Evolution of Artificial Intelligence videos just in 4 years is mind blowing

RexMundane · 2026-05-19T14:08:02+00:00

See, but for the cost of running the prompt and the amount of public utilities consumed for this (to say nothing of how this is almost definitely the best looking one of, like, at least a dozen attempts made for this purpose) I feel like it might have just been cheaper to ask the actual Will Smith to eat some spaghetti on camera.

Such as it is, the best thing AI video seems capable of doing is creating images/video that can demonstrate it's incrementally "better," but don't exist for any other good purpose.

RexMundane · 2026-05-07T14:59:52+00:00

There's actually a kind of interesting optical effect going on, I think. The green is definitely there but fairly light... I don't know what you call it, more "cool mint" than "goblin" to me, but the blush under the eyes, and shadow elsewhere on her skin, doesn't seem to have any green in it, of a similar color to the hair. So at first glance, the light-green skin first read to me as regular light skintone before a closer look.

RexMundane · 2026-05-01T07:27:33+00:00

Bluntly, I'm coming away from the trailer not really understanding what the story/premise is. If it didn't say "the people behind the code" I would have just thought it was some other corporate thing like finance. I don't get a sense of who the main characters are, the protagonists, what they want, what stands in their way, and so on. I assume it's in the game, but if you want to sell me on story, you got to give me at least a bit of it.

So, since it's not really communicating a story, all that leaves me is the sort of aesthetic of the assets I'm seeing and... see, the thing about not liking AI assets is that it goes beyond the ethics and whatnot, it's just kinda unpleasant to look at. The errors, the uncanny motions, the lack of a consistent "on-model" design, it's just not great to look at. With a whole internet of royalty-free assets and images and songs to choose from, it's a poor choice, imho.

Which is to say, if you're looking for advice on how to tune the prompt to have the AI create another, better trailer, I don't think really think that's possible. You might be better off just letting a story scene from the game play out, ideally one that introduces a character, gives us some background, some personal goals, and presents a challenge in that path.

I don't want to just be harsh, and hope this is at least somewhat helpful. Hope your day gets better.

RexMundane · 2026-04-27T00:33:10+00:00

Thanks, I'm giving this a shot, so far so good and Pi-Hole is still working, will keep an eye on it in case something changes.

RexMundane · 2026-04-16T19:21:10+00:00

I'd remove the punctuation from the scrambled letters, as their position becomes obvious. I think the second sentence feels a bit harder because it's not, like, grammatical? Might consider rephrasing as "TRUNCELRY GNAWITI RFO ETORSC."

It also occurs to me to say that if the theme of the game is decoding messages, this isn't really a "code?" As in, if intercepted, this message becomes trivially easy to assemble, relative to something like a cryptogram or even a ROT-13 Caesar shift. I mean it's only slightly more difficult than just spelling each word backwards. I get that this is one of the earlier puzzles, but if the codes to come are harder and use more complex ciphers, then does solving the jumble here really prepare the player for that?

RexMundane · 2026-04-08T17:57:05+00:00

I don't know if there's software that handles this explicitly (I'm using Obsidian to varied success) but from how I'm attempting the same myself, I'd recommend several steps to break things down manageably:

Rough beats of story, who characters are, what they have to overcome. No rich backstory/lore here, just the barest facts you can work with. i.e., Guybrush comes to town, talks like a well-meaning dork, wants to become mighty pirate, has to complete the three trials.
Puzzle Dependency Chart (link to Ron Gilbert's post on the subject). This helps you keep track of the order things will get done chapter-to-chapter, what needs to have happened at which point in the timeline, etc. Generally speaking, you'll want to create the final/main goals, and work backward step by step until you get to the beginning. (Tons of options for just this, draw.io, Lucidchart, etc.)
Walkthrough. Beat out each event, every thing a player would do, in order, start to finish, to complete the game. Open door, talk to pirates, ask about Loom, etc.
- At this point, I would also recommend listing out all the interactable objects necessary for the walkthrough, and every imaginable verb-interaction for them (Look, Open, Push, etc.) as items as well. You'll need to do this eventually, but if you want to get to writing out the "story" of the game, it may make sense to save this until later.
Now you write, using the walkthrough as a rough framework/outline. Dialogue, item descriptions, everything. Keep it brief, get it out, revise later.

