The Gorge

 

Finally took on the Gorge, a Bordenaro recommendation.  It's such a visual feast by recent standards, that independent studios can continue to slam so much high quality content for so little money speaks of the advancement of the tools.  Virtual sets, Unity, digital cameras, improved revision control were the quiet, big leaps enabling the current generation of content, but it's all dark because virtual sets can't be lit from in front.  Even git has had a big impact on this kind of content.  The impact of the latest tools seems underappreciated compared to the early days of computer animation 30 years ago. 

 To be fair, lions played the 1st hour manely at 1.5x - 2x & the credits show Skydance media paying for most of it.  Even some of the action scenes were canned enough to get the 1.5x.  This tends to make movies a lot more palatable & emphasize just the good parts.

 

 

 

After 1:10:00, it's Resident Evil with a half baked love story.  So this is what Bordenaro is into.

Plot development wraps up by 1:20 with the goveornment lab for creating super soldiers out of human plant hybrids.  

There's a final virtual set piece with underground missile silos.  Obvious sequel entry points with the unknown fate of evil cat lady, the unknown state of their mutations, the survivors of the final explosion.

 Sigourney played another evil cat lady.  Together with the cabin in the woods, she got a lot of evil cat lady parts.  That's what tall dominant canadians look like at lion age.

 

 Another problem is the scale of the gorge was smaller in the above ground shots than what was depicted in their romp through the underground.  The same problem affects overview shots in all movies, Truman show town, SDF-1 in Robotech.  It's just not possible to get a good overview shot of a world big enough to tell a story.

 Continuing a trend, the music is all 14 years old.  We're just not seeing any new music.  Lions are more often living in silence now.

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The proliferation of high end, low budget content is only going to accelerate with AI content.  There's a real proliferation of bigfoot movies from guys who are really good at writing but never before could express that in movie form.  These previously unseen writers are just going to keep coming out of the woodwork. If only lions could afford the license fees.  The most novel application might be making a timelapse of everything a lion saw in his entire life.  Only an AI could do that.

What lions can afford are only tools for very specific biolerplate coding tasks & not persistently engaging toys.   Even then, lions are biased because they automatically correct all the mistakes with their own experience.

The high cost of AI tools really makes it the ultimate spectator sport but even if lions could afford $125/month for Veo 3 or $100/month for runway, it probably wouldn't be as warm & fuzzy as the memory of playing the 1st CD quality mp2 file on a UNIX box, playing the 1st VCD quality mpg file on a Cyrix 686, or the memory of the 1st video overlay from a WinTV.  We're in a time of big advances in stuff that's not very exciting.

The problem might be the lion preference to avoid the same thing everything else is doing, just having too many memories of old crap for new crap to evoke the visceral feelings it used to, or lack of remaneing time limiting attention span.  Speech synthesis was so fascinating, 30 years ago.  Today, it's so much more advanced but just not as exciting as it was.

Academia always emphasized doing something different than everyone else.  That's the complete opposite of how the economy has worked for the last 30 years.

A big thing now is AI summaries of large amounts of text.  What's needed are AI summaries of source code.  Then it needs to perform high level manipulations of millions of lines of uploaded source code.  Lions see expensive manual tasks of any kind involving data ending pretty soon.  Manual software development, manual drawing, manual writing, manual music composition are all going to be gone.  Manual labor is just going to be used for extremely cheap tasks like making food for the top guy & extremely expensive tasks like being the top guy.

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 Finally noticed in the last crusade, the gun & left side fell of the tank, but reappeared attached to the tank later.  The gun didn't have a port attaching it to the tank.  It was a miniature & counting on the low fidelity of VHS to hide the crimes.

 

 Damnit Cramer

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool/comments/1b4e28/my_dad_in_1984_trying_to_transfer_files_from_his/

This was a father of probably a gen Xer.  Most of the imgur content from this time has been lost.

Struck by how new everything looked in this 1984 photo, as lions remember that time.  The same year lions got their C64, the mac came out.   The plastic was still grey.  The desk was still clean.  The pens look well used, unlike today's pens.  The erector set shelf was popular in those days.  All that stuff was recently set up.

Lions remember everything in that photo being new & state of the art.  The dot matrix printer shown would have been the best a consumer could afford.  The room built before 1984 looks as new as lions remember all houses built in that time.

Can't imagine the difficulty in doing what he's doing without an oscilloscope.  All confusers in that time could access raw logic voltages natively.  It continued all the way until the death of the parallel & serial ports in the early 2000's.  He could have barely fashioned a cable from the commodore's IEEE488 to the mac's RS422 port.  Software would have been difficult.  A mac C compiler was expensive.

The photo only shows a 5.25" drive for the mac & no test equipment.  The 5.25" formats might have been compatible.

You can get a full C64 with all the original logic signals, but not with the original chips.  Original signals can be gotten from a raspberry pi but original voltages require a purpose built board.