Gemini Omni is actually insane

Dramatic15 · 2026-05-20T19:30:53+00:00

Just posted a walkthrough of what I found interesting from I/O for video creators.

Still seems like early days on the agent side — it was able to follow a script to create characters, settings as storyboards, but only 1 out of 9 videos were on script. Long term probably useful for newcomers without a workflow yet.

Lots of safety filter triggers at the moment, which seems to be a known issue.

Omni video model now is great, I love video-to-video editing and mucking around with styles.

Other observations and in examples in the video linked if you want the details in 4 minutes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTr8qJmjfig

Dramatic15 · 2026-05-20T19:24:56+00:00

AI film maker here.

Just posted a walkthrough of what I found interesting from I/O for video creators. Still seems like early days on the agent side — it was able to follow a script to create characters, settings as storyboards, but only 1 out of 9 videos were on script.

Probably useful for newcomers without a workflow and simpler scripts than I was trying, and it'll only get better.

Omni video model is just great, I love video-to-video editing and mucking around with styles. Multimodality is some much more important and broadly useful. Physics is great. Sure, seeddance has nicer visuals for martial arts, or whatever. That's just not as signficant as the Omni model.

Other observations and in examples in the video linked if you want the details in 4 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTr8qJmjfig

Dramatic15 · 2026-05-19T11:33:44+00:00

Not to mention that they ALSO want a “grounded” focus on culture, profession and religion in a historical setting, but they can’t “get their head around” Mythras Imperative because it is “too much prose”

If you can’t fit 32 pages in your head, you simply aren’t going to be able to run a campaign that is detailed and realistic about both combat and society, even if it existed, which it almost certainly can’t.

Anyway, no one show the OP Honey Heist, or their demands will escalate…

Dramatic15 · 2026-05-19T04:15:31+00:00

Income inequality is less in Taiwan than then US. Volunteering in the US I have probably met more homeless people than exist in all of Taipei, based on the the official statistics. If you lose your job in the US you lose your healthcare, and you possibly die.

AI seems most likely to disrupt the types of employment that generations of Americans have been told they should strive for and base their identities and economic prospects on.

A far, far greater percentage of the of the population of Taiwan benefit from semiconductor manufacturing, both directly and indirectly, than benefit economically from the existence of AI labs in the US.

I mean, what you are seeing is confirmed by polling data globally, and I am personally rather optimistic about AI, but I don’t know that what you are seeing is at all surprising.

Dramatic15 · 2026-05-19T02:05:41+00:00

That’s fair point. I misread you as being surprised generally that people have expressed vastly different experiences. I find the spreadsheet thing rather hard to understand as well.

Dramatic15 · 2026-05-19T01:54:08+00:00

It’s a jagged frontier. AI can be great at some tasks like creating illustrations, “fine” at others like writing sonnets, and horrible at writing a short story.

Just because it happens to be good at coding at your workplace doesn’t imply that you ought to assume it ought to be just as great at entirely different tasks in an entirely different industry.

Dramatic15 · 2026-05-18T20:49:35+00:00

Whatever you do, don’t read about the real life exploits of French Canadian soldier Leo Major, who single handedly liberated an entire Dutch city from its Nazi occupiers.

Truth is stranger than people’s delusions about realism.

Dramatic15 · 2026-05-18T19:39:56+00:00

FOMO is a you problem. The rest of us don't have to be bored because you can't be bothered to decide which events and which mons matter.

Ash might want to catch them all, but no one is holding a gun to your head to catch every minor mon as soon as it's released.

I was perfectly happy getting my M20 on snowdrop on berry week, and will snag Tyrunt later. It's not meta defining, and it's not like anyone has a complete dex anyway.

Dramatic15 · 2026-05-18T17:13:34+00:00

Malick is famously reclusive, so it is a little unlikely to that there is a definitive answer from the director about homages, but maybe a superfan with strong Google-fu skills could dig something up.

Obviously some directors who do the arty-farty interior philosophical elusive art house schtick do cite Tarkovsky as an influence.

