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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   2133 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 3, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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An argument for literacy through Wojac symbology

https://www.thestopgap.net/a-sumerian-problem/

It seems that 3D CGI animation has completely won against more 2D traditional animation styles. Looking at the animated media consumed by my kids these days, EVERYTHING is 3D-modeled CGI. I don't know of a single piece of animated media for kids that is not anymore. But is any such 3D CGI better than traditional animation? When I say "better" I mean, does it make better art than it would be if they did the same thing in traditional animation? Is there anything that this medium does really really well? Does it connect with us in a better way, make us feel more in any way?

I'm going to guess that the best thing that CGI does is "be cheaper". This makes sense, as once you produce a CGI model, you can use it forever, and you can adapt it to make new models. Do you want to make a scene of a crowd cheering? For traditional animation, you'd have to draw each person in the crowd over and over and over again, 24 times for each second. That's a lot of people to draw! For CGI, you can take one model, change it slightly to make other people, or use other preexisting models, and then animate them in a much less time consuming process than drawing frame-by-frame.

However, most 3D CGI stuff that I've seen looks kinda bland. As a case study, we can look at all of the Disney live action stuff vs the original animation. With the original animation, the artists pour lots of character into their characters. They exaggerate movements, change their faces to be very expressive with human-like characteristics. With remakes that extensively use CGI like The Little Mermaid and The Lion King, the characters are just kinda flat. I suppose this is exacerbated that Disney has tried to make all of the characters seem anatomically appropriate, resulting in Simba looking kinda like he's meowing instead of horrified when he sees Mufasa die, etc. But even without this caveat, I can't really think of any CGI that I feel like did something amazing. As another example, I've heard about the animators who make pokémon sprites complaining when pokémon switched over from 2D sprites to exclusively 3D models starting around 2013 ish. They complained about how you just can't give the same level of character to a 3D model as you can to a 2D sprite. Just making something look realistic does not necessarily make it better art.

Can anyone point to any 3D CGI media that does something really well, that elicits an emotional response that traditional 2D animation could not? Is CGI just a cost-saving measure to churning out bland media?

Some extra thoughts:

One thing that 3D CGI excels at is total animation. 2D animation is really restricted by the medium. Characters usually move in the plane that is perpendicular to the camera and the camera can pan or zoom, but its orientation is fixed. Total animation, that is, having the whole scene move relatively to the camera, is incredibly expensive, as you can no longer rely on background cels staying put and animating just the characters.

Let's say you're drawing two characters running along a long hallway of sorts, constantly avoiding oncoming obstacles. The easiest way to animate them is to have them run to the right. If you want them to run towards the viewer, you have to radically simplify the corridor, probably having a relatively short loop of wall and ceiling decorations. Anything more complex is total animation and it simply blows the costs of the animation sky high.

3D CGI is total animation by default, so you can have your characters and camera do whatever they want. Model your hallway once and you can have your camera weave and bob around the obstacles, circle around the characters, have the characters get closer to it or lag behind and all this without having to redraw every frame from scratch.

Are you aware of bluey? Maybe you don’t have kids? Bluey is an outrageously popular 2D animation show for kids that looks like it could have been made in 1995. It’s made in a software called celaction2d.

I can’t really overstate how popular it is. It’s made in Australia. It’s so popular that I suspect it will start having more copycats from more modern first world countries. (Just kidding Australians).

It’s also extremely wholesome. I can’t think of a single but of degeneracy in the entire show.

I've heard of Bluey, but haven't watched it. Kids are slightly too young.

Not even a gay couple walking in the background? Strange.

Not that anybody online seems to be aware of.

Fellas, is it degenerate to walk down the street with another man?

I can't. 3D CGI is soulless trash as far as the eye can see. So is most 2D animation as well, of course, but to a noticeably lesser degree.

Can anyone point to any 3D CGI media that does something really well, that elicits an emotional response that traditional 2D animation could not?

The example du jour of technically masterful, visually beautiful 3D animation right now (well-deserved, IMO) is probably Fortiche Production's 2021 Netflix series Arcane, surprised nobody's brought it up yet. I wouldn't hesitate to put its visual design, character animation and acting, and general execution up on par with a Prince of Egypt or a Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind or Akira or whatever your high-water mark for excellence in 2D animation might be.

My impression is that even people who didn't connect with the story or characters still generally praise the visual style and animation as noteworthy. It's a pretty striking departure from what people have come to expect from big-budget 3D animation - with heavy use of a non-photorealistic rendering style, hand-painted model textures, key effects like fire and smoke actually animated traditionally in 2D and composited in, and other creative ways of sort of "bridging the gap" between 3D and 2D animation, with a result that ends up taking on a distinct character of its own. One of the most common things people say about it (which I agree with) is something like "every frame looks like a piece of traditionally painted concept art", and I think it achieves things that would be technically very difficult or prohibitively labor-intensive if it had been a fully 2D-animated production, particularly in character acting and environment, that strengthen the emotional beats and storytelling.

