I like to play devil’s advocate and am interested in sharing knowledge about my hobbies! I like gaming and VR, AI, herbal vaporizers, media analysis and philosophy!

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I’m not sure if iGPU’s are typically used for transcoding, which may be part of why you’re having difficulty finding solutions.

    As for re-encoding H264 into H265, increased file size is common. Encoding from source for the first time into H265 will lower file sizes, but if you’re re-encoding something you’re almost always going to lose data while increasing file size, especially on hardware encoders due to the methods and time it takes.

    Basically, try your hand at Very Slow software encoding. Wait a day. This H265 file will likely be smaller than the Hardware Encodes of the same thing.







  • I use lib-redirect for everything if I really need to get to a reddit link. It’s rare, but there are certain types of communities where I’d like to get a “average laymans” perspective and unfortunately just due to the size here on the fediverse there is rarely wide-spread availability. As you mentioned, specific games. Lots of hobbies. Even the opportunity for consumer tech talk, if I’m interested in replacing something that’s 8+ years old there’s just not a lot of existing content to search through here and that leaves blog posts and… Reddit.

    I’ve had plenty of time recognizing what astroturfing looks like, so I rarely feel like I’m left out of options to search. All that said, I’ve been doing this a lot less since the whole shift happened. Maybe an endeavor every few months, rather than few days/weeks.










  • At this point digitally downloading things needs to just stop being called piracy and start being called digital archival. WiFi went down, luckily I have my digital archive.

    All the people who made the content already got paid for their hours in large media. If you’re pirating from a studio that is 1 to 10 people you probably know that and probably know it’s lame. The money we’re paying to view/listen is literally just the corporation trying to “make money back”, even though the CEO and execs are probably a few tonnes richer than the rest of us, and the regular working class is getting paid hourly.

    We’ve really got to be moving away from restricting knowledge, honestly even the idea of a $/hr type thing. Imaging being charged 15c every time you heard 40 seconds of a song or TV show. I like the idea of artists being paid royalties but our current system is such a scam with us, the core creator, getting hardly anything after the corporations get their cut. FFS, audiobook producers get more share of royalties than musicians do (most audiobooks are ~40% royalty share and musicians are lucky to get 25%.

    It’s hard as an artist. I want to be able to make money off my music, and be able to live from just that. The very real reality is that piracy (digital archival) would have almost ZERO affect on me due to the scale of it. People would be more likely to hear about me through its word of mouth than they are currently trying to buy my music with my advertising (none). I’m also not making music for money, but so that it can be listened to. Making money from it is more of a benefit than the goal, despite how nice it would be to do nothing but make music.

    So, really, if I am hardly affected by people archiving my work, why in the fuck would HBO be? And if it were true, why would they remove hundreds of movies and shows from their service, lost forever. How are the royalties from those being lost when I archive it?

    No, there is none.

    There is only one reason to not digitally archive something. One alone.

    Metrics.

    If you like something and you want it to survive, fucking pay to watch it. I love It’s Always Sunny. I have all of it archived, and mostly watch it there. But I will put money into Hulu once in a while just to stream Sunny, for the new season, for whatever. Because those guys have more hours of my life than any other show, and I want them to be able to continue making it, and they can only do that if FX sees that enough people watch them to justify continuing. I don’t agree with everything Hulu does, like their showing ads for networks even on the “Ad free” tier (the network contracted for it, which leads me to wonder when other networks won’t leverage for the same deal), and something else that I had on my mind but just escaped me due to the late hour. Those guys all already got paid, the crew and teams, everything is taken care of. But for another season to happen enough people have to have seen it on a platform that matters to them, so the only thing that really matters is the metrics.

    Of course, if you’re HBO even that doesn’t matter and it can be all thrown out anyway… so…

    to digital archival I go



  • I gave it a read and there’s some interested takes but overall disagree and I think this particular read may miss some of the best parts of what make Blade Runner work. To just respond to the surmise, since all 10 points to me are more like 7 and even those 7 kind of just come down to these 3, lol.

