Art Markham

@portraitinflesh I block all these people on first offence now, as well as the vagueposters. But it may well be futile as there seems to be no end of them.

Does anyone else find it depressing, how easy it is to build engagement just by asking ChatGPT to write you a 400-word essay on whatever's trending? Something in this guy's bio tells me he's not on Twitter/"X" for intellectual stimulation. The LLM "house style" is maddening, too.

@AdrienCaine @AlanMCole Other such things are thrilling. There's no obvious thrill here. Just danger and the risk of a cold, watery death if you make a small error.

@AlanMCole Not more or less mentally ill than other types of thrill-seekers and "extreme" sports enthusiasts, I guess. People doing crazy freestyle climbs are more insane to me. At least the divers aren't like "safety equipment? that's for pussies, I'm going in raw."

So are “cave divers” just uniformly mentally ill or what?

@SiNuTrmon There's a massive difference between -15° (crisp, pleasant, even if it can such the heat from you quickly enough) and -30° (no chance I'm going outside).

I’ll say it a million times if i have to but nobody who believes this has experienced real winter

@movierabbithole @dldvr1990 @AnishA_Moonka @Idonnowhatoput "Generate everything" is more or less Marvel, down to the clothes and interior rooms. A lot of the time you are getting the faces of the actors, plus CGI. I think a lot in Star Wars as well. Those kinds of films. Animation obviously a different thing!

@artmarkham @dldvr1990 @AnishA_Moonka @Idonnowhatoput "Generate everything" is like Moana, Toy Story and Avatar and no one seems to have a problem with that. This use - practical sets with CGI set extention is the normal thing to do. Nothing "exceptionally practical" about it.

You're watching a $248 million film and not a single green or blue screen was used. The alien is a handmade puppet. The cockpit physically rotates to simulate gravity. I looked at the production tech behind this 95% score, and the engineering is wild. Phil Lord and Chris Miller, directing their first live-action movie in 12 years, built the entire Hail Mary spacecraft as a real set at Shepperton Studios in England. Not a miniature. Not a digital model. A full-size ship interior you can walk through. Production designer Charlie Wood studied the International Space Station, Russia's Mir station, and the Boeing 747 cockpit to get the look right. He deliberately made the panels mismatched, because real spacecraft are assembled from parts made by different companies. Nothing matches perfectly. That's what makes it feel real. The cockpit is only about 8 feet wide. It sits on a mechanical platform that can tilt, spin, and shake, so when the ship changes direction or enters different gravity conditions, the whole set moves. Chairs end up on walls. Ladders flip direction. Gosling was suspended inside a spinning ring so he could float and move through the ship for real, reacting to actual hardware around him. No guessing where a wall might be added later. Then there's Rocky. He's the alien co-lead, and he's not CGI. Neal Scanlan, the creature designer who built the Porgs for Star Wars, spent a full year on this character. Over 300 designs before they landed on the final look. Rocky is a thin, hollow shell, 3D-printed from a digital sculpture, then hand-painted in see-through layers so light passes through him like skin. His arms pop off and swap out depending on the scene: one set has a closed fist for walking, another has tiny motorized fingers strong enough to pick up objects. Five puppeteers (nicknamed the "Rockyteers") operated him in every scene. James Ortiz, an award-winning puppet designer from New York theater, voiced Rocky and controlled him on set. When Scanlan met him, he told Ortiz, "You're Frank Oz, and I'm making Yoda for you." Every reaction Gosling gives to the alien is to something physically in front of him. Greig Fraser, who won the Oscar for shooting Dune, filmed the space scenes in the larger IMAX format (that taller image you see in IMAX theaters) and the Earth flashbacks in regular widescreen. Then the team did something unusual: they took the digital footage and printed it onto real film strips, twice, using two different types of film stock. Then they scanned those strips back into digital. It sounds redundant, but it adds a texture and warmth that you can only get from physical film. Fraser used the same technique on Dune and The Batman. Drew Goddard spent six years writing this screenplay. His last adaptation of Andy Weir's novel, The Martian, earned him an Oscar nomination. He described the challenge this way: a screenplay gets about 5% of a novel's word count. The lead is alone for most of the runtime. When he finally gets a co-star, that co-star doesn't speak English, communicates through sounds closer to whale song, and has no face. Goddard called it a screenwriter's nightmare, then said that difficulty was the whole point. He and the directors fought studio pushback to keep Weir's original ending intact. 95% from 212 critics. 98% from over 2,500 audience ratings. And the lead isn't a superhero, a cop, or a soldier. He's just an ordinary middle school science teacher.

@exQUIZitely All the early 90s LucasArts ones were fantastic. In rough order: Monkey Island I/II Sam and Max Hit the Road Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis Day of the Tentacle Full Throttle Don't recall playing Last Crusade. Later Monkey Islands were less perfect, or maybe I got old.

Best point-and-click adventure of the 90s. If you had to pick one, which would it be? I will go with Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (Monkey Island and The Dig were very close seconds). What's your #1 pick for the 90s?

@SandyofCthulhu The point is to harmonise and coordinate so that trade can be open in a level playing field. That's the one-sentence version. It wasn't to fill gaps in laws. Not saying it could not be done better and with fewer words. But Grok can't know.

Every nation in the EU already had a full set of laws before they joined up. The EU lawbook has tens of millions of words. (Over a billion if you count the different language versions.) Why did nations with functional laws need so much extra?