Is it funny to me that my personal high-water mark for 3D animation is a TV series set in the universe of the video game League of Legends? Yes, a little.

The "kids/family-friendly animation" equivalent to that approach would probably be something like TMNT: Mutant Mayhem (2023), which is also trying for that kind of 'Expressive 2D/3D Hybrid Painting' look. Puss In Boots: The Last Wish (2022) also did this to an extent. The initial positive reaction to Enter the Spiderverse (2018) might've actually kicked off the trend (on groundwork laid by things like Disney's 2012 "Paperman" short film). I can't really speak to the overall quality of any of those movies as stories, but they all strike me as visually interesting and inspired compared to the larger catalogue of 3D animated family movies of the last two decades. If everyone starts leaning into this kind of look and milking it on a superficial level without any of the creative vision that's supposed to come with it, it might start getting tired fast, but as it stands, these kinds of heavy stylistic experiments are pointing in a good direction to me. It's expressive in the way that stylized 2D animation can be expressive. High Photorealism, now that we can do it well reliably, is ... kind of boring to look at, it turns out.

All that being said, yeah, I can point to a couple examples of studios experimenting with the medium in interesting ways, but broadly, neither the high end (incredibly expensive photorealistic CGI lions that communicate 1/10th the emotion that a cel of expressive lineart overlaid onto a cel of color communicated in 1995) or the low end (Walmart clearance DVD rack or straight-to-youtube Disney Tinkerbell series #48) are particularly pushing the envelope of what's possible in the medium. Nothing Pixar has put out in a long time has really blown me away in a visual sense that I can think of offhand, and a lot of popular 3D-animated children's TV or web programming is just depressingly sparse, sterile, and unemotive.

(late edit: on the Pixar point - After thinking about it more I've remembered Wall-E, which I think actually does really owe a lot of its charm and emotional depth to the realism of the hard, mechanical robots and the contrast between a photorealistic dirty, dusty earth and clean, ultra-curated colony ship. I don't know if the stark divide between the two story settings could've been achieved as well in traditional animation, and I think the machine characters really do benefit from the fact that they're models and not drawings.)

I do think you're right that cost is a driving factor once you get below the production budgets of major studios. Honestly, in terms of bang for your buck, a lot of modern economical 2D animation techniques produce an arguably lower quality product than the equivalent cost 3D animation. Low-cost 2D animation doesn't look like The Magic School Bus (1994) anymore, it looks like The Magic School Bus Rides Again (2017). Or Star Trek: Lower Decks, which appears more polished and is 'for adults' but to me just looks fundamentally offputting. No amount of fancy lens flare and bloom in post can save that. That's not to say there's not also some great, traditionally-principled, technically-masterful 2D animation happening out there right now, but to my eye there's just as much slop and creative poverty in 2D productions as there is in 3D right now.

whatever your high-water mark for excellence in 2D animation might be

Pinocchio

I found I liked Arcane's art style in small doses, but to me it was too visually noisy. Watching it I felt like I had to work to pick out the important figures in each scene.

I think it's mostly a labor-saving measure, although modern AI art will help a lot with that.

I play a lot of AVNs, and I see that the quality of 3D art is a smooth slope. Anyone can set up a content pipeline with some mildly customized assets and start churning out a new render for each line, the biggest limiting factor is probably their GPU. Getting the renders to look good and not uncanny probably doubles the work, getting the animations to look good probably quadruples it.

2D art required a real artist to even start making something. That's why most, if not all, 2D VNs stick to blurred backgrounds and a few posed images of the characters for the majority of the scenes, with only the pivotal scenes switching to a few full-screen drawings with the characters in more dynamic poses. Animating 2D art is much, much harder. Tools like Live2D and Spine are incredibly labor-saving, but the barrier to entry is super high, as you can't just draw the key frames and hire some lesser artists to do the in-betweens. You have to know which scenes can look good with Live2D, how to break down your first key frame into pieces and rig them to make the animation. And it still won't let you do something like this, the vast majority of Live2D animations looks barely better than Saturday morning Hannah-Barbera classics.

In a couple of years AI art will help a lot. Right now, there's not enough LORAs or what's their name that let you churn out images in the style you want and almost everyone uses the one that has the same energy as polystyrene moldings. It forgets tiny details between different drawings, so animations are right out. But all of this can and will be fixed. I'm reasonably sure Disney is currently busy making AI tools that will let it go back to lavish 2D animation and open-source tools will catch up with Disney a few years later.

