Liliam 🏳️‍⚧️

Notice reading: "Important: If you're located in the UK, you may be part of an experiment where your information will be processed by an age-assurance vendor, Persona. The information you submit will be temporarily stored for up to 7 days, then deleted. For ID document verification, all details are blurred except your photo and date of birth, so only what's truly needed for age verification is used."

Discord advises UK users that they "may be part of an experiment" where instead of their age verification data never leaving their phone, it will now actually leave their phone
www.eurogamer.net/discord-advi...

Forbes article on a controversy regarding a Netflix documentary about the final season of Stranger Things. In the documentary, a browser tab with the show's script is seen next to three other tabs, which appear to display the ChatGPT logo. Excerpt from the article: "Attempting to say that a blurry tab icon is ChatGPT (even enhanced with AI, nothing like that shows up)" Bewildered emphasis on "enhanced with AI" added by me.

We are so cooked as a species

Why We Don't Use AI | Yarn Spinner We get asked about AI a lot. Whether we’re going to add it to Yarn Spinner, whether we use it ourselves, what we think about it. Fair questions. Time to write it all down. Yarn Spinner doesn’t use the...

We're not subtle with all our sassy skeeting about it, but it's probably time for a persistent, official statement about our stance on AI.

TL;DR: we know what we're talking about. GenAI is harming creatives. There will be no AI features in Yarn Spinner. yarnspinner.dev/blog/why-we-...

You know, it's easy to say "don't listen to the harassers", but the reality is you have to deal with the comments they leave, so feel I should do my part to offset that.

I really appreciate your voice in more ways than one, you have something to say and the courage to put it out there. Much love 🩵🩷

Oh my god, I just realized how much this reeks of the LOST finale. They spend an entire hour of the show humanizing the Man in Black and how he just wants to leave the island

and then Kate shows up with a shotgun and BANG "I saved you a bullet 😎" (kicks his bleeding corpse off a cliff)

It's wild that from an in-universe perspective, what happens is Will, ALONE, peeks into Henry's mind and goes "I understand now, you're just like me, you were manipulated just like me."

"..."

"..."

"Well I ain't telling no one, get'em Mom 😎"

Is this gonna be up on Nebula soon?

If we are banning cell phones for kids we need to be talking about banning chatbots for boomers
www.persuasion.community/p/my-chatgpt...

ATTENTION SPEEDRUN FANS‼️

I accidentally bought AGDQ tickets on the same day I'm supposed to get married & they cost me $2,000 (plane, registration, hotel, etc.) If anyone wants to go take my place for FREE it's going to be at the St. Marys church his name is John he's 5'10 super nice guy

並木晃一 4th CD『Still Here, Still Me』 on X: "セガの仲間 久保田浩君が亡くなりました 長く闘病されてましたが残念です 課が違っていたので一緒に仕事した事は 少ないですが https://t.co/AwISj5CLscのアルバムHyper Driveで 野呂一生氏アレンジ SWORD OF VERMILION 新たなる旅へ(PS III） のピアノを弾いてもらいましたね ご冥福をお祈りします https://t.co/oE29LtlJzl" / X セガの仲間 久保田浩君が亡くなりました 長く闘病されてましたが残念です 課が違っていたので一緒に仕事した事は 少ないですが https://t.co/AwISj5CLscのアルバムHyper Driveで 野呂一生氏アレンジ SWORD OF VERMILION 新たなる旅へ(PS III） のピアノを弾いてもらいましたね ご冥福をお祈りします https://t.co/oE29LtlJzl

as announced by former colleague Koichi Namiki: Hiroshi Kubota (aka "Jimita"), the ex-Sega composer & programmer who wrote the X68000 SMPS sound driver for Mega Drive & personally arranged the BGM for Sonic the Hedgehog & Michael Jackson's Moonwalker, has passed away x.com/k_namickey/s... 🇯🇵

R.I.P.

Oh lord this is a deep cut hahaha

vorp?

I wonder who signed off on the S&K cartridge. From the nonstandard hinged shell (and cardboard box!) to the passthrough port, must have been some wild times at SEGA

then the fake Super Sonic object queues up one last art change, Sonic's DPLC routine sees you're no longer Super and returns normal Sonic's running tiles, but the object keeps using Super Sonic's mappings, ending in a single frame of mojibake.

