Gorth

Good news for those of us who likes the Frieren story. The manga just lefts its hiatus and picked up on the story where it left off (image is the end of chapter 140, chapter 141 has been released). The Foundation Arc, the Shadow Warriors planning to assassinate the head of The Continental Magic Association ("CMA") at a ball in the imperial capital. Back row from left to right is Sein, Stark and Falsch, next row is Fern, Frieren and Sense, all making up a bodyguard for the head of the group, Serie. Most powerful being known in existence (in the setting at least, if there had been such a thing as a scale, she is beyond an order of magnitude more powerful than Frieren) and also the designated target of the Shadow Warriors, an ancient clandestine imperial special forces unit specialized in fighting mages. Not on this image are the last two two people the CMA brought along, featuring at the end of chapter 141, Land and Ubel. The latter looking like the proverbial nuke ready to go off (Ubel is probably more dangerous than a nuke because a nuke follows the laws of physics and logic).

I watched Dandadan episode 4... Thought long and hard about how to summarize events in the episode in a meaningful way. In the end I was just giggling like a maniac going "screw this", it's just not possible 😵‍💫 Something about volcanoes, giant earthworms, crime families, martial arts priests who dreams of becoming social media stars, aliens, romance, the fastest known mannequin joining the fight, granny Seiko dishing out the hurt with a baseball bat... you name it.

Not so much a new scientific discovery as a particular new trend in use of existing technology, AI for movie generation at budgets that doesn't require Hollywood studio funding. I.e. "normal" people can do it too if interested enough to learn a bit about it. I myself dabbled a bit with AI pictures (Stable Diffusion and Flux). Looking into what is currently available in the genre of converting images into short video sequences. These people have spent a bit more time on it and create some hilarious videos. Same channel have videos like The Most German man, The Most Reddit Man etc. in the world, etc.

Hey, I'm sure the Russians said the same thing when the Germans deported Lenin and put him on a train to Russia 😝

Dandadan episode 3... as wacky as ever. Momo and Okarun is stranded in a subterranean cave together with a century's worth of buildings. Looks very much like a giant sink hole. Trapped with the giant Mongolian Deathworm trying to force them into suicide and The Evil eye, still possessing Jiji's body. Okarun manages to catapult Momo (with a helping psychic hand from Mom) up to the surface. She lights the house above the cavern up and calls the fire department. Remembering something she learnt as a kid, worms don't like wet terrain. True enough, the worm surfaces and wrecks half the neighbourhood before dying from exposure to sunlight. At the bottom, Okarun tries to save Turbo-Granny from sticky orange good, just to end up stuck himself. Along the way, the dying worm regurgitates the "family" that has spent the last few centuries sacrificing victims to it. They promptly blame Momo for what is about to happen and... the volcano next to the town starts erupting, lava running everywhere... Makes sense, right? You sort of have to see it 😂 edit: before anyone points out that i missed something, disclaimer, I probably missed at least half of what happened in the tl;dr; above

All they need then, is a sign over the entrance to the city that ways "Arbeit macht Frei"

From our Finnish fellow Nordics...

I had so much to say about the subject and all of it in incredibly bad taste, so I might save it for 5 years and then revisit the thread (out of respect for those who died) 😖

Yeah, but now the conversation looks odd after the ai bot is gone 😇

A Scandinavian ballad...

Watched first episode of second season of Dandadan. Creepier than ever. Okarun and Momo almost ends up as worm food. Literally 😁 Also... looking forward to this, even if still half a year away (I had to watch the thumbnail three times before realizing the pun of the bum, literally showing the area beyond "the end")

@majestic be nice

War? What war? It’s a US “special military operation” 👍

I wonder if Gromnir would consider visiting the large hadron collider some day… bringing a steak 🥩😝

Is there really any doubt left that he has wet dreams at night about becoming a new Putin, Xi or Kim?

Voice acting is a significant expense. Hence why it's... avoided if possible. Besides costing a lot of money, it also means it's close to impossible to do any changes to the conversations once recorded. Some companies might record variants and different inflections of the same sentence etc. so they can pick or tweak later, but it's still prohibitively expensive. Edit: The expected *additional* revenue from recording voice overs in a different language has to meet (and exceed) those expensese

@Gromnir I must shamefully admit I remember very little about the Camp David sessions 🤔 What had lodged somewhere back in my head was memories of the Oslo Accords in the 90s where Rabin and Arafat committed their respective factions to mutual recognition, peace and a two state solution. Something that was a hard sell for the two leaders

A peaceful solution. No one lives forever, including ayatollahs, so it might be last chance to start a war away from home when voters get restless. After all, last time peace reared it’s ugly head, the Israeli pm got assassinated

Bastards in Nottingham are still scouring the web for anything that could threaten their IP, but every now and then something slips through the cracks. A channel with some "interesting" AI fan service movies https://www.youtube.com/@AdeptusCinematica

It’s not a question of “need” as much as an opportunity to create violence , fear and chaos. Desirable effects for Trump when trying to dismantle the state and retain power indefinitely

Some things just age well... like Blind Guardian 🤘

@BruceVC might appreciate this one. Putting it here as there aren't really any political messages in this video

I thought NZ had already sold out to the Chinese... maybe its a pact between Xi and Putin on how to partition the world in spheres of influence?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce9vxve994ro There was an image clearly visible as Trump spoke and said: "Look, here's burial sites all over the place. These are all white farmers that are being buried." Uh huh... But the image isn't from South Africa - it's actually from a report about women being killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Summed up Trumps latest act of embarrassing himself in public quite nicely for me 44 people were killed in the farming community last year. All colours added up. In a year when 26,232 people were murdered. Makes farming seem like a very safe occupation by comparison. Edit: The memorial from 2020 for the two farmers you mentioned were also mentioned in the BBC article at some point in addition to the old Reuters image from DR Congo that Trump used