Microsoft previews Copilot Appearance, a virtual character with real-time expressions, voice, and conversational memory, for some users in the US, UK, Canada (Tom Warren/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/713715/microsoft-copilot…
Accidental character design (wet spot from where I had placed my umbrella)
#FacesInPlaces
marvel_partnerships: Marvel character partnerships (2018)
A network of partnerships among characters in the Marvel comic book universe. Nodes are either heroes or villains, and edges represent partnerships between such characters. The partnership network was extracted from Wikipedia pages of these characters, which indicate partnership relations with other such pages.
This network has 350 nodes and 346 edges.
Tags: Social, Fictional, Unweighted
May 26: In your work, how much of an active character is your setting?
Active? Not a lot, but you still have to respect the environment, the city dangers, the cold wastes, and the desert for example. But that's not an active character, that's just the setting itself.
Series C, Episode 10 - Ultraworld
TARRANT: And because they said it we're supposed to believe them.
AVON: What else are we to believe? I told you they could take us out like that. [snaps fingers] Why should they bother to lie?
[Tarrant exits]
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/310/256
Just had an #acting #coaching client with a new piece of material find the last line of it totally anew as the character was deeper from our having worked on the speech. So cool to see.
#ActingCoach
tbh at first I almost stopped reading bc of the main character's casual misogyny. It is very male gaze-ish, but this book excels in giving you characters that make you feel overall uncomfy and still it sucks you in and you can't stop reading.
Is JoJo Siwa some kind of superhero character? What franchise does she belong to?
A good friend of mine has the Muppet character "Beaker" as his avatar. For reasons.
He offers me advice. I offer him advice. We chat. These are #ChatsWithBeaker
We’re learning how to create and share MEDIA in our “Creating Cool Websites” summer camp! Today we are adding AUDIO with Vocaroo to our “Favorite Animals”
Google Sites, and starting our “City Travel webpage” project with Adobe Express!
https://lessons.wesfryer.com/courses/sum…
Got the Roll Dice dialog box themed up about as nice as its going to get. Still might make it a touch smaller though.
#pathfinder2e #python #programming
May 26: In your work, how much of an active character is your setting?
Active? Not a lot, but you still have to respect the environment, the city dangers, the cold wastes, and the desert for example. But that's not an active character, that's just the setting itself.
'Series co-creator Trey Parker claims the team was told by their producers that they had to blur Trump's penis. They refused, and put eyes onto it to make it a "character", which wouldn't need to be blurred.'
Sermon on the 'Mount
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sermon_o
Just between us: I know that my daughter is named after a Nintendo character and I own that decision!
BUT my neighbour’s kid is named *Anakin*! He could turn to the dark side of toxic masculinity any time now!
moviegalaxies: Moviegalaxies, movies 410-466 (2018)
Social graphs for over 700 movies from the moviegalaxies.com website. Each node represents a character in a movie and each edge is a same-scene appearance between two characters in that movie. The weight gives the number of same-scene appearances. Networks are extracted from movie scripts automatically.
This network has 58 nodes and 201 edges.
Tags: Social, Fictional, Weighted
Character.AI hires Karandeep Anand, former Meta VP of Business Products, as CEO, 10 months after Google hired away the startup's co-founder and CEO Noam Shazeer (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/20/charact…
Record-breaking 'gigantic' deep-sea limpet species named after ONE PIECE character
https://phys.org/news/2025-07-gigantic-deep-sea-limpet-species.html
LZSE: an LZ-style compressor supporting $O(\log n)$-time random access
Hiroki Shibata, Yuto Nakashima, Yutaro Yamaguchi, Shunsuke Inenaga
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20107
Got the initial dice rolling implementation in the #Pathfinder2E character sheet. Not the prettiest, but it works pretty damned well. `[Ctrl] [D]` to open the dialog window, `[Esc]` to close, and `[Enter]` rolls the dice.
#programming
Denseness results for zeros and roots of unity in character tables
Alexander R. Miller
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15153 https://arxiv…
Series A, Episode 12 - Deliverance
JENNA: Basic respirator, that's about all. [Blake enters.]
BLAKE: The coordinates place both capsules within one square mile. [Hands Cally the coordinates.] We're going to put you down in the centre of the search area.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/112/59
How do you pronounce char?
Do you say car?
Do you say care - since it is the beginning of the word character?
or do you say it like the beginning of the word charcoal?
