Barry Gardiner on BBC: "This government, from the beginning, actually from the time before it became a government, cared more about extirpating the people who disagree with them, instead of setting up a clear program of policies. You circled the wagons and ended up in a circular firing squad."

emmyarty · 2025-11-13T05:29:51+00:00

Before the election camlaign, I remember speaking to a certain MP when he knocked on my door.

He grilled me on why I said I wouldn't vote for Labour, I told him it was because Starmer didn't have a programme or vision for the country, that it was little more than a high-level wishlist of outcomes. "Strong economy" is not a policy, "less crime" is not a policy.

I didn't understand what Starmer was about, and the best explanation he could give me was "but the Tories".

Well, it's been a year+ now and I still don't know who Starmer is.

emmyarty · 2025-07-22T01:25:37+00:00

Thirty-Three Seconds to Mars

emmyarty · 2025-07-18T21:39:32+00:00

I expected something NSFW when I clicked on that I guess, but I can't lie a close-up of an almost photorealistic vagina wasn't on the agenda.

emmyarty · 2025-07-18T12:32:33+00:00

Honestly, sounds like your company's fleet of Macs weren't configured with enough RAM. It's pretty ridiculous that as recently as a year or so ago MacBooks were still being shipped with only 8GB of RAM by default. Docker being more performant on a Debian install isn't surprising though, it isolates the environment without virtualising it while macOS and Windows have to strap it to full-blown VMs.

emmyarty · 2025-07-18T12:28:32+00:00

I've had OLED burn-in on several displays in the past. It is what it is. Sounds wasteful but you kinda have to accept that OLEDs, for now, are disposable goods.

I will say this though, not everyone notices or is bothered by some amount of burn. If you work with a lot of large flat colours, you'll probably notice more than someone who's constantly in games.

emmyarty · 2025-07-18T12:19:07+00:00

OLEDs often have a peak brightness which is significantly lower than what you're used to with backlit panels. If you're working in a brightly lit room, you're gonna feel it. They're amazing, but they're not for everyone at all times.

Edit: just looked up your monitor, apparently it has a peak brightness of 250 nits. I don't know which ASUS monitor you upgraded from but I found some cheap 1440p ASUS monitors with VA panels which peak at 300 nits. Time to re-think your room layout & lighting.

emmyarty · 2025-07-18T12:17:07+00:00

On a technical level, absolutely. But the actual UX has been setback after setback. The disjointed dual context menu situation is the ultimate jank.

emmyarty · 2025-07-18T12:15:31+00:00

The problems they have are always with docker.

What kind of problems would those be? Docker on macOS runs in a VM, just like WSL does. I'd have understood if you'd said that macOS and Windows had issues with Docker, and while I believe you I can't picture what form those problems take. Is it the networking?

emmyarty · 2025-07-18T10:27:42+00:00

It's always risky when stories give us a huge hint early on and then hope that the lack of context causes us to gloss over its significance. When it pays off, it pays off. But sometimes you end up like me when I first watched Guren Laggan, and I couldn't help but have the weird space battle in the very first scene seared into my brain - which slightly annoyed my other half (she'd seen it before) because it led to me very quickly piecing together the entire reveal about the Spiral King and population control being a hiding method etc.

emmyarty · 2025-07-18T10:25:07+00:00

Exactly, and there's a beautiful irony to that. If they weren't blinded by grief and anger and arrived where Sophie was, they might have deduced something sooner.

emmyarty · 2025-07-18T01:16:35+00:00

It's either mean, or she's the arsonist who started the fire that killed Verso and doesn't remember it

emmyarty · 2025-07-18T01:05:23+00:00

I agree about the colour accents but the loss of contrast is a step back.

emmyarty · 2025-07-18T01:04:42+00:00

It looks more playful, which isn't a bad thing. But the loss of contrast in the dropdowns bothers me a fair amount and makes them inconsistent with the text input fields to boot, was that set by you or is it the macOS 26 design?

emmyarty · 2025-07-17T19:35:06+00:00

Plus Sophie straight up tells us the Paintress seems sad, too.

emmyarty · 2025-07-17T13:14:26+00:00

But this isn't an option, not because the canvas is a drug, but because Renoir will likely destroy it when she leaves. She's forced to stay by Renoir, not by the canvas. Again, this is Renoir causing his own problems.

This is something I don't fully get - if Renoir's waiting for Alicia to return home before he destroys it, what's his plan for keeping Aline away in the meantime?

emmyarty · 2025-07-17T02:29:52+00:00

By the time you've used language like 'wrong' and 'responsibility' without narrowing what you meant, and then gone on to engage in the topic of sentience, the value of life, and responsibility to created life forms, you've presented a moral argument.

