#tech specs

[ebookfriendly]

Where is technology taking us? The more we depend on the technology, the more we should talk about it, evaluate it, and spot both risks and opportunities.

Take a look at tech quotes by Pablo Picasso, Douglas Adams, Stewart Brand, and Northrop Frye that are visualized on vintage patent drawings.

(via Thought-provoking tech quotes on vintage patent drawings)

[overactiveimaginationhere]

Name: swoop

Gender: female

Personality type: good natured, friendly, kind, prone to tangents where she utilizes complicated technical terms to describe things

Faction: autobot

Subgroup: dinobot

Function: aerial combat specialist, bombardier, technological specialist

Weapons: underslung wing mounted single fire twin missile batteries, thermal arming sword, thermal spiked flail, retractable combat claws

Bio: originally serving as the dinobots' air combat specialist, while also providing support to her ground bases allies via targeted bombardment of ground targets. Following her team's escape from shockwave's lab, and the experimentation the amoral decepticon scientist had performed on them, swoop found herself fulfilling a role better described as part technological support and part older sister to most of her team. This is a peculiar situation when, of the original five members of the lightning strike coalition team, swoop was the youngest of the five. Swoop has a tendency to go on tangents, with a related predilection towards using complicated and advanced technical terms to describe things, however while the complicated terms may fly over the heads of the other dinobots' they still listen quite happily to her tangents with good cheer and a fond smile. Even if the complicated terms swoop uses leaves the rest of the team utterly confused on what she's talking about, they'll still happily listen to their sister as she goes on a long winded and complicated explanation that may or may not actually relate to the current situation or environment.

[inioranackatori]

Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale

Alternatively, writers for children’s cartoons have no sense of scale.

(look GaoGaiGar is amazing but I have no illusions what it’s target demographic was supposed to be, and I am not it)

Instead of putting art in-between commercial segments, GaoGaiGar puts tech specs. For everything. Everything. Up to and including Leo Shishioh’s gag inventions that show up for five minutes in a single episode and never appear again.

This is a wonderful gift to fic writers, because we can go look up exactly how tall the dreamboat BFF Guy Shishioh is. You can even look up if his name’s spelled Guy or Gai (the answer is yes).

Let’s take a look at one of those tech specs, hum?

Soldato-J 002. The man who’s face gracefully adorns this blog as a profile picture.

Now, there’s a lot of stuff here, so let’s take it piece by piece.

I know nothing about electricity, so let’s hop over that for the moment. Instead, let’s look at this man’s max speed: 2 X 10 to the 7th power meters per second.

That’s 20,000,000 meters per second. Or for those of us not on the metric system, that’s about 12,427 miles per second. For comparison’s sake, the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. To pile on the comparisons, the speed of sound is 750 mps. Soldato-J is going sixteen times the speed of sound. Sonic booms should be going off all over the freaking place.

Switching gears, now. Let’s dive into this bit of tech spec:

The first thing to catch my eye is the - er… “Reft” hand? I’m just going to hand wave that as an Engrish mistranslation - Japanese has no hard “r” sound, and so substitute in the letter “l”, leading to all the shenanigans.

Let’s focus instead on Soldato-J’s dimensions.

2.1 meters works out to 6 feet 11 inches. Da man would be snapped up by every basketball league in the US by that metric alone. Which is to say, extremely tall, but not too far outside the norm.

His weight, though, is 0.2t. The “t” stands for “tons”. The man is 400 pounds. He weights as much as a freaking sports motorcycle! (And looks better than one, too.)

But now… Now we’re at the part that breaks my brain.

Span: 3.0 meters. That’s 9 feet. As tall as an ostrich and arguably just as dumb sometimes. It’s also three times the width of the average door.

If the span is measured from the tip of one of his shoulder armor bits to the other shoulder armor bit’s tip, that means -

Soldato-J cannot walk through doors.

