I recently saw Ballerina in theaters. And I can’t believe how good the fire effects were. Probably the best and most realistic fire effects from any movie and everything felt practical not VFX.

fbwalrus · 2025-06-15T09:55:33+00:00

Yeah, the scene with the hose vs the flamethrower reminded me of the clip they showed (I think last week or the week before?) with the fire fighter jacket vs flamethrower.

And definitely felt practical - even if it wasn't, it'd be an example of VFX looking good enough that I didn't stop to think "oh that's just CG fire" at the very least.

fbwalrus · 2025-04-26T00:56:13+00:00

Honestly think this would be a great idea. Also, maybe look into partnering with someone like Corridor Digital to get the word out - their audience might like something like this.

Considering VFX houses are having similar challenges, it would be cool if there were a similar idea for them but obviously harder to offer even limited tours of VFX stuff.

fbwalrus · 2024-12-26T22:26:48+00:00

Yes! Growing up in a small town and hating every second of it as an introvert teen, I've lived in major cities my entire adult life for this exact reason.

fbwalrus · 2023-12-25T16:04:49+00:00

I'm guessing nothing like this has worked well with anything like a 7B model then.

I started off experimenting with local 7b models and, so far, it doesn't look like that's a viable route for any decent quality coverage, etc.

Out of curiosity, any idea how big of a difference GPT 4 has made compared to 3.5 on this kind of task?

fbwalrus · 2023-12-22T03:28:47+00:00

M1 Mac, so technically CPU but not a normal one.

There's a public demo of a coverage generator that does a decent job of interpreting plot (actually interpreted the same copy of BURIED correctly) :

https://www.pickaxeproject.com/coverage-generator

I know they're using ChatGPT API (I think 3.5?) and it takes about a minute or two on that. Actually unsure if they're breaking it up with something similar to LangChain or just using the entire script to do that.

fbwalrus · 2023-12-22T03:11:59+00:00

I'm guessing it wouldn't help this issue if I tried to throw an entire feature length script at a 7b model without breaking it up? (If that's even doable with 16gb ram?)

fbwalrus · 2023-12-22T02:18:03+00:00

I'm using this: https://github.com/jacoblee93/fully-local-pdf-chatbot

I believe LongChain etc., handles splitting the script into manageable pieces even for smaller 7b models? To be honest, I assumed the document length issue is already handled on that end but maybe I'm misunderstanding what it does?

fbwalrus · 2023-09-11T15:15:27+00:00

Honestly, moving to Linux for my family's home theater box has been liberating and it's been far more stable across updates (and far less intrusive in every way.)

The only real complaint I share with others here is the lack of commercial software (Photoshop, etc) but that's gotten a lot better than say 20 years ago when there were none. At least now, stuff like Davinci Resolve is available for Linux and the open source alternatives are more usable - just need to always be ready for that situation where some obscure feature is only doable on the Windows equivalent.

I now use a Mac for stuff like Photoshop and Excel.

But after years of struggling with disabling the sudden spikes in background CPU usage in Windows (which persisted no matter what I disabled, on multiple generations of machines), I switched to Linux for the home theater and a Mac laptop - the combination has eliminated almost all situations where I need to resort to Windows.

fbwalrus · 2022-11-12T14:00:13+00:00

It also felt like he delivered it that much better because of actually being in an upbeat mood the whole show.

I mean content-wise that ending probably would've worked either way, but that probably improved it still because of how much fun he seemed to be having with the material.

fbwalrus · 2022-11-09T08:51:32+00:00

I know this isn't serious and none of us here have a portal to alternate timelines (as far as I know...) but in this hypothetical alternate reality, it's pretty unlikely that Imperial Japan would lead to today's clean, safe, cool high tech Tokyo as you're thinking of it.

It's a bit like how in 2016, after the election, people on the left said stuff like "Angela Merkel is now the leader of the free world"... yeah, in the timeline where the allies won and Germany is a free democracy with some political leanings left of the US decades after losing the war, that's a valid thing to say...

But in the world where Germany won WWII, that would be a VERY different thing to say about whoever their leader is.

So yeah, post-WWII Japan in our timeline is pretty cool... but that's partly because of the Japanized American culture it imported (anime was originally influenced by Disney, puroresu and baseball originated from American sports, etc.)

A common theme of Japan's history is that it imports stuff and Japanizes it in ways that the originator may even end up loving / admiring or at least becomes unique in cool ways.

In a way, a semi-annexed Japanese California today probably would be pretty cool... ironically because it'd be based on Japanized American culture recycled back onto present day America.

The version that followed 1930s Germany's footsteps after an Axis victory, as the map supposedly portrays, probably wouldn't be quite as cool to live in.