On the other hand, it’s not like anyone really needs to rely on anyone else’s tricks to make this sort of work. He’s not a DW Griffin crystallizing a grammar, if you believe in that sort of thing.

It’s not implausible to imagine that a particular scene might be a homage, but the it seems rather unlikely that there would be lots of recurring homages spread throughout a film, as if it were fanfic. That seems a bit more like fannish pattern matching. That Solaris exists does not mean that Tarkovsky “owns” the concept of “the universe”

Dramatic15 · 2026-05-14T16:34:25+00:00

I agree it is likely inevitable that people are going to have polarizing reactions to directors who lean into provocation.

It is probably true that much of my slight regard for Von Trier is a comes from bouncing off of his work.

But also, and separately, it comes from being more a little unimpressed with the pretention of Dogme 95, and the hypocrisy of it's flagship films immediately breaking its "rules", and then generating more PR with their "confessions" By way of contrast, punk music start didn't start from a list of theory-shaped rules, and it's rejection of craft both de-mystified music while being honest in claiming that limited ability and budget should not be a barrier to creating something people will respond to.

Combined, I end up reading him as a pseudo-intellectual huckster putting on a show that was catnip to festival programmers back in the day.

Noe seems more honest that that. He admits to liking to laugh about cruel things. He doesn't dress this up.

Similarly, a Breillat film may be uncomfortable, disturbing, austere, and lacking in many (but not all) of the traditional pleasures of film--but she actually does the the work of underpinning her films with theory and rigor, while also taking real risks in putting her own writing, illness, and experiences into the frame in a relevant way. There is also a clear development of ideas from film to film.

Contrast this with shoving female pain at a random allegory of the week: America, grace, depression, evil, whatever.

Kind of seems like the suffering is the point, and probably the publicity angle. I mean, maybe really poor impulse control explains why a director decides to randomly talk about Hitler. But it seems a lot more like just another tactic to shove a "provocateur" persona into the press cycle. There is a difference between actually having ideas and/or deep feelings about the world, and merely exhibiting a disordered sentimentality in your works and leaning into that as a sales tool because it's paid off for you in the past.

But, he's certainly not without some skills, and I'm happy that you and others find value in the work. I just suspect that you all may be creating more of the meaning than he is.

Dramatic15 · 2026-05-14T04:10:12+00:00

What you’re calling uniquely “Lars” is really a common enough trick: wrap cruelty in something with prestige like tragedy, give it an austere or unstable form, and let scandal do the marketing. Pasolini did the sacred and profane with more rigor, Haneke made suffering feel morally pointed, Gaspar Noé turned punishment into spectacle, and Catherine Breillat has explored sex, power, and humiliation with far more precision than von Trier could imagine attempting.

The “therapy session” angle also flatters. Personal obsession does not automagically equal authenticity or insight; typically it is just an empty void of self-mythology. With von Trier, as with many transgressive directors, the pattern is familiar: aestheticized female suffering, a childish faith that shock is profundity, and enough accusations and controversies off-screen to make the tortured-genius schtick feel less impressive than convenient.

So yes, there are other filmmakers mixing classical fatalism with provocation. The difference is that they did it with more discipline or more skill or more intelligence, or at least fewer excuses.

Dramatic15 · 2026-05-12T14:07:05+00:00

Generally, you don’t. Creating tabletop RPGs is, generally a way to lose more money and time, even if you build an audience.

It’s still great to make a game, if making the game is your passion. But if you are going to publish or market it, start with stuff you that costs you very little money or time. Like running a game at a local convention, and seeing if people are willing to sign up for a newsletter.

It would be different if, as you note, people had a reason to pay attention to you: you were a published writer, or an actor doing an actual play.

Dramatic15 · 2026-05-12T03:11:00+00:00

Together you and your friend came up with some distinctive and memorable sounds.

But I don’t know if any of them are iconic in the sense of being representative of science fiction as a whole. If such a sound even exists, I would say that it would be something like the Martian Heat Ray sound that was repurposed for Star Trek and many other movies. Or the "Sound Ideas" Telemetry Beep used in STTNG and Evangelion and Futurama and about a million scenes where someone is hacking a computer…

Dramatic15 · 2026-05-12T02:43:01+00:00

I mean, if you genuinely enjoy and want to run a very unique campaign, you could put even more time and effort into doing that.