[redwidowym]

If you look closely, you can see the small gap where the suit actors can see out of the helmets.

It always amazed me how the suit actors in tokusatsu shows could still do what they do when they have to wear helmets that limit their vision like that.

When it comes to the Yukimori helmet, even though I rely a lot on the blindfighting techniques mom taught me, I still need to see as clearly as I can, despite the visor being lit up like it is. If you look close you can see slits under the visor that help me see.

[stunticonbreakdown]

LEGACY BREAKDOWN TECH SPEC, 2023

[bag-xml]

real

That was a damn face-lift. That was the end of the Steve Jobs Apple era, and the beginning of the Tim Cook and Jony Ive Apple era.

[nokillbananashelter]

I’m a retro game, film, and animation enthusiast since basically birth, and my videogame hot take is that 60/120+ framerates can and do sometimes ruin the visual aesthetic of games that are designed to look great while framelocked at 30 fps or are designed with lower fps in mind and there is a reason film & tv doesn’t chase 60 fps. Its also a similar reason your sportmode ass tv raising framerate makes things looks bad that goes beyond the tv making approximations with AI-it is harder to make things not look cheap or dated in higher framerates. It’s also the same reason retro games looked better on CRTs. You’re breaking the fragile illusions’ originally designed presentation when you don’t have some level of “smear” in mind. Thats all there is to it.

Remasters can address this! Tuning up lighting, improving textures, etc. But you have to be so careful sometimes, because it doesn’t take much to render out original character within the art.

I’m not arguing for chug, lag, or frame DROPS as a good thing. Simply saying raising the technical fidelity of things can be compared (sometimes) to raising the speed of a record player. You’re distorting it’s designed settings.

I really hope we are entering an era where chasing technological advancement is not about horsepower and making a number go bigger. I feel like chasing gadget specs very often misses the forest for the trees.

[karanseraph]

Once again I am asking y'all to call the items in question spectacles or specs so we can have the "tech specs" joke work when Scalpel is looking at a bot through a doctor's technical spectacles and sees their technical specifications.

I'm sorry Hasbro did away with the tech specs plus red decoder gimmick, but it was a thing and our real world play pattern should parallel a process in their fictional universe.

Also, yes, it's for aesthetics sometimes, like if Starscream does it. Thundercracker may actually wear readers that throw a bunch of Earth grammar tools on his HUD that he didn't fully assimilate internally because that spelling and grammar software looked suspicious or something.

And removal of optical wear is a key lesson in how to be a handsome actor, if I recall correctly. Very dramatic.

“why would robots wear glasses if they could just replace their eyes” you fools. you ignoramuses. this is transformers NOTHING is ever explained about their anatomy except for like 3 organs. the rest is literally bullshit. ive written 55k words of bullshitting my way through theoretical robot biology disguised as a fic with a story. live your life and make up some space magic reason to put glasses on ur robot

[starscream-is-my-wife]

at least the twins don’t know about this

[centaur-dreaming]

gguuuuuuuuuysssss hhhhhhellllppppppp

[hopecomesbacktolife]

while I expected lots of cute moments with bb-8 and pew-pew adventures in Poe Dameron: Flight Log (which, don’t get me wrong, I definitely did get and was very happy about!!) along with lots of cool ship specs and tech details—

what I wasn’t expecting (a surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one) was several instances of incredibly heartfelt, evocative, and sweet introspections from Poe on his family, upbringing, philosophy / ethics, the resistance, and love 🥺 so many sweet characterization tidbits in this book, I really enjoyed reading it ♡

if you’re interested in reading it as well, I borrowed it (for free!) on internet archive which I highly highly recommend, it was such a fun read and it’s very easy & user-friendly to borrow books from them!

[karanseraph]

This is important. I need y'all to call them "spectacles" if bots wear them to justify the "spectacles" page on tfwiki which is separate from the glasses page.

Also, TC in specs needs to be added to that page.

Let me have this.

