vaguerant

Even calling Trump’s election fraud claims “unproven” is lending them far too much weight. “Unsupported” is probably the most charitable way to describe them.

It makes sense when you realize they take “women’s health” to mean literally one thing only: access to abortions.

The implication I got was that Agatha was giving Rio bodies in a sort of unspoken deal to keep Nicky alive–hence her coming and taking him when Nicky backed out. Going a step further, maybe Rio knew that Nicky was no longer going to go along with the plan after this one time that he refused, so he no longer served her needs.

The idea there would be that Agatha can’t face him because of the deal she made him an unwitting party to. Based on his nature and how Agatha described him, it seems like if he had known why they were out killing witches constantly (trading their entire lives for an extension of his own), he would not approve.

Usually I’d say if we don’t see the body there is a chance, but I think her going back to the start (of her training) means her time is over.

I agree, but also given Lilia’s experience of time, she’s only really dead chronologically. Maybe now she gets to enjoy her youth.

I absolutely was not expecting the Lilia reveal to be so incredibly satisfying. A couple of days ago, I wondered if anybody had listed all of her various outbursts in an attempt to put them in some meaningful order, but even though I was on the right track, this was much better than what I was imagining (I was guessing some kind of latent prescient ability locked away in a separate personality). I love Patti LuPone and they really did both her and Lilia justice here. Perhaps more than anything else, this will be the hook for a rewatch, seeing Lilia again in her true context.

I simultaneously want the series to be done so I can start again and want it to keep going forever.

Even though there is some network effect just in terms of there being much less content on the threadiverse than Reddit, I do feel like this is something we’re somewhat shielded from. For the most part, we’re not here to follow specific people: my friends aren’t on Lemmy/Mbin, or maybe they are, I don’t actually know or care. I have a Mastodon, but a lot of the people I’d theoretically be interested to follow are still on Twitter, or BlueSky, or Threads or something. It’s not enough of a pull factor to make me join any of those, but it’s probably why I barely use Mastodon.

Rotschy, which routinely hired teenage workers amid recent labor shortages, violated the law when supervisors assigned tasks known to be dangerous and prohibited for minors to perform.

L&I later issued significant fines against Rotschy for the incident, but has for years approved special “variances” for the company to hire minors despite its history of serious safety violations.

For their part, Derrik and his parents say they do not hold Rotschy responsible. It was a fluke, an unlucky break — not the company being neglectful, they said.

“I don’t think Rotschy failed my son in any way,” Derrik’s dad said. “All these events culminated into this accident.”

I hope they were paid very, very handsomely to say that.

This is a bit of an oversimplification. Generally, they would use the laughter from the actual audience in attendance. The stands were mic’d but the nature of filming anything is that it will often take multiple takes. Ideally, you get a perfect performance and response on the first take, but that’s not reality. Maybe you got a great laugh, but Jerry clinked a glass loudly over Jason’s line. So they cut and reset, Jerry does the joke again and there’s no mistakes, but the audience response is more muted because they just heard that joke.

The solution here is pretty obvious: grab the laugh from the first take and dub that over the performance from the second take. Technically, you’re misleading the audience at home because that laughter came from a different take, but it would also be misleading to show the home audience the tenth take and you hear the audience murmur awkwardly as if they hated it, when that’s just the response you’ll get from an audience ten takes deep into hearing the same joke.

There’s even the reverse case, where maybe some audience audio just isn’t usable. Nobody notices it on the day, but there was one take you got perfectly the first time, but in editing you hear some guy sneezing loudly while the rest of the crowd is giggling. You could just lose that scene or mute the audience for it, or crossfade into some similar audio you got from the previous scene, or whatever. Other times, your actors might continue a scene but the audience laughs over the next couple of lines, so you fade the crowd. In this way, the audience response is only as fake as the show itself is. Maybe Julia gave a funnier line read in take 3 but Jason hit a run on take 5, so you edit those together, making the best of the stuff you got on the day. Sometimes it was necessary to do the same for the laughs.

It was always preferable to get the real audience response to the actual current take, because if Michael does some physical bit to play off the crowd, you should hear them respond at the appropriate time, even in the middle of a longer laugh. But sometimes the pure documentary fact of what happened in the take that made it to air just isn’t the best version of the show. Ultimately, it’s not a scheme to trick people into thinking the audience responded differently. If anything, a joke that the audience didn’t respond to would get changed on-set rather than fixed in editing. You’d huddle with the writers and go “They don’t like this, what else have you got?” Then you’d feed your actors the new lines and see if they got a better reaction.

tl;dr: Crowd sound in any sitcom that is filmed before a live studio audience is mostly genuine.

For a post-script, even pre-taped outdoor scenes and stuff would be shown to the audience on large monitors so that a) they could follow the story and b) so their reactions could be recorded in the same session, with the same crowd, including the same guy with the staccato laugh so everything sounds consistent across the entire episode.

Sorry this is so long.

I definitely hope we get more backstory to William/Billy. I think the big question hanging over the series now besides Tommy is …

Nice to get the payoff to the call-forward “A lot happened to me at 13, too.”

Somebody has fed you or you have invented bad information. Neither Yuzu nor Ryujinx, the two Switch emulators which recently ceased development due to intervention from Nintendo, included Nintendo’s code. The Yuzu settlement required those developers to acknowledge that

because our projects can circumvent Nintendo’s technological protection measures and allow users to play games outside of authorized hardware, they have led to extensive piracy.

There was never any mention of them stealing Nintendo code.

Ryujinx, we know even less about, because the agreement went down privately, but there’s literally zero indication of any stolen code. We know that Nintendo contacted the developer proposing that they cease offering Ryujinx and they did.