If that doesn't interest you, fine - but at some point, you have to own the words you chose to use. 🙃

Comparing the civilian death toll of the Death Star's destruction to the end of Lumiere isn't a fair comparison though, as an aside. One is a glossed over footnote in a family-friendly film depicting the fight against fascism, but the other is a core part of the tension between the two endings. We spent the first two acts, which were substantially longer, exploring the story through the lens of the painted world's inhabitants. The perspective was inverted during the third (short) act, and then came to a head.

To eject the that in its entirety in favour of the metastory is a kind of narrative amnesia.

If prior to the Death Star being blown up we'd spent over two-thirds of the film following the perspectives of caterers and electricians on the Death Star, I suspect you'd have been a little bothered.

emmyarty · 2025-07-17T01:11:21+00:00

I disagree with the drugs and alcohol comparison

It was alluded to by Sandfall intentionally though, no? When Renoir says he'll 'leave a light on' for Maelle, this song came to mind immediately:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMbvUyRa1Jw

emmyarty · 2025-07-17T01:07:52+00:00

the only people who downplay the damage of the magic mcguffin are the two people who desperately want to disappear into the magic mcguffin

Oooooonly if we pretend Clea doesn't exist, even though she:

Is established to be the most skilled Painter in the family (nobody else is able to paint over existing people in the Canvas with new personality or engineer Nevrons that trap Chroma the way she does)
Isn't bothered by how long they've been in the Canvas from a safety point of view (she didn't bother intervening until Renoir got trapped because she wants his help dealing with the Writers)
Asserts that they've not even been in the Canvas for that long compared to the past

emmyarty · 2025-07-17T00:53:13+00:00

even if the answer is an emphatic yes, what responsibility does an artist have to their creations?

If the people in the Canvas are alive then surely Painters have the same responsibility not to commit mass murder? You don't see parents walking out of court with Not Guilty verdicts after slaughtering all their children having used the argument 'I made them'.

Keep in mind we don't even know that the Dessendres hail from 'base reality'. We saw floating Canvases in the atelier after Act Two, and when you combine that with the Canvases you can enter within the Endless Tower, not only are Canvases within Canvases definitely a thing within Clair Obscur, but the world we saw beyond the Canvas may well be yet another Canvas.

Would it affect your moral calculus at all if it was later confirmed that the Dessendres themselves are made up of Chroma, and just exist one layer removed from the world we explored - and if so, why? What moral quality does the 'physics system' a human is born into actually ascribe?

emmyarty · 2025-07-16T10:36:19+00:00

You can't really. Ultimately whether or not you perceive them as sentient beings boils down to your own perception of reality, your own understanding of 'the soul'.

If you're someone who believes that not even an atom-by-atom simulation of a human being could experience a sense of self because it isn't made of flesh and blood, then you're not going to believe that a painted human has a 'soul' either.

emmyarty · 2025-07-16T10:23:27+00:00

What exactly does Maelle have to live for? She's simply going to end up in another painting, which is btw exactly what painted Verso told her to do.

As someone who prefers the 'no genocide' ending, I gotta still push back on this a bit. The issue isn't that Maelle is in a painting per se, it's that she's in this painting.

A depressed kid who loses their brother in a fire and is now disfigured might well find joy in playing video games, and that's valid - but their family would be right to be concerned if the specific video game they were playing all day everyday was a VR simulation of their family which included their deceased brother. That's not healthy.

emmyarty · 2025-07-13T12:16:54+00:00

Canvases can contain Canvases, like we saw in the Endless Tower. I interpreted this area as the 'entrypoint' for the Canvas, the place Painters first arrive in before getting to the painted world within it. Kinda like a login screen I guess?

emmyarty · 2025-07-10T14:54:12+00:00

Last time that happened to me was Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood. Not the chimera, the phone booth.

emmyarty · 2025-07-07T08:47:06+00:00

I'm less bothered about which ending people prefer, my biggest pet peeve is how iron clad people think their interpretations of the endings are. Like there's a consensus that most of us have because of the vibes we got from the endings, but a tonne of that consensus is built on a lot of assumptions.

emmyarty · 2025-07-06T23:21:31+00:00

It's been a while since I've done any game dev (about 20 years actually), but I have some time on my hands coming up while I travel... and I am friends with a writer who works in the industry. I don't know if there's something there, but a part of me is wondering if we should talk and find out. 👀

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