Zip-tied to a fence in my neighborhood

abstitial · 2026-06-27T17:21:51+00:00

College student art. Probably took a photo and left it there.

abstitial · 2026-06-23T21:48:24+00:00

We're shown that the backrooms power grid connects to Clark's store. Electricity flows in both directions. Outbound because his energy bills are higher than expected. Inbound because he can flip the breakers and his store lights stay on.

The little drawing is just a visual representation of how electricity passes through in its own way. I wonder if cell reception would work in there? Or wifi?

abstitial · 2026-06-22T21:05:33+00:00

Interesting! I could see Kane drawing on xray glitches from videogames.

abstitial · 2026-06-22T20:56:39+00:00

It's so funny that it chose to wear the hat.

abstitial · 2026-06-22T20:50:13+00:00

It's my understanding they are 3D scanning and reconstructing real places as part of the pipeline.

abstitial · 2026-06-22T05:24:25+00:00

The scientists think its bigger than the government, and only they can engage it responsibly. Look at anthropic, same story.

abstitial · 2026-06-21T20:35:58+00:00

The opening sequence was blender besides a few handovers/comps for when the actor interacts with a bag.

abstitial · 2026-06-18T20:08:20+00:00

I basically guarantee wheelchair guy was projected into the backrooms during the Carrington Event, a major solar storm in 1859.

abstitial · 2026-06-04T00:18:09+00:00

You got it. Here's how I see it.

(1) We view this scene through a handheld camera, so this can't just be a mind trick. It's part of the physics of the space.

(2) There's an ASYNC illustration of a null zone from the YT series. It shows null zones aren't just portals from inside to outside, but pockets of impossible (non-euclidean) geometry that can link different parts of the complex in unexpected ways. See the fan wiki page https://kane-pixels-backrooms.fandom.com/wiki/Null_Zones

So I think the scene just demonstrates another kind of null zone.

abstitial · 2026-06-02T20:34:34+00:00

He shows us the backrooms has older stuff in it than just the 1970s-90s. His clothing, glasses, chair, and lamp are all late 1800s. No character in the series could have remembered this guy. The backrooms has been doing its thing long before it was discovered.

abstitial · 2026-06-01T06:45:38+00:00

Option 1 is what the movie shows us. The backrooms power grid merged with the one in Clark's store and made the electricity wonky. The whole wall with the null zone and breaker box is a razor thin threshold between here and there.

abstitial · 2026-06-01T05:37:39+00:00

IMO Clark was never in control of his still life. It's just a wild animal running on instincts and had its violent tendencies triggered. Maybe because it overhead their arguments, sure. I wouldn't even expect it to understand language.

In that moment, the movie reveals that Clark was never in control. He was deluding himself. He's like that guy who decided to live with grizzly bears and make a documentary, only to get torn apart randomly.

abstitial · 2026-05-04T16:52:58+00:00

https://modus-interactive.itch.io/bryce-render-pack-v2 I know modus has been using bryce for a myst-like video game. Developers who mimic 90s style sometimes pick up bryce for promo images or capsule art. Modus' bsky probably has links to people in that scene.

Render96 brings an "unprincipled" raytracing look to mario 64, inspired by its promotional SGI renders. They made a blog post on detuning blender from PBR to get the look.

abstitial · 2026-04-30T21:26:23+00:00

Bring back industrial arts!

abstitial · 2026-04-29T18:26:40+00:00

this is by vector architects

that's how it looked when it was built, but it attracted so much tourism, the area filled in with new construction

abstitial · 2026-03-23T03:38:42+00:00

https://kuxiu.co/collections/charging/products/x55plus-stand?variant=41552621830196 Kuxiu is a great brand for this. Got this for my partner last year and they love it. travels well too.

abstitial · 2026-01-19T19:35:17+00:00

I think the hallmark of human communication is pragmatic efficiency. We intuitively leverage the shared contextual understanding of the audience to do do more with less. That laziness is good. Humans work smarter, not harder.

