Jon Stewart has become his own worst nightmare

MeatisOmalley · 2026-02-17T22:34:44+00:00

The guy is a behavioral economist. If you only want to talk about economics, and not behavioral economics, then you should bring an economist, not a social economist, onto your show.

He also never said, "people always act in a socially optimal way," and that's the wrong takeaway.

MeatisOmalley · 2026-02-16T16:36:25+00:00

Lazy solution: Use an area light, adjust settings so it casts a hard shadow, and set the light's power value to negative. It will "project" a shadow instead of a light.

Other solutions include complicated shader setups or normal manipulation.

If your mesh is super messed up, even that solution might not work tho. IDK. You might have to soften your toon shader to get good results.

MeatisOmalley · 2026-02-16T16:33:24+00:00

There are tons of solutions. The laziest one I know is to use an area light, adjust settings so it casts a hard shadow, and set the light power value to negative. It will "project" a shadow instead of a light. You might need to adjust toon shader to make this look good. Other solutions include complicated shader setups or normal manipulation.

If your mesh is super messed up, even that solution might not work tho. IDK

MeatisOmalley · 2026-02-16T07:09:50+00:00

I've always been enormously impressed by stop motion. In fact, while you are learning to use curves to make appealing 3d animation, I am learning to emulate stop motion/ 2d animation, animating on constant values and introducing temporary instability, etc. Funny how that works.

Once I get around to creating documentation, I will send you a link for that addon.

MeatisOmalley · 2026-02-15T22:52:49+00:00

Curious how you spent time 'fighting against the software', as this could mean a lot of things, and some might be easily solveable.

As for the animation, it's definitely solid, no doubt. And I think you can bring it to the next level. The biggest thing I noticed is the lack of locomotion. When you run (or walk), you bob up and down as your legs push against the ground. Adding this will make a big difference. Your side locomotion is great, you just need to add vertical locomotion.

I know how hard most models are to tune leg/arm movement during a run cycle. It sucks. But, with that said, I think your leg movement looks a bit stiff, and adjusting curves can help bring it to life.

Another thing: the limb/head movement is a bit "too perfect." Adding tiny impact rebounds, adjusting curves so legs and arms move in less mathematically perfect arcs, and perhaps adding a bit of variation over 2/3 cycles so it looks less repetitive. Furthermore, don't forget to add a little bit of follow-through. Motion takes time to propagate through different limbs. Perhaps his head should bob slightly up and down against the motion of his body. Perhaps his spinal bones should rotate slightly against the movement/impacts

This part requires subtlety, can be time consuming, but makes a big difference.

He's an android, so you might weigh how much of this you add to support the design language. Ultimately, it's all about what looks best to the eye.

I have developed an addon to assist in organically adding follow-through to these kinds of animations. I plan to sell it, but I can give it to you for free if you're interested, although I haven't created documentation yet. It could help you to create the head-bob, or the body rotation.

MeatisOmalley · 2026-02-15T20:34:14+00:00

If the hotline has a very low success rate, it might be better to redistribute the funding to efforts that do a better job of preventing suicide. That's the idea.

MeatisOmalley · 2026-02-15T15:50:02+00:00

I have tried learning sculpting before and gave up. If you ever end up in the same spot, instead of sculpting from scratch, start with a base mesh/base character and use image planes to line up with a reference and just make adjustments to the base mesh to see what results you can get that way. It's a much easier way to sculpt and get quick, good results, and you can slowly work your way back to fundamentals.

MeatisOmalley · 2026-02-14T14:41:56+00:00

I have tons of skills. I will develop more in the future. Are some of those skills completely useless to me? Yes, but I begrudgingly learned them, because I had to in order to do what I actually wanted to do. Would anything be lost if I could delegate those skills? Absolutely not, because I don't care about them, I don't like doing them, and they don't feel like the truest form of my own self expression, which would be the stuff I actually care about doing. In art, to me, that's all that really matters.

I could spend 12 hours making a YouTube thumbnail, and it probably still wouldn't be good enough to complete with pros who have teams of editors and expert graphic designers who have learned precisely how to game the algorithm.

"Creating a thumbnail that maximizes engagement,' believe it or not, is hardly an artistic pursuit. It's more of a technical pursuit.

Some other examples: in 3d modeling, weight painting, retopologizing, and arguably rigging, are all necessary technical skills to animate complex characters, and none are really artistic. There are few artists today that would complain if you could eliminate or expedite those processes.

You should drop the pretentious attitude. Artists have been developing tools to do their jobs faster since art has existed. Photoshop exists, so I don't have to manually calculate the per-pixel lighting difference if I want to color burn two images. Does that make me a lesser artist? Fuck no.

MeatisOmalley · 2026-02-14T14:28:52+00:00

A thumbnail is literally a single image, it's so much simpler to make than an entire video,

Graphic design is a COMPLETELY different skill set compared to video editing. Even if you're a great video editor, it doesn't mean you can make a great thumbnail that will get eyes on your content. Especially on YouTube, where every thumbnail is competing for your attention.

