CMS of explosion.fun

Author: reubenroyk@gmail.com

  • Orb: On the Movements of the Earth

    Orb: On the Movements of the Earth

    It was too dark to figure out what’s going on.

    This was most scenes, ugh! They were all too dark.

    And in between there would a scene which would be too bright, and the screen would be at max brightness because every other scene was too dark and the bright scenes would burn my corneas off!!

    Here is a dark scene. Most scenes are super dark like this in this show. I tend to turn the brightness up, so that I can see better for shows like this.

    And then suddenly you’ll have another scene like this, which just hurts your eyes.

    There were many since things happening in the anime, too bad I couldn’t see any of it! Since everything was happening in the dead of night and it is all dark all the time.

  • Lord of Mysteries

    Lord of Mysteries

    Why the hell was this show so dark? I couldn’t see anything without cranking the display brightness up to the max! But when I do that the bright scenes would appear blindingly bright. Ugh!

    Every time a show does this, I loose interest after a few episodes. There will be scenes that are clearly too dark, where I can’t make out what’s going on, and really.. you won’t care after a few episodes. “Let’s just get this over with” is the thought process you’ll probably have in your head.

    This show has some amazing animation though, insanely good. I wonder if we can expect this from lots of other studios as well.

  • Dunkirk

    Dunkirk

    I for some reason expected this to have a story as well. It seems much more like a super well directed documentary.

  • Ranma 1/2 (2024)

    Ranma 1/2 (2024)

    Super cute anime that is really fun you watch.

    But this anime is built around one little quirk, and once you get used to that quirk, it’s a less engaging. The quirk is that the father-son duo can turn into a panda-girl duo if splashed with cold water.

    This quirk is really funny and leads to a bunch of funny interactions at the start. But you grow used to it quickly and then it’s not as funny.

    The story does progress though. It doesn’t feel like the show will be stretched out in order to make more money. If that were to happened, I might have trouble finishing the show.

  • Introversion isn’t real

    Introversion and Extroversion Might Not Be What You Think

    We’ve all heard of introverts, extroverts, and now, ambiverts — people who fall somewhere in between. But what if these labels don’t fully capture what’s really going on? What if your “vertedness” has less to do with your personality and more to do with what you’re talking about?

    Here’s the thing: many people who call themselves introverts seem to come alive when talking about topics they’re passionate about. I’ve had phone conversations with self-proclaimed introverts that lasted for hours — full of energy, laughter, and zero social exhaustion. Yet, these same people would be considered introverts in more general social settings. Why is that?

    It’s often said that introverts need alone time to recharge after social interaction, while extroverts gain energy from being around others. But I’m not convinced it’s that simple. Maybe introverts just need conversations that matter to them. Or maybe anyone would feel drained if the topic didn’t interest them.

    Think about it. An introvert might feel completely drained after small talk about the weather or sports they don’t follow, but light up when the topic turns to video games, anime, philosophy, or science. Suddenly, they’re animated, talkative, and far from shy or quiet. And guess what? They’re still not exhausted afterward.

    Now flip the scenario. Imagine an extroverted football fan dropped into a room full of people passionately discussing the latest anime series. That same extrovert might suddenly go quiet, unable to contribute or stay engaged. The social energy they usually thrive on isn’t there anymore. They’re the quiet one now.

    So what’s really going on here?

    It seems that our ability to connect, engage, and enjoy social interaction depends heavily on how much we relate to the topic being discussed. If the subject is meaningful or exciting to us, we’re energized, regardless of whether we think of ourselves as introverts or extroverts. If not, we’re likely to withdraw, get bored, or feel drained.

    This even plays out in real-world scenarios. Consider someone who moves to a new country. They were the life of the party back home, constantly social and upbeat. But now they barely speak the language, don’t understand the local culture, and have no connection to the popular sports or media. Suddenly, socializing feels like work. They’re tired after every conversation. Have they become an introvert? Or are they just out of sync with the topics and cues that used to make connection easy?

