Juno

people getting fired for having a little fun the reason why we have less things with unique character nowadays fun is offensive and a nuisance to many people

About 15 years ago stuff like this would’ve just been a small part in a larger game full of other stuff you could do

The fall of Avatar should be part of every animation and film school curriculum >Create arguably the greatest animation ever with loveable characters who each have their own development arcs, a perfect plot, and a captivating world >Produce a live action adaptation which ends up being one the worst movies ever made in general >Sequel series with an unlovable MC, incoherent romance, and fuck up the entire world >Go back to live action and try to make it more adult but just end up with endless exposition and awkward scenes, add in new details which contradict original animation for good measure >Go back to animation for a new movie featuring original characters, mediocre plot but ruin the characters' voices and then have it leaked months before it was to be released >Create new sequel series but retcon the entire world and story because Korra fucked everything up so bad the story simply could not continue What the fuck was their problem.

Spider-Man 2 in 2023 reportedly cost 315 million dollars with a team many times larger than the studio that made this 2010 Toy Story game. The water in it still holds its own against almost anything new. Old games like this one worked kind of like a painting. The artists painted all the lighting into the scene by hand, before the game shipped. When you pressed play, your console just displayed the painting. Everything stayed crisp. Big games now do the opposite. They calculate all that lighting live, while you play. That live math produces a faint shimmer, like old TV static. To hide it, the game blends a few recent frames together. Then a piece of software guesses what a sharper picture should look like. What you see is part old frame, part new frame, and a bit of guesswork. A brand new AAA game on a PS5 Pro can end up softer in motion than a kids' game from the PS3. Now the budgets. Horizon Forbidden West cost 212 million dollars with a peak team of 300 developers across 5 years. The Last of Us Part II was 220 million over nearly 6 years. Cyberpunk 2077 came in at 316 million total. Those figures are from leaked court filings. Ghost of Yotei shipped in 2025 for around 60 million, confirmed on record by the studio's co-founder. Toy Story 3 was made by Avalanche Software, a Utah studio of roughly 100 people, with a 10 person Pixar team looking over their shoulders every other week. The budget was never announced publicly, but it was a sliver of any of those numbers. The small team had constraint going for them. They picked a cartoon style they could perfect. Stylized art ages well because it is not chasing a moving target. The Buzz in that clip is from 2010 and still looks at home on a screen today.

The people in this photo aren't friendlier than you. Their apartments are just smaller. So small that Parisians basically gave up on living indoors and moved their living rooms onto the sidewalk. And that was the whole plan. In the 1850s, a city planner named Baron Haussmann tore apart medieval Paris and rebuilt it. He widened streets into boulevards, capped every building at five stories, and added one rule that explains this entire photo: the ground floor of every building had to be a café, a bakery, or a shop. The apartments above were intentionally tiny. Some were single rooms carved out of old mansions. No garden. Barely any sunlight. A private balcony was something most Parisians would never have. So the café became home. You ate breakfast there. Held meetings there. Received your mail there. By the late 1700s, Paris already had close to 2,000 of them. In 2002, there were still 1,907. Even now, after years of closures brought that number to about 1,410, the coverage is absurd: a 2020 city study found 94% of Parisians live within a five-minute walk of a bakery. When COVID shut indoor dining in 2020, Paris ripped out parking spaces, turned them into outdoor terraces, and let 9,800 cafés and restaurants keep them permanently. An American sociologist named Ray Oldenburg wrote a book in 1989 called The Great Good Place. He had a name for spots like the Parisian café: "third places." Not your home, not your office, but the casual in-between spots where you actually get to know people. Cafés, pubs, barbershops, the corner store where the owner knows your name. His whole argument was that American suburbs were built with only two zones, your house and your job, connected by a car. No sidewalk café, no place to bump into a neighbor by accident. The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a national health epidemic in 2023. Being alone all the time is as bad for your body as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Half of American adults say they feel lonely. Weekly socializing dropped from 5.5 hours in 2003 to just 4 hours in 2023, and it never bounced back after COVID. Americans between 15 and 29 now spend 45% more time alone than they did in 2010. The scene in this tweet looks like a personality trait. It is a 170-year-old engineering project that works exactly as designed.