#programming #programmers
Moka Espresso
In 1933, Alfonso Bialetti introduced the Moka Express,
#coffee #espresso
Democratizing Game Modding with GenAI: A Case Study of StarCharM, a Stardew Valley Character Maker
Hamid Zand Miralvand, Mohammad Ronagh Nikghalb, Mohammad Darandeh, Abidullah Khan, Ian Arawjo, Jinghui Cheng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13951
Fictional depiction of mild self-harm, blood.
#WritersCoffeeClub July 23: Share a description you're proud of.
I've been writing a vampire novel lately. Here's a description from the scene when the vampire character proves to the human protagonist that he's been telling the truth:
—
"It's okay, Ada," he gave me a reassuring close-mouthed smile. "Just watch."
He slashed across his wrist in a motion that made the matching scars on my left arm hum. I covered them with my right hand, as if to calm my skin that I wasn't hurting it like that anymore. That we were merely watching someone else.
The cut on Theodore's arm turned red and angry, as expected. And then, just before the wound pooled up enough to bleed, it closed. I watched time run backwards as it disappeared, the skin stitching itself together to leave no trace of the violence imposed on it by the blade.
"What?" I walked up to him as he handed his wrist to me for inspection. I ran the tips of my fingers over the spot where the cut was mere moments before - but Theodore's skin, cold as always, was smooth and unharmed.
—
I'm reading Witch Hat Atelier right now (checked out of my local library) and it's top-notch amazing, including the plot, world-building, ethics, character designs, and of course three staggering artistic quality, both in raw illustration quality and artful compositions. It's not shy with playing with the manga form either, with lots of stunning unique panels and active gutters. I also just realized the "shounen manga for girls" formula I've been looking for (which is a formulation that's nearly as important for boys to have access to as girls). But I also really love the humor, including ridiculous puns that are often well-translated. In this scene, the main character Coco has forgotten she's using a mist form spell and ends up blowing away her mist-form body even as age rushes into a chaotic situation, leading to this pun.
#AmReading
marvel_partnerships: Marvel character partnerships (2018)
A network of partnerships among characters in the Marvel comic book universe. Nodes are either heroes or villains, and edges represent partnerships between such characters. The partnership network was extracted from Wikipedia pages of these characters, which indicate partnership relations with other such pages.
This network has 350 nodes and 346 edges.
Tags: Social, Fictional, Unweighted
An ab initio foundation model of wavefunctions that accurately describes chemical bond breaking
Adam Foster, Zeno Sch\"atzle, P. Bern\'at Szab\'o, Lixue Cheng, Jonas K\"ohler, Gino Cassella, Nicholas Gao, Jiawei Li, Frank No\'e, Jan Hermann
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19960
Forget password leaks, how about a website that has every combination of every 4-32 character passwords. (347,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (or 347 novemdecillion))
https://solst-ice.github.io/every-pass…
Counting Matrices in SL3(Z) with Fixed Completely Split Character Polynomial: Preliminary Upper Bounds
Igor Rivin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15129 https://…
🎮 Feeling like #N64 or #PlayStation but don't have a console? #RetroArch on Apple TV or other TV-Box is a real game-changer! Runs super smooth and brings nostalgia st…
Series A, Episode 12 - Deliverance
JENNA: Basic respirator, that's about all. [Blake enters.]
BLAKE: The coordinates place both capsules within one square mile. [Hands Cally the coordinates.] We're going to put you down in the centre of the search area.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/112/59
@… danke! Es ist super simpel und kommt der Programmiererseele sehr entgegen. Fühlt sich eher nach skripten als nach setzen an. Und es warnoch nie irgendwas underfull! 😁
Stecke aber auch noch nicht supertief drin. In
CharaConsist: Fine-Grained Consistent Character Generation
Mengyu Wang, Henghui Ding, Jianing Peng, Yao Zhao, Yunpeng Chen, Yunchao Wei
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11533
Chrono Odyssey (Playtest)
Requested access to CO's Playtest this weekend and got the notification on Friday I was in. Installed and launched the game. Game defaulted to Epic settings. Left it there and started the game. Right off the bat, the cinematics had strange artifacting on them. Almost looked like the Steam browser in the background was ghosting into the game somehow.
Created a character. Decent customization. Male doesn't look absurdly buff. Femme isn't overl…
In the #ISE2025 lecture today we were introducing our students to the concept of distributional semantics as the foundation of modern large language models. Historically, Wittgenstein was one of the important figures in the Philosophy of Language stating thet "The meaning of a word is its use in the language."
