Well, this commenter didn’t say much, but this other dude sure qualifies. I’m not going to try to imitate his “dumb person’s idea of how a smart person writes” style, but his argument largely came down to “It is OBJECTIVELY bad that this season of a crime series that has always included supernatural elements that was…

I appreciate your comment and I do think the show could benefit from more supporting characters of substance, but given how prevalent paper thin female supporting characters have been on TV for the past 80-years, I think the show can succeed just fine even if the only real heroes are female. 

I’m enjoying the small town vibes, which is somewhere between Fargo and Mayberry. That’s a new dimension that, paired with the gothic horror, is helping keep this show fresh. Also, I would totally live in the TSALAL station. Gym, library, big ass kitchen? Sign me up. 

I agree. A lot of shows could learn a lesson from this episode for how to explain who all your characters are in a way that feels natural, not like characters are explaining things to each other that they obviously all know. The relationships and tensions between the characters played by Foster, Hawkes, and Prior…

Well, there’s always one contrarian.

I liked the minimalist exposition that filled in the back story for all the players. It makes them feel like people with actual lives and not just props for the protagonists. Like that little bit with Leah about “that day” that told you: She was Danvers’ stepdaughter, not her bio-daughter, that her dad died in a DUI…

Counterpoint, Microsoft don’t need to sell hardware:

Burton’s film is not great, maybe not even good. But Giamatti, Helena Bonham Carter, and Tim Roth all gave excellent performances, and the ape makeup was extraordinary (and possibly the last of it’s kind - the CG apes of the recent trilogy are likewise quite good, but another kettle of fi- er, barrel of monkeys entirel…

As a huge Planet of the Apes fan who thinks the 2001 remake is the worst part of the franchise (even the 74 and 75 tv series are better), Paul Giamatti, Tim Roth, Michael Clark Duncan, and Helena Bonham Carter’s work on that film is far too overlooked. They all commit 110% and with Rick Baker’s makeup you begin to…

Could be worse but the current AI climate certainly magnifies the issue.

You mean during development? Why would they take the time to record terrible voicework they intend to replace later when they could just press the button for text to speech? One is a button press and one is the guy from the mail room’s time plus the sound engineer, editor, director’s time. Text to speech is a great…

He’s easily my favorite part of that movie.

Gonna get the mailroom guy to record 12,000 lines? Because it wasn’t just those 8 lines, they surely started with every single line recorded by text to speech and then replaced by the final audio as it was recorded.

Game developer here. This is no big deal at all, we use TTS as placeholder all the time. Having even bad TTS voice placeholder helps development of a game so much you wouldn’t believe it (and TTS placeholder is now getting really good). Well developed tool pipelines have ways of flagging this stuff so it doesn’t get…

most of the games I’ve worked on have had some kind of robovoice that plays in absence of a speech file. like, we as game designers we would call a dialogue event, which often it pulled up some sort of UI thingy to go with it (character portrait, subtitles) and if there wasn’t a speech file to go with it, it’d just…

Text to Speech placeholder has been a thing in game narratives for 20 years. We’re talking Microsoft Sam. We had a thing in one game I worked on that if there was no speech audio file associated with a dialogue event line, Microsoft Sam would read line instead. Very embarrassing that Ubisoft shipped with this.

Text to speech - aka robospeech - has been used as placeholder speech in games for decades now. We’re talking 2000's Microsoft Sam, not AI. This is stand in until final voice over lines are recorded, mastered, and implemented into game. Very embarrassing for Ubisoft that they shipped with this though. Signed,…

Oh yeah, check it out. Snl even mocked his bizarre fixation on YMCA on weekend update. The "real" village people show up to sing a song in the tune of YMCA demanding he stop. 

Did he really?  I know he has no sense of irony, between playing Fortunate Son and Memories sung by the very very anti Trump Betty Buckley, but goddamn that... Jesus. 

The YMCA reference pertains to Trump. The idiot would (and probably still does) play it at all his rallies and he'd jerk around in an attempt at dancing. There's ymca trump supermixs on YouTube of all the rallies.