Blizzard cinematics like this one (battle robot has PTSD) are generally held up as great CGI shorts.

I'd say the thing they do really well - better than hand drawn animation - is sell a coherent physical world. Because it's all modeled, things persist accurately through the scenes, like the blades of grass on the robot's shoulders, the clovers, the moss, etc. If that were hand drawn animation, I would expect that to vary and change. A good hand animator would probably get most of it correct, but maybe the length might be subtly off in a way your brain would pick up on.

I suspect western animators have simply conceded the 2D space to Asian studios that do it better. Kids in China for instance are said to "live a 2D life" due to the ubiquity of Japanese-style animation there. While the popularity of anime and manga is increasing over here as well, I think the works aimed at younger audiences (<10 years old, say) haven't made the jump as well either for financial or cultural reasons (or gatekeeping by local networks). Older kids on the other hand can navigate the internet well enough to find what they're looking for if they have an interest.

The Lego Movie plays to the strengths of 3D CGI on account of the subject being made of countless tiny pieces of uniform rigid 3D shapes. I imagine it was a huge effort to make in CGI, never mind trying to do it freehand.

Replying to you and @RaiderOfALostTusken

I agree the Lego movie did a good job with the CGI and certainly wasn't lazy. But I think my point still stands of, would it have been better if they had done a more traditional 2D animation? Might the character movements have been accentuated in specific ways, such that it could have connected even more with its audience? Is there any particular strength of the way they animated the characters in CGI that would have been less effective if they had used traditional animation instead? The fact that you say:

I imagine it was a huge effort to make in CGI, never mind trying to do it freehand.

doesn't contradict my premise that the primary thing that CGI is good at is cutting cost and effort. It kind of supports it.

Only because the movie is about a real world dad and son relationship, making the lego scenes appear as realistic as they would if you were the kid playing with them helps put you in the kids shoes. If the movie was done in traditional 2D style, I believe you could tell the same story but I'm not sure if it would land as well emotionally.

In general I'm not sure. Would I like Toy Story as much if it was a standard cartoon style? I like the Miyazaki films well enough I suppose. Other than those I don't think there are any traditional 2D films I like as much as say, Ratatouille or The Incredibles. And I don't know if that's because of the animation or in spite of it

I totally agree with the broad thrust of your post, just pointing out that The Lego Movie is the rare example that justifies its use of 3D and CGI where something like Toy Story, another genuinely good 3D CGI film, could quite conceivably have been rendered freehand in golden era 2D style without any great loss, and probably faster and for a smaller budget - it's the script, the characters and the top tier voice actors that make Toy Story good, the CGI was a technical novelty.

You can't render complex mathematically accurate physics in freehand - and I'm not saying I'm certain they did in TLM - and that's okay because 99% of the time you don't need to to tell a story. But if you want a convincing effect of a tidal wave of tiny Lego pieces crashing over a Lego city, a box full of loose pieces being exploded, or a Lego model that accurately models the qualities of the real product then CGI is going to give a "better" result, and faster. I'm not actually sure it would be cheaper though, 3D rendering is notoriously intensive and the credits for that film are vast.

A talented artist certainly could draw something that looks like a lot of Lego pieces interacting, but the emphasis is on like. CGI will be more immersive for that use even if perhaps it's less graphically expressive in its line-work and frame advances. A hand drawn Lego Movie would give you the "what if you could draw Lego coming to life" feeling where CGI is that much closer to "what if Lego could come to life". The artificial plastic-ness of Lego is an ideal match for the blandness of CGI where something like The Jungle Book or Lion King remakes will fall into the uncanny valley by trying to make singing animals look realistic (I assume, I haven't watched either of them).

In short putting aside cost, speed and effort I think The Lego Movie really would be at the very best no better if it was made without CGI.

I think well done 2d animation tends to look more "real" than 3d animation for anything organic, which I think has to do with the complexity of organic movement that is too time consuming to replicate with 3d models (when all it takes is the right pencil stroke to emulate in 2d). I also notice this with "muppets", if you watch Fraggle Rock for instance they show a ton of expression and liveliness that would just be too time consuming to do on a computer.

I think if you aren't satisfied with what Pixar is putting out, you're probably not going to find anything more visually sophisticated than that in the realm of computer graphics.

I thought The Lego Movie was a innovative use of CGI that made something genuinely impressive, especially how well they got the lighting figured out. It made sense narratively that it should look like that, and acted as a good contrast for the later emotional live action beats.

