Sorely disappointed that the canon that dogs in the Swan Boy universe are in fact just small humans, as established in the third comic:
...has now been definitively disavowed in today's comic:
Note the decidedly canine dogs in the first panel:
I always thought this gag was quite charming and kept looking forward to it coming back one day, but alas, today my hopes are dashed.
All of a sudden, the team of four was sitting in front of over 780,000 words. Any project of this magnitude would be daunting, to say the least. But Ace Attorney presented a unique series of challenges. After all, the visual novel series starring a rookie attorney and an absurdly large character cast is known for pun names, excess of jokes originally translated from Japanese, and subtle word mentions that become key pieces of evidence during trials. Over the following year, the team lived and breathed Ace Attorney.
[...]
“We decided that, inside the courthouse, they would treat each other formally, because that’s the facade they have. But that formality doesn’t exist outside the courthouse. It’s impossible to maintain the relationship with ‘usted’ because they already knew each other from when they were kids,” Morales says.
[...]
An overachiever sentiment led the group to try and keep most of them, but there were some significant lines drawn. When it came to transphobic and fatphobic jokes, of which there are plenty, the team proposed Capcom to censor or remove them altogether, touting the line between the games being a product of their time and considering modern sensibilities.
This post has so many interesting tidbits in it!!! I had a lot of fun reading through it, even though I've really only played the first game in the series. I strongly recommend giving it a read.
can't wait for English to redevelop the tu/vous distinction and then lose it again so the only second person pronoun is "y'all"
I'm sure all of you have already read my Apologia for RSS (the very first post on this blog!) and I'm sure you're all reading this in an RSS reader you've chosen for one reason or another. But does your RSS reader show you everything a post contains, or is it hiding the deepest, juiciest quips and chatter from you?
I've been on Tumblr since its heyday back in 2011, and it's now the only social media I can really say I use regularly[1]. One of the aspects of its culture I appreciate tremendously is the concept of "chatting in the tags". Tags in Tumblr are snippets of text attached to both posts and reblogs, but only the original instance. If you reblog a post, that reblog doesn't include the tags of whoever you reblogged it from.
Although tags were presumably intended primarily for cross-referencing posts on the same topic, Tumblr culture has adopted them as a way of writing sotto voce commentary on posts, visible only to people who are following you specifically without escaping into the larger network. Sometimes people use this to be funny, sometimes to relay anecdotes, sometimes to be catty. Universally, it gives a window into the personality of the person you chose to follow, above and beyond just their curatorial decisions about what to post.
Even on one's own posts, tag chatter provides a means of adding a bit of commentary that's tangential to the post itself, of a different tone, or a little more personal than they want escaping into the wider network.
One of Tumblr's virtues, and in fact one of the main reasons I still use it at all, is that it provides RSS feeds for every user. These are the main way I read the website at all! What's more, these feeds actually contain that user's tags. For the technically-minded among you, the feed entry looks like this:
<item>
<title>
gonna be a lover for a minute, reblog and put in the tags the last movie that you LOVED like…
</title>
<description>
<p><a class="tumblr_blog" href="https://perfectday1972.tumblr.com/post/792148193180827649/gonna-be-a-lover-for-a-minute-reblog-and-put-in">perfectday1972</a>:</p><blockquote><p>gonna be a lover for a minute, reblog and put in the tags the last movie that you LOVED like intensely loved like 5 stars on letterboxd LOVED</p></blockquote>
</description>
<link>https://www.tumblr.com/nex3/824507509470625792</link>
<guid>https://www.tumblr.com/nex3/824507509470625792</guid>
<pubDate>Sun, 09 Aug 2026 14:40:35 -0700</pubDate>
<category>PlayTime</category>
<category>although todayhat was a rewatch</category>
<category>most recent new one was Chimes at Midnight</category>
</item>
Those <category> elements are the tags.
Neat! But totally useless in practice unless a reader actually
displays them.
My…
posted on ludic.mataroa.blog AI Mania is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
Over the past year, I’ve run point on all of our company’s sales, led the technical components of all but two of our engagements, and over the lifetime of this blog have had something like 300 catchups with professionals from around the world. This has ranged from people on the ground in niche service industries to executives at Fortune 500 companies1. Because of this, I've had a front-row view to our collective institutions across both the private and public sector undergoing breath-taking mass psychosis. This essay is an attempt to describe the bizarre dynamics that are currently at play, as I am in the rare position where my wellbeing is not contingent on paying lip service to madness, and to reassure the people trying to survive amidst all of this that they are not crazy.
[...]
It has become outright dangerous to even raise the possibility that AI might not be the solution to a problem, let alone be the sole focus of a company’s entire strategy.
In every sufficiently large business we have observed (say, with 500+ employees), we have noted that continued advancement, and increasingly continued employment, has started to require repeated professions of belief in the transformative power of AI for said business. I am not talking about providing ideas about how to use AI in the business – I mean religious profession, declarations of faith. Overwhelmingly these statements are made by non-technicians, though it is not uncommon for technicians to emit deranged statements to curry favour.
I don't love all of Suresh's framings around LLMs[1], but I do appreciate that his closer exposure to them has given him the perspective to write this piece. This matches my experience very closely. I've so far managed to avoid participating in the false zealotry he describes, but I'm not sure how much longer I can manage it. My colleagues have not. I can hardly blame them.
Meanwhile, it's extremely clear to anyone who hasn't succumbed to the reality distortion field that this monomania is completely corrosive to the organization. Suresh documents the realities of this corrosion, although I imagine most people reading this have seen it in one or another aspects of their lives.
Personally, I'm just doing my best to grit my teeth and try to do good work as best I can, both professionally and personally, until we get back to a point where the managerial consensus is once again that "quality" is a real thing that exists. Until then, I suffer.
I feel that a hard-line zero-tolerance standpoint is necessary due to the myriad negative externalities and the strong tendency for "well I can see it being a bit useful for X" being taken in bad faith as a broad license to use it "where it makes sense". Even in cases where they're not strictly enforceable, zero tolerance policies establish a culture and enable enforcement…
There's so little we in the global north can do to aid the historical struggle of Palestine. We can try to sabotage the military-industrial machinery, although that risks serious legal repercussions. We can send money, although many people have little to spare and finding trustworthy recipients is difficult. Or, for no money and no risk, we can choose not to buy entertainment products that Palestinians have asked us to boycott. But for reasons I cannot fathom, even this is beyond so many people!
has anyone ever given a name to the bird that appears in the first shot of the Twin Peaks intro?
what do you think is the ideal aspect ratio
1:1. where's that squarephone