🙂

This was an antisemitic conspiracy theory yesterday

Notice they cut the person selling the drink but didn’t cut the price of the drink to match

@pocketoripa Pocket Oripa !

@SENRivals SENPOOL

We need to see a SENPool in every game 👀 Giving away a Sentinels Rivals Bundle to 5 people who like and comment "SENPOOL" Winners chosen in 24 hours ⏲️

The $46 billion vape industry hired flavor chemists to solve a specific problem: nicotine tastes bitter. The human tongue has T2R receptors that detect nicotine and trigger aversion. So the industry reverse-engineered the problem. They loaded e-liquids with fruity aromatic compounds like farnesol, farnesene, and ethyl butyrate that suppress the bitterness signal and activate sweetness perception through the orbitofrontal cortex instead. Turns out they built something more powerful than a nicotine delivery system. A 2023 study in the Journal of Neuroscience found that green apple vape flavorants, with zero nicotine present, independently fire dopamine neurons in the ventral tegmental area and increase dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens. The same reward circuitry that nicotine hijacks. The flavor chemicals alone were producing reward-seeking behavior in mice. A separate study found strawberry additives significantly increased nicotine vapor sampling, meaning the fruit smell made subjects inhale more of the drug without any conscious decision to do so. 95% of vape users choose flavored products. The industry has always framed this as “consumer preference.” The neuroscience says the flavors are pharmacologically active compounds that directly alter brain reward circuits and increase drug intake. Now look at what those compounds do once the device gets tossed. The UK was discarding 5 million disposable vapes per week before the ban. The aromatic volatiles don’t stop broadcasting once the device is empty. Orthonasal olfaction, the same pathway that makes you smell a strawberry from across a room, works identically in mammals. A squirrel’s olfactory system processes fruity volatiles through the same receptor families humans use. The signal reads as food. Nobody saw squirrels gnawing on Marlboro butts for 60 years. Vapes show up and suddenly there’s footage from London, Philadelphia, and Wales. The animals are chewing on lithium batteries wrapped in candy-scented plastic because the flavor engineering worked exactly as designed on a nervous system it was never tested on. The lithium in those discarded vapes equals 5,000 electric vehicle batteries per year. Oxford researchers found the cells inside can cycle 450+ times, but the product is built to be used once and thrown in a park. A squirrel holding a blueberry vape on a Brixton fence is the most honest product review the flavor chemists have ever received.

“You’re just blinded by nostalgia”

Man fuck EA lol

It was the one glanceable quality indicator for the video you're about to spend your time watching

The biggest issue facing Modern Gaming is the absolutely unhinged, sociopathic corporate leadership who see video games not as entertainment or a form of art, but as a guaranteed ROI. They will destroy thousands of careers if their work doesn't generate maximum revenue.

@tennisgeek681 @jameskhansen 3 stadiums. Ashe, Armstrong, Grandstand.

@jameskhansen They need to stop being greedy. US Open only charges for 1 stadium and you can go everywhere.

In a statement sent to The Athletic, BNP Paribas Open says it will "carefully evaluate" the change to Stadium 2's ticketing policy when the tournament ends, after Victoria Mboko and Amanda Anisimova played in front of a sparse crowd. nytimes.com/athletic/70997…

Co-founder of Call of Duty claims Activision 'pressured' Infinity Ward to make a Call of Duty game on Iran attacking Israel in 2010, but says the developers declined to do so

The loudest voices screaming "Release the Epstein Files" just voted to BURY the sexual harassment files of Members of Congress. Get it now?

Epstein reportedly got Congress to cancel funding for a scientist named Stanley Pons who was researching cold fusion and getting results according to leaked mails Epstein influenced Congress to kill his funding, and other scientists discredited him by trying to recreate his work but doing it incorrectly so they could claim it never worked. This is very similar to the Fallout TV show plot, where a scientist invents cold fusion, Vault-Tec buys out her company, labels her a communist, blacklists her, and discredits her.