Sunsofold

The phrase 'can God do this' makes me want to see a parody of Genie's song from Alladin where it's 'Can Your God Do This?' and it's just a deity dis track by Ganesha, Odinn, or Cthulhu.

How much of the anti-musk/anti-tesla success is due to people's activism vs the cybertruck being a piece of crap? I suspect if Tesla had just kept making EVs and put a bit of effort into fixing up build quality instead of creating pretty much the ugliest, most overpriced, and nonsensical vehicle to hit the road, possibly ever, the company would not be in anywhere near as bad of a position. If, as I have heard, Musk was the one to push for it to be made, and then Musk decided to get involved in politics, creating reputational issues, it all could be said to be his fault.

Hmm. That's a tall order for most shows.

There are some that were good but so short lived it's hard to say if they count. Better Off Ted, Firefly, Black Books.

Longer ones tend to screw themselves up at some point.

E

Playing Receiver in Receiver 2 was a fun surprise.

You don't have to live in the third world to lack access to A/C either. Just being poor is enough in some places, and other places, even if they could afford it, may not have ever thought of it that now will. The American Northwest had that stint of temperatures a few years back that were causing all sorts of trouble, and part of the issue was people who had only heating because it wasn't normal to get that hot.

I do, but I am slightly discouraged from doing so by the drivers in my area. People are always so terrified of not being the first waiting at the next red light, they see a turn signal as a warning to 'speed up and go past this car before they can get ahead of you.'

...unless it is. Tipping points could mean that there will be a certain level of emissions, which we may already be too late to avoid, that will take the earth out of the expected ranges and put it somewhere we can't predict. I can't say, but more informed people than me have suggested it as a real worry.

The question of 'What is the purpose of government?' is simultaneously deeply important to society and yet rarely, if ever, addressed in a useful context. I have watched people argue about multiple policies, speaking past each other the whole time, just because they had different baseline assumptions as to the purpose of government and couldn't even see their opponents had a different definition.

A ways back, I saw an article about how the French were rioting because their retirement age was being increased from 62 to 64. I remarked that it was interesting to see the French rioting against a change that wouldn't even quite bring them to parity with the US but Americans can't be bothered to riot for almost anything. A Frenchman said they didn't want to even be more like the US in any way.

This law is absolutely the now-classic American attitude that kids can watch violent movies all day, but if they'rEXC exposed to one female nipple, you gotta shut it all down. Is France turning into America now, following Britain down the red, white, and blue path?

Never been one to get scared by horror movies. I just can't get the buy in necessary to feel scared for the characters. However, the closest to traditional horror I can think of that really was effective was Green Room. It's intense in its loud parts and tense in it's quiet. It's realistic modern cult horror.

If you expand the field out a bit and look to more of a 'leaves you with dread about reality' effect, 'When the Wind Blows' is very affecting. It's animated but the story is quite realistic.

...when I use AI generation, I have an idea or specific image in my head and I do my best to come up with a prompt that will produce what I want, or more usually, I use photoshop...

Therein lies the difference. You have an intended target and use tools to create it. The artistry is in the skill and effort put into communicating your internal concept. To my knowledge, people generally aren't saying AI is useless in a creative process, just that typing in a few words and hitting 'generate' until you get something cool, or just running a filter over an image to make it look like a drawing, isn't artistry.

...there are AI models for specific tasks, say generating human faces, that co trolled experiments have found that people can't distinguish between the AI content and the real thing.

I failed to communicate my idea clearly enough. I'm not talking about the artefacts that sometimes make images look weird. I'm talking about the deep brain sense that one can develop that can tell the difference between someone acting vs emoting, singing vs lip synching, etc. An ingenuous performance has a different character to it that can be said to fall into the uncanny valley.

There is also plenty of traditional art that hits the uncanny valley or simply doesn't look right, but that doesn't make it any less art, does it?

That depends. If hitting the valley is intentional and done using skill, that's just normal art. If it has intent but not skill, it's incomplete art. It's failing to communicate as intended, much like I failed with words above. It's part of becoming good at something to screw it up, though, so it's to be expected sometimes. If it has skill but no intent, that's craftsmanship rather than artistry. Craftsmanship is great but has a subtle difference in how it is experienced.

there's still a barrier between the type of art miyazaki is fluent in and AI art.

That's not so good as an analogy. AI imagery isn't art by itself. Even in your example of your own work, it's materials, at best. Saying AI image generation is artistry is like saying hiring someone else to paint a picture makes you an artist. Even 'prompt engineering' at its finest makes one an artist as much as project management makes one a programmer. So, the general argument comes from the pretense rather than the tool. Bringing your sentence closer to the mark would be something like 'There is a barrier between art, which Miyazaki is experienced in, and this particular type of tool one can use.' It's an apples to oranges comparison, like comparing the field of astronomy to a camera.

Should we take him as an expert on art and view digital art as less than traditional art? Or should we just roll our eyes at the stubborn old man stuck in his ways?

That's an obvious false binary. People are perfectly capable of being right about one thing and wrong about another. You give his words weight because of his expertise. That doesn't mean you have to take them as gospel, but ignoring all of an expert's opinions because you dislike some of them, or some implications of them, is a terrible idea as well.