mm/dd/yy calendars are an abomination in the eyes of all sane people.
What have you learned today?
- Thread starter hanselthecaretaker
- Start date
Find me a sane person and I'll apologize.
I've been looking into the various Pokemon manga today and I came across this image from Pokemon: Pocket Monsters, as far as I can tell the first ever Official Pokemon manga released:
Yes, that is Red pulling down his pants and grabbing his balls instead of his Pokeballs. Nintendo approved. This manga ran for 14 volumes. Suffice it to say, this never got a western release.
Also here's an image of Sapphire from the manga Pokemon Adventure sticking her nose up a pokemon's butthole:
You can see the poop on her nose in the later panels. It was censored form the Viz release, because kids don't appreciate poop jokes or something?
Also here's an image of Sapphire from the manga Pokemon Adventure sticking her nose up a pokemon's butthole:
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As a proud 'Merican, I was deeply troubled to learn the logic of the "dd/mm/yyyy" format makes as much sense as it does, i.e.: incrementally larger indicators of time. I saved my sanity by rationalizing that it takes more syllables to say "the 31st of March" than simply "March 1st," so suck it, rest of the world.
Can't help but feel choosing a longer number for the first one is a bit unfair!
Never seen Seinfeld. Never felt any urge to neither. (Probably cause while the UK is bad at almost everything that matters, the choice of comedy entertainment to distract the boozy proletariat tends to at least be of higher quality) That being said, an infinitely generated AI version of the show does seem like a far more intriguing entry point.
www.escapistmagazine.com
Nothing Forever Is an Infinite, AI-Generated Seinfeld Episode
Nothing Forever is an infinite AI-generated Seinfeld episode streaming 24/7 on Twitch, creating comedy with Larry, Fred, Yvonne, & Kakler.
www.escapistmagazine.com
Technology is going to kill us all eventually, but first — it’s making us laugh. Mismatch Media is garnering a lot of attention on Twitch for its watchmeforever channel, which is host to Nothing Forever, an infinite AI-generated comedy that is streaming 24/7. Nothing Forever uses the iconic comedy Seinfeld as its foundation, using familiar scenery, bass licks, and four characters that look a lot like Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer. Scenes typically take place in Jerry’s (“Larry”) apartment, and all scenes are split up by a static shot of his apartment building. The Larry character also does standup comedy routines sometimes, and periodically, a faux TV Guide channel will play, scrolling through fictional TV listings. It’s art.
What allows Nothing Forever to generate infinite AI-generated Seinfeld is a combination of OpenAI’s GPT-3 with some set art assets and other AI. Character animations are basic, stiff, and repetitive as one would expect, but it’s all really charming.
If you’re wondering if the comedy dialogue is genuinely clever in Nothing Forever, the answer is of course — absolutely not. The dialogue does flow together from one sentence to the next, but it’s still fairly nonsensical. However, that randomness just ends up making it really funny anyway, especially with the laugh track that plays at random intervals. It’s basically hypnotic. I’ve had this ridiculous thing playing for over an hour now.
Enjoy a dialogue exchange I hastily transcribed on the fly, and I hope the character attributions are correct:
Larry (Jerry avatar): “Hey, guys, I just heard something interesting. Did you know that most people can’t tell the difference between a sliced apple and a jelly donut?”
Yvonne (Elaine avatar): “Are you serious? That’s nuts. How did you hear about that? Sounds like something Fred would do.”
Fred (George avatar): “No way. I wouldn’t eat a jelly donut if you paid me. Although, it would be kind of funny to do a taste test and see who can tell the difference.”
Larry: “Well, I think that’s a great idea. Let’s do it tomorrow.”
Fred: “Alright, it’s a date.”
Larry: “Well, if it’s a date, I’m going to bring the donuts.”
Is any of the above funny? In a genuine sense, no. But in an ironic sense — yes, kind of. But if you’re not sold yet, enjoy one of Larry’s classic comedy standup routines:
Jerry standup: “Hey, everyone, ready for some laughs? Alright, so, what did the fish say when it hit a wall? Dam! Haha. Alright, what did the computer do when it was mad? It threw a tantrum. Alright, one last: What did the egg say when it wanted to dance? Eggcuse me!”
The standup routines seem to be more directly informed by actual comedy jokes, since they sometimes make sense, and I actually laughed really hard for that first one because of how the AI delivered the punchline.
