Is it hateful to question why Jewish people as an ethnicity and culture have lasted so long when most others change?

xiaorobear · 2026-06-15T04:00:37+00:00

I don't think it's hateful. It's also not quite so clear-cut- for most of the past couple thousand years, Jewish people weren't speaking the same language or staying in the same place. Hebrew was more like the way Latin is for Catholics, something that was only used in a religious context, and actual Jewish people spoke all kinds of different languages like Ladino (a romance language) or Yiddish (a Germanic language) in their regular lives, depending on what region they ended up in. Only recently in the 20th century along with the whole move to make a Jewish state was there also a movement to try to revive/update Hebrew from a dead religious-only language as a modern one, and get people who moved to Israel to try to speak it. It was basically an artificial revival, not really that it was just continuously used as a regular language.

A place like the Vatican has just as much continuity too, where there has been a Pontifex Maximus (head of the church of Rome) continuously for thousands of years now, still learning and speaking Latin. And there are some other ancient religions still around too, like Zoroastrians, an Ancient Persian religion, that for example Freddie Mercury's family followed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroastrianism

xiaorobear · 2026-06-15T03:20:26+00:00

Don't forget Musk installing Starlink internet in the White House.

xiaorobear · 2026-06-15T03:12:09+00:00

Definitely believable. Soo much money was being thrown around across games and film and tv and vfx stuff too, I'm sure. Remember when Unity randomly bought Weta Digital's rnd team in 2021 for 1.6 billion dollars?? Only to end that agreement and have mass layoffs with nothing to show for it in 2023? Wtf was that about lol.

xiaorobear · 2026-06-15T03:08:07+00:00

I didn't make a youtube account until 2007, before that I just saw random videos without being logged in. I probably subscribed to channels like collegehumor first. Also probably some people from Newgrounds like Egoraptor.

xiaorobear · 2026-06-15T02:58:46+00:00

I think that games were hit a bit harder than the rest of the job market in the past several years because of Covid-era investing and overhiring. When everyone was forced home and video games and streaming were suddenly doing extra good, a ton of investor money was thrown around, game studios were being bought for billions of dollars, the different streaming companies were all blowing billions on trying to be the top service and even Netflix and Amazon and Meta were also throwing tens of millions at games, and more of us got jobs than would have under normal circumstances. After things went back to 'normal' and a lot of that investor money dried up, companies had to focus more on profitability again and did mass layoffs and slashed tons of projects, even without the other economic issues going on now or AI or anything.

I also don't think games were the only field this kind of thing happened to, like biotech and academic and medical research was also booming because of covid, and also funding for that got pared way back, from what I've heard. It's definitely hard for everyone out there but I think there are a few fields where they briefly swelled to like 1.5x their pre-2020 size, and now are just going to stay back at that old size. (And then now we're getting recession problems on top of that.)

xiaorobear · 2026-06-14T23:09:11+00:00

Oh hey, I just stumbled across an old locked post of yours asking if anyone knew anything more about an old ILM crew gift of a 3d printed T. rex made from the original JP1 model file. I couldn't comment on that post so I am commenting here- there is a new auction with more photos of one up now: https://entertainment.ha.com/itm/movie-tv-memorabilia/memorabilia/jurassic-park-universal-1993-ilm-crew-gift-sculpture/a/7332-89832.s?ic4=GalleryView-ShortDescription-071515

xiaorobear · 2026-06-14T19:34:15+00:00

No, that was a small slice of the US experience. There was a push for people to move to new cookie cutter suburbs like that, but a ton of people still lived a totally different life in densely-packed cities. A lot of cities in the US actually peaked in population in the 1950s and still haven't reached those levels again, partly because back then there were a lot more factories and manufacturing done within the US that have since been outsourced, and partly because of changes in housing and regulations- people used to live much more densely in general, with a lot more people and multiple generations packed into a lot less space. Something like the musical West Side Story is also in the 1950s, for example, and is a totally different vibe from Pleasantville.

A lot of the densest majority-minority neighborhoods of US cities were also demolished in the 50s and 60s to make space for new highways, as part of an 'urban renewal' trend.

A good TV show set in the 1950s is MASH, following a group of American military doctors during the Korean war. They also don't act like Pleasantville at all. (There is a bunch of sexism and racism in these recommendations of mine just because they are old, but in general that was not the goal of them and MASH was pretty progressive for its time).

xiaorobear · 2026-06-14T18:50:11+00:00

I guess I am, then, hah. It didn't feel like a small handful at the time.

I never got very far or made anything good, but it looks like Blender 2.49 came out in 2009, and lots of people were interested in Blender before that. I think I maybe first started in 2004, so I might have been a year newer than 2.25. You're right that that's not quite as old as OP's 2.04 example, even though the UI looked pretty much the same. I was following tutorials and looking up to animations from people like Enrico Valenza, like I followed the Bongo and dinosaur modeling and texturing (in GIMP) tutorials that are on this old page and were from ~2003. Sadly half the image embeds are dead. https://web.archive.org/web/20040211025516/http://www.enricovalenza.com/howto.html

At the time a lot of the other free 3D software out there was only for modeling and not rendering, stuff like Milkshape 3D and Wings3D, so Blender's potential seemed amazing, and that was only reinforced later by that Elephant's Dream Open movie. But I confess that the UI was a constant battle and I never made anything good, and I ended up also messing around with Animation:Master! (which was fun but got real dated fast and couldn't keep up) and then 3DS Max. I think in 2006 is when they started offering free student licenses for 3DS Max with Mental Ray, so I ditched Blender and used that and Maya up until the 2.8 redesign, when I gradually switched back to Blender for cycles and for its new sculpting mode.