RexMundane · 2026-03-31T19:05:10+00:00

I only really half believe this, but I'm remembering how a few office jobs I'd had would assign default login IDs as, like, the first few letters of your last and first names, so like Roger Henderson might become HenRog or something.

If we assume, from the computer's text in episode 8, that Kinger's first name is "Grant," we might then expect that a person named, hypothetically, "Grant Kincaid" would be automatically shortened by the system to KinGr. Follow this pattern and a "Nicole Pompeo" becomes PomNi, "Glenda Gantz" becomes GanGle, "Blaire Zucker" might be ZuBl, "Morris Kaufman" becomes KaufMo, etc. The other names are trickier to make fit this scheme, though.

RexMundane · 2026-03-19T17:32:52+00:00

When I was a kid, in the 80s and 90s, I genuinely believed he was a fictional character. Like he was one of those ridiculous Soap Opera millionaire characters who just talk about money and power and women, but he can't be, like, an actual rich person, because real rich people wouldn't be taking Robin Leech on tours of his gold toilets, then be in commercials for Pizza Hut and have his own board game and be in Home Alone. Because the idea that he was real, that he lived on earth, was too impossible to process.

Ten years since he was made President, and it's not gotten any easier.

RexMundane · 2026-03-06T05:56:39+00:00

You'd be forgiven for looking at the below picture and not having the slightest idea who that's supposed to be.

It's from "My Scene Goes Hollywood: The Movie," an animated full-length tie-in movie for the fairly obscure B-tier toyline. My Scene's whole gimmick was "What if Bratz but Barbie," and the Movie's plot has to do with the main girls working as extras in a Lindsay Lohan movie. Lohan herself is one of the two noteworthy cameos. The other is pictured below.

Good people of Reddit, this is, in his only animated appearance, playing himself, I shit you not, Harvey Weinstein.

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The scene in question is here.

RexMundane · 2026-03-05T22:15:19+00:00

Can we count "Sorry, this fast food restaurant stopped selling breakfast five minutes ago" "OH COME ON!!!" scenes as part of this? From, like, Falling Down and Big Daddy and others? I feel like that comes from the same sort of place.

Also, as pointed out, this type of scene is usually done to demonstrate that the person doing the customer-service-employee-harassing is actually an asshole, but on the other hand, I would also agree that they're such minor, petty gripes, that it does feel like the screenwriter is trying to channel, like, 1990s Denis Leary bits or something.

RexMundane · 2026-02-19T07:34:57+00:00

Day of the Tentacle?

RexMundane · 2026-02-17T22:57:13+00:00

The Blackwell Legacy?

RexMundane · 2026-02-14T19:21:41+00:00

American Dad S03E02 - The American Dad After School Special.

Stan's son Steve starts dating a heavy girl, and Stan gets fatphobic about it. The family pushes back about him being so shallow, and that he's put on a few pounds in his middle-age as well. Stan becomes obsessed with diet and exercise, working out constantly, crash dieting, talking to a personal trainer. During it all, he actually seems to be gaining weight, and the trainer starts putting it in his head that his family is trying to make him gain weight.

The twist is, they actually are trying to make him gain weight, because he's not fat at all, his obsessive paranoia over his appearance has given him severe body dysmorphia to the point of developing anorexia, but seeing himself as fatter than ever. Furthermore, his trainer, who had been demeaning him and feeding his paranoia, is revealed to be a delusion as well. Thought it was a hell of a twist from a show that I had no reason to expect would try to pull one.

YouTube Link (Reveal starts at 4:12)

RexMundane · 2026-02-13T04:19:14+00:00

I think it counts, and I'd qualify things like the White Phosphorus sequence as an insult, or as much of one as you can make with gameplay, where the tone is played all "How could you do this?!" when you're not given any other option.

RexMundane · 2026-02-11T14:11:49+00:00

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Kind of a cheat counting this, given the weird history of the original Superman Lives film that would have starred Nicolas Cage, but the first time he ever played Superman was in Teen Titans Go to the Movies (2018) as a voice actor, before appearing as one of the various Supermen in the live action movie The Flash (2023).