In any case, Nothing Forever and its AI-generated Seinfeld antics are an excellent way to throw away hours of your life, and the six-thousand concurrent people viewing it at the time of this writing would agree.
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In the very late 1700s, in Britain they tried building a lock for a canal where they didn't want to use much water, so they basically made an elevator shaft full of water, the boat goes into an airtight box floating in the water, then they they sink it to the bottom and open water-tight doors to let you out to the lower level.
Surprisingly, this worked most of the time, and almost only killed the investors in a terribly predictably accident once, before being abandoned for reasons seemingly unrelated to this being a terrible idea.
Surprisingly, this worked most of the time, and almost only killed the investors in a terribly predictably accident once, before being abandoned for reasons seemingly unrelated to this being a terrible idea.
As a former Merican colony, we often use a mix of metric and Imperial (not that MM/DD/YY is either of those, but I'll get to that). We use feet and inches almost exclusively for people's height. Personally I think breaking height down into feet and then inches allows for easier comparisons. We also tend to use pounds for people's weight (at least outside of a medical setting). This one I'm not entirely sure why, but personally when I try to lose or maintain weight pounds are easier to track.
Anyway, back to MM/DD/YY. If the day is of more concern, then more often than not the date takes place during the current month. In which case, as you said, it would be easier to just type March 1 (or Mar 1 if you're feeling spicy). If the date is months away, I'd be far more concerned with what month it is before the day itself.
Analog Horror is a thing I kind of knew about but not the actual term for it. Most because I stumbled across the Monument Mythos which I fucking love for how batshit wierd it is and occasionally genuinely creepy and disturbing. Like "Hey, let's do a cosmic horror series where James Dean became president instead of Richard Nixon but he's possibly the devil in disguise and most of the video cameras look about 20 years behind their IRL counterparts as far as footage quality" kind of weird conspiracy shit.
I learned that, in a truly ironic twist, not only does the person who kickstarted the whole "gender reveal party" thing, Jenna Carvunidis, regret having done so because of what it led to, but the daughter she did it for has since shown signs of being gender-nonconforming.
Absent
And twice is the only way to live.
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That's interesting. The digital age added some new fields for drama (bugs, video conferences) but I think it's lost more. Ringu needed VHS, it's just not the same with an instant-copy-edit support-less digital video that you can watch by hopping through the timeline. White noises are needed for spectral communication. Microfilms must be physically delivered, by agents who are isolated between phone booths. Handwritten letters must emerge from the dust. We need the blur, the loss, the materiality, to enrich narratives, be it in rational thrillers or in supernatural anguishes. Our tales and imagination need the analog age just as much as it needs medieval times, 18th century high seas or the old west. Our tech had destroyed some ghosts' ecosystems...
Or maybe our imagination needs to get better. In place of microfilm, memory cards/usb drives. Phone booths? Burner phones. Perhaps Sadako 2.0 is represented by data corruption in a digital stream or a pattern of scratches causing playback errors on a disc. And who is to say a phantom cannot hope across a Skype call?
Absent
And twice is the only way to live.
- Jan 25, 2023
- 1,594
- 1,557
- 118
- Country
- Switzerland
- Gender
- The boring one
We try, we try. But a USB's content could be sent over the internet (or spend time on a reason not to). A burner phone still breaks the isolation (of "having to find a phone"), and heck, you don't even need a burner phone, just grab a passerby's. And we do have some interesting creepypasta and movies exploiting the new digital fields that I've mentionned (haunted videogame bugs, haunted video calls, online content remanence, etc), such as the brilliant Pon. But it's more contrieved, because it's less contrieved. I mean, the plot and its "rules" are more difficult to establish, because universal interconnection makes it harder to justify how a ghost would be contained in a plot-friendly space or device. A VHS can be a mysterious aladdin lamp. An internet ghost would instantly go full Ultron, or require a counter-intuitive plot device to keep it as a local unit. This all-or-nothingness makes it more difficult to vary stories.
One thing I love about ghost movies is how any (new and old) support can get haunted. Name an object, a new device, whatever, and wham, there's a what-if-it-was-haunted story. But in the age of dematerialization, there's a convergence towards "what if the network was haunted". We lose the specific poetry and mystery of older artefacts.