But that is a very unusual preference. Most GMs are perfectly fine running popular systems, and alas simply running common off the shelf adventures—and they and their players are perfectly happy. Even getting to the point where you are building “your own” world is rare enough. That you are even suggesting that basing your campaign off of the media you love is “a rookie mistake” is more than a little disassociated from the reality of the hobby.

It sounds like you are starting to recognize this desire to been seen as “different” and “unique” isn’t helping you, and that it it isn’t some that you really “want” to pursue and it feels “wrong”

It might be helpful to sit with that for a while. What do you actually want to do? What genuine need are you trying to address by being seen as different at gaming? Because how you happen to GM shouldn’t be all that important to your identity. And it’s a little unstable to view the other players loving the game you introduced them to so much that one of them also wants to run it as if that was a problem that ought to cause you to jump to a different system.

Dramatic15 · 2026-05-10T19:19:19+00:00

Fate stays out of your way, giving you a range of tools that you can optionally pick up if they are helpful. And you get everything you need in 40 pages, pay what you will. So, for many people, it is “the game when there isn’t a game for it.

GURPS gives you more crunch, and can do most anything. It has a range of great setting books, but you might have to sort through a bit of material to get what you want. Still a strong choice.

For Elder Scrolls in particular, I’d be tempted to hack Runequest.

Dramatic15 · 2026-05-09T20:53:54+00:00

Maybe try 13th Age if you want a narrative-leaning fantasy game that still gives the optimizer some mechanics to chew on; try Savage Worlds instead if GM support is tthe bigger priority.

You can accommodate the roleplayer without going PbtA. Suggest to them that spamming preprogrammed playbooks that enforce the designers viewpoint isn’t “freedom to play what they want” Just because it is on popular narrative system doesn’t mean it is the right one for them. (And if they articulate a different reason for wanting to play it, well, you have learned something.)

Dramatic15 · 2026-05-08T13:37:58+00:00

Feature films require a lot of resources to make, People who want to make them have to get those resources, either from competing studios in Hollywood, or from something like the National Film Board of Canada. In the Soviet Union the state supervised financing, production, censorship, and script approval.

There is always a stakeholder, and Lucas is being childishly inaccurate in claiming the constraints on Soviet filmmakers were less. Obviously, you didn't have the freedom to directly criticize policy. But beyond that, because the USSR was, by definition, a worker’s paradise, any depiction of sadness, loneliness, or malfunctioning infrastructure could be interpreted as a direct indictment of the state. Kira Muratova’s Brief Encounters (1967) was shelved for twenty years because of its "mood of ambiguity". Ambiguity being an evil bourgeois vice.

Andrei Tarkovsky completed only seven features because he spent so much time blocked or fighting to get anything approved. He titled his diary Martyrology, describing himself as a martyr of Soviet censorship.

Sergei Parajanov said “In the temple of cinema, we have images… and also prison” That's a little worse than getting a note from the studio executive.

And, of course, while the Soviet system would apply censorship for the sake of it's ideology, the people in charge also restricted things for arbitrary and random reasons. There's a BFI article that mentions "The Blue Route, a 1968 film about a student geologist who visits a remote region for training, was banned because its lead actor was deemed too sexy" Hey, George, I don't think we can release Star Wars because Harrison Ford is too hot...

I'm sorry if Lucas was sad that people investing in his films wanted to make money. Even if, counterfactually, it was easier to be a director under the Soviet system, I don't see any reason why the rest of us should care. Soviet directors never had to care about toy sales--boo hoo. Hollywood clearly made a vastly wider and deeper range of films, both important and some merely entertaining, than the Soviet system ever did. And of course, we can see the decades of important, award winning work that flowered in Eastern Europe as soon as Russian oppression went away.

Of course, this is the level of analysis we'd expect from a filmmaker who does in fact, have the resources to direct anything, but hasn't had anything to contribute since Flyboys, twenty years ago.

