Rose's Garden

big dino my beloved let imagineering make gigantic mechanical abominations again

There is something incredibly poetic and tragic about the Walt Disney animatronic exhibiting the same moral issues of the Lincoln one (looking inaccurate, causing mass discourse about whether the descendants would have wanted it, questions over likeness and whether you're depicting an idea of a person that will massively distort their image years after they are no longer around to defend themselves), down to being in the same venue and show structure.

One part of the architecture of the new Defunctland video that I really liked was how the inclusion of all the sketchy interactions with "living characters" (sexual harassment, transphobia, etc) wound up tying in well with the concluding thesis statement abt how theme park attractions are all made and operated by real people somewhere in there. You certainly only get pushy "flirting" from theme park characters when there's a real person behind it who feels like they've got enough anonymity and plausible deniability of "playing a character" to get away with it. And these human biases are built into the soundboard characters too: voice line options are sorted by whether a targeted guest is a boy or a girl (or adult man or woman), and the options that follow that choice are based on social presumptions for said gender. Roz has "flirtatious" voice line options for adult men, for example, but I doubt operators are given those same options if the targeted guest is a woman. Presumably soundboard characters have many more princess-related options under the "girl" menu, and this is based off assumptions the real people putting the attraction together made. And in operating the "living character", the real person working the soundboard is making choices based on thier own biases and assumptions about a given guest.

i am going to fucking choke i'm watching the new defunctland,

The only reason that AI has any presence in our economy is that Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon are intent on spending more than $765 billion in capital expenditures in 2026 and a trillion more in 2027 because they have no other hypergrowth ideas, even though generative AI has yet to show any real potential as something that can drive meaningful revenues (let alone profits), as evidenced by the fact that none of these companies break out their actual AI revenues, a point I made on CNBC late last week.  Google does not have the next Google Search, Microsoft does not have the next Microsoft Office, Meta does not have the next Facebook, and Amazon does not have the new AWS. That’s why they need you to believe that AI is a big deal without them ever having to prove why outside of capital expenditures. They want you to assume that all this money can’t be wrong, even though when you remove OpenAI and Anthropic (who represent 89% of the revenues of the largest AI companies) the AI industry is, at best, pulling in $20 billion in annual revenue.

while I don’t agree with that referring to men in their 30s-early 40s as “old man yaoi”, I UNDERSTAND why many people who primarily consume honest-to-goodness BL manga are quicker to call it that, because there is just such poor representation for men that aren’t hairless dehydrated 20-something twunks. They’re wrong, but I get why it happens.