Tootfinder

The New York Times, AP, RCFP, and other media organizations back an effort to block a new Texas law requiring app stores to verify users' ages (Wendy Davis/MediaPost)
https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/411151/new-yor…

New York Times, AP, Others Ask Court To Block Texas Law Restricting App Downloads
"The Act renders wide swaths of speech at the very heart of the First Amendment's protection presumptively off limits to minors when accessed through apps -- a critical channel of distribution for news organizations," news organizations argue in a proposed friend-of-the-court brief filed Wednesday with U.S. District Court Judge Robert Pitman in Austin.

An absolutely extraordinary look at how to improve rendering of ASCII art, first in static images, then in motion. As he gets into contrast enhancement for complex grayscale animations, the vector lookup works starts to be parallel to work happening with language models. Just an excellent narration. https://alexharri.com/blog/ascii-…

ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering
A look at how I used shape vectors to achieve sharp, high-quality ASCII rendering.

How Toy Story, released 30 years ago, changed animation, relying on 117 computers running rendering software 24/7, as modern animation now appears artificial (Maya Phillips/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/movies/toy-story-anniversary-animatio…

‘Toy Story’ at 30: Animation Has Never Been the Same
The Pixar Era kicked off 30 years ago with the first installment of the popular franchise. It’s given us countless hits, but something has also been lost.

CAG-Avatar: Cross-Attention Guided Gaussian Avatars for High-Fidelity Head Reconstruction
Zhe Chang, Haodong Jin, Yan Song, Hui Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.14844 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.14844 https://arxiv.org/html/2601.14844
arXiv:2601.14844v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Creating high-fidelity, real-time drivable 3D head avatars is a core challenge in digital animation. While 3D Gaussian Splashing (3D-GS) offers unprecedented rendering speed and quality, current animation techniques often rely on a "one-size-fits-all" global tuning approach, where all Gaussian primitives are uniformly driven by a single expression code. This simplistic approach fails to unravel the distinct dynamics of different facial regions, such as deformable skin versus rigid teeth, leading to significant blurring and distortion artifacts. We introduce Conditionally-Adaptive Gaussian Avatars (CAG-Avatar), a framework that resolves this key limitation. At its core is a Conditionally Adaptive Fusion Module built on cross-attention. This mechanism empowers each 3D Gaussian to act as a query, adaptively extracting relevant driving signals from the global expression code based on its canonical position. This "tailor-made" conditioning strategy drastically enhances the modeling of fine-grained, localized dynamics. Our experiments confirm a significant improvement in reconstruction fidelity, particularly for challenging regions such as teeth, while preserving real-time rendering performance.
toXiv_bot_toot

#30DayMapChallenge 🗺️ Day 6️⃣: Dimensions
I decided to use time as my third dimension and created a simplified animated map showing the Earth’s terminator (the line dividing day and night) around the #Philippines 🇵🇭 at 6 p.m. throughout the year.
Since the Philippines is very near …

Die IT so heute morgen: "Oh, ab heute 18:00 laufen übrigens alle HR-Anwendungen nicht mehr, bis Anfang Januar 2026 kein Zugriff. Wenn ihr eure Daten z.B. Lohnblätter braucht, müsst ihr die heute noch runterladen."
Um 12 war der Link auf das Lohnabrechnungssystem bereits entfernt. 🤬

This is so much more of a shitshow than even I realized. Alan Wong was making major amendments and sending them to his prospective co-sponsors in literally the last *hour* before the deadline.
https://missionlocal.org/2026/01/sf-great-highway-ballot-measure-…

Roadkill: S.F. measure to reintroduce cars to Great Highway ‘crashes and burns’
San Francisco requires only four supervisors to put a ballot measure before voters. That low bar was too high for Supervisor Alan Wong.

the team behind material for mkdocs have built a new static site generator
i open their webpage and it lags my entire pc with, i think, this background animation of "moving lines". taking a screenshot took several seconds and chromium stopped rendering the ui at one point
any idiot can make an efficient static site. it takes pure brilliance to make it inefficient (why does it need 1 GB of GPU memory?!)

Today's open-source part of our VFX Pipeline is #mongodb
We're using the Deadline render manager and it came with mongodb as its backend. Over time I've started to use it for other pipeline needs: keeping track of dependencies between comps and cg (and between Houdini scenes and their abc/usd files) for example. This helps a lot with consolidating and pruning the huge amount of …

Welcome to #TextModeTuesday! For the next few weeks I'll be posting some projects & experiments related to this just spontaneously made up hashtag. If you've got something related to interesting text-based art/experiments, patterns, ASCII-art, ANSI-art etc. please share — the more, the merrier...
To start with, here's an experiment from a few years ago to demonstrat…