Just picked this one up from the #library:
Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter by Kate Conger
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/209543060-character-limi…
Series B, Episode 04 - Horizon
CALLY: [Enters] Orac, where did you get this information? [Holds up a data card. Avon takes it]
ORAC: I was instructed to obtain anything relating to the planet. The data was obtained by cross-referencing prisoner and execution lists. It is standard procedure.
https://blake.torpidity.n…
"…give a formerly flat character some _single defining trait_, obsession, or problem to deal with. Just this one weird-yet-relatable thing. And suddenly, this character and the scenes they were in would come alive."
- Tony Tost
https://practical.substack.com/p/the-m
what is a golang? probably this:
What makes a show "adult"?
How do you make a character-driven story?
How does one tell a riveting story when the audience already knows the outcome?
▶️ Shut up and watch Andor - Bookborn
https://youtube.com/watch?v=alljOrUgHoY&si=iLPRabImYbUp6S…
Analyzing Character Representation in Media Content using Multimodal Foundation Model: Effectiveness and Trust
Evdoxia Taka, Debadyuti Bhattacharya, Joanne Garde-Hansen, Sanjay Sharma, Tanaya Guha
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14799
Truly saddened that McAuslan has replaced their only world-class #beer (St-Ambroise Oatmeal Stout) with an extremely dumbed down Irish stout with nearly no roast character, and a much thinner body.
I totally get that it wasn’t selling as well as Guinness, but attempting to compete there can’t possibly actually make business sense. Guinness drinkers are still going to order Guinness.
The Oatmea…
Popular across social networks, these profile pictures are designed to represent you! Tell me your style! Would you like your character to be holding Coffee, a Book, or an iPhone? Wearing a Panda suit? Sure, you got it!
#Design #Illustration #Portfolio
Digital rights organizations urge the FTC to investigate Character.AI and Meta's "unlicensed practice of medicine facilitated" by therapy AI chatbots (Samantha Cole/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/ai-therapy-bots-meta-character-ai-ftc-comp…
Replaced article(s) found for cs.LG. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.LG/new
[3/8]:
- Beyond Win Rates: A Clustering-Based Approach to Character Balance Analysis in Team-Based Games
Haokun Zhou
𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐧𝐨𝐰: multiplayer 𝐵𝑒𝑎𝑡 𝑆𝑎𝑏𝑒𝑟 -- practicing seriously to get my score up
#games #multiplayer #sliceoflife #vr
Superconductivity in kagome metals due to soft loop-current fluctuations
Daniel J. Schultz, Grgur Palle, Yong Baek Kim, Rafael M. Fernandes, J\"org Schmalian
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16892
Series B, Episode 04 - Horizon
CALLY: [Enters] Orac, where did you get this information? [Holds up a data card. Avon takes it]
ORAC: I was instructed to obtain anything relating to the planet. The data was obtained by cross-referencing prisoner and execution lists. It is standard procedure.
https://blake.torpidity.n…
Yes, the only video game I play is #Warframe!
MR 26 – Wisp Is Love, Wisp Is Live
Ballas is dead, Margulis’s mercy, Lotus’s final kiss.
But Kaya Velasco? She is eternal.
Ballas gone, but she outlives sentient beings.
BALLAS DEAD, NOT KAYA! 😘 💋
I don’t care if she’s code and pixels, my heart’s got no patch notes!
They can’t stop me from loving a digital …
A friend of mine, after watching « Lucifer » on my recommendation, shared this nugget of wisdom: the Lucifer character archetype is basically Ryō Saeba from « City Hunter ». I agree.
#anime #series
Series A, Episode 11 - Bounty
CHENEY: Hey! Get out. Everybody get out. [Blake slips up behind him and knocks him down, and they all drive away.]
CHENEY: Cheney to all units, this is Blue Mobilization, I repeat, this is Blue Mobilization.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/111/287 B7B3
Introduced an #acting #coaching client to new material and so cool to see them finding the character. The specifics already started to emerge on the second reading.
#ActingCoach
Romance, Relief, and Regret: Teen Narratives of Chatbot Overreliance
Mohammad 'Matt' Namvarpour, Brandon Brofsky, Jessica Medina, Mamtaj Akter, Afsaneh Razi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15783
Any email address is a valid email address once it has at least one character before the @, one character after the @ and a character after the full stop (.)
You should _not_ be doing any checks beyond that. (Unless the domain name is a known spammy domain/TLD, of course, but that doesn't appear to be the case here)
My email address is a 1 character before the @, 2 characters after the @ and 2 letters after the full stop(.)