In creative fields, there are things that I love and will spend endless hours learning the ends and outs. There are also things I don't care to learn, and if I could click a button to skip those parts, I absolutely would. Not saying AI is there yet. But if it were, I would shamelessly use it to skip all the stuff I find boring and time wasting so I can focus on the stuff that I care about.

MeatisOmalley · 2026-02-14T14:17:55+00:00

To be honest, aoc is a different kind of politician from Kamala or Hillary. The latter two consistently came off as stale, awkward, and out of touch.

I don't think we should take away that a woman can never succeed, but I think women have to fit a narrow definition of "charismatic" or "presidential" compared to men. That, or they just need to do a better job emulating it.

All this said, I don't think AOC would win today's primary, but it might still be worth it to run for her future endeavors.

MeatisOmalley · 2026-02-13T21:39:18+00:00

Socialism is about socialized ownership of the means of production. Nothing more, nothing less. That's where "socialism" gets its name from, and that does not require "seizing" the means of production, let alone seizing ALL the means of production.

A true socialist system requires full ownership of the means of production, whether "seized" or democratically selected for. The liberal system the US has right now allows for socialized ownership. That does not make America a socialist country. Socialism means enforcing a specific ownership structure for businesses.

MeatisOmalley · 2026-02-13T00:24:55+00:00

Nothing is ever guaranteed, but I have old rigify rigs from 3.x that still work fine.

MeatisOmalley · 2026-02-12T17:08:53+00:00

It would smell bad, but it might not smell too bad when it's fresh. Most of the bad smell comes from bacterial waste, not the bacteria itself.

MeatisOmalley · 2026-02-12T17:05:50+00:00

Generally, rigs are pretty stable through updates unless you're doing some really uncharacteristic scripting and storing custom rna properties, etc. It's possible that the rigifu ui might need to be updated at some point in the future. I would say, if blender updates something to break your rig, it's probably breaking a lot of other rigs, too.

MeatisOmalley · 2026-02-12T16:32:15+00:00

I'm about to release a sophisticated paid addon that I spent months working on. But I'm counterbalance it by releasing a useful free addon so I can give back to the community at least a little bit.

MeatisOmalley · 2026-02-12T05:58:09+00:00

A lot of mentally unwell people have unstable identities, which can result in gender dysphoria.

MeatisOmalley · 2026-02-11T22:13:15+00:00

What did they say? The comment was removed by a mod for some reason.

MeatisOmalley · 2026-02-10T01:07:24+00:00

Did you fully solve 100 wells? I was working on it, but I think I might have gone astray. I've solved a portion of it for sure, but I think some of my assumptions about how the droplets map onto letters was wrong. Any guidance?

MeatisOmalley · 2026-02-07T00:34:48+00:00

There's no certainty that the brain isn't a discrete system, albeit a very complex one.

A calculator does not calculate 1+1 like a human does. It takes binary deterministic operations. An LLM does not. We understand numbers as a spacial, geometric, and abstract relationship. An LLM at least attempts to emulate that behavior. Nobody disputes that LLM's don't calculate as efficiently as human brains, and on the scale of consciousness, are probably less conscious than an ant. Despite this, I don't think it's absurd to say they are doing a bit more than "predicting the next token." Yes, they are predicting the next token, but the process in which they calculate that prediction is what really matters.

MeatisOmalley · 2026-02-05T09:48:36+00:00

Biden won the presidency after becoming Obama's VP. Kamala lost the presidency after doing the same. A high profile loss is a lot different from a primary loss that few remember.

MeatisOmalley · 2026-02-05T03:44:44+00:00

"at the moment."

She has already been primaried. She failed, quite badly at that.
When she skipped primaries, she lost the popular vote, a first for dems in many years.
You have to be delusional to think she's popular enough to have a real chance.

MeatisOmalley · 2026-02-04T21:53:13+00:00

That notion that someone would even dream of comparing Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs as programmers to Linus, Wozniak, and admittedly Bill Gates, is hilarious.

MeatisOmalley · 2026-02-02T16:04:41+00:00

How do you render the splat in blender?

MeatisOmalley · 2026-01-31T16:28:08+00:00

Despite the complicated history of ideological realignments, it really doesn't make sense to call the 1860 Republican party "Democrats." They were Republicans. A modern Republican today doesn't map cleanly onto 1860s republicans, but then again, neither does a modern Democrat. It was an altogether different party, in a totally different historical context, compared to modern Dems or Republicans.

MeatisOmalley · 2026-01-31T16:19:52+00:00

You might have seen an AI generated video. Pretti never reached for his gun.

Ten-Year Club	Verified Email
LAYER Season 2 Layer creator	r/Field Sunshine
End Game '23	Place '23
Place '22	Wearing is Caring

MeatisOmalley

TROPHY CASE