@bouguereau_stan @royllovians In terms of groups that would never intermarry? I don't think so, at any point of history. Or can you describe them? But even then, it probably wouldn't change the proposition. Some people are really underestimating the numbers involved here.

@royllovians There are like fifteen social class boundaries between farm labourer and aristocrat

Do people think the youngest son of the eldest daughter of the second-youngest son of the middle son of the youngest daughter of the youngest son of the youngest son of the third daughter of the second son of the youngest son of a duke was also a duke?

@brazillianphil @romanhelmetguy He's wrong, and he's so wrong in such a stupid way that I'm irritated that he thinks he has any right to stand in front of a board and pretend to teach people about things he is completely stupid and clueless about.

@romanhelmetguy I’m not sure what’s funny. He’s right. Modern money is nothing but numbers on a screen. The gold standard has been gone for a while, fractional reserve banking allows for money to be “printed” out of thin air.

“If the banks can print as much money as possible, why do we have poverty?” 💀💀

@BernieDainton @DM_Vincenzo Good point! Louis VIII in 1216 is also a good one - many parallels to William & Mary in the run-up, but proper fighting and he didn't ultimately succeed. Although it isn't as if he was held off at the cliffs of Dover either.

@artmarkham @DM_Vincenzo And Henry Bolingbroke

William of Orange would like to have a word about why 1066 wasn’t the last time England was succesfully invaded.

@DennisB57750265 @DM_Vincenzo Israel is very big on the Dutch angle, and that's good because it was once overlooked. But it doesn't much change how I see it. As I said before, you can make a case either way. Clearly there was literally an invasion, as with Henry. But still much more deposition than conquest.

@artmarkham @DM_Vincenzo It suited the States General even more and the power lay with them more than William. But Jonathan Israel explains it better than i could, so please do take the time to read the article i’ve included.

@DennisB57750265 @DM_Vincenzo It suited William. But he was accepting an offer made to Mary that arose from English political dynamics. The line of succession remained with the Stuarts - Anne succeeded. Very different to the Norman conquest, where the English elites were brutalised and largely replaced.

@artmarkham @DM_Vincenzo And if the Dutch Republic wasn’t trying to stop a grand Catholic alliance between England and France William would’ve never been sent to England with an army and a fleet 3 times the size of the Spanish armada by the States General.

@DocJoby @BrickCenter_ He doesn't come to a stop, pass, or shoot?

It is a travel... but... That's 4 steps after he caught the ball, we can at least be objective. You are allowed 2 steps while gathering: "A player who gathers the ball while progressing (e.g., catching a pass or ending a dribble while moving) may take two steps in coming to a stop, passing, or shooting the ball." The only possible defense for the ref... he didn't have control of the ball on those first two steps, then he made two legal steps and established a pivot foot.

There's no such thing as traveling in the NBA anymore. Jalen Green took SIX steps in a 1-point game with 25 seconds left... no call 😭

@dldvr1990 @AnishA_Moonka @Idonnowhatoput Big difference in how a movie turns out between using CGI to augment physical sets and costumes vs using it to generate pretty well everything.

@AnishA_Moonka @Idonnowhatoput They love to say this but this project is using CGI and not only as replacement, literally was in different vfx houses the past couple of years

@r_h_martins @MiroCyo No, because the proportions are very different. One person might be my ancestor 1000 times and one might be my ancestor 1,000,000 times. But it's still quite interesting, especially when you're looking at it along the lines of "I'm descended from William the Conqueror" and so on.

@MiroCyo If everyone was everyone’s ancestor also genetically, we would all be (and look) the same, and it would be pointless to study population genetics.

More or less true, but ~99.9999% of your genealogical ancestors at that depth are ancestors in a pedigree sense only They contributed literally nothing to your genome You descend from ‘everyone’ but you carry DNA from almost none of them

@BileBoy67 @RealPostFolder I would invite you to come and sniff me but I worry it would be misunderstood.

@artmarkham @RealPostFolder Stinky boy detected

@royllovians @BigGuyHimself Obviously it's the case that not all ancestors at a given time contribute genes in the same proportions.

@BigGuyHimself @artmarkham Keeping in mind that most of your billions and billions of ancestors do not actually contribute genetic material to you due to the random recombination of generic material.

The actual truth, which people have repeatedly refused when I explain it, is that roughly 25–35 generations back, you are descended from ***every single*** person who was alive in your ancestors' entire region of the world so long as they have any surviving descendants today.

@DanielParker_13 @BigGuyHimself @royllovians Some groups will have relatively strong barriers. But 1000 years is a very long time, and everyone in those groups will have ancestors from far outside of them. I would think they still meet the criteria of being descended from everyone who was around in 1100 who has descendants.

@artmarkham @BigGuyHimself @royllovians Ashkenazi Jews and Indian castes are strong counterexamples which are extremely segregated. Even after 1000 years, there is only very limited exogamy.

@BigGuyHimself @royllovians It's mathematically possible, but practically not possible. You'd need to have an entirely segregated community for 1000 years, and no such community exists.

@royllovians This isn’t inherently true. A European could be a descendent of 1% of Europeans alive in 1100 and another could be descendent of a completely different 5%. There wasn’t much interclass marriage in that time.

@CheviDon @RealPostFolder Michael Jackson used to get clingfilm wrapped around doorknobs that he might have to touch. How far are you going with this?

@artmarkham @RealPostFolder Your body comes into contact with more things than you might think