It is valid.
#noxp
I'm not really a fan of #Spiderman. Spiderverse was a great movie experience. But before that? Not really into the character nor the movies.
This look at the evolution of the web-slinging effects, however, made me appreciate the franchise a lot more.
Character.AI rolls out features like AvatarFX for video generation, plus Streams and Scenes for creating and sharing videos with characters on a new social feed (Amanda Silberling/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/02/chat
Have y'all who are into anime seen Kinnikuman Perfect Origin Arc on Netflix? Kinda reminds me of Dragonball, but with more wrestling - and I'm not really into either of those things, but I love Kinnikuman. Go figure. It's based on the manga by Yudetamago (ゆでたまご) and some of the character designs were used by Bandai and then Mattel for the M.U.S.C.L.E. figures in the 80s. As they say, boosts appreciated for reach. I'm super curious.
I mean I knew that Musk was a giant loser but you won't believe how pathetic he can get. I am about to be finished reading "Character Limit" and the stories in there are something else. He is a small, damaged, complete loser of human being. wow. So much external power and money, yet he is a miserable twat. So many stories... will have to attach some here
"I want to establish a wide range and play all kinds of parts. It's that sort of acting career I really respect. I like to turn a sharp left from whatever I've done before because that keeps me awake. That's why I want to be an actor - I don't want to play endless variations on one character."
-Tim Curry
#acting
Watched "Convoy" by Sam Peckinpah (1978). What an interesting window into another era. Production-wise it was certainly a feat: dozens of trucks, locations, helicopters, stunts.
Story-wise it's "dudes sticking it to the man". The main character, however, doesn't want to start nor lead a rebellion. But the people following him project their own struggles onto him and are part of the convoy for a variety of reasons. Media tries to shine a light on this. Smart!…
"I want to establish a wide range and play all kinds of parts. It's that sort of acting career I really respect. I like to turn a sharp left from whatever I've done before because that keeps me awake. That's why I want to be an actor - I don't want to play endless variations on one character."
-Tim Curry
#acting
Series B, Episode 12 - The Keeper
GOLA: Guards, bring the other fool back up. Be well my love. [To Tara] Will she be well?
TARA: [Keeping a straight face] Oh yes.
GOLA: Good.
JENNA: [Looking at the amulet again] Oh, I'm sorry, it is forbidden.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/212/417…
Series A, Episode 03 - Cygnus Alpha
BLAKE: [Whispers] Vila. [Pause, then louder] Vila. [Pause] Gan. [Pause] Gan.
GAN: [Moves to bars] Blake.
BLAKE: What is it? What's the matter with everybody?
GAN: How did you get here?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/103/377 …
Series D, Episode 12 - Warlord
ZEEONA: I didn't intend to. I go home tomorrow aboard their freighter. Tarrant will take me.
[Corridor in Scorpio base. Zukan and Avon are walking along.]
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/412/158 B7B3
Series A, Episode 05 - The Web
CALLY: You're very practical.
[Decimas are exploring the area immediately outside the laboratory. Inside, Geela is making adjustments to the console.]
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/105/394 B7B5
Series A, Episode 06 - Seek-Locate-Destroy
RAI: Yes, Supreme Commander.
SERVALAN: Let them know, too, that any lack of cooperation, any hesitation in responding to an order, will be treated as mutiny. Let them know I have said this. Dismissed. [Rai clicks his heels and exits. There is a bleep from the comm. Servalan ignores it, looking pensive. The comm bleeps again and Servalan reacts this time.]
#Blakes7 Series D, Episode 06 - Headhunter
TARRANT: [V.O. over comm.] Muller can't.
AVON: Well, we'll give him a refund on his ticket. Just get that ship back, Tarrant. We'll worry about the details then. Out!
https://
Series A, Episode 10 - Breakdown
BLAKE: Jenna, you take my place. Brief Cally.
[Computer room, Gan tries to pull piping from wall]
AVON: Gan, no! You'll break the computer links, we'll never get them started. [Avon tries to stop Gan, who thows him off]
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/110/295
Series A, Episode 06 - Seek-Locate-Destroy
RONTANE: With respect, Supreme Commander, we are aware of the facts. They are simply that with all the resources that the Federation can call upon, this one vulnerable, lucky man is still free to cause havoc.
SERVALAN: You have some criticism of my handling of this matter, Secretary Rontane?
htt…