Decipher SciFi

Removing the manual work of 3d tracking in video production. CamTrackAR. Smartphone camera software processing innovations. Making creative tools more widely available. Grousing about Adobe’s overwhelming market-share and user-hostile subscription model. Hoping for a shift.

Dark Sky, the honestly best of all weather apps, was bought by Apple and have shut down their Android app. It is a sad day. Open government weather data APIs enabling innovation. Machine learning weather models. Hyper-local extrapolation and push notifications. Weather forecasting/reporting as a demonstration of probabilities.

We took the bullet for our website visitors and implemented a site search on DecipherMedia.tv in JavaScript! The result: we still do not enjoy JavaScript. But we do have search! Future functionality improvements. Here is our internal documentation. And a reminder that our whole site is open source and available on GitLab!

Our continuing fascination in seeing Doom on more things. And the less it makes sense, the better! Doom on Windows 95 in Minecraft, because why not.

Game feel the book. Creating a satisfying input/response loop when all you’re really doing is mashing buttons. Vlambeer on mobile game “juice.” The relative difficulty of providing good “feel” on mobile games with a uniformly smooth display as an input device. Putting overtime into the design of basic repetitive game mechanics, e.g. Mario or God of War. New frontiers in game feel.

A wonderful, simple, directly productive introduction to core concepts: Scratch! Proud parent moments.

Apparently The Passion is getting a sequel? The wackiness of ecclesiastical minutiae. Discovering more schisms in Christianity.

X-Men as the dawn of comic book blockbuster cinema. The un-comicbook-ness of previous Marvel adaptations like Blade and Punisher. X-Men as the gateway drug to the language of comic book storytelling. Perfect casting Patrick Steward and Huge Jackedman.

Blockbuster budgets and making getting swole your full-time job. Kumail Nanjiani and Rob Mcelhenney being honest. Muscle cows and muscle dogs

Look, it’s not that hard. All you need to do is lift weights six days a week, stop drinking alcohol, don’t eat anything after 7pm, don’t eat any carbs or sugar at all, in fact just don’t eat anything you like, get the personal trainer from Magic Mike, sleep nine hours a night, run three miles a day, and have a studio pay for the whole thing over a six to seven month span. I don’t know why everyone’s not doing this. It’s a super realistic lifestyle and an appropriate body image to compare oneself to. #hollywood

-@robmcelhenney

Mutations: usually do nothing or are bad. But also sometimes are good! Exploring the high variance in mutations in the world of X-Men. Picking the best X-Men power: raw force production vs longevity.

The honey badger of the north!

Lichtenberg figures. Making puberty even more awkward. New-mutant death rates. Norwegian reindeer mass lightning death.

The reality of most hacking: social engineering. Hackers vs Sneakers. The 90s as the best period for hacking in fiction, back when people understood even less how computers worked. A review of Hacking in media.

Free as in speech, free as in beer, etc. Freedom-respecting social network alternatives and the dream of critical mass. Mastodon. How the USGS uses Twitter data to track earthquakes. The impossibility of competing with YouTube. Appreciating Free software and open source and collaboration.

Ranting about a user experience failure with Instacart. Text encoding, Unicode, emoji, and non-Latin writing systems. Emoji standardization. Lesbian emoji activism and the new beaver emoji!

Stephen Wolfram and Arrival Heptapod logogram creation. Ravens. Figuring out how to spell “Bomberman” in Heptatpod.

Dungeons and Dragons is fun! The positives and negatives of play-by-post. A review of our (Chris’) failure with Decipher RPG. A desire to try again! Liam Ginty.

Monster Care Squad: A Ghibli-inspired tabletop adventure of healing Monsters and solving local problems in the gentle world of Ald-Amura

“Percent” is literally just latin for “per hundred” and Christopher was this many years old when he realized this! And then we learn about per mille and per myriad and have to promise not to start using them.

A rewarding pun-tastic etymological romp. Also it was really tasty!

Sanic. 8-bit nostalgia. Remember the Mario movie? Imagining other possible Genesis-era ports. Chris is eagerly awaiting the film adaptation of Pigskin Footbrawl.

Sega licensing sports for title recognizability. Sega finding a mascot in Sonic and dominating the console space, momentarily.

Sega does what Nintendon’t

Unused Sega mascot candidates, including extra-mustachey Teddy Roosevelt! Sonic character design history. Consistency in appearance and attitude over decades and how to undo it all in your first draft of your movie. Don’t forget creepy-ass original movie sonic with his creepy human teeth. VFX responsibilities and character re-renderings. Tiny blue Godzilla.

Release the butthole cut!

-Christopher

Sonic’s smagic speed powers. Comic book power levels where they expand to fit the plot. The speed of sound and relationship with atmospheric density. Creating “frozen time” action scenes. Setting the bar at Quicksilver. Sometimes, you can only care about the science as much as the movie does. Supersonic vs hypersonic vs ultrasonic and the mixing of and Latin. Running loops.

A long-term human domestication collaborator. The lovable version of a porcupine. Spikey defense mechanisms. Covering yourself in other animals’ poop for fun and profit. Allocoprophagy.

Enabled introversion. Social anxiety and human avoidance: online ordering abd contactless food delivery.

Hoping for normalization of mask-wearing to confine your illness ot yourself. The popularization of medical masks for the lay population in China around the “Manchurian plague.” Masks failing to combat person-recognition (or probably even facial recognition 😥).