I don't know of a single piece of animated media for kids that is not anymore.

Keep in mind that the old Disney films kept selling VHS/DVD copies long after their release, and today are available on Disney+, so it's unclear how well new releases correlate with their media consumption.

Putting that aside, any anime for kids would be the obvious exception. It's just that, other than a few examples like the Pokemon anime and the subset of Studio Ghibli films that are child-friendly, they are mostly only watched by children in Japan. The reasons for this are pretty obvious - young children aren't seeking out their own media, aren't good with subtitles, etc. I think it used to be more common for (dubbed and often heavily edited) anime to air on children's cartoon television networks, though even then the target audience was older than the stuff for really young children that stayed in Japan.

Even western 2D animated series are invariably actually animated in various asian countries (and Japan itself often outsources some of the animation work to Korea or China). The grunt-work of animation also gets subsidized by the fact that a career in anime is a dream for many in Japan, people put up with horrendous hours and wages trying to make it. In western countries that doesn't happen, there's no native 2D animation industry so nobody tries to get into it and there's no pipeline teaching new animators.

That's true, I wasn't thinking of anime. I suppose that might be because my kids are too young for that as of now.

The Talos Principle 2 is out! I've been loving everything about it so far other than the very confusing map layouts. The first game had a few confusing maps of its own, but I've just completed the first hub and I would be lost without the signs at every intersection. I have no idea how I even found every hidden puzzle.

I have a long weekend ahead of me and I know exactly how I will spend it.

I am 1000% into Talos Principle 2 right now. I'm not sure how much the plot changes based on dialog choices, but it makes my heart sing watching them take shots at Malthusian bullshit left, right and center. It's a refreshing change of pace from the typical soy slop that passes as a story in games these days.

I'm in the south right now and the Sedona/Havasupai/Zion-like landscape there is just hnnng.

I'm not nearly that far. Only to North 2. Been a long time since a puzzle game grabbed me like this. Maybe since the last Talos Principle. Manifold Garden got me initially, but then it got so open ended it became overwhelming.

For such a neat name they just slapped “2” on there (at least Roman numerals)? I’d have preferred The Second Talos Principle but that might implicate something unintended. I haven’t even played the first one but I own it.

Looks like it won't have time travel puzzles from the first installment, which almost everyone hated. I personally didn't find them that hard, but I did find them daunting.

I played Harry Potter Legacy and reached 100% completion last night. I cant remember the last time I 100% completed a game like this. The assassin creed series and far cry series have the similar big maps and lots of collectibles, but I tire of the game before I ever reach it.

It was a good game, combat was interesting, if a bit easy once I got the hang of it (I had to turn up the difficulty to hard, but still never died). I liked a few of the side stories more than the main story. There were some silly fan service moments, like at the end how your house ends up winning the house cup cuz one of the school teachers gives out a bunch of points to just you.

There was some level of story and gameplay disconnect. I was slaughtering a dozen enemies at a time, and still sometimes got reactions like "you are a kid, it is much too dangerous for you!" Kinda like when some no name bandit in Skyrim tries to mug the dragon born that is walking around in Daedric Armor.

I had fun roleplaying a bit and making my own personal cannon. I unlocked the killing spell, and never used it on anything smarter than a Troll. It was a little silly that the killing spell got treated so badly, but I created a literal mountain of bodies without the killing spell. (unless they are all just sleeping)

I also had the thought that finishing a game at 100% completion is kind of bad. One thing that could be said in favor of an assassins creed game that I play to 80% is that there was enough content for me to play for as long as I was enjoying the game. I suppose I could start a new playthrough in harry potter in a different house, but Ravenclaw felt like it fit best, and I don't respect the other houses very much.

Harry Potter Legacy

Hogwarts Legacy, you mean?

Yah

I had fun roleplaying a bit and making my own personal cannon. I unlocked the killing spell, and never used it on anything smarter than a Troll. It was a little silly that the killing spell got treated so badly, but I created a literal mountain of bodies without the killing spell.

There's a huge bit of hypocrisy in the way that you can learn an explosion spell and routinely aim it directly at people and that's not unforgiveable. But the Imperio spell, which (if the game allowed it) could be used to force an enemy you would otherwise be forced to kill to surrender is an Unforgiveable Curse.

Imperio is a huge security breach just waiting to happen with one simple spell (and, indeed, happened in the books). The Killing Spell is known to be impossible to block (not sure if it was mentioned in the books), negating a huge part of Aurors' training. Crucio, well, it's a spell for causing sustained pain and doesn't have the excuse to be useful in combat (you're stuck pointing your wand at 1 opponent and they'll either be fine the second you stop or you're going far enough to do mental damage).

