming past them at several times their speed, which would be considered dangerous, so speed limits would be implemented and I wouldn’t be able to use public infrastructure as a practice track anymore.”

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.