That one time we did a viking episode with The other Lee. Our best historical understanding of Viking grooming standards, and how that very much differs from out contemporary depictions. BUT! The contemporary depictions are really fun so it’s ok. 👌

The problem-solvingest birds. Ravens and other corvids and their respective quality as tattoo-subject candidates. Planning ravens on the chest/shoulders. Maybe a jackdaw sleeve?

For real, fuck those guys. Cultural appropriation.

Welcome to the Decipher Media colorectal new update. Christopher’s incoming bidet. Fiber supplmentation and chasing the ghost poop dragon. Young men living on Mountain Dew and waffles.

Demodex never poop and then explode with poop and die

Testosterone levels over time. Testosterone replacement therapy. Dancing - fun for the whole family! Strength nostalgia.

Again with the motion sickness.

The site is now open source! Go take a look if you’re into Jekyll or Ruby or Gitlab or generally just podcasting the hard way.

The unqalified Spanish art resotrers are at it again! And don’t forget the OG: [Monkey Jesus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecce_Homo_(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecce_Homo_%28Mart%C3%ADnez_and_Gim%C3%A9nez,_Borja%29). Hanlon’s razor.

As per our Colossus Roundtable: watch Person of Interest!

The Black Wall Street Massacre. Detecting buried remains with ground-penetrating radar.

Doing splodey blue-balls on a city vs dropping a squid. “Saving” humanity. Narcissism. Super-genius space-prison escape plans. Spaceships vs submarines. Catapults, trebuchets, and escape velocity.

Ol’ bluey. Creating life. Exploring the universe when you can be everywhere and everywhen at once. How and why would anyone want to blue themselves this way? The Dr Manhattan formula from human to complete lack of concern for humanity.

Chemical VR. An alternative route to Alzheimer’s treatment.

Not the sweet and sour delicious dessert, but the computing devices. Kodi, Smart Mirrors, retro arcade machines, and low-power cheap servers in the closet. Apple moving to ARM. The next generation of game consoles. SSDs.

Chapter-markers. Auto-generated subtitles and “free” transcription.

The sad story of The Memeseeks Box. Learning how to frame what may be your “failures.”

Both a cleaning tool and a defense against madness in the presence of eldritch horrors. “Because they’re made of metal, and robots are strong.” Using the Roomba as a parenting tool. Deebot Ozmo.

It’s everywhere. Referring to our Wall-E episode with heaping portions of appreciation and concern for plastics.

Withholding the sale of facial recognition tech from police. Bezos the nigh-trillionaire being able to afford his own ISS.

“Cartoon Room House” used in episode image background, by mixrobastudio/pixabay/CC-0

Garbage in/garbage out with ML training. Whether or not you allow the user to protect the driver at the expense of the pedestrian, those deicisions are still being made. The advantage of rolling blacked-out rooms on the commute. Hacking autonomous vehicles.

Job competition in “knowledge work” when people live functionally infinitely and tirelessly on electricity. Loopholes for the wealthy.

Electrical mapping of the brain. Desctructive neural scanning. Do we even have any other options for mapping our brain structure? Brain damage and resuscitation.

Creating immortal and infinite digital slaves. Multiple instantiation of persons. Hormonal simulation. Physical, mental, and emotional growth when your life is “virtual.” Living longer and learning not to be the horrible old racist grandpa. Sense of self over time when uploaded. What virtual conditions could be so bad that it’s not worth “living” anymore? Waiting for democratized afforable versions of necessary technologies. “ROM hacking” your reality.

Sharding (not sharting) your virtual worlds. Manipulating and filtering memories into re-experience. VR suit options: piezoelectric, pneumatic, and TENS.

Standing desks are great and all, but the real flexibility innovation is not sitting in a car for hours every day. Inventing the “standing car.” Hip adductors like steel bands.

Just Dance.Video game bodily control abstractions. DDR. GTA V. Video game scale and budget madness. GTA 2 demo nostalgia with co-bff Joe.

Polymath went from game engines to cars to actual rockets to VR to AGI, and we wish him great luck on that last one. Doom nostalgia.

Yay! Space! Dramatically lowering the cost of space travel. Fancy new flight suits. Are touch screens a good idea? Space travel automation expectations.

Enjoying the early fight and chase scenes in Extraction. The use of language and subtitles for storytelling. Video.

It’s expensive! And if oil is ever expensive enough to justify the cost of drilling in Challenger Deep then by golly you start investing in alternative power instead. Semi-submersible deep-water drilling platforms. Drillships. We drill kinda deep in the ocean but like, not actually deep. Record drill depths and the vast gulf from there to the Mariana Trench.

Gravity meets Aliens. Pressures and temperatures that are more deadly than getting spaced out of an airlock. The deepest hole humans have ever drilled was barely deeper than Challenger Deep is under the surface of the ocean.

Nitrogen narcosis: it’s bad for you! Atmospheric mixture issues under pressure. Sealab I, II, and III. Aquanatical research. Sperm whales get the bends. Oh no your suit some kind of exploded. Monsters of the deep. Deep sea gigantism.

Engineering against 16,000 psi and freezing temperatures. Concrete strengths and saltwater issues.

Exothermic implosions - they’re like explosions, but backwards! Pistol shrimp. Long-range radio communications through water. ELF. Past discussions on the matter. Dumb infrared.