Interesting Links for 05-02-2024

[andrewducker]

1. RTD Reveals Series 14 of Doctor Who Was Planned to Air Much Sooner, But Hit By FX Delays

(tags:drwho TV cgi )

2. The Apple Vision Pro's Killer App Is … Kitchen Timers

(tags:time cooking augmentedreality apple )

3. Autistic brains create 42% more information at rest

(tags:autism brain )

4. Alan Moore's "Big Numbers" planning spreadsheet

(tags:comics alanmoore planning spreadsheet )

5. Playing dance mat games can help prevent falls in older people

(tags:dancing games age )

6. Finance worker pays out $25 million after video call with deepfake 'chief financial officer'

(tags:ai fraud video )

7. Nearly 1 in 4 American Adults Who Get COVID-19 Suffer From Long COVID

(tags:Pandemic disability doom )

8. It's now 128 years since we discovered The Greenhouse Effect

(tags:globalwarming co2 history )

9. A newly discovered letter from Tolkien sheds light on Balrogs and Legolas

(tags:Tolkien funny lotr )

Comments

[simont]

I bought a dance mat a while back with the thought of using it mainly as exercise (rather than mainly as gaming). It broke almost immediately. Shoddy product quality, I thought – all I did was jump up and down on it!

[andrewducker]

Hah!

You'd think they'd be good for that, wouldn't you?

I should look into whether there are such things for The Switch. As my children would no douby enjoy it a lot.

[helen_keeble]

So there are currently no actual dance mat games for any major console, but you can pick up a cheap PC-compatible USB dance mat on Amazon/ebay and use it with free open source ddr emulators. Stepmania is the most well known one, but Project Outfox is a bit more up to date.

The emulators don’t come with any music/dance tracks for obvious reasons, but it’s relatively easy to find vast archives of every ddr/beatmania/etc track ever made, plus copious fan tracks.

The cheap usb dance mats aren’t great, but they’re fine for casual use (especially if you duct tape them to the floor or a piece of hardboard. Unfortunately for anything better, you’re looking at £500+ on a giant custom made arcade-quality dance booth.

[andrewducker]

Thank you, that's really helpful.

[helen_keeble]

I fell down this rabbit hole six months ago with my own kids, after running across a random (modern, imported from Japan!) DDR machine in an unassuming arcade. We had a brief but very enjoyable obsession with it, where I got to almost impress my 13 year old by still being able to ace Butterfly on hard difficulty, 20+ years later. :D

[andrewducker]

You never know when your skills will come in useful!

(I shall have to hope that Rock Band makes a comeback in about a decade)

[helen_keeble]

Rock Band only just stopped active support! The very last dlc was released a few weeks ago. They’ve been putting out new songs every single week since release of Rock Band 4…

Of course, that’s not terribly helpful as the wireless Xbox controllers now go for 3-4x retail price second hand on eBay, and are mostly falling to pieces. However, excitingly there’s meant to be a new 3rd party compatible guitar controller in the works, for release later this year IIRC.

[helen_keeble]

Thank _you_ for triggering one of my mostly abandoned special interests, thus giving me a warm glow of satisfaction at Being Useful!

[andrewducker]

It is lovely to get even a few minutes thinking about something special.

[jack]

Ooh, also grateful to know. Last time I looked I was quite interested in something like that, but I only found official ones I'd need to buy a whole console for, or knock-off ones that looked like the games weren't very fun even for just "following the directions to very misc music".

[helen_keeble]

Project Outfox is a fun open source project because it aims to emulate _all_ rhythm action games. So as well as DDR mode it can emulate Guitar Hero, Rock Band, that weird old Gamecube game with the bongos, Taiko no whatever-it's-called, etc.

It can take a bit of futzing with settings to make the USB dance mats work on current laptop hardware. I couldn't get them to work at all on my new Macbook with the M2 Max silicon (due to all sorts of security levels Apple introduced to the driver stack), but it was fine on an older one. I gather it's easier to set up on a standard Windows or Linux machine.