It allows us maybe potentially say Animated Scalpel could be wearing "tech specs" (specific opticwear) to potentially view tech specs (technical specifications) as he has been depicted in red-lensed optical devices.

Also, we can joke about how some versions of Air Raid enjoy looking at spectacles.

Also, if you legit write for TF, just call them "spectacles" once, OK?

I am very normal about Thundercracker and Starscream in glasses.

But also the absolutely fascinating worldbuilding of glasses existing still interests me. Everyday glasses for Rung. Reading glasses for these two. How does it work? Do the magnify? Help sort data somehow? Switch the color? Is it something that can't be fixed by getting new eyes? Is it still an issue if they got a full reframe which Starscream is prone to? I would love to know.

[mish-mash-marsh]

A-spec people in tech crew

I am of the opinion that every theatre tech crew has at least one a-spec person in it. Surely I've talked to enough a-spec techies for it to not be a coincidence... They say the gays like acting, I guess they left the stage setup for the aroaces! XD

I gotta know though:

reblog if you're a-spec and/or a techie? :0 /nf

Edit: For the sake of this poll, let's say stage crew counts as a tech crew

[starrytalking]

Do you ever meet someone and think that they are so cool that if you were attracted to people in that way you would have a crush on them?

[bayporwave]

Before the students left Rek, the rakii had been in the process of developing their own AI. At first they were gifted such intelligence by the students, providing washed-down copies of themselves to add to their tech and craft management. But when the need for more personalized AI and general curiosity arose, they went to work, using the student provided AI as a base or reference point. From there, three types of AI sprouted off these projects: • Student AI - Highly valuable, practical holy relics of what remains of the students. These are "purest" AI and are strictly held within Iot's control, only able to function off student tech. There are only 4 existing and 2 remain within the Idle Library. These AI are again, much more watered-down and while are fairly sentient they aren't 100% sapient.

• Hybrid or Steward AI - A mix between student and rakii coding. Since rakii couldn't exactly copy paste the student AI's themselves, what was given, they managed add on it. These AI were specialized and trained to understand the workings of rakii history, and language, while also being able to work on both student and rakii devices. They are still held under Iot control but with special permission, they can be granted to important government official or funded servers. These AI are a tad more self-aware, understanding their purpose and history just fine.

• Factotum AI - Completely rakii made and trained AI. With little to no student involvement, these AI are either standard algorithmic run assistants or commercially used for things like personal computers, phones, self-driven vehicles (mainly rail cars and public transit) or vending machines. Not ALL devices have AI of course, as the general public have a lot of mixed feelings towards, not such distain but prefer to be the only one in control of their tools. On the upside, they are heavily regulated and lack any possibility for self-awareness or sapience. The ones displayed here are two steward AI named Wyrr'Yoii (left) and Booror (right). Wyrr'Yoii is currently housed on the lunar settlement, Wubu maintaining life support and security, taking the avatar of a temperate. They were handed over to the rakii aerospace committee by Iot, which is heavily funded by the city for the investment of seeking out their missing gods. Wyrr'Yoii is described to be standardly monotone and critical, yet easy-going and understanding. They know exactly where their functionally lies and are always willing to lookout for the inhabitants within them. They have long-range communication with ground control, and furthest orbiting station in their system, "The Needle of Shwati" (A Wubu settler checking in with Wyrr'Yoii)

Booror, is housed within an arctic government building in the Shto Dominion hence taking an arctic avatar. Having accepted trading offers and territory with Iot, they were later granted a steward to keep purpose tabs and documents on community. Ensuring those higher up are up-to-date with any possible trading changes. Though the general public are often wary of this development as recently there has been a project in the works of providing AI with RC units, wanting to see how these AI can interact with the physical world. One unit being an elaborate success, however the reactions of many were generally, "It looks creepy." and it became more of an underground project. (Cartographer Wa'chaa "Quiibii" Iot, speaking with Saiba in their RC unit)