Yes, I think they mention Avada Kedavra being unblockable in the books, but if I recall the rationale for it being Unforgiveable is that you have to truly wish the person you aim it at to die. If I recall the rationale for Imperio being Unforgiveable is that you have to want to dominate the target. Sure, those rationales make sense on their own, but what are we expecting to happen to someone if you aim Confringo (Blasting Curse) at them? It's essentially shooting a bazooka at someone. Surely you're shooting it hoping it won't be blocked, so what are you hoping for? For them to only lightly explode to bits and not die? Somehow there's no moral event horizon being crossed in the game if you shoot it at all human and human-equivalent sentient beings. In the books, I don't remember the good guys casually casting deadly spells in combat, to avoid this hypocrisy.

Maybe moral norms were different in the 19th century. I guess it would have been boring if the only spells you could cast in combat were stupefy and expelliarmus.

unless they are all just sleeping

Balloon pop spell!

I've only watched gameplay and haven't tried it myself, but while the game seems like a good game, I'm mildly confused at the poor job it does of being an RPG in some important regards, such as making you feel like a student in Hogwarts as well as an intrepid adventurer.

What I do find baffling is how inconsequential the use of Unforgiveable Curses is, even if you do them in public or in front of your teachers (!). I understand the desire to not be too restrictive of the player, but it would have been easy enough to have it diegetically explained as a temporary relaxation in the light of the Goblin Revolt, and make the character face repercussions for blasting anything and everything they see with a killing curse, even if you don't end up in Azkaban or kicked out of school.

What I do find baffling is how inconsequential the use of Unforgiveable Curses is

I think that's just the way transferring original material to another medium works (you see it a heck of a lot in fanfiction, and in media it's often a form of fanservice that isn't the 'boobs and butt' type): there's this Cool Thing, you want to see/be able to do the Cool Thing, we're gonna sell it on 'your character can do the Cool Thing/the main characters do the Cool Thing' and so whether it's movies or games or what you will, the Cool Thing gets done willy-nilly.

In the books, there's a moral and ethical price - after all, this is why they're called "Unforgiveable" Curses. But when you're doing a tie-in/spin-off of a major franchise that is a licence to print money, you weigh up "Do I make it so that Cool Thing is rare and dangerous, or do I let your main character be the one who can do Cool Thing at will to blast the mooks because You're Just That Special?" and you decide "the fans want Cool Thing, if I don't give them Cool Thing they won't buy this".

So now you can go around zapping people with Unforgiveable Curses because that's what the majority of customers want. I also think there's a certain coarsening around morals and ethics in recent years (I know this is going to come across as "kids these days") but we've had a CW thread about "why bother with rules in war, the most effective way to win is crush the enemy and by shortening the war aren't you saving lives, so hell yeah use chemical weapons, bomb civilians, whatever it takes so you win fast and hard!". That to me is the mindset which goes "Unforgiveable Curses are really effective, use them, never mind the bleating about morals or the effect on the soul, pshaw!"

While I think you’re spot on regarding Cool Things, and the coarsening is plausible, I would hesitate to use this site as a bellwether for public morals and ethics. It’s very, very self-selected for edgy contrarianism.

That's true, but I have seen such attitudes expressed elsewhere and some years back. I do think there's been (for whatever reason) a genuine lack of understanding about rules of civility, where it's "but it's war (or other conflict or struggle), why wouldn't you do all you could to win, no matter what it takes?" That there are some things that are just wrong to do seems to be completely out the window. Whether that's due to "but we're the Good Guys so it's okay for us to do it" thinking or not, I can't say.

I am not sure how new it is, ending WW2 with nukes was arguably a breach of those erhics of civility in the service of ending the war quicker and thus saving more lives overall, is basically exactly the same logic you were talking about. Down to the same debates really.

Hardly - the destruction of civilian population centers with strategic bombing was not new in 1945. It was something accepted and widely used by all sides. nor was the use of nuclear weapons rationalised in those terms until later.

Thats...my point. It isn't some new invention, to breach the "civilized norms" of war. Because everyone accepted targeting civilians was ok then, so complaining about people now and making it some criticism of modern people wanting to break the sacred rules of war is nonsensical. We've always justified it to ourselves. Whether its targeting civilians, using weapons of mass destruction and so on.

It wasn't new then and it isn't new now.

I've only watched gameplay and haven't tried it myself, but while the game seems like a good game, I'm mildly confused at the poor job it does of being an RPG in some important regards, such as making you feel like a student in Hogwarts as well as an intrepid adventurer.

Some of it is explained as the main character having a special natural affinity for magic. The main character tends to learn new spells super easily with minimal instruction. There is a little mini game we have to play.