I really wish dance mat games would get a revival, because they're tons of fun! Waving Switch remotes randomly in Just Dance just isn't the same...

[channelpenguin]

I hate games and can't dance, but I am not allowed to do martial arts any more, so i was hoping that there might be mileage in this concept. I like the idea of a standalone device to plug into the TV, very very old school, like me! I am small and light, maybe I would be lucky...

[andrewducker]

There are dance games for The Switch, but no dance mat ones. The existing ones you need to put a controller in your pocket or hold it in your hand for it to detect motion.

But elsewhere in this thread there's a helpful comment about PC ones.

[helen_keeble]

You can get standalone plg into tv dance mats, but they’re way over priced and not very good. Most of them are just making up a stream of random arrows to some chiptunes rather than having any type of choreographed tracks.

I’ve seen people make some lovely homebrew ddr consoles with Raspberry Pi and Stepmania open source software though!

[simont]

Honestly, I might prefer random arrows and not-especially-memorable tunes to the fixed dance sequences in DDR-type games. One thing I did find while playing them is that they make you pay a lot of attention to the music, because it's your cue that this or that hard bit is coming up – and that means those tunes will earworm you more or less for ever. Even now, a decade and a half after I last played Dancing Stage Euromix, several of its songs will start playing in my head on repeat if I see one triggering word from the lyrics.

[channelpenguin]

Oh gosh, I never thought of that. As a hobby musician, songwriter, performer that could be HORRIFIC for me. My brain is insanely good at replaying music at me (though happily not always exactly, so I get creativity out of it). I don't think I want THAT sort of music in my mental mix, even though being cued by it would make the moves easier because it would likely take me only one go through to memorise them...

[andrewducker]

A Pi, stacked with your own choice of music, sounds like a great idea.

[channelpenguin]

When I get another life to have the time... Sigh.

[channelpenguin]

Though anything that involves Pi appeals...

Nearly 1 in 4 American Adults Who Get COVID-19 Suffer From Long COVID

[jack]

Oh gosh, that is a lot. And only a few times less for "non-trivial long covid". Although I don't know if there's a cut-off for "life-semi-permanently-impairing long covid". I'm trying to look at the numbers and see how much of that might have been from the first wave, and I'm not sure. I feel like I'm getting an impression from anecdotal accounts that people being permanently-ish impaired is less common now most people have been vaccinated or had the disease at least once, but that "low energy for 1-3 months" is more common than I'd realised.

Re: Nearly 1 in 4 American Adults Who Get COVID-19 Suffer From Long COVID

[channelpenguin]

I would also like to know these things. But I'm not sure how much energy I have for the outrage then depression that nothing will be done to prevent further damage.

A newly discovered letter from Tolkien sheds light on Balrogs and Legolas

[jack]

I hoped there was a newly discovered letter until I saw the tags :)

I think my opinion on Balrogs is that I think Gandalf fought a balrog who didn't have wings, but if someone thinks balrogs have demon wings some of the time, that seems in-character for them.

Re: A newly discovered letter from Tolkien sheds light on Balrogs and Legolas

[anef]

I was buying it until I saw the second paragraph.

Re: A newly discovered letter from Tolkien sheds light on Balrogs and Legolas

[andrewducker]

Many people would have fallen for it without the second paragraph.

42%

[mair_in_grenderich]

I read (or skimmed, at least) the article and I STILL don't know what the comparison is with: the autistic brain not at rest, or the non-autistic brain also at rest...

Re: 42%

[andrewducker]

From context I'd say compared to non-autistic brains at rest.

Re: 42%

[mair_in_grenderich]

funnily enough I was leaning towards the other interpretation, but I guess you're most likely right

#3 autistic brains

[mellowtigger]

Interesting. I don't find it at all surprising. I've written many times about what I call "permutation exploration", and it fits well with what they describe.