But for peaceful purposes only!

Finally, we have built the Torment Nexus, from the beloved book Do Not Build The Torment Nexus.

Blame ClearChannel. Nickelback emerged near the peak of one company fucking up commercial radio throughout the US. This new band played inoffensive pop-alternative-country melange, seeming broadly acceptable to everyone without exciting much of anyone. Their image was squeaky-clean while their conventionally attractive frontman looked vaguely rugged. All very saleable, but aggressively generic.

So: take an audience at peak rude irony. (This is the era of Celebrity Deathmatch, “Mike Tyson ate my balls,” and Game.com ads calling their customers morons.) Subject them to the same middling singles over and over. Ask how they feel about this merely okay experience taking up air time that could easily be Destiny’s Child, Third Eye Blind, or Shania Twain. Try not to act surprised when they smirk and say they hope the entire band dies.

People hate Nickelback because it’s fun to hate Nickelback. It is easy and rewarding to hate Nickelback. Everyone knew about them, but nobody was a diehard fan. You could perform ingroup bonding with nearly anyone by saying “Fuck Nickelback, right?” You could privately grumble about hearing “How You Remind Me” for the dozenth time this week, without any baggage like Creed’s religion-bait popularity or various artists’ public feuds. Hating Nickelback is uncomplicated. To this day, I have no goddamn idea what Chad Kroeger is like, or what he’s into, or what he’s done. But I still knew his name without checking.

And nobody’s replaced them. Rampant piracy deepened people’s musical tastes by letting them choose what to listen to, instead of the constant deluge of lowest-common-denominator payola. Streaming later made it polite and acceptable to pay artists nothing. Meanwhile, internet forums and thousand-channel cable packages allowed culture to splinter. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a Taylor Swift song. I don’t care, and I don’t have to. Having any reputation become memetic like this is obscenely unlikely now. To have that reputation be… mediocre? Unthinkable.

After the inauguration? No, fuck that guy.

We can cross off “Ride BMX on DMT with DMX.”

Splitting hairs, but a green card only means permanent residency.

And NOTHING HAS CHANGED in twenty years - yeah? Not a fucking thing that should shift how they release games. Consoles are still sooo different from PCs, with their AMD x64 CPUs and AMD RDNA GPUs.

Relevant XKCD.

Well, yes, now.

!ObscureInstruments@sh.itjust.works

Also, what friggin’ PeerTube instance blocks downloads? You already sent me the data.

I saw the entire original broadcast run of Clerks: The Animated Series. All both episodes.

Only six episodes were produced, and they eventually aired, but I did not find this out until years later. The internet ended a longstanding era where you could be aware of and interested in something, but know fuck-all about it, and have no sensible way of learning more. So I’d heard of Kevin Smith movies - but never seen any. Watching the Clerks movie would have taken a trip to a physical video-rental store, with my parents, and then convincing them (and myself) to rent a vulgar black-and-white movie for all of us to watch together. Wasn’t happening.

I was more likely to rent and watch any of the R-rated films that somehow got cartoon adaptations - which were part of that same impotent awareness. Robocop and Ghostbusters and fuckin’ Starship Troopers were advertised anywhere and everywhere, and kids liked the shallow cool parts in the trailers, so executives said “fuck it” and licensed no-budget G-rated spinoffs to sell toys.

Anyway. The Clerks animated series exists because Disney wanted an adult-ish show to compete with The Simpsons. Everyone did. Disney knew they had a gap in their demographics for twenty-something dorks with disposable income. Aaand then they handed the finished episodes to ABC, who used a focus group of old farts and children. Of course it bombed. The premiere was the fourth episode produced, which stuck the characters in a courtroom drama, and ended with a wacky consequence-free style change wherein the outsourced animators rebelled and delivered a lolrandom dance party. The second and final episode aired was a fake clip show full of flashbacks to episodes that did not exist.

At least Clone High got an entire season.

Over water: maybe. Over land: lolno.

Sure, we’ll take it.

And it’d sound like they’re literally phoning it in. At that point, no, the artists and writers would just do it themselves. Like old times.

What this tech makes possible is hiring Nolan North to do everyone. Men, women, children, cats, dogs, stuffed toy dinosaurs, everyone. It’s mocap for your vocal cords. You don’t have to look like David Hayter to move like Snake, and you don’t have to sound like Michael Shapiro to talk like the G-Man. What people will hear and see is the performance.

Using AI to recreate a real person’s voice is the dumbest possible use. It’s like drawing a cartoon that can only resemble a real living actor. Just… make something up. How does this character sound, in your head? Generate that, and then use style transfer, so anyone can do that voice.

Because the text-to-speech version is only the voice… not the character. You still want real human actors performing the character. The AI part is just a costume for their throat.

The premise is sort of hilarious. “Everybody’s just blindly copying this one kind of network. We made the bold decision to copy the other one.”

You see ads?

Right, because Linux definitely can’t run Windows software. Don’t check.

Moist.

It’s not a brand name. Two American companies picked different compound abbreviations at roughly the same time, and somehow one name spread here and the other name spread everywhere else.