I swear this must be the section Iizuka programmed.

The result is that depending on how many video frames have elapsed at the moment the level starts, the animation will have one of four patterns: AABB, ABBA, BBAA or BAAB. If the switch from A to B or B to A happens on the same frame that Knuckles punches off your super flag,

🥺

I took a quick look and I think it's not a version difference, it just has a 50% chance of happening.

They did the totally normal thing of changing Super Sonic's current sprite based on the *vertical interrupt count* rather than a local SST variable, or you know the normal player anim functions.

oh nice I didn't know this was a version difference!

Yeah, that's the most likely explanation for the weird color order, but it's wild that they didn't just throw in a replacement Nemesis blob for the bird. It would've only taken up a couple hundred bytes.

It's *not* for the title card as one might guess, code was added that picks green specifically.

Lmao I just noticed I completely misplaced the wasp enemy's flame. I couldn't use the mapping files because the Sonic 1 and 2 disassemblies are zinky zoogle bogos binted

The piranha enemy looks alright, but the crab is definitely too pink. Maybe they could have worked in a few art replacements and shipped this after all?

I dunno, maybe it could have happened? Had they not been strapped for time. Sonic 3 famously missed its street date and was split in two, and it's honestly a miracle that everything lined up in a way that made Knuckles in Sonic 2 possible.

The colors are definitely a concern in both games though!

Knuckles the Echidna in Sonic the Hedgehog (2005)

Switch the colors around a bit and you can get it looking pretty authentic!

The most successful approach is probably still Stealth's 2005 hack: it coerces Knuckles' sprites into the Sonic 1 palette, which unlike later games has three shades of red available.

If you paste in Knuckles' reds, it starts looking pretty good! Robotnik starts becoming a bit festive though. 11/12

Some might not even be possible — you could make all the pinball plungers in Spring Yard Zone purple, but the jewel blocks in the special stage all use the same art, switching between VDP palette lines to display in blue, yellow, pink and green. S&K wisely cut those down to just three colors. 10/12

Crimson bees don't look so bad

Green lamps and red lightning

Oh no.

OH NOOOOO

Because of that, if you try to shove Knuckles' colors into the Sonic 1 palette, you'll suddenly need to replace a *lot* of graphics. 9/12

Enemy sprites use Sonic's palette in both Sonic 1 and Sonic 2, but Sonic 2 steers clear of the colors that are not guaranteed as Super Sonic

And therein lies the rub: the vast majority of sprites in Sonic 2 already avoid the blue gradient, since those colors change when playing as Super Sonic. In Sonic 1, a game without Super Sonic, the blue gradient is as safe as any other color in the palette, so level sprites make good use of it! 8/12

In Sonic 2, flickies and water are blue as one would expect

When playing as Knuckles, both become red with stray green pixels

This was already a problem in Sonic 2, because Super Sonic modifies these colors

They missed a few spots, though. Flickies and the Aquatic Ruin Zone waterline become red with green spots when playing as Knuckles. Flickies seem intentional, as they also turn red in S&K, but the water seems to have been an oversight even in vanilla S2 - it becomes yellow when Sonic is Super. 7/12

Barriers are an example of a sprite that is replaced when playing as Knuckles

Extra graphics still need to be shipped, though. Sonic 2's palette has four shades of blue, but Knuckles needs three shades of red + green for his socks. This disturbs any graphics with blue gradients, so replacements are provided in the S&K ROM, colored gray presumably for aesthetic reasons. 6/12

This comes at a performance cost, since writing to the RAM buffer is done byte-per-byte on the 68k CPU. But it saves *tremendously* on ROM space, since you can read Knuckles' sprites from the S&K ROM and the level sprites from the S2 ROM, without having to ship pre-converted versions of either. 5/12

The fact that this works as well as it does is actually bonkers

They solved this by altering the routine that queues a DMA transfer of Sonic's sprites from ROM to VRAM. It now "pre-scrambles" the pixels of Knuckles' sprites into a RAM buffer, then queues a DMA transfer from RAM to VRAM. If you apply the Sonic 2 palette, the colors are suddenly unscrambled. 4/12