Simon Davis

I've been watching since 1984 so... yeah. And I thought I was being extremely fair :)

Frame grab of an obviously AI-generated video, showing Optimus Prime mid-transformation. The frame shows parts sprouting nonsensically from the wrong parts of the truck cab, morphing into place rather than folding out from their proper locations.

Yes, this is definitely how G1 Optimus transforms.

That's ok, neither does he.

"Boromir was right."

SFX Issue 45 None

Looks like this is it! www.gamesradar.com/sfx-issue-45/

Anyway, my favourite bizarre celebrity interview moment remains Christopher Lee finding out Peter Jackson was making Lord of the Rings movies whilst doing an interview to promote his guest appearance as a wizard in some crappy Robin Hood show in SFX, and immediately only caring about that.

Laika are so good at their process, it's getting genuinely difficult to tell the difference between retouched physical puppetry and pure stylised CG.

Out browsing TFs in Smyths today; stood behind mum & small child. Mum is scanning the shelves, asking who the child likes, remarks: "Is there an Optimus?" And it dawned on me that no, there actually wasn't. And that kinda seem like TF sales 101, that there should *always* be an Optimus.

Now I'm torn. Still not a huge fan of the amount of the combined bot that isn't the actual characters, but your comment recently on treating the arm/leg frames as the hand/foot parts from the G1 / CW combiners made me re-think it a bit. And I always did like the look of Bruticus...

... somebody just counted how often we see particular shirt colours and went off that, didn't they.

2005:
"My cabbages!"

Dude, they're Terminators. They've been Terminators from the very beginning when the Chaos Android first appeared in Space Crusade in 1990 - itself a lite board game sibling to Space Hulk, which was very consciously inspired by Aliens. That's just how GW rides (rode?) pop culture.

Alternate picture: you're a content farmer (human or bot) casting a wide net to find clickable content you can repost on your own account. Alternate alternate picture: you're a cutesy sleeper account farming followbacks, ready to flip to subtle or overt propaganda once you've got a big audience.

(Close second was distracting craft-level issues with phrasing, lettering etc.) I'm aware there's much bigger themes in there, eventually; I just found the packaging a massive turn off and bailed after 10 issues. I'd have been fine with it as a side line comic, just didn't land with me as the main.

IDK, possibly? I'd have thought the art style was far enough removed to avoid that - most of IDW was much 'toonier'. For me personally, the 1984 designs were the least of my issues; biggest was the feeling of just smashing toys together, big-name legacy characters getting violently hi-then-die'd.

Hm, wonder if that also implies that YT isn't showing them to many new people, or if it's just that the losses from regular viewers not recognising it more than offsets any new viewers brought in by the alternative versions. (FWIW the usual version worked on me when I first encountered it)

"Dunno how to tell you this my man, but there's a whole bunch of things that have won prestigious awards that I still don't like. You going to bat for every single Best Picture Oscar winner?"

*shrug* I gave them 10 issues or so after being unimpressed with the first one. I had issues of basic grammar with the dialogue, found the lettering awful, and felt the "brutal action" swerved between juvenile and oh-so-edgy. Not everything is for everyone. You like 'em, I don't, and that's fine.

👀🤞

Mind you, whatever you're using does look pretty shiny on the camera-facing bit of her hair!

What the prop people do, AIUI:
- Underlying surface needs to be *really* smooth
- Usually apply chrome lightly over gloss black first coat
- Clear colour coat over top to tint

Dunno if anyone's fully cracked it yet; the best I've seen have been Alclad chrome thru airbrush or Molotow chrome pens.

I swear they once moved it for a welly-throwing event.

Didn't have "spend the whole day trying and failing to repair my main computer after the boot drive suddenly died" on my bingo card, ugh.

And just DAYS after the MS deadline to sign a reinstalled Win10 up for extended support. 😡

I mean it literally means blood so...

Dialogue seems improved from when I bounced off it after the first half dozen or so DWJ issues - was having a lot of trouble with "that word doesn't work that way" on top of disliking the overall tone. I wish they'd fix the awful lettering for the TF characters though.

I worked for Stagecoach HQ for a little while years ago, on the data side. The reported actual MPG from those pre-hybrid buses was *shocking*.

Jeez, that escape tunnel.
I *still* shudder thinking about "the choice that was no choice".

From what I understand he was talking about in-house pattern matching / learning algos for auto-tweening, i.e. the good kind of AI. Not the generative LLM/GPT/theft machine type - though it's certainly to the latter's benefit to confusingly use "AI" for both.

Love the slight misalignment of the blue plate 😆

It's not *just* that I opened the microwave and found the cold cup of coffee I'd put in there this morning; it's that I would swear blind I'd drunk it at the time and taken the cup back out to wash.