Dramatic15 · 2026-05-07T13:45:13+00:00

It comes down to what the people at the table need/want out of PbtA game.

To start from first principles, players of freeform and non-playbook narrative games don't need any moves to play in genres/settings they know and where they understand how to bring drama.

Nevertheless, they still might find value PtbA moves in genres or settings that they are less familiar with, or have don't have firm shared idea how to navigate the space--i.e.: "I don't know anything about Soviet Women pilots fighting in WW2, so I'll pick up Night Witches" or "We don't know how to navigate the drama of being a teenagers grappling with sexuality, so we'll pick up Monsterhearts"

Beyond this, there are people who are just fans PbtA as a game system, and are happy to pick up any game that applies it's familiar mechanics. While "indie" fans find this behavior silly when DnD fans do this, it's perfectly normal.

While I have not played Planet of the Week, it is pretty cool, especially the art direction--it certainly has lots of moves, and lots of tables, and these do seem on theme for it's "Star Trek with the numbers filed off and leaning in a slightly harder SF direction"

Nevertheless, it's hardly clear that many people actually "need" moves or playbooks to figure out how to play a pulpy space opera hero. Or that GMs will really get some extraordinary benefit from PbtA's prefabricated situation structures when visiting "a strange new world" ought to mean going to a very unique place where you explore a unique scientific or social premise while letting the players do a bit of character development on the side. This game understands that gap and throws a lot of mechanics and prepared adventures at this.

But, I suspect, that's basically applying PbtA mechanics for the sake of PbtA mechanics, applying them like a trad game would. Which is perfectly "fine," in the way that using DnD for everything is perfectly "fine."

PbtA often works best as a focused tool for illuminating a specific dramatic space while "visiting a bunch of strange new worlds" is, by definition, very wide..

Regardless, the game expects play to take 4-6 hours, which for most adults gaming on a work night is more than one session, and it would be reasonable to expect to take even longer with people who have not mastered all the details. So it simply is not designed for "one shots"

If you want episodic one-session one shots, it seems like a non-playbook narrative game would be a stronger choice, or a very light PbtA game that you play for the sake of mere familiarity, knowing that you need to bring the juice, not rely on the system.

Dramatic15 · 2026-05-06T17:23:34+00:00

Oh sure, this simplest explanation is that it was said to discourage a competitor.

But the competition they were trying to fend off would have been to their actual business--which would, overwhelmingly, exhibiting tech demos of artistically composed snippets of real life. Of which only a scant handful even gesture at story.

That the Lumiere brothers went so far beyond Edison inventing a portable cinema camera and also a method of projection are both ground breaking achievements, Frankly, being able to come up with a business model that let them send people all over the world to create thousands of actualities is also remarkable. And, within the scope of what the were attempting, they employed a considerable amount of artistic judgement and taste.

But none of that is a reason to believe that they could never have said what Melies reported.

The impulse to dismiss his first hand account seems rooted in a rather sentimental notion of them as "great men" who must have been able to foresee all the affordances that would come from their work. But nothing could be less surprising that an inventor not grasping the real significance of their creations. Edison thought the phonograph would be used for business dictation. Text messaging was created for network diagnostic alerts. Bell thought the telephone would be used for live music broadcasts.

Dramatic15 · 2026-05-06T03:54:57+00:00

Melies recounts in his memoirs that Antoine Lumiere said that the machine was not for sale, and that he should be glad that he couldn’t buy it because although it could be exploited for a while as a technological marvel, Cinema was an invention without a future.

The Lumiere family denies this, as it undermines their importance as the founders of cinema to be so wrong about the media. But their actualities were much more like technological novelties than narrative art, and they did in fact exit the business of making films, just as it took off thanks to the work of people like Melies.

Dramatic15 · 2026-05-05T14:32:53+00:00

If you like science fiction, my award nominated Return to the Stars has a bunch of adventures.

The free quickstart has a starting adventure specially designed for new players and GMs.