    Maybe the idea of introversion and extroversion is more flexible than we thought. Maybe your social energy depends not just on who you’re with, but on what you’re talking about and how much it aligns with what matters to you.

    If that’s true, then perhaps being an introvert or extrovert isn’t a fixed trait, but a reflection of how easily you can relate to the conversations around you.

  • People Love Numbers and Stats

    Having good tracking and feedback leads to great progress.

    I’ve noticed that people work really hard on tasks when it is very evident exactly how something can be changed or improved or if there is at least an illusion of such evidence.

    In school, children are measured on a number of parameters, test scores, athletic performance, debate competitions etc. Improving those metrics are associated with success, so kids attempt to improve those metrics and they very often are successful.

    People who trade shares on the stock market tend to increase their portfolio over time, adding money to the portfolio when they can. Few quite buying shares on the stock market, some invest passively, but most after starting to invest, keep investing. I am suggesting that this is also because there are numbers indicating the users success in the stock market and a somewhat evident path to success on the stock market.

    Let’s consider a more negative example, gambling, people who take up gambling often continue despite knowing full well that they are losing a lot of money in the long run. Here again, there are metrics showing you exactly how well you’re performing and what strategies you may try to improve your chances at winning.

    Another example in fitness, biking/running vs weight training, if you join a run club or biking club and go for a couple of events, you’re likely to continue going. Your gym membership on the other hand, is very easy to quit. Most users buy a gym membership at the start of a new year and quit before January is over. While there are those who quit running too, the likelihood is far greater for your weight training. Why is this? One answer is community and accountability, which is fine. But another reason is tracking and feedback. Fitness trackers are very good at recording your runs, your exact cadence, run power, heart rate, distance ran and various other metrics. This lets you keep track of your performance and helps you attempt to improve these numbers. If you did a very long run, but you didn’t know how far you’d managed to go, then it isn’t as interesting.

    So I think people can thrive with good statistics and clearly evident pathways to improve their life. But this is almost entirely missing in adult life. There is no manual or handbook to live life. Nothing telling you what next step to take to advance your life. Most of the growth in a person’s life happens during School and University. Then growth stagnates. If this is because there are no clear success indicators, couldn’t we put those back in?

  • CEO’s Affair turns into Great Marketing?

    CEO’s Affair turns into Great Marketing?

    Recently Astronomer ex-CEO Andy Byron was caught on camera having a mistress unknown to his wife. The internet went crazy about this, and we had thousands to maybe millions of people discussing how he was wrong to cheat of his wife etc.

    But really it doesn’t matter to anyone. Why do you care about a strangers relationship? Around the world millions of people get cheated on, and that hasn’t mattered in the slightest, then how come this became the talk of the country (even though everyone lost interest quickly after)?

    In this article we explore that, at least that’s what I wanted to do. Maybe I’ll do that once I get the time. Bye!

  • Narivetta

    Narivetta

    Well I wish I could rate this a little higher but these are the ratings.

    The pacing was a bit uneven. While the overall flow wasn’t bad, certain scenes got a little too much time, detracting from the central narrative. A significant chunk of the film is spent on the protagonist’s romantic life and his struggle to find meaningful work, plot points that ultimately have little to no bearing on the main story once it kicks in. Similarly, scenes depicting hazing within the police force and elaborate chase sequences seemed more like filler than substance, adding to the runtime without enriching the plot. All of this felt like a missed opportunity to explore the far more compelling theme at the heart of the film: the violation of Adivasi rights.

    On a positive note, the character development, particularly of Varghese, played by Tovino Thomas, was done quite well. Tovino convincingly portrays an oppressive (dirt-bag) police officer who gradually transforms after realizing he is just as vulnerable to injustice as those he once oppressed. Some scenes are genuinely powerful in highlighting how dehumanizing and prejudiced his views of the Adivasis were early on. But there wasn’t enough background laid to show that Varghese, the character played by Tovino was a scummy person initially. So the belligerent nature on display by Tovino in later scenes often stood out and did not seem in character for Varghese.