Obviously, Nintendo was bothered in both of these cases because the emulators do facilitate piracy, but that’s not the same as them having infringed on Nintendo’s copyright by using their code which you are claiming. Both of these emulators were developed open-source; if they were built using stolen Nintendo code there would be receipts all over the place. That was never the problem.

I’m not going to check the whole archive, but going back to at least 2005, Nintendo was asking users to …

report ROM sites, emulators, Game Copiers, Counterfeit manufacturing, or other illegal activities

https://web.archive.org/web/20051124194318/http://www.nintendo.com/corp/faqs/legal.html

Here’s some more quotes from the same page where Nintendo is viciously anti-emulation:

The introduction of video game emulators represents the greatest threat to date to the intellectual property rights of video game developers. As is the case with any business or industry, when its products become available for free, the revenue stream supporting that industry is threatened. Such emulators have the potential to significantly damage a worldwide entertainment software industry which generates over $15 billion annually, and tens of thousands of jobs.

Distribution of a Nintendo emulator trades off of Nintendo’s goodwill and the millions of dollars invested in research & development and marketing by Nintendo and its licensees. Substantial damages are caused to Nintendo and its licensees. It is irrelevant whether or not someone profits from the distribution of an emulator. The emulator promotes the play of illegal ROMs , NOT authentic games. Thus, not only does it not lead to more sales, it has the opposite effect and purpose.

Personal Websites and/or Internet Content Providers sites That link to Nintendo ROMs, Nintendo emulators and/or illegal copying devices can be held liable for copyright and trademark violations, regardless of whether the illegal software and/or devices are on their site or whether they are linking to the sites where the illegal items are found.

I’d say it started on at least Nintendo 64. The original Japan-only Animal Crossing game for N64 had playable, emulated Famicom (NES) games. Nintendo even ran a special offer to get an N64 Controller Pak with Ice Climber pre-loaded which you could plug into your controller like a game cartridge and play inside Animal Crossing.

I do wonder whether the algorithm understands sarcasm. A while back, I watched a video about some movie bombing, something objectively bad like Morbius, and they joked that the movie wasn’t actually failing for all of the obvious reasons, but because it was “too woke”. They didn’t really believe that, they were just making fun of people who say that about movies. Still, for the next couple of weeks I had to keep marking channels as “Don’t recommend” because they were all unironic right-wing rage-bait about the woke agenda. I don’t know for certain that that’s why I suddenly got all those recommendations, but that was my best guess.

For years I thought Mickey Rooney (1920-2014) and Mickey Rourke (1952-present) were the same guy. I’d see Mickey Rooney in a movie and be like “Wow, he’s looking pretty good for his age,” thinking he was a man 32 years his senior and/or dead.

I finally twigged when I eventually saw Iron Man 2 (2009) and was like “How is he doing this?!” and actually looked him up.

Something very sketch is definitely going on. I’m not sure how much of the episode to believe really happened. Agatha’s comportment completely shifting and her sudden awareness of who Teen is, the casual way Lilia responded to Alice’s death and Teen’s outburst, nobody was behaving in-character for the last scene. Maybe we just saw the beginning of a trial for Teen?

On first reading I breezed right past that, going “Sure, they’re telling me the weights of the bears.”

I guess that probably depends whether you’re counting by raw numbers or by proportion of each age group. I just looked this up and Pew Research Group has this chart from April 2024 (attached). Proportionately, it shows a fairly consistent shift toward more support for Republicans as the age brackets go up, with the one exception being from 60-69 and 70-79 where support drops 2%. Either way, Baby Boomers are proportionately more supportive of the Republican Party than Gen Xers are.

Moving on from proportion to raw numbers, that’s definitely tougher to tell. The Wikipedia articles for each generation cite the latest census data, but that was in 2019, so obviously figures will have changed since then. Still, the census said there were 65.2 million Gen Xers living in the United States, vs. 71.6 million Baby Boomers. Have six million Boomers died in the last five years? Probably not, but obviously the ratios will have gotten somewhat tighter since then.

Ultimately, on raw numbers, I’d say Baby Boomers (currently aged ~60-78) currently outnumber Gen Xers (currently aged ~44-59) and are proportionately more likely to support Republicans, per the Pew chart.

EDIT: I got ninja’d, but I brought a chart.

Look, I absolutely hate to do the reading comprehension thing but you’ve misread both the article and my comment on it. The reporter who performed the rescue was Fox’s Bob Van Dillen. The person quoted, however, is Subramaniam Vincent, director of journalism and media ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. The writer of this AP article quoted Vincent who recounted the situation. The writer also added some additional context to Vincent’s remarks which serve to explain the concept of rescuing a person who is crying out for help.

So … sorry … no. I’m not asking that.

I dunno, it seems pretty safe to me. I’ve ridden the same carbon fiber bicycle for years and it has never imploded.

This article is weird. For one thing, the last sentence quoted is just confusing:

Van Dillen is then seen wading through the water with the woman on her back, carrying her to safety.

Who’s the “her” in that sentence? Anyway, the really confusing part is that they then consulted with an expert on journalistic ethics:

It’s clear that while he had a professional obligation to report the news, “there’s also someone whose potential life is at risk,” Vincent said. “So I think the call he made is a human call.”

Considering the rising waters and the woman’s cries for help, along with not knowing when help would arrive, “it’s a straightforward case of jumping in — a fellow citizen actually helping another,” Vincent said.

Why is the writer explaining this basic concept like I’m an alien? Sometimes, people stop doing their job for a few moments to save somebody’s life even though that’s not what their job entails. That’s interesting. Are the humans then punished for their dereliction of duty?