Jan 16, 2023
Tracy Butler's beloved 1920s feline adventure will be Iron Circus Studios' first short film, and it looks fabulous.
Itās an article!
....and a trailer!!Ā ā£ ā£ ā£
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Tracy Butler's beloved 1920s feline adventure will be Iron Circus Studios' first short film, and it looks fabulous.
Itās an article!
....and a trailer!!Ā ā£ ā£ ā£
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch ā¢ No registration required ā¢ HD streaming
āØš February Book Releases Are NOT Playing šāØ
@gizmodoĀ just dropped its list of 69 new sci-fi, fantasy & horror books coming this month. Swipe to see new speculative titles from Black and Indigenous authors we are particularly excited about.
š¤ Books to have on your radar: š The Daughter Who Remains āĀ @nnediokorafor š„ The Hospital at the End of the World āĀ @justinckey š§ The Body āĀ @bcmorrow šµš¾āāļø The Johnson Four āĀ @christinahammondsreed š©ø Dead First āĀ @comptonwrites š Cleopatra: A Novel āĀ @saaraelarifi š Night of the Mannequins āĀ @stephengrahamjones š The Secret World of Maggie Grey āĀ @authorgranger
These stories imagine whatās possibleāand whatās coming.āØ
š Shop these titles and more at www.sistahscifi.com or bookshop.org/shop/SistahScifi.
Better yet, check them out at yourĀ #locallibrary!!!
Compute is a finite resource.
Wow, turns out AI can't scale infinitely; who knew?
Last fall, it looked like Sora, a video generation model, was set to be OpenAIās next big thing. Last week, the company abandoned it completely in a decision so sudden that itĀ even caught Disney by surpriseāand the House of Mouse had aĀ $1 billion pledged investmentĀ tied to the model. Now, theĀ Wall Street Journal has an autopsy on the decision, and it shows OpenAI in a bind that is becoming increasingly common for AI companies: Thereās only so much computing power to go around. Per the report, OpenAIās decision to axe Sora came as the company was putting the finishing touches on a new AI model that will reportedly emphasize coding and enterprise servicesāan area the company hasĀ increasingly focused onĀ as it tries to figure out how to turn a profit on any of its products. To launch that model, though, the company needed more compute, which meant it had to make a choice: Keep the resource-intensive Sora up and running, even though it wasĀ reportedly losing $1 million per day, or pull the plug and free up those processors for the new model. OpenAI chose the latter. And while Sora had certainly fallen off in popularityāit went fromĀ hitting more than one million usersĀ faster than just about any app in history to maintaining fewer than 500,000 active users at the time of its death,Ā per WSJāthere were stillĀ people who swore by itĀ andĀ people who were paying for it. Clearly, there were not enough of them for OpenAI to keep letting them churn out videos withĀ dubious legitimacy under copyright laws, but the whole situation is a good reminder for users of all AI services: The tools youāre using are currentlyĀ heavily subsidizedĀ by the vast amount of investor money that has poured into these companies, and when the bills come due, those tools are either going to disappear like Sora or become prohibitively expensive. Anthropic recently quietly announcedĀ that it will limit user sessions when interacting with its flagship chatbot Claude during peak hours, instituting caps that will affect everyone from free users to those forking over $100 per month for a Claude Max subscription. The implication of that decision is similar to OpenAIās move to put an end to Sora (though for the exact opposite reason,Ā Claude is too popularĀ rather than a forgotten money pit), which is that these companies will pull the rug if they canāt figure out how to monetize you.
For all of last week, the front page of jalopnik.com looked like this. Some of the stories were moved around if you reloaded it, but the same stories appeared. They finally posted new content today. Still, I have to wonder if Jalopnik writers are staging an undeclared work slowdown.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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For Sol and this specific team of Jedi on Brendok, we have to remember they have little experience with actual darkness. Weāre in a period of time where the Sith have been supposedly wiped out. The Nihil threat fromĀ theĀ High RepublicĀ novels are already well behind them, and even the more prevalent āForce Sectsā have seemingly dwindled in number and influence.Ā This begs the question: are they feeling a ādarknessā or something āstrange?ā In an organization so insular in their beliefs and trained since an early age,Ā anyĀ other usage of the Force would be seen as strange, even unsettling. Their lack of experience with other Force cultures outside their own [makes] the jump from āstrangeā to āevil/badā...all too easy.
--Jordan Maison - The Acolyte's Fascinating Parallels Between Jedi Recruitment and Colonialism (Gizmodo)
From pro-AI candidates losing primaries in Utah to bans in New Jersey, the backlash against data centers is growing.
After my last post about the Screen Rant response to Jenny Nicholson's Galactic Starcruiser video, it was pointed out to me that Gizmodo's I09 division also put out an article defending Starcruiser. I'm not going to spend as long analyzing this one.
It's the usual you've already heard: people were confused that it wasn't just a hotel, how you had to put effort into it to get results back, that the staff and Imagineers worked real hard on it, there were people who liked it.
It's all the same defenses that clearly are hoping that you haven't watched the video, and probably they haven't either. Since, you know, the video basically dismantles all of those arguments one by one.
I will say it also attempts a slightly bafflingly progressive take on it, like saying stuff like:
"To manyĀ Star WarsĀ fans who were able to check outĀ Galactic StarcruiserĀ during its short-lived existence, the attraction presented a chance to act on the frustration many share in their day to day lives of watching atrocities happen and feeling like thereās little we can do about them."
Which is pretty gross, right? Comparing 'going to a hotel on vacation' with 'fighting the good fight against the bad shit in the world'. I mean, especially when you consider one of the paths is joining with the fascists? Also it's owned by a billion-dollar corporation? Which even the article briefly points out...which is the point the article writer should of rethought their stance.
Now, more importantly, looking at the articles from Screen Rant and Gizmodo and I'm sure there's others, I'm sure people are wondering/thinking that Disney had a hand in this. And to be honest...
No, probably not. Well, not directly, at least.
Rather, these websites require access. Access to press releases, access to interviews, access to special events. So writing a puff piece defending Galactic Star Cruiser is a pretty safe bet to do, especially if you suspect that Disney is planning to still do something with the GSC. As has been pointed out, the building still remains intact, and a lot of the signage in the parks is still there. So if they reopen it as, say, a dining experience, then the website who wrote a puff piece defending the honor of the Halcyon is much more likely to be invited to opening night than Jenny Nicholson is.
Additionally, these days websites such as Screen Rant pay like crap, to the point where the only people willing to work on them are the true believers. It's like how game developers are some of the worst paid and most overworked dev teams, because the industry knows they can get true believers who want to Design Video Games in the doors.
So no, I doubt Disney is directly in anyone's ear about this. But rather, it's websites taking advantage of the situation to try and get into Daddy Disney's good graces. There are always useful idiots.
Confusing it for a hotel only damaged the expectations for Disney Parks' ambitious immersive experiment.