What I do find baffling is how inconsequential the use of Unforgiveable Curses is, even if you do them in public or in front of your teachers (!). I understand the desire to not be too restrictive of the player, but it would have been easy enough to have it diegetically explained as a temporary relaxation in the light of the Goblin Revolt, and make the character face repercussions for blasting anything and everything they see with a killing curse, even if you don't end up in Azkaban or kicked out of school.

I think in general they just took the lazy programming route on a bunch of things. There is also no penalty for being outside the dorms during curfew. They have a mission or two where they fake it by forcing you to use stealth in certain areas of hogwarts (a classic "sneak into the forbidden section of the library"). Also the headmaster conveniently bans quidditch that year. I cant imagine what kind of nightmare it would have been to program that sport.

Also no one seems to take the Goblin revolt very seriously. It seems most of the government and authority figures are in denial. Which isn't too unbelievable from a story perspective. But it means any kind of "special considerations" are off the table.

I can appreciate taking the lazy programming route. I'd rather have them make a good system for what they can do well than spend a lot of effort to make a crappy system that everyone hates.

I'd say the best thing about the game is the unique combat system. Its all very close range, closer than almost all modern shooters, but not actually melee range. The visual cues and mixed spell options make for a system with plenty of death. By the end of the game I felt like a god in some combat situations. Dodging spells to zip around the battlefield, or blocking them to unleash powerful retaliatory attacks. But one or two mistakes in a row would bring me to the edge of death.

The whole unforgivable curses thing suffers from increasing rust as the series progresses. First introduced as absolute trump cards, then slowly becoming more and more routine.

I mean, the Wizarding World went from a period of relative peace to warring against the resurgent Death Eaters, so I find that hardly surprising, and I can't recall many of the "good" guys ever resorting to them, if at all.

I can't recall many of the "good" guys ever resorting to them, if at all.

I mean, in the last book there was the protagonist casually using the torture spell on someone for the crime of spitting on an old lady he liked.

As far as I recall it wasn't much harsher than kicking him in the balls in context. Certainly wasn't a prolonged torture session like a typical Cricuatus use case.

That's the point, the creep from 'one of three unforgivable curses we will never tolerate' to 'oh it was only a little bit, kinda like kicking someone in the balls.'

He also mind-controlled a guy in the Gringotts earlier.

I also had a point about how Azkhaban seems significantly worse than the killing curse, but I deleted that part of my comment, because I realized real life prisons are often much worse than the crimes they punish too.

The "good" guys stupefying their enemies just to send them to a torture camp for the rest of their lives doesn't seem all that good though.

Yeah. Especially if the penalty for getting caught is life in Azkaban...if that's the case, I would expect a lot more big-league criminals in this world to fight to the death to avoid being captured by law enforcement. A big league drug lord or something can do OK in prison; a big league Death Eater is just going to spend the rest of his life being tortured by Dementors.

Another thought. I read a bunch of litrpg and progression fantasy novels with very mechanical magic systems. Like slot in experience, get +2 to magic pool. Harry Potter has a much more whimsical take on magic. Where many of the things that happen ... dont make sense. But that is fine, because its magic.

I agree and this is actually something I really like about that setting. Magic isn’t supposed to make sense, it’s weird and kind of whimsical that some things only work if someone’s heart is pure, or if they truly hate the other person or whatever. Much better than - as you say - mana thresholds and magic damage points.

If I can't whisk my shit away with a spell, I'm not playing.

Then again, given how lethal the Hogwarts toilets and plumbing are, it's understandable that you might want to apparate such things away instead of venturing where a troll can exacerbate your hemorrhoids.

Spooky season may be over, but I encourage anyone interested with fond memories of the hunting game genre to watch this review of their final, greatest installment.

When they're running from the stampede and the guy is trying to kill more buffalo than Wild Bill in one day I just lost it. That's amazing.

I know precisely what you've linked to without opening it.

Mandalore is a gem, and I think this video was the funniest thing I've seen all year, just watching the safari vehicle sequence took years off my life from laughing alone, and the whole experience is the closest I think you can get to being on deliriants.

I physically ended up on the floor after one of the flashback sequences, and I was stone cold sober. This video is a work of art.

It's a shame they don't make games any more, I want to go hunt down the existing megafauna on our globe with C-130J airstrikes and tactical nukes, which is the only sensible escalation for a sequel.

(From reading the comments, the previous games had Big Foot and other cryptids, so in a way this game is more down to Earth. At least in some regards)

I really miss Waffles fm, the private music tracker that popped up after What cd died, became quite popular for a couple of years, and then died itself. Not so much the tracker, but the forums and the editorial blog post things about weird genres of music were great for finding really obscure music (and even movies). It seems like every other music based forum I encounter is full of typical culture war bullshit.

