Social psychologists must be having "fun"

Something I was talking about with hellofriendsiminthedark made me think about I really don't have the language to describe some of the processes I see online, where someone is exposed to traumatising and distressing material on the internet and starts acting out in an effort to make themselves feel safe again, often exacerbated by an unsupportive environment, and then gets dragged into the orbit of someone charismatic and awful.

Like, how do you talk about someone like that? They're not necessarily radicalised, because their need for control often ends up wholly internalised, and you can't call them abuse victims because the "abusive relationship" was parasocial and often wholly one-sided in practice.

How do we talk about someone who's a survivor of an internet cult where the algorithm and an unwitting filter bubble was the key component of the social isolation? How do you talk about emotional abuse when the abusive element is decentralised into a mob?

CGI coming onto its own as an artistic tool

I've been talking about Arc System Works' work towards perfecting the limited animation look of anime using 3D assents, and wondering when the style might get adopted by animation studios because it's at the level where it's really starting to take on a beauty of its own, and I feel like I might not need to wonder anymore, because I've been watching Kimetsy no Yaiba and



Hahahahaa



Oohohohohoo

Kimetsu no Yaiba is, in general, an astonishingly good-looking show. The studio working on it, Ufotable, has an excellent understanding of lighting, overexposure and bloom, and their effects work on Fate and Kara no Kyokai is in my opinion what really elevated the art of those shows to the level it was at. Kimetsu no Yaiba continues the trend, but the art style it uses is a lot bolder and dramatic with its shadows, so they get to really show off "inky" hyperreal look light and shadow can take on if they're well-utilised.

Along with their usual effects work, Kimetsu no Yaiba mostly uses a lot of simulation and particle work. If my eyes aren't completely incorrect, they also occasionally use 3D models for characters, but they either have a finishing pass to "roughen" the motion through hand-drawn work, or simply hide the seams using heavy post-processing and cellshading, like they do on the particle systems they use for some of the effects. They then layer on generated and hand-drawn stuff, which hides the seams even further.

It's such a competent and beautiful combination and it's super impressive that not only did they realise the art style (which is also intensely fluid in the manga) lends itself to this kind of effects work, but then to take that concept and actually apply it consistently and in a way that doesn't look cheap or artificial next to the hand-drawn effects work is just really, really, incredibly impressive.

Based on what little cell-shaded work I've done, I've always maintained that the problem with most 3D-for-2D stuff is simply not having the correct kind of shaders and going too hard on the framerate. Especially in 3D anime, this feels like it might be an issue of production culture and the concept of "sakuga" not translating very well to 3D, as generated inbetween frames will never be as composed as the ones made by hand, and it's nice to see that I'm not entirely off about that :D