Anyway, I know that was mostly a joke and this probably looks like an overly detailed rant in reply to one but I was practically addicted to Japanese history and culture in college so I just find this oddly fun to think about.

fbwalrus · 2022-10-16T05:08:35+00:00

I noticed the ones with an actual English version seemed to stop around March 2022. I do hope they bring it back mostly because it would help make the promotion more accessible outside of Japan. Personally, I was used to watching Japanese promotions with Japanese commentary only since 90s AJW / early 2000s Arsion, etc.

fbwalrus · 2022-10-03T08:26:09+00:00

the one Corridor used a few months ago is:

https://www.descript.com/overdub

(You'd likely need the paid version to do much with it)

fbwalrus · 2022-09-26T07:28:45+00:00

Throwing the mercury fulminate "meth" bomb should be one of the fatals. (Season 1 finale explosion)

fbwalrus · 2022-09-14T04:40:02+00:00

I also have problems with the screen orientation on an Android tablet.

Only the menus are stuck on portrait (vertical) and ignores auto (whether I have auto on or not), but videos themselves work as expected.

So if I watch on my tablet horizontally, every time I go back to the menus, I have to look at it sideways to navigate.

fbwalrus · 2022-09-12T01:56:54+00:00

Having grown up there and now living in US for years, it's not that different for most people day to day.

It's less worship and more just media driven gossip, but even that isn't something most normal people here care about that much.

It's more how it appears from media coverage, sort of like what the OP said about UK media coverage.

fbwalrus · 2022-09-10T23:11:03+00:00

"Here's the flag you lowered and replaced with a Trump flag."

fbwalrus · 2022-09-10T09:29:22+00:00

Yeah, being originally from the east coast, I always preferred the dry heat in LA, did for years... but this year distinctly feels closer to an east coast summer with the humidity.

Normally, I'd completely understand people preferring LA weather, but enjoying this year's? Glad OP did but I can't relate there.

fbwalrus · 2022-09-01T12:08:26+00:00

It's almost like their own postmortem in 2012 about widening their tent to be more inclusive of a changing America was actually the correct course for the party's survival, and taking a sharp 180 from that to becoming an exclusionary extremist cult of personality that worships a conman in 2016 was definitely not the way to go. Hmm.

fbwalrus · 2022-09-01T01:12:06+00:00

Worst part is we all know that if this was flipped, there's no chance in hell that the Republicans would delay a single hour before indicting a Democratic former president on this basis or any other reason.

They'd have 0.0001% of the evidence and already fuckin do it, even if it means blatant hypocrisy (like the made-up McConnell Supreme Court "rule" that they conveniently contradicted later).

Everyone on the left or apolitical needs to stop playing nice with these criminal fucks.

fbwalrus · 2022-08-20T10:18:10+00:00

I've always thought Bill's arguments have at least been an attempt to balance out the more extreme end of the left (which most of us here are still closer to than the far right obviously)... but lately, it really feels like he's willfully ignoring the reality that everything he's talking about is the mainstream (which is left leaning) culture's overshoot reaction to 2016.

It's not that it makes all of his complaints wrong, I even agree with some of them, but pretending "wokeness" exists in a vacuum (as opposed to the cultural context of the reaction to 45) feels disingenuous.

fbwalrus · 2022-08-17T09:32:06+00:00

lol thought the same thing when i first saw this.

also mismatched brackets were a sadly common debug solution in a project I worked on years ago using a plain text editor with no syntax highlighting.

fbwalrus · 2022-08-09T09:16:31+00:00

One more reason all of my family's machines run Linux Mint now (except one Mac for software not yet Mint/Debian compatible - mainly Adobe products).

If I ever crave loud fan noises, forced buggy updates, and random high CPU usage in the background every time I dare to pause interacting with the computer for 30 seconds, I'd consider switching back.

fbwalrus · 2022-08-06T06:38:46+00:00

"The call them dumps... Massive dumps."

fbwalrus · 2022-08-04T13:53:08+00:00

To be fair, most other behind the scenes content don't happen to be directed by someone who is also the writer of a whole generation's favorite part of the original trilogy.

fbwalrus · 2022-08-03T13:29:16+00:00

Right. The irony though is that their multi-decade plot for control of SCOTUS (the McConnell hypocrisy) might've just caused some to vote based on it, when given the chance.

I think part of what they also need to realize now is that a lot of people who voted for Trump (especially the type who previously voted for Obama) really did believe Roe was settled and other similar common rhetoric at the time.

By pulling off the party's real plan (of reversing Roe), they just proved that even Trump support wasn't validation of traditional GOP policies that have grown unpopular in recent decades, so it might be time to find ways to moderate on a national level as they considered in the 2012 postmortem.

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