  • Building a Fitness app myself, since AI couldn’t handle it

    In my last article on coding with AI, I was very impressed by the output produced by AI code gen tools and the speed at which these tools allowed us to prototype. Here is that article for reference: https://www.explosion.fun/blog/post/rebuilding-my-website-with-ai/

    This time I was much more bullish on the capabilities of AI tools, and I employed them during the making of my React-Native Fitness application. Though these tools were markedly less effective in this category. React-Native I suppose forms a significantly smaller pie of ‘all the code in the world’ than web development or NextJs does.

    I can see this being a real problem for any subset of programming that doesn’t get as much attention as NextJs. Perhaps programmers would still have a job in the AI driven utopia future.

    I should delineate how I used AI for this experiment and the tools I utilized. I started off with Augment Code, an AI coding helper said to be as good as Cursor AI. When I used it though, I didn’t think it was, so I switched to Windsurf – a strong Cursor competitor.

    Windsurf though has apparently lost it’s place after OpenAI acquired Windsurf, since Anthropic had stopped supplying Claude to Windsurf. Windsurf was so much worse at programming without Claude. Later Anthropic agreed to be present on Windsurf again, though as users we would have to BYOK (bring your own key) to use Claude on the Windsurf editor. So I found myself deleting Windsurf a few hours after the experiment started.

    I decided I would stick to Cursor’s free tier or just do it myself. The free tier was doing much better than Windsurf was performing.

    I used Stytch, Google’s AI UI design platform to design a few panels and they came out really good. They provide an option to copy paste the design onto Figma, though that feature didn’t work as smoothly as I would have wanted.

    Right around this time, Google released their Gemini CLI to the public and made it Open-Source. So I figured I would try it out since it managed to design UI panels really well. Maybe it could do the app quite well too. Gemini CLI did not manage to contribute meaningfully to the application.

    The poor performance of AI code gen tools in making mobile applications was giving me confidence about the future software job market. I pray my confidence lasts.

    Is AI Net Negative?

    I’ve programmed some more.. the code base grew.. I let the AI run rampant on the code base and now the AI tools have no idea what’s going on.

    Here is a panel and some other artifacts the AI created. At the top you can see a white bar with (tabs) written in within it. That shouldn’t be there.. So I asked Cursor/Claude why it was there. After some analyzing it agreed that it shouldn’t be there.. AI added that and now didn’t know how that got there.

    It was something similar with every component AI had built, everything needed re-writes, large scale re-writes. I believe it did contribute significantly at the very start, but it can only do the absolute basics.

    I just have trouble seeing this as the reason for the current decline in hiring.

  • Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines

    Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines

    Visually Stunning, But Lacking in Substance

    Makeine delivers shockingly high-quality animation for a series that hasn’t quite broken into mainstream popularity. Some shots are so incredibly beautiful, it’s hard to believe this much talent was dedicated to a show with such a simple premise.

    Early on, the series is packed with humor and creativity. Each episode felt fresh, with clever editing and use of music that made the viewing experience genuinely fun and engaging. But as we grow accustomed to the characters, the novelty begins to wear off, and so does the comedy.

    It almost feels like the creators started running out of ideas. Once the character introductions and basic development were done, the absence of a compelling overarching plot became impossible to ignore. The episodes became less engaging, and while the animation remained impressive, the team seemed less experimental and more reserved with their visuals as the series progressed, almost like they were losing interest in the show.

    It’s still a good show, but it could have been amazing with a better story. There’s still so much potential for deeper character development, a melancholic character development arc could add so much value to the show. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like the show is headed in that direction.

    Often times, the show begins to introduce more characters with interesting personalities at this point, perhaps to keep engagement high, but it would be so much cooler to send the main character through an emotional arc now. His character is perfect for such an arc.

    Complaint

    I couldn’t tell which name belonged to which person, sometimes first name would be used and sometimes second name would be used. It is nice that the show doesn’t over-explain and lets the viewer figure things out as the story is progressing, but it was confusing.