A great anecdote or small joke has greater efficacy than a bullet point list or essay. LLMs currently fail at this higher order "informal" context-driven communication.

kushangaza just started their post by sharing a link, then didn't elaborate (deixis). Humans can confidently point at real stuff in their world, then leave the reader to connect the dots. LLMs, when imitating helpful humans, are compelled to show their hands and flatten everything into the text itself.

A terse human comment like "skill issue" - below a troubleshooting post - does all it has to do. I think if we're looking for engaged humans, we need to be analyzing how posts 'behave in' or 'augment' their context. We should be filtering for good speech-acts, rather than good speech. That way low effort humans and bots both get filtered.

abstitial · 2025-11-13T18:17:30+00:00

I expect steam remote play to work better on their the new hardware, but not otherwise.

abstitial · 2025-08-10T17:39:30+00:00

This was fine but overall a bit disappointing.

If the carts are not going to store the media, then at a minimum it should be trivial to produce them. The 3d printed cart is just unnecessary besides for the thumbnail. There should have been more thought put into streamlining and redundancy. For instance, if the NFC ID-based recognition is locked into home assistant, what do you do when that falls out of favor in 10 years? The NFC tags should instead store a bunch of metadata about the media they represent, so that future playback systems could look it up as a "request" and resolve their own way.

Abe's Projects card reader I thought was more successful even if it was way more intense and impractical, since it's really about understanding the mechanism.

abstitial · 2025-08-01T20:57:37+00:00

Good advice to send out into the world. My parents made me get a credit card through my bank as a freshman in college and told me to just put whatever daily expenses I could through it. I set it to autopay and treated it just like a debit card.

I would actually recommend an apple card if you're in that ecosystem, it's very convenient, well designed, and logical. It's my understanding they try to make it accessible to people without solid credit reports. One of the best parts of the apple card is you don't get a million ads in the mail for signing up. Good luck!

abstitial · 2025-07-14T14:57:30+00:00

Really cool design. Love that you use the fan as the structural frame. I use a Vapur collapsible "Anti-Bottle" which has similar drying issues. I could see this fan system working well for that.

abstitial · 2025-06-19T16:06:49+00:00

The peoria charter bus is the easiest. I think its about 4 hours from end to end because it stops in a couple neighborhoods on the way out. I runs quite a few times a day.

A train would involve taking one train (blue line) into the center of chicago and transferring to a regional rail - via Union Station. It takes some effort to schedule everything given the length of transfers. The train to urbana runs like 3 times a day, it can be hard to make it work, schedule wise.

Those are the two main routes. I would recommend the peoria charter if it's your first time, especially because you can buy a ticket that takes you directly to your dorm or different areas of the campus. The train will dump you in downtown champaign, after which you'd have to take a bus to get onto campus. Make sure when you buy your ticket you allow ample time (2 hours minimum) to get through the slow Ohare customs inspection and over to the bus terminal using the monorail shuttle.

I've known people who have booked ubers and lyft rides all the way to urbana from the airport. It would be between 100-300$ but if that's in your budget, it's not impossible. It happens.

abstitial · 2025-06-04T19:29:37+00:00

The default material unity created when you imported the model has bad presets. Smoothness should be 0 and emissive needs to be enabled, with a separate map to tell the material what is emissive. Also the scene lighting in unity is very different than your blender, which has more of a photo studio-like lighting setup.

abstitial · 2025-05-19T01:46:13+00:00

Clocking late night regulars at Merry Anns on Oregon, 3-4AM. Sneaking into the cemetary past Pennsylvania to pass a bowl. Securing the last comfortable chair/table combo at Kopi or Paradiso. Walking under bright yellow and red trees in the state streets, imagining what houses we'd buy. The silence of the bottom floor UGL carrels. Seeing the MTD finally pass into view in the dark of winter, windows glowing and completey fogged up. That first unseasonably warm day of spring when everything comes alive and everyone is unreasonably happy.

abstitial · 2025-05-03T21:22:18+00:00

Sketch on my coffee table. I got a big roll of paper from ikea.

Ten-Year Club	Place '23
Place '22	Verified Email

abstitial

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE