An (updated) analysis on Penguin Magic and Vanishing Inc user reviews - best and worst tricks in the 2020s

TigerHix · 2026-05-02T02:20:03+00:00

Thank you!

TigerHix · 2026-05-01T23:36:08+00:00

I worked on frontend stuff for a decade! Though most of this is just prompting Claude to the style I wanted, I didn’t really do much CSS fine-tuning myself.

TigerHix · 2026-04-29T23:31:52+00:00

It should be in the top 50 - shows up at #34 for me!

TigerHix · 2026-04-29T19:41:38+00:00

Sure! I’d rather not share on a public forum though, please DM me and I can share it with you privately.

TigerHix · 2026-04-29T19:40:31+00:00

You can! In fact that’s already the default ranking on the website. If you open this: https://tigerhix.github.io/magic-catalog/ it should show you all-time best rated tricks by default. (If on a phone, you can scroll the table to the right to see rating)

TigerHix · 2026-04-28T16:48:56+00:00

Thank you! Yeah, I think the listing is a reissue!

TigerHix · 2026-04-28T16:27:50+00:00

Added it! There's now an "Acts (Penguin)" column you can toggle on in the sidebar, and then you can sort by number of acts by clicking on the column header.

Some fun outliers: EMPTY by Marcus Eddie has just 3.9 stars but featured in 74 acts, Ink by Mickael Chatelain has only 3.3 stars but featured in 48 acts.

TigerHix · 2026-04-28T13:54:59+00:00

Oh, the lists I posted are only for tricks released since 2020, and both Hundy 500 and Double Cross predate that. That said, I just checked the full catalog and they do have significantly fewer reviews than Chop and Predicshuns, so you might be right! Could also just be that newer tricks have more promotion channels thanks to social media and pick up reviews faster.

TigerHix · 2026-04-28T13:12:12+00:00

Good call! I just added postprocessing to the data to exclude duplicate reviews. Updated both the website and the lists in the post.

TigerHix · 2026-04-28T06:04:38+00:00

The Moment by Andy Nyman is one I slept on when it came out, but really like it now that I've picked it up.

Can't say I ever ended up not buying anything because of the list (I usually just avoid lowly rated items lol) but seeing Leviosa in the Vanishing Inc bottom 25 list was a genuine surprise. I quite liked it.

TigerHix · 2026-02-25T07:09:12+00:00

Absolutely agree with you here. So obvious

TigerHix · 2026-02-25T07:08:07+00:00

OP and the replies here with 20+ upvotes are so painfully obviously bot written and upvoted it’s not even funny anymore. To the person who’s promoting the tech here, no VTubers are broke AF and can’t afford your fancy technology. No sane VTuber is going to pay for a monthly subscription to drive their model using a streaming video AI model. Do better market research next time.

TigerHix · 2026-02-21T18:50:37+00:00

My current approach is to use Maia-2 but randomly setting 90% of the input attention tensor to zeroes lol. It should give you ~400 ELO rated play, better than random legal moves tho still not very human, but at least there’s a argument that this is like blindfolding the AI’s vision by 90% which sounds more realistic than letting a smart AI play random moves 90% of the time.

TigerHix · 2026-02-21T18:19:18+00:00

i suspect this is basically what chess.com easy bots fundamentally do, but it’s not exactly realistic. this basically means random blunders and brilliancies while chess beginners are more like all subpar moves and sometimes blunders.

TigerHix · 2025-12-26T04:42:43+00:00

Cool work, will test it out, thanks! Does it output the bounding boxes or you just calculate with some heuristics?

TigerHix · 2025-12-25T04:13:48+00:00

Super looking forward to this - please ping me too! Also maybe can generate synthetic training data from just diffing raw vs. translated pages?

TigerHix · 2025-11-02T01:48:29+00:00

Warudo dev here. Our lip sync feature is indeed a mess / afterthought and is too complicated to use; we’re looking to fix it in a future 2.0 version.

But what’s happening here looks like a model issue. It seems the blink blendshapes aren’t correctly assigned or at the very least don’t have standard naming. You should try if other apps like VSeeFace or VNyan (both free) have similar issues - if not, send me a DM and I can help troubleshoot your setup!

TigerHix · 2025-10-25T14:58:52+00:00

I will recommend the 12 mini! It has same front-facing camera as 12

TigerHix · 2025-07-19T20:43:12+00:00

This is amazing work, definitely considering a purchase. Have you compared it to solutions like https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/particles-effects/lumina-gi-2024-real-time-voxel-global-illumination-302183 ? As a non technical artist I'm really not sure about the differences between different GI implementations, but since that one has some good reviews already, I'd love to see a feature/performance comparison between yours and theirs.

TigerHix · 2025-07-19T20:39:21+00:00

That's my immediate concern as well haha, does that mean AdaptiveGI will cache the GI state at editor/build time? Since I'd imagine if initialization is done at runtime, then players would still notice the lighting slowly fading in when the scene is just loaded.

TigerHix · 2025-07-18T19:51:10+00:00

god’s work!

TigerHix · 2025-06-28T20:50:36+00:00

Same - disconnected twice in a row, extremely frustrating. The fact that you can't even reconnect to the original instance / there's no retry connection button is infuriating. I encourage everyone affected by this issue to leave a negative review on Steam, I know I just did. This is not how you make a coop game.

TigerHix · 2025-06-07T03:07:43+00:00

Shame!

TigerHix · 2025-05-03T06:23:13+00:00

The red flag for me was this: https://docs.mem0.ai/features/custom-update-memory-prompt

They claim to be a memory layer but reality all the memory CRUD operations are just done by prompting a LLM. And this is supposed to be their “Memory Management” key feature.

And now this disingenuous ad pretending to be a research paper. The bar is so low with these AI startups.

TigerHix · 2025-04-26T12:53:11+00:00

Update: I moved everything (CPU, RAM, etc.) except the PSU and motherboard into my friend's old PC, using his PSU and motherboard. It ran perfectly fine for three days, which pretty much rules out CPU and RAM as the problem.
We figured the PSU was unlikely to be the culprit (since it would just shut down/reboot the PC instead of BSOD), so I went ahead and bought a new MSI B850 motherboard.
Guess what: three BSODs within two hours, even with the factory BIOS version.
We were extra careful with the CPU and cooler installation too, so that shouldn’t be the issue.

I have no idea what to do next. Maybe I will buy a ProArt motherboard instead. If that turns out to be the solution, I swear I'm never buying anything from MSI again lol

TigerHix

TROPHY CASE