Idk just pouring one out for another victim of the current age.

Two other trackers emerged after the death of what.cd and have been doing fairly well.

So here's an admittedly fairly trivial matter that's been on my mind lately. This is a bit of Fun, bit of Wellness, take it mainly as a lighthearted question because it's really not weighing on me too badly all things considered.

It's Friday and I'm home after 10 hours poring over numbers in Excel spreadsheets. I find that after a workday like this it's hard to get myself to do anything at all, it's almost as if there is a daily quota of mental effort I can expend on things. Once I devote all of that to preparing people's financial statements, income tax returns, business activity statements and so on I can't devote any more of my focus to my own projects and endeavours. Not to mention memory limitations, I am now using a significant portion of my storage capacity to track goings-on at work (made worse by my clients' numerous demands, which I will mention later) and remember the appropriate accounting and tax treatment for various matters as well as the relevant circumstances of each of my clients. The work itself isn't necessarily super difficult in and of itself, it's just that there are a lot of clients asking for a lot of different things.

It's quite hard to coordinate anything after work too, because my clients are often absolute fucking children who expect they be catered to on a timeframe that suits them - for example, they want things to be done at a certain time yet sometimes take forever to provide the information necessary to do the work they request, and their delays sometimes require me to stay long after close of business. Yesterday, I had scheduled something with a family member at 6pm, and near close of business the client returned with over a dozen transactions they wanted me to process (while this is something that happens on Thursdays the client usually provides the relevant info earlier in the day), and I was forced to complete the work hastily and hand it over to a reviewer - who unsurprisingly found errors. Said reviewer was not happy about that, and I have stopped planning anything after work because of this. Compared to other stuff that's happened though, this is a small matter - this same client requested that we do work over the Christmas period for them, when the office is closed and people are expected to take annual leave. Please note, they sprung this on us in November, when almost everyone else working on the client had already made travel plans, and as a result I might be the one who has to do that work.

I can't really list anything significant I do outside of work at the moment, because as it is right now the work week smashes me enough that I can't build up the level of focus necessary to actually do things. In other words, I feel as if I'm becoming my work, and I'm not sure if I like that.

How do you not be a boring person after work? Help, please.

In college, I joined the schools smallbore target shooting team. It was amazing at working your mind but in an entirely different way from active thinking required for classes. Perhaps that's part of why golf is so popular?

You don't have to answer these, but

  1. Why do you let clients demand things like that? Can't you clearly define deadlines and turn around times upfront? Make them pay rush fees if they really need to?
  2. Why when others have plans, are you expected to do the work? Is this reciprocal? Can't you make "fake" plans and stand firm?
  3. Why do you work after work hours? Do other people do this? Is it part of the industry or is it just you?

Why do you let clients demand things like that? Can't you clearly define deadlines and turn around times upfront? Make them pay rush fees if they really need to?

I'm a graduate who works with other people on clients, work gets delegated downwards to me. I'm not involved in client management to the degree where I would be able to tell them to fuck off. I do communicate with clients insofar as it's relevant to me finishing the job, but setting boundaries with clients would be a clear breach of my ambit.

Why when others have plans, are you expected to do the work? Is this reciprocal? Can't you make "fake" plans and stand firm?

I didn't make "fake" plans since I want to see just how much progression I can milk out of the job. If burning my candle at both ends does absolutely nothing for me, I'll scale back my participation.

As to whether it's reciprocal, I don't know. I may not end up being the one doing the work, since one of my superiors has said that they might be able to do the work if their schedule allows for it. So that's a possible indication that they would try to accommodate a schedule I had.

Why do you work after work hours? Do other people do this? Is it part of the industry or is it just you?

Yes, other people do this. To varying extents. I have been told that I work quite hard and that I don't have to stay so late completing client work. But the reason why I do this is because if I don't get tasks off my plate early, I'm going to be absolutely overwhelmed later when things start coming due and clients start making stupid requests that derail my plans.

For example, one of the earliest clients I started work on back in September did not respond to a query that we sent them, and made us wait for a month. When their representative/intermediary responded in the middle-to-end of October, her stated reason was that she was on leave and that none of her staff were able to deal with our query. Then reminded us she wanted the work done by 31 October. Making this worse is that this was a period where I had another client's deadlines coming due. I had to work almost exclusively on these two clients and drop the rest of my existing client work to deal with it, and have just been getting back to working on my other clients now.

