It’s about time I got my hves back.

I see Pitch; I up-vote.

Top 50 anime openings

Obligatory:

I’m Comic Sans, Asshole by Mike Lacher from McSweeney’s Short Imagined Monologues June 15, 2010

acrypol-pasta

Consider also meat floss: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_floss

It’s legit, just super desiccated. Babish made some while recreating Khlav Kalash from The Simpsons.

https://youtu.be/jiFcNVfbY5A

Lose the glass. Embrace the de-boxed space bag with a spigot.

Heely-haws.

If your analog control requires your entire hand, it’s interesting.

If your analog control requires several pointing fingers, it’s interesting.

If your analog control requires your thumbs, it’s shit.

Now get the fuck out of my office!

One of the things I was most curious about with this series was the animation style they were choosing to use. Hiroshi Nagahama used rotoscoping to make Flowers of Evil, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. The mouth movements would have been better - they actually look pretty rough in spots here. Motion capture or vtuber tech maybe?

I’ve been following this series. Queer culture varies from region to region, so it was really tricky to watch the show without projecting the concept of a western trans identity onto the main character.

It took the full length of the first season before Makoto articulates his identity (genderqueer from what I can surmise - a man with he/him pronouns who prefers feminine presentation… mostly), with the option floated to him of being able to live “as a woman,” but with no specifics given to the cultural context of that phrase.

It would be really cool to get commentary on this show from Japanese queer folks who can speak to the language choices and cultural context behind this show.

I’m waaaay more interested in that than a movie.

No love for Bananya Around the World?

Or dropping the first “r” and being blinded by ska porn.

🎺🎺🕴️

Trained for years on Skyline 3-Ways.

Basic, but they have to start somewhere.

I’m sharing a screenshot of the two together as “how it started / how it’s going”.

http://mltshp.com/p/1QB3B

Oh how far we’ve come…

https://theonion.com/what-biden-can-do-to-win-over-gen-z-1851427528/5/

The artist is SpookToons ( https://spooktoons.carrd.co/ ), and here’s the link to their original BlueSky post for the image: https://bsky.app/profile/spooktoons.bsky.social/post/3kyjhptojhe2h

I think it technically counts as Spring, but Dead Dead Demons Dededede Destruction has me enraptured.

But if we’re talking about Summer alone, hands down, Dungeon People.

Asking the person you’re debating to look up your own citations is certainly one way to converse. But ok, let’s go for it.

In Aug 2023, Forbes published an article describing the proposal of “unfettered access” you referred to:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/08/21/draft-tiktok-cfius-agreement/

In June 2024, the Washington Post reported that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) turned down the proposal and includes some broad reporting as to why:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/tiktok-offered-an-extraordinary-deal-the-u-s-government-took-a-pass/ar-BB1nfAcE

The article isn’t very technical, but it mentions some interesting responsibility angles that the US wouldn’t want to back themselves into:

• throwing open some, but not all, doors to server operations and source code creates a mountain of work for the government to inspect, which would be a workload nightmare
• the US government’s deepest concerns seem to be about what data is going out (usage insights on the virtuous side and clipboard/mic/camera monitoring on the ultra shady side) and data coming in (bespoke content intended to influence US residents of China-aligned goals). Usage insights are relatively benign from national security perspective (especially when you can just mandate that people in important roles aren’t permitted to use it). Shady monitoring should be discoverable through app source code monitoring, which you can put the app platforms (Apple, Google, whoever else) on the hook for if they continue to insist on having walled app gardens (and if you trust them at all). The content shaping is harder to put your finger on though, since it’s super easy to abstract logic as far out as you need to avoid detection. “Here, look at these 50M lines of code that run stateside, and yeah, there are some API calls to stuff outside the sandbox. Is that such a big deal?” Spoiler: it is a big deal.
• the US can’t hold Byte Dance accountable so long as it remains in China. Let’s say the US agreed to all this, spent all the effort to uncover some hidden shady activity that they don’t like (after an untold amount of time has passed). What then? They can’t legally go after Byte Dance’s foreign entity. The US can prosecute the US employees, but it’s totally possible to organize in such a way that leaves those domestic employees free from misdeeds, leaving prosecutors unable to enforce misdeeds fairly. It’d be a mess.

The second article explains this somewhat, but I’m admittedly painting some conjecture on top regarding how a malicious actor could behave. I’ve got no evidence that Byte Dance is actually doing any of that.

But going back to the “influence the public” angle, I’m struggling to see how different TikTok is versus NHK America (Japan’s American broadcasts) or RT (American media from the Russian standpoint) aside from being wildly more successful and popular. But I guess that’s all there is to it.

I’d prefer our leaders also be transparent with us regarding their concerns about TikTok. The reductive “because China!!1!” argument is not compelling on its own.