I mean, it was only a matter of time, right? Nintendo’s hit open-world game Tears of the Kingdom features a surprisingly robust and dynamic physics system you can build with, so it stands to reason that if you create a few “if this then that” scenarios, then bam, you basically have the working fundamentals of a computer system. And that’s exactly what players are doing now. Go ahead and get the “can it run Doom?” joke out of your system. I’ll wait.
SEASON: A letter to the future – Story Trailer
Tears of the Kingdom doesn’t just repeat the same expansive open world formula of its predecessor, Breath of the Wild. With the ability to manipulate various objects, glue them together, and have them interact with a remarkably fluid and realistic physics simulation, players have found interesting ways to traverse the map, build incredibledeath contraptions, or do silly things like build a pilotable T-rex or, um, Metal Gear Ray. But now, Hyrulian engineers are turning their attention to programming logic, using the game’s building systems to now make more complex contraptions and even rudimentary computational processes. Think of it as Zelda’s version of redstone from Minecraft. And it’s working.
Tears of the Kingdom player builds a basic calculator in the game
The first example of such a device is this one-bit calculator built with rotating panels and lights.
Nintendo / c7fab
Now it may not be entirely obvious what’s going on here, so let’s try to break this down. As software developer Zenni told Kotaku, calculators are essentially “made out of inputs of 1 or 0 and go through logic gates which can determine an output.” She continues:
Instead of gates, [this example uses] mirrors to act as logic gates and a physical gate to determine which inputs to switch between. The example [in the original video] is 1 bit, so adding 1 + 0 which equals 1, or 1 + 1 = 0 with a carry of 1. If you could bypass the drop limit of TotK, you could actually make a working calculator, which is really cool.
As some in the comments of the original video have stated, this is an “Adder,” which, as you might’ve guessed, adds things together. It’s the most fundamental function of how a computer works.
Image: Nintendo / c7fab / Kotaku
Here’s a more basic example illustrating how rotating devices and light objects can be used to create scenarios that control different inputs and outputs:
Nintendo / c7fab
After building this, user c7fab was able to make a slightly less advanced version of the video above with a half adder:
Nintendo / c7fab
Now before you go any further in referencing that darn ‘90s shooter everyone seems bent to get running on just about everything, there is a limit as to how complex this is thanks to Tears of the Kingdom’s 21-object build limit. In theory, if you took multiples of these Hyrulian adders and had them function in concert, you could get more complex computations, leading all the way up to what we’d expect from a fully functioning calculator. But given the game’s limit, it’s unlikely that we’ll see anything beyond simple base two computations.
Other feats of Hyrulian engineering
But, basic calculators ain’t all. As you may well know, Tears of the Kingdom also features physics by way of electricity. That means that creating circuits isn’t just limited to lights and mirrors. Check out this video showing off how with a bit of electricity and moving objects, you can have some interesting interactions.
Another example is a functioning diode, which allows electricity to flow in a specific direction, built using various Zonai devices.
While these examples are very basic compared to what kinds of devices and computational processes we use every day, it’s kind of stunning that this at all works and, when you get right down to it, how simple many modern day feats of technology are at their core.
As was the case in Breath of the Wild, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom lets Link use his shield as an improvised surfing device. It’s both fun and useful for getting out of trouble if you know how to do it. But TotK adds a little twist to this fun mechanic by way of the game’s new Fuse ability. If you thought surfing on shields before was fun, then just wait.
An Anime That Might Make You Put Your Minecraft Bed Next To Someone
Tears of the Kingdom is quickly gaining notoriety for how playful and intuitive its various physics and crafting systems are. Fuse and Ultrahand are cool ways to combine various objects together, but combined with the game’s lifelike physics, players are discovering all manner of interesting ways to get around puzzles, combat, engage in questionable activities, and simply have fun. One such possibility is the ability to fuse random objects to Link’s shield to either boost its defensive characteristics or augment the game’s shield surfing technique depending on what items you attach it to.
Shield Surfing 101: How to master the technique
You may’ve accidentally triggered the shield surf technique if you ever tried jumping while holding your shield up. To shield surf, you’ll want to execute this button combo in this order: X + ZL + A. (You can also swap the order of X and ZL for this combo). Note that only shields with smooth surfaces will work. So something like the Armor-Shard Shield with its spikes will just make you fall.
It’s best to practice this while stationary at first. Once you get a feel for it, a running start will give you some momentum. The steeper the slope you’re going down, the further you’ll move. Note: this does damage to your shield. So save the cheap ones for thrills or use the technique as a quick evasive maneuver to mitigate damage to your shield.
Also, when you paraglide while shield surfing, your shield will stay glued to your feet, so feel free to chain surfing with paragliding back to surfing. Also, hitting the shield surf combo while paragliding will put you into a shield surf, so the next time you’re paragliding to the surface, now you can land with style.
Fuse your shields to Zonai Carts and Sleds for more fun
Zonai devices can be found all over Hyrule. Two in particular can be fused to your shield to boost its surfing capabilities: carts and sleds. You can find carts from the Zonai Dispenser above the Upland Zorana Skyview Tower, which is also highlighted in this guide). Sleds can be found at the East Gerudo Sky Archipelago Zonai Dispenser. Note that these are not the only places to find such items, but we’ve had the most luck getting them here. You can hover above dispensers in the map to see what items are available as well.
Once you get these items, drop them in front of you, then hit L to call up your abilities. Highlight the item you wish to fuse and then hit ZL to bind it to your shield. Fusing a cart to your shield will essentially give you a skateboard to roam around with. This offers far greater travel distance and control than just a shield alone. You can also ollie with a cart shield.
Fusing a sled basically gives you a snowboard (but you can use it on grass and other surfaces). You can surf along with galloping horses—which is almost as fun as swimming with tigers (don’t ask).
