I like the idea that these were your first impressions of China, as in you stepped off a plane, had one look around and thought "Wow, this place seems like a ruthlessly effective technocracy that has achieved very impressive outcomes for its citizens but it's certainly a cultural-slash-societal system I never want to live in."
vaguerant
joined 11 months ago
I think Jame Eagan trying to make babies in whom he sees Kier is probably a good read. The baby in the opening credits seems to have Kier's face, which in a metaphorical sense is Jame's goal. The innies are also "babies" in a sense, and Jame says he sees Kier in Helly R, so that's another "baby" with Kier in them (although this one is a stretch because they're more like adolescents this season). Third, I guess it contrasts Kier with Dieter, who spilled his lineage in the forest rather than procreate and pass it on.
The final scene of Mark S and Helly R running down the hall panicked and giddy into a freeze frame zoom quotes Truffaut's The 400 Blows. In that film and several that followed, the character of Antoine Doinel, age 14, represents a younger facet of the director himself. He is an innie Truffaut, if you will, coming of age.
In the climax, the rebellious delinquent Doinel escapes from the reform school to which he has been confined and runs to the ocean. He looks around, without any obvious plan for what to do next, before looking towards camera in a freeze frame zoom that encompasses the uncertainty of his future from here.
On a less literal level, I wonder whether the freeze-frame and fade to red connects back to (outie) Mark and Devon's original after-image plan. We get a fading after-image of Mark S and Helly R and the implied question: "Who is alive?" Besides the literal sense when it referenced Gemma, that's obviously a question that goes to the heart of the show. Who is alive?
If you follow any open source projects on GitHub, it's useful to know that you can get an Atom feed of most pages (e.g. the commit log or releases tab), by adding .atom to the end of the URL.
Atom feeds are not the same thing as RSS feeds but any halfway modern RSS reader should be able to handle both. Feeder for Android, mentioned by ElectroVagrant (twinsies!) elsewhere in this thread is an example of an "RSS reader" which also supports Atom.
Here's an example Atom link for Interstellar (a cross-platform Lemmy/Mbin/PieFed app) releases: https://github.com/jwr1/interstellar/releases.atom
This is a handy way to get notifications when things update, especially useful if they have no internal update mechanism. If you can navigate your way to the Releases tab, then you can turn it into an Atom feed and you're done.
He prefers to groom Ivanka anyway.
This article sucks horrendously. The Japanese PM was asked about Assassin's Creed Shadows by a member of the House of Councillors, which from a quick search is roughly like the Senate in many western governments.
Prime Minister Ishiba responded to the questions by Kada, saying that if such actions were carried out at real-life landmarks in Japan, he would oppose them. He said that acts such as shrines being graffitied are completely out of the question, which was in reference to a real life act from November 2024.
Holy fuck, the PM doesn't want people to vandalise shrines in real life. He's so mad about Assassin's Creed Shadows, everybody point. Also, the writer doesn't know how to spell feudal ("fueduel") and that's probably the worst part.
I think the most concrete thing they've done is remove the Twitter/X icon from their web site. If you scroll down to the footer, you can see their social links, which no longer point to Twitter for either @Mozilla or @Firefox.
It doesn't look like this is emulating Atari 2600 games, if only because the form factor of the watch (vertical orientation, ballpark 3:4) is the exact opposite of the old console. These appear to be native ports to whatever hardware the watch is running.
Also, is this not just a bad product? Why would anybody want to play games on their watch? Most people already have another device in their pocket that's going to offer a better experience.
In fact, he could have just argued that he did spend the money on "white horse".
I keep seeing opinion pieces like this, but I remain unconvinced. Sure, if his sincerely held intention was to do anything at all positive for the US and its allies, his actions would read as insane. But if he actively, deliberately desires to harm and destabilize both, then he's going about it the right way. Screw Hanlon's razor: stupidity is inadequate to explain any of this.
As long as we're talking Virtual Boy, I'll plug my QoL patches for Virtual Boy games.
Most of the patches are for adding save support, which covers the following games:
- Bound High!
- Golf
- Jack Bros.
- Mario Clash
- Nester's Funky Bowling
- Red Alarm
- Space Squash
- Vertical Force
- V-Tetris
- Waterworld
In some cases, this amounts to saving your high scores, since a lot of VB games are very arcade-style and don't really merit saving progression. However, for a few (Bound High, Golf, Jack Bros., Mario Clash and Space Squash), your gameplay progress is saved. These games are greatly improved by the addition of save support.
There's a couple of other patches which aren't save-related:
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For Bound High!, there's a debug patch which unlocks all of the dummied-out debug features left behind in the game. While they are cross-compatible, I don't recommend using this in conjunction with the save patch because entering the debug codes to have all stages completed will also overwrite your save data. I suggest patching two different ROMs, so you have a debug ROM without saving, and a retail ROM with saving.
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For Hyper Fighting, there's a bug fix patch to correct the brightness setting.
I don't think severing works as well as Lumon would like. We see tons of crossover between innie and outie awareness, even down to simple stuff like Helly R being able to name Delaware, Europe and the equator. The testing floor and Macrodata Refinement seem to be about making severance more precise by refining exactly how much of the complete mind the innie has access to. They are impressed that Cold Harbor Gemma gives no indication of having an emotional response to what they have identified as the most significant trauma of her outie life because the current state of severance isn't achieving that.
We don't really know what an innie's response to being confronted with major outie trauma would be, because the Severed Floor is so clinically sanitized of anything that could possibly resemble the outie's "real" life. Even when the innies are allowed to do something outwardly normal like a dance party or a funeral, it's fundamentally weird and wrong because they are avoiding giving them experiences that reflect life on the outside. I don't think this just comes down to Lumon being incredibly weird, although that helps.
If what MDR has achieved is some sort of perfect severance with no crossover, then Gemma is no longer needed. They can apply this knowledge to all severance from now on and Gemma herself is only a liability: somebody who was kidnapped and tortured for literally years, who the entire outside world believes to be dead. If she gets out and tells people, that's going to damage Lumon. If she dies (again), they don't even have to bother telling anybody.