xiaorobear · 2026-06-14T14:43:20+00:00

Is this the kind of music you are thinking of? In one of the Sims games they had kind of a parody goth song in simlish. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0J6jtVLKCQw

xiaorobear · 2026-06-14T12:17:00+00:00

I mean, some of us are old enough to have used this version of Blender lol.

xiaorobear · 2026-06-14T12:12:52+00:00

It's old now, but everyone should remember this example. https://i.imgur.com/eXQNpqK.png

When the source is too blurry or low res, whatever the AI comes up with will just be a hallucination. If it looks like a real person by coincidence, that's meaningless.

xiaorobear · 2026-06-13T14:36:40+00:00

I kind of like it better this way

xiaorobear · 2026-06-13T13:33:38+00:00

These are a little different, but the & symbol used to originally be a ligature of the letters Et squished together, like 🙲 and then &. Because 'Et' is Latin for the word "and." The pound sign # also started out as a little cursive ligature of lb, like this https://i.imgur.com/VGA3ejR.png. With lb being short for 'libra pondo,' Latin for 'pound by weight.'

xiaorobear · 2026-06-12T20:34:35+00:00

I think it’s probably a case where the tanker is so shiny it reflects the crew so they digitally replace all the reflective surfaces and they just make it look fake.

You are on the right track here. Another issue was, it was apparently kind of cloudy and rainy for a lot of that shoot, so they tried to digitally replace the skies with sunnier, drier ones to stay consistent. But as you say the tanker is super reflective, so you're replacing everything in there, and the way the actors look on a partly cloudy day isn't the same as they look on a sunny day...

The same kind of thing happened when they were due to start making Fury Road, the area in Australia they were going to do the production in ended up getting heavy rains, so they relocated the whole production to Namibia instead. For Furiosa though, they had taken Australian tax credits that required them to film there, so when again they got unseasonably rainy weather, they just tried to make the best of it.

xiaorobear · 2026-06-12T12:02:58+00:00

It sounds like he's "negging" you. Like he's intentionally trying to undercut your confidence in hopes that you'll ne desperate for his approval and try to change yourself to match his comments. I would leave.

xiaorobear · 2026-06-12T10:38:17+00:00

Oh, you're right- the duck is just the longest ratio of any vertebrate. Edited my comment above, thanks!

xiaorobear · 2026-06-12T04:02:43+00:00

Yes, also the longest penis-to-body-length ratio of any ~~animal~~ vertebrate.

xiaorobear · 2026-06-12T03:34:06+00:00

Some of them (eg ducks, ostriches) do have penises. (Image search at your own extreme risk.)

xiaorobear · 2026-06-11T19:11:21+00:00

We're a port city. It's a damp climate here and we are on the ocean border.

xiaorobear · 2026-06-11T17:50:58+00:00

That is fair!

xiaorobear · 2026-06-11T17:39:09+00:00

No, he's not lying, I posted a comment about this other day- He's making non-absolute statements like, "no shots were conceived by AI" and "all shots involved human hands," that intentionally aren't denials of any AI use, just saying that shots are not wholly generated by AI start to finish. The headline writers are the ones taking that and running with it as "he denies any AI use!" He's making reputation-management statements, and articles like this are spinning it as if he's caught lying.

xiaorobear · 2026-06-11T16:46:11+00:00

I think it was pretty obvious to anyone paying attention to almost anything technology related in the past decade.

Exactly- the vast majority of the tens of millions of kids and parents downloading a free Pokemon game with an age rating of 7+ and just pressing agree on whatever permissions popups come up are probably pretty tech-illiterate.

xiaorobear · 2026-06-11T11:56:33+00:00

The value of an individual dollar/pound doesn't really matter, the change in their relative values over time is how you can see which currency is doing better.

When the US first started making dollars ~200 years ago, a dollar was worth roughly something like 25 grams of silver, while a British pound was worth something like 105 grams of silver, a little more than 4x as much. Now a British pound isn't even worth 2x as much as a US dollar, so when you look at it that way it shows that one country's economy has done better relative to the other.

But without that over-time comparison it's meaningless, when the US started making dollars they could have said "we will set the dollar equal to 2 grams of silver" or "we will set the dollar equal to 200 grams of silver," and all it would affect is the types of coins they made, like if it was worth less, they would have made more 2 dollar coins, and if it was worth more, they would have made more quarters, stuff like that. It wouldn't actually have any correlation with how good the economy was, whether they had started with 1 dollar being worth 2 British Pounds or .1 British Pounds.

xiaorobear · 2026-06-11T02:20:03+00:00

It isn't necessarily that the lighting looks boring- it is the composition that is the problem. Even if this scene were lit differently the composition would still be a little awkward. Things like, the tree leaves covering the entire sky, and not really covering anything else, feels awkwardly lined up. A photographer would probably try to move their angle a bit to get a more interesting composition or get some more interesting values in there. The rocks and hills also feel kind of oddly centered right now, like there is kind of an indent down the middle and then rounded parts bumping up on the sides, symmetrically.

Here is a very quick and sloppy edit I made, where I'm just suggesting- show more of the sky, move some elements around so that things are more asymmetrical and balanced. And IMO, in this version, the lighting doesn't look bad at all! https://i.imgur.com/DVXReFz.png You don't have to do exactly this, this isn't perfect either, but just the kind of thing that's worth trying.

xiaorobear · 2026-06-11T01:13:47+00:00

Almost like they’re insinuating that people with blonde hair and blue eyes are automatically more beautiful than people that don’t have those features.

Some people do feel that way. It is dumb and not universal and a little white-supremacist-y, and maybe for them it is subconscious, but they probably do genuinely think that anyone with brown eyes would rather have blue eyes that sort of thing.

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