arquebus_x

I was going to get this game. Now I’m not.

It also has a 1v1 mode (player vs computer or PvP) that is just fantastic. I actually spent most of my time playing the 1v1 mode way back in the day.

I’ve been an Apple fanboy for years, too, and I still am. The alternatives aren’t exactly better. And anyone who is surprised that Apple is dragging its heels and trying to do the bare minimum to comply, well, get back to me when you’re no longer twelve. Companies aren’t your friends, even when they look like they are. Hell, Google’s sudden about-face regarding Right to Repair is 100% intended to fuck over Apple. It’s not about the consumer, it’s about the money. Always, with every company, every time.

Developers want alternate app stores because they want to make/keep more money. There’s no other reason. Every other reason given just comes back to more money. Is that a more valid argument simply because they’re smaller?

I’m in favor of Apple opening up iOS to alternate stores. I think it’s going to be a privacy and security nightmare, but the horse is pretty much already out of the barn and the barn is burning, so… whatever. But I’m not so naive to think Apple’s going to fully embrace the ideal concept of alternate stores unless somehow it’s a way to beat Google’s or Samsung’s face in, and take their money.

Do you not understand how unions work?

The contract would be a combination contract, for performance and AI training. That’s explicitly the thing that’s been agreed to here.

That’s correct, but it’s important to distinguish something explicitly here. The voices may not be copyrightable, but the dialogue is, as long as it’s not also generated by AI (i.e., dynamically generated). Also, the trained model that generates the voice is still proprietary: only its product (and only the sound itself, not the words if the speech is from a script) can be openly used.

It does, yes. And they can also choose to opt out of future uses of their voice in the AI trained model. Which essentially means that their contracts are on a per-project basis, rather than allowing the game developer to force them to contract for the current project and any future use of the model by that game dev.

That’s… what this agreement proposes.

This deal solves the problem you’re encountering, because it allows game companies to use real voices to generate dialogue. It will sound a hell of a lot better than the 100% AI generated voices you dislike.

And it will protect voice actors’ jobs because the deal effectively requires new contracts for each use out of scope of the previous contract (i.e., the “opt out” language), and it encourages game companies to continue to rely on voice actors rather than switch to 100% AI generated.

Without this deal, game devs will just go 100% AI (and the tech will improve dramatically), and within a year or two, game voice actors will have no jobs to contract.

This is especially important in light of the trend toward dynamically generated dialogue in RPGs, etc. Without allowing an AI to train on real voice actors, dynamically generated dialogue will have to be 100% AI generated (no human voice involvement).

Voice acting in all fields is already a diminishing market because of AI generated voices. One of my coworkers had to get a job where I work because his VA jobs basically dried up. This agreement stanches the bleeding by permitting the use of AI trained on VAs (but only allowing use on a per-contract basis). Without that permission, AI would just be trained on open source / freely available voice samples, and there would be no contracts, and VAs would just … not exist anymore.

It wasn’t awful, it was just hapless. It probably would have gotten its sea legs in a second season.

Sad story: the actress who played the little girl died a day after her honeymoon and 8 days before her 22nd birthday, from a heart attack. (She’d had a heart transplant when she was 15.)

The big problem with “Lost” is that many in the writer’s room (and the showrunners themselves) were raging racist assholes who decided to steer the show toward all the white characters, which meant changing a lot of their early plans.

I just want a Babylon 5 reboot! Goddamnit!

If Kbin defederates from Threads, I’ll just leave Kbin, and stay with Threads. Defederating over vibes is not how the fediverse is supposed to operate. And for everyone advocating for this dumb idea, I’m just using this thread as a honey pot.

What it comes down to there is whether the act of selection is an act of art. If there is no skill other than picking, I’m not sure I’d consider it an artistic act. (For similar reasons I’m very much on the fence about a lot of modern art.)

Jesus Christ that NYT article has so many weasel words in it. “Seen as”, “appear to be,” blah blah blah. I hate the NYT.

Duct. Duck is a brand name

Yes. But also mostly no.

Wikipedia:

“Duck tape” is recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary as having been in use since 1899 and “duct tape” (described as “perhaps an alteration of earlier duck tape”) since 1965

and:

In 1971, Jack Kahl bought the Anderson firm and renamed it Manco. In 1975, Kahl rebranded the duct tape made by his company. Because the previously used generic term “duck tape” had fallen out of use, he was able to trademark the brand “Duck Tape” and market his product complete with a yellow cartoon duck logo. Manco chose the term “Duck”, the tape’s original name, as “a play on the fact that people often refer to duct tape as ‘duck tape’”, and as a marketing differentiation to stand out against other sellers of duct tape.

People should really do the bare minimum double-check before showing their whole ass.

As others have noted, “duct tape” is the last thing you want to use on ducts. Better to actually call it “duck tape,” as it was for the first 65 years of its existence.

No one’s going to watch a realistic exploration sci-fi show about small unmanned ships quietly going about their jobs with no drama.