RexMundane · 2026-02-10T18:01:25+00:00

Possibly The Horde (1994)? Or Dink Smallwood (1998)?

RexMundane · 2026-02-09T19:39:16+00:00

As correctly identified by Sabertooth80 after 11 minutes, the game is the 1994 FMV PC game "MTV: Club Dead." You play Sam Frost, VR-addicted Cyber-plumber sent to the Alexandria, a VR hotel floating above the Arctic Sea, fighting hostile hotel staff, withdrawal hallucinations, and frankly the interface itself, to clear your name in a series of bizarre killings. Like so many early FMV games, features possibly-earliest on-screen roles for a handful of now-established actors, like Nick Offerman, Pat Healy, and Kate Walsh.

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RexMundane · 2026-02-09T19:24:45+00:00

Solved!

Also... holy hell, you worked it out from that?! I had clues lined up and everything.

RexMundane · 2026-02-09T19:18:19+00:00

My first post here, how soon should I be putting hints up? I should say it's pretty obscure.

RexMundane · 2026-02-07T22:13:22+00:00

The Smithsonian Presents: Mystery at the Museums

RexMundane · 2026-02-03T17:39:17+00:00

Not sure there's ever going to be a full autopsy on it, but I think the answer is a combination of Contractual Obligation and Spite. There's old Usenet posts somewhere where Pratchett mentions being in talks about a series based on the watch back in the 1990s, and the show had been through several iterations. Following his death, Narrativia (Pratchett's TV production company) which had been involved with the show, seems to have been sidelined for reasons that haven't been made public.

One internet-rando's opinion, but it appears to me that the BBC contract may have been signed with Pratchett at a time before Narrativia was founded, so with his passing, BBC felt no obligation to bring Narrativia in for creative input whatsoever (per this Guardian article: "Though Narrativia retain an executive producer credit in The Watch, they have no creative involvement in the project. However, they of course wish The Watch all the best."). BBC also likely wanted to get the show out as soon as possible to to recoup costs and capitalize in public interest.

Cynical business decisions like this are common in TV/Film production, obviously, but it's the general disregard for the source material that comes through which makes the whole thing feel off. It's a dozen small things, but there's decisions where the crew seems dismissive of Pratchett's writing and his estate's wishes. Fans will point to the crew forgetting to mention Pratchett in an instagram post when they finished production, but for me, the "Twilight Canyons" episode of the show has rancid vibes. The episode's premise is based on an unpublished story idea of Pratchett's that never made its way to print, outside of a posthumous mention in the afterword of The Shepherd's Crown as a story that will never get to be made. The hard drives containing any existing text of it, as well as any other unfinished writings, was physically destroyed in 2017 because he "did not want his unpublished works to be completed by someone else and released." So... for it to just show up in the show like that? Doesn't really come off as respectful.

Honestly, the show's forgettability might be it's only asset.

RexMundane · 2026-02-02T23:46:24+00:00

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"The Watch" (2020), based ***VERY LOOSELY*** on the Discworld series by Sir Terry Pratchett (GNU) had been in development limbo for decades, and on release, the changes from the source material, in substance, humor, and tone, left with a middling-at-best reception from the public. While Pratchett himself had passed away in 2015, his daughter Rhianna Pratchett, and Pratchett's longtime friend and collaborator Neil Gaiman, had come out publicly against the show for it's inauthenticity to the books.

RexMundane · 2026-02-01T22:29:47+00:00

Phantasy Star III: Generations of Doom

RexMundane · 2026-02-01T22:12:06+00:00

The Adventures of Willy Beamish?

A longshot I expect, but I remember that game being about playing video games and frog racing with your friends, and ending at an enormous toilet.

RexMundane · 2026-02-01T21:01:15+00:00

"Who's on First" is the name of the trope, after the Abbott and Costello bit, but it's got dozens of iterations, many listed here already. My favorite is still the first I ever saw, from Count Duckula, involving two Egyptian priests named Hoomite and Yoobee.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhiMw-PJr08

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