Satsuma @Satsuma@cat.family

@titania yeah i mean, it would have been nice to cast a nonbinary actor in a nonbinary role, and i do hope they at least have some non-cis people on board as consultants but there are plenty of nb people out there who look exactly like Skarsgård so that’s not an issue of “too masculine” per se

@idlestate @titania yeah post trailer i’m a lot more likely to think you’re either a crank who complains endlessly without bothering to check whether the new info lines up with your original impressions, or you’ve dismissed the entire rest of the casting as unimportant which doesn’t say great things about you

@soph_sol that makes sense! what cool little birds

@soph_sol oh wow i absolutely had the call vs song distinction backwards for chickadees! i’ve heard both but the name one is so much longer and more complex…

@idlestate @titania when the show was originally announced, Skarsgård was the only one who’d been publicly cast and Martha Wells was the only person who wasn’t a cis white man of the five or six people they’d announced on the production team, which made the whole thing seem like a bit more of a boys club when there was a dearth of other info.

But Skarsgård seems to get the character and the trailer made it clear they weren’t just aiming for a bland white dude action flick by casting him (plus, the rest of the casting was clearly done well). so you know, the show having an unfortunately normal amount of “wow hollywoods writers and producers sure are mostly men” isn’t really worth grousing about for a million years.

@pamela https://www.stsci.edu/contents/news-releases/2025/news-2025-015

@soph_sol okay but chickadees literally just say their name like pokemon, *surely* everyone can do that one

@pamela they found a roving black hole bc it ate a star

@JessMahler @zersiax they’re using AI to generate the voices, using similar training methods to how we’ve trained chatGPT to generate text which lets them create larger corpuses of sounds faster and more cheaply than it does to record a person speaking & break that down into constituent parts. It also theoretically gives improvements in that AI can do more natural pattern matching as to which of the hundred a sounds its generated is appropriate than the extremely complex if then statements a normal TTS would use could (more accurately I think it actually generates the new clips on the fly but for discussions sake we’ll just focus on how this allows a larger set of sounds)

However this is all pretty marginal, it’s most just being touted as revolutionary bc AI makes the hot new thing makes firing all your voice actors okay while previously we judged companies for doing that sort of thing.

@villainousfriend @Betty yeah i think the people saying its fine if english majors don’t get dickens are maybe a little over-indexing on the headlines “cant read” and less on the studie’s “to the standards we expect for english majors” but the people critiquing the methodology of the study are 100% valid that format of reading sounds absolutely excruciating to me

@Lady @aescling @wallhackio https://glitch.cat.family/@Satsuma/114458577837284735

@aescling @wallhackio @Lady its a valid reading of the text