Once I sent the financial statements and income tax returns off to her (very late in the month), she found a discrepancy between the client's internal financials and ours, then passed it back to me to investigate this discrepancy. It turns out our numbers were correct and this discrepancy was the client's own damn fault because they posted an adjusting journal twice in the prior year, which affected current year balances. Then after she was told this, she then came back with yet another issue - this time it was a trivial nitpick about the presentation of prior year figures, which meant I had to adjust it and send off again.

This kind of thing makes it impossible to properly plan my time, so I just get all the work out of the way early so I won't be too swamped once a client does something utterly irritating like that.

This sounds like public accounting, and if it is, the only way forward is out.

All my partners and senior managers were divorced. I don’t want to get divorced. I won’t get divorced unless my wife does something I think she's incapable of doing. So I made plans to leave, then I left.

Since then my marriage has been enriched, and my friendships outside of work have flourished. Where I was regularly turning friends down for a casual evening activity before (“it’s at 6? I can’t even know if I’ll be available by 8”), I am now sharing dinner with a different set of friends every week, sometimes more than once a week.

How do you not be a boring person after work? Help, please.

  1. Get a different job that is less demanding.
  2. Learn how to flip your switch faster. If you go from work mode to fun mode in just a minute you can have more time for both. Some way to psych yourself up, a song, a shot of your favorite liqour, a good fap, etc.
  3. Wreck your sleep schedule. Just stay up really late on some nights to have fun and make up the sleep on other nights.
  4. Be worse at work. There is often a range of performance that all gets treated essentially the same. Different companies have smaller or larger ranges. But its where an employee getting 3 things done a day is treated the same as an employee getting 5 things done a day. If they drop to two things done a day its a problem. If they go up to 6 things a day its maybe worthy of praise. The worst place to be is at the top of the "standard work" range. You are working too hard for too little recognition. If you can't get to 6 things a day, it doesn't help you to get close and do 5. If you aren't getting special recognition just do better than the worst employee, and be a joy to have around and you'll be fine.

Yesterday, I had scheduled something with a family member at 6pm, and near close of business the client returned with over a dozen transactions they wanted me to process (while this is something that happens on Thursdays the client usually provides the relevant info earlier in the day), and I was forced to complete the work hastily and hand it over to a reviewer - who unsurprisingly found errors.

This is certainly where I would start, with the drawing of appropriate boundaries. While granting that it's not always an option for the obvious reasons, my own reaction to such a development would be, "wow, that sucks, I'll take a pass in the morning". If the response was that it needs to happen today, my reply is simply that I already have plans and that the client needs to provide a standard 24-hour turnaround time, that I am not infinitely flexible in turning my personal life and time management over to accommodate their slipshod decision-making and time management. By setting appropriate boundaries, I can plan my own life better and be dedicated to doing the things I actually care about, which are decidedly not the things I've done to pay the bills.

In conjunction with that, scheduling consistent activities that appear as calendar blocks that are inviolable is helpful and ensures that you'll do the things you care about. For me, that's a running club. Have something you need me to stay for on Tuesday? Nope, can't, I have trackwork with the boys at 5, so I'll see you tomorrow. This both defines the work boundary and locks me into doing a nonwork activity that I care about.

Also worth a mention is that failing to do this will result in the problem getting worse. If you're the guy that's willing to pick up the slack when some asshole asks for something at 8PM, well, you're the guy that's going to get told to do it.

I can't tell you how to be less boring outside of work.

However, you clearly don't have an infinite amount of work. So any time savings there would be something you should seek out, and the better you get at this, the initial problem becomes less of a problem.

Is there any standardized format in the data you deal with? If so you can automate all the grunt work with a python script. If it's not standardized, it's going to be a bit more rough..

BUT GPT-4 exists. I'm sure "code-interpreter"/"advanced data analysis" can do what needs to be done at a fraction of the time you would need in excel. And anonymizing data is trivial with a python script as well.

I really don't think someone sufficiently smart enough to use ChatGPT and write a bit of code should be doing excel-monkey work in this day and age when we have tools that can do that automatically with natural language prompts.

Automating away a bunch of my work has actually been in my mind. There's often no standardised format to the data though (sometimes a client will just throw us various bank statements, rental statements and other such documents and we'll just have to use those). This isn't an insurmountable problem and I do want to do it, but I haven't had sufficient downtime to pursue that goal yet.

Human in the loop my man -- just take your best shot at automating the thing and then present it to yourself (or better yet a lackey) item by item as approve/don't approve.

You do work like a robot this way, but stuff gets done a lot faster even if your automation is highly imperfect.

Did you try using code interpreter for a batch or two? It can demolish through spreadsheet grubt work.

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