Teen me had my mind blown when, after finding this song super catchy, I read the lyrics in the liner notes.

plasma gun

One of the first “aha” design moments I ever got was the Doom plasma gun. There was a kid’s toy version of the American M-60 Light Machine gun that I had. The back half was pretty cool on its own, the typical thumper machanism to make noise, but it also had secondary triggers in the stock and a little gear that would advance a belt of soft plastic ammo. Didn’t do anything except move, but the effect was cool.

The front actually came off, and was a pretty decent quality suction-dart shooter. However, if you turned it around and used the the mating surface as the “muzzle…” BOOM! (or “ZAP” I guess… lol) Doom plasma gun, down to the exact number of ridges.

“Language models don’t apply to us because this is not a language problem,” Nesterenko explained. “If you ask it to actually create a blueprint, it has no training data for that. It has no context for that…” Instead, Quilter built what Nesterenko describes as a “game” where the AI agent makes sequential decisions — place this component here, route this trace there — and receives feedback based on whether the resulting design satisfies electromagnetic, thermal, and manufacturing constraints… The approach mirrors DeepMind’s progression with its Go-playing systems.

This is kind of interesting and cool, and it’s not a hallucinating LLM. I’ve designed a couple of simple circuit boards, and running traces can be sort of zen, but it is tedious and would be maddening as a job, so I can only imagine what the process must be like on complex projects from scratch. Definitely some hype levels coming from the company that give me pause, but it seems like an actual useful task for a machine learning algorithm.

And both are delicious.

I don’t seem to hear as much anymore, but for a long time this was me with EVE Online.

And everyone else in the room clapped, I presume?

Peaked in obedience school…

Yeah, I mean there’s not a big huge punchline, but this was clearly a bit of a general send-up, and also prodding at a very specific “Tim Tebow” type of muscular Christianity.

That type of Christian man is big and strong, but also extremely manicured and soft-spoken (even while saying the usual heinous shit) and “effeminate” by certain heteronormative standards. The look and vibe lends itself to fairly easy jokes about men who are closeted or so naive they don’t realize they’re closeted, which will needle some and maybe give others food for thought. Anybody who’s spent time in the Bible Belt will have met the dude in this comic, and maybe his wife.

For a while it was four, but then Nazi Spanish Inquisition pope died.

Very cool, but is anything as cool as that Space Wars Computer Space cabinet in the same scene?

LOOSEN UP!

We’re too close!

Are those OG '83 Return of the Jedi sheets, or a re-release?

Okay, I’m willing to accept that we generally shouldn’t decide that our personal lines in the sand can serve as meaningful differentiators between art and not-art. By the same token, don’t expect me to be particularly impressed by a (mostly) photorealistic composition just because you spent 30 minutes fine-tuning your prompt. If I’m not appreciating your skill and the time you committed to your vision, the bar for the impact you need to make is that much higher. For me, most AI art falls flat on that front as well.

Maybe someone will be the breakthrough artist that shows the rest of us luddites what a genuinely beautiful interplay between drafting a prompt and massaging an engine will look like, but (1) even that person is something other than a painter or a photographer, and (2) I don’t think we’re there yet and may never be.

I like that, though I might consider that rhyme, alliteration, and especially repetition also aid retention by requiring less data to be committed to memory as-is. References to other works are also very much a shorthand for cramming pre-existing memes (in the Dawkins sense) into less “word-doing.”

I dunno. The whole thing breaks down pretty quickly, as most analogies between mental and computational process do, but it’s fun to think about.

Adults also make a face with how much it’s a copy of Frozen’s premise.

Definitely very similar, but it’s different enough, I’d say. It sort of makes explicit that there are cultural repercussions to imposing Elsa’s burden on everyone, that embracing individuality can ironically create a stronger sense of community, and then, in splitting Elsa into Rumi and Jinu, it allows for parallel redemptive tracks, one who never had a “Let it Go” first act moment at all and suffered because of it, and one who really thoroughly bought into the anti-social aspects of it but is then gaslit into thinking they can never be anything better.

If we can do the Hero’s Journey a thousand times, we can do Elsa’s every few years, especially when the rest of it is changed up and fun. I do think there’s a world where K-Pop Demon Hunters comes and goes without making any waves, but the songs are all earworms and it hit at just the right moment, apparently.

Kit Secord from the one-season Rocketeer reboot for little kids.

Kipo (And her dad) from Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts.

Nemona from Pokémon Violet (and Friede from Horizons), plus a talking Pokédex that ended up too clunky to bring anyway.

Various levels of authenticity versus ease of assembly/comfort, and I’m proud of them regardless, but I’m tired, boss. Thank fuckin’ Christ that Nene Kusanagi from Project Sekai actually has a factory-made costume.

Sounds like he’s made peace with its living on in forks as well. Nice to see he’s doing okay.

Even the AI generated animated eagle at the bottom of the page is like, “WTF is this? Why are you even looking at this bullshit? This is all a terrible idea.”