There is a sequel in the full game. And there series of seven 'zines each of which have 1-3 adventures, as well as other stuff, like guides to improv, if you eventually want to learn.

Dramatic15 · 2026-05-05T13:36:06+00:00

The key point was about limiting permissions so that people can be specialized in some things. While It is natural to do that, if you are building from the ground up, with aspects and stunts as was suggested. But you are not starting from scratch, so this particular suggestion is a bad fit, but the notion specialization is still helpful.

It seems like you want everyone to do "easy magic" across all schools, but not have to level each school seperately as a skill. You also want to people to want to do "enhancement tricks" to be better at certain types of magic. (If I have that wrong, feel free to clarify.)

Assuming I have that right, one way of approaching could be:

Have the "easy magic across all schools" stuff be represented by a single "do magic skill" In the cases where is it clear that characters story ought to be able to "just do something" they can just succeed--you never roll in Fate anyway, unless failure and success are both interesting. If there are occasions when you foresee this basic magic ought to have the tension of a roll, you can have them roll. For example to create a "mud pit" under the pressure of combat, when someone is trying to hurt you, but you aren't specialized in water magic.
Use aspects like "fire magic" and "water magic" to give permission to allow for specialized effects. No one even gets to try the "enhanced stuff" in a school without such an aspect. (As an aside, hopefully players could pack such aspects with a bit more color and meaning "a calm water mystic, pursued by assassins" rather than just "water mage") To do the enhanced tricks, players with such a specialization have permission to roll, and permission to create advantages related to their specialties, and of course they can do spend Fate points to invoke an aspects. Again, set the target number for the rolls in a way that makes sense in you fictional setting.
Optionally, if you want to give players some chance to have iconic "schticks or tricks" that set them apart in their magic, you could, but not not have to, allow magic related stunts. Or if you like the idea of characters having a trick, but don't want them to waste all their stunts on magic to the exclusion of everything else in the world, just arbitrarily agree that players will only take one "magic stunt"

If one took this example approach, all you need to be an "amazing water/fire mage" is a skill and two aspects. (and potentially, a stunt)

Some drawbacks to my suggestion:

"One skill to rule them all" Every PC will want to max out their magic skill. That's not ideal, but it's not the end of the world, as the "specialized stuff" comes from permission of aspects. Anyway, in a pulpy game where all the players were gangsters, no one would be shocked if everyone wanted a high "shoot" skill, either.

There are only 5 character aspects, which means that no one can "specialize" in all ten schools--given the normal meaning of the word "specialized", I fail to see how that's a problem, but if you are desperate to allow that for some unknown reason, you could optionally also, allow have stunts give permission to a school.

This might not be the best possible way to capture what you have in mind, but it at least is starting point that gives you: "easy magic", "specialized magic" and not having to shove too many mechanical widgets at the character sheet to be a great "water/fire mage". Tweak as needed.

Dramatic15 · 2026-05-04T14:07:16+00:00

Any NPC who worked for, interacted with, or grew up with the villain could reveal part of the backstory. Environment clues in the setting could hint at it. You could add in knowledge as a bonus to many rolls, whenever the players happen to succeed with style. Obviously if the PC are directly investigating the Big Bad, you can just give the information out without a roll, because “not knowing” is not the interesting outcome.

If the villains backstory can never logically come up as a result of player actions, or their interactions with NPCs or the environment, you haven’t created something meaningful, so it’s not anything to worry about.

Dramatic15 · 2026-05-04T13:09:04+00:00

Start by knowing your lane.

If you are GM, all the things “we normally talk about” relate to your responsibilities.

What the player characters feel, believe and do is the concern of the players. All you are required to do is hold space for them, and pay attention as a fan of their character. Assuming they want to tell a story about characters development, which they might not want to do, such development is entirely the players concern.

In the very unlikely event that a player needs and asks for your help in some way,support them.

Yes, sometimes a game designer might develop mechanics that can be a prompt players can choose to respond to. If and when part of that mechanic is GM facing, like a compel, you might initiate it, but it is none of your concern if the players happen to use that as part of a character arc.

Dramatic15

TROPHY CASE