    First and foremost, its pacing is fine. Bad pacing in a movie is far worse, like Anna, and even pacing in a good one like Dune, doesn’t mean anything necessarily - Blade Runner does a fine job if you are able to pay attention, I guess. Personally it seems a little odd to blame being molded by contemporary media to be the reason why an older film no longer holds up. Let me put it this way though - We have Drive (2011) and Baby Driver (2017). In a lot of ways, these movies are exactly the same at times being almost shot for shot early on (likely homage). But Baby Driver is an extremely fast paced movie, and Drive is an extremely slow burn. Both of these movies, like Blade Runner, do something different, so of the critiques there can be I’m not fully on board with this one, unless the argument is that old movies should be able to take any viewer out of their subjectivity mold, I can’t really agree with the takeaway from this. I had a harder time watching the new Dune than I did Blade Runner, does that make Dune’s pacing worse than Blade Runner or is Blade Runner’s pacing better than Dune? See what I mean? I might feel different had there been any examples, but it seemed that it just found a “Blade Crawler” comment and made a point about it, and now that’s bad because… movies are faster paced? Nyeh, not sold, lol.

    Decker is no more than an analogue for the viewers to be in the world, he may be the protagonist but Decker, IMO, is far from the main character. I also disagree about him lacking complexity, however I would say that it is indeed because he is 100% a foil to the antagonists. Decker isn’t meant to be this incredible Blade Runner that no other can live up to - he’s good sure, he’s alive and has his faculties and limbs, but he quite literally takes the role of the futuristic Desk Jockey, he is just the pencil pusher that grinds up the replicants. More on this later.

    Whenever I watch Blade Runner I’m always surprised by how it’s such a quiet film with so much exposition in just a few sentences. I don’t think anything overshadows anything else. I think there is a strong emphasis on atmosphere which helps with the world building we get from the characters and interactions. It critiques hyper-capitalism by showing a world far in the future that by all accounts is exactly the same, save a few office jobs that have evolved. The underground is still working girls and chefs and the government is still uncoordinated and corrupt. Without the focus on visuals to evoke just how different this world is supposed to be, we don’t get snapped back into mundanity when we see Decker ordering food and getting stopped by other officers. Moreover, the depth of the story comes specifically from Roy Batty, who as I mention should be viewed as the real protagonist. I think the movie itself argues this point to the bone, but everyone only ever seems to want to talk about Decker so maybe not.

    I find it hard to see a lack of depth when Roy and Pris, literal cybernetic robots, are the most emotive characters in Blade Runner. The only other character we genuinely see some emotion from is the Tinkerer J.F. Sebastian, who has a love for his toys and makes friends with the replicants. They get inhumanly emotive at times, but they more than anyone we see express just how much they want to live. Roy’s entire journey is a process of becoming human, until death when he gives birth to Decker by saving him. Roy lived as a human would have. In life, Roy was enslaved, escaped, and lived on the lamb. He sought vengeance towards God (Tyrell), found love, exacts vengeance once more before, in my opinion, realizing and accepting that God was right. There is no extending life. Not his own.

    As he sees Deckard about to die, with the understanding that Roy himself will soon as well, Roy saves Deckard not as an act of mercy but as a birth. To extend life. For me, the story isn’t much about Deckard. It’s about what Deckard’s piece represents for humanity. He isn’t complex, he doesn’t need to be. Not everyone is. Particularly when Deckard himself isn’t even the point that the film was trying to make, each and every quintessential moment of philosophy comes from the antagonists musings, not the protagonists inquisitions.

    Your final act in death is to give life which you were no longer allowed.

    That is complexity.


  • Jack Black rarely really plays himself in voice acted roles. He really embodies Bowser in the Mario Movie, and even Kung Fu Panda he isn’t really himself, so I’m not really worried for Claptrap.

    As for the other examples, I don’t think actors have to be young or yolked to play a character. Not that I see Hart as Roland, just that I don’t think his size matters for this at all.

    But yeah the movie could really go either way, there’s a lot of potential but Borderlands could very easily be a franchised series so I do wonder about the casting from a different perspective.