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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • FaceTrackNoIR. Head trackers for Flight Sims are unreasonably expensive. So you just give the FaceTrackNoIR guys $4, get a download link in your mail (which you can keep forever), slap some webcam on your monitor from 2004 and boom, head tracking. It’s a fairly decent piece of software that gets the job done.

    Additionally you get a bunch of extras like, smartphone compatibility, and a bunch of plugins for common head trackers, if you don’t want to use their own software.

    And it doesn’t do any AI garbagio with the face recognition, just good old fashioned algorithmic pixel tracking. All local.














  • I think there’s a way simpler economic reason. If you have an ensemble of actors, the more scenes they have the more you have to pay. So killing them of one by one is an easy way for a studio to save money (let’s not forget, the US has an Union for their actors). Also we live in the age of sequels so having only a minimal cast transfer between movies means way less contract renegotiations. At least I think it started that way and then just grew into a cultural school of filmmaking in Hollywood. It just became the way you do things.

    It might also be an artifact of the popularity of slasher movies from the early 2000s’ where the whole point was to kill characters.


  • Prevalence of Death in Hollywood movies.

    Seriously, how many times does some side character in a Hollywood movie escape death by an inch then looks at the protagonist and smiles, only to be instantly killed anyway.
    Or the fact that if there’s a group of people in a horror movie, only the main protagonist and their estranged love interest or child will survive till the end.
    Or if the protagonist is shown to have a lovely quiet life with their love interest, they will lose them in the next 5 minutes.

    I can excuse the protagonist mowing down some unnamed goons, but Hollywood treats their named side characters as disposable garbage too.

    Watch foreign movies and you’ll get what I’m saying. There, a single character death is usually a big deal and a major pivot point for the story.

    I’ve recently started watching more biographies and it’s so much more enjoyable knowing that a character isn’t going to suddenly get hit by a bus for having a good time.