This doesn’t make your shield invincible. Surfing will still subject your shield to wear and tear, even when fused to something, and it will break. So use it where it makes sense. It’s a pretty fantastic way to get some distance from Gloom Hands.
Shield surfing is just one of the many playful tricks Tears of the Kingdom offers, allowing both fun and strategy. And fuse only heightens the shenanigans you can get up to. Just queue up some appropriate music and watch those steep drops!
PALM BEACH, FL—Responding to the news that the Manhattan District Attorney had indicted him over payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, former President Donald Trump denounced the move Friday, telling reporters, “All arrests are politically motivated, as the legal system is the codified exercise of political power.” “This indictment is obviously an attempt by the Democrats to use against me the complex webs of power relations that influence the nature of rights and consequences in a given society and that we conceptualize as a legal system,” Trump said before quoting verbatim a passage from political philosopher Michel Foucault that reads, “The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the ‘social-worker’-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based.” “This is nothing more than a political witch hunt carried out by corrupt Democratic officials using the law as a political cudgel, as it intrinsically is, because what is the law but a system by which the powerful may enforce adherence to certain rules and strictures among the less powerful? These Soros-backed Manhattanites are using the United States legal system as clarified in the landmark 1803 case Marbury v. Madison—which established the Constitution, and therefore America’s legal system, as not merely a set of principles but as the actual law of the land—to target me for what they claim is a violation of those laws. Yet I remind them that until now no American president has ever been indicted, which is as clear an example of the politically charged nature of the law as I can think of. Legal positivism, as understood by Jeremy Bentham and others, tells us that there is not necessarily a connection between morality and the law, and so it follows that a so-called lawbreaking act that may be considered punishable in some cases is left unpunished in others. Is that discrepancy not, then, a question of political power? For even such an act as taking another human life is deemed effectively above the law in some cases, if we are to follow the Schmittian logic of the sovereign state of exception. What these partisan hacks need to get through their thick skulls is that political concerns are permitted, by general agreement, or at least by the threat of state violence standing in for democratic accord, to make legal structures and consequences selectively applicable. But this is just another example of big-city legal departments wielding the law for political aims. I mean, seriously, just look at how the law is selectively enforced on the Black populations of U.S. cities, with arrest and incarceration rates far outstripping those of whites. The critical race theories of Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and others are instructive on this point, positing that legal progress for Black people only occurs when it converges with the political interests of the white elite. Of course, I’d expect nothing less from a sad, declining country where political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” At press time, numerous Republican officials, including Sen. Lindsey Graham, Rep. Matt Gaetz, and Rep. Kevin McCarthy, had come out in agreement that Trump’s arrest was politically motivated by tweeting passages on legal relativism from TheCommon Law by the late Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Inspiring Woman Becomes Professional Surfer Despite Shark Biting Head Off
Recently, “AI” machine-learning technologies have been creeping their way into artistic fields in both entertaining and harmful ways. While some AI content creators are just making videos for harmless fun, others, like the creators of a recent AI-generated anime short, wrongfully believe they’ve democratized the animation industry when they’ve really just come up with a more technologically demanding method of plagiarizing other artists.
Earlier this week, Corridor Digital, a Los Angeles-based production studio that creates pop culture YouTube videos, uploaded a video called “Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors.” Written and directed by Niko Pueringer and Sam Gorski, it revolves around two twins vying for the throne left vacant by their recently deceased father. Their battlefield? A game of rock, paper, “twin blade.” By leveraging the machine-learning text-to-image model Stable Diffusion, Corridor Digital gave camera footage filmed in front of a green screen a dramatic anime-like appearance. It’s basically AI-assisted rotoscoping. You can watch the video below.
“It’s part of our humanity to try and visualize things that don’t exist. Like, let’s talk about traditional 2D animation. Cartoons, the most creatively liberating medium, is also the least democratized. It takes incredibly skilled people drawing every single frame of your movie to make it happen,” Pueringer said in a separate YouTube video, titled “Did We Just Change Animation Forever?” “But I think we came up with a new way to animate. A way to turn reality into acartoon and it’s one more step toward true creative freedom where we can easily create anything we want.”
In a pinned comment underneath, Pueringer wrote that their AI-driven animation production technique isn’t meant to replace human animators but as a means to bring visual ideas to life without the “near-insurmountable mountain of work” that a large animation studio with a large budget would need to get the job done.
“Imagine one person, or a few friends, bringing their crazy ideas to life. Imagine if a traditional animator could automatically have their drawings inked and colored. Imagine eliminating the uncanny valley on CGI faces. These tools have the potential to do that. We’re trying to figure out how, and sharing our journey. If we want community-controlled AI tools, we need to develop them as a community, otherwise, they become proprietary tools locked behind a company,” Pueringer wrote.
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In an email with Kotaku, Peuringer said that although someone can train an AI model to learn the styles of many artists, it’s incorrect to assume that is the technology’s sole use case.
“Through this experiment, we’re figuring out how we can use [our] own art with these tools to speed up the process. ‘Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors’ is the first step in our experiments [in] figuring out how any of this works in the first place,” Pueringer said.
Feeding an AI model data isn’t creating art
Despite how appealing the AI behind ‘Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors’ may seem to Corridor Digital’s fans, the group’s AI-powered anime is yet another harmful innovation in the animation industry because it steals from real artists in ways that seem little different than the prospect of other machine-learning technologies copying and selling actors’ voices without consent.
Unlike the breathtaking Dragon Ball Z fan film, Dragon Ball: Legends—which took the indie studio Studio Stray Dog four years to make—Corridor Digital’s attempt at recreating the passion and energy displayed in early-aughts anime comes off as violently hokey and embarrassing because it’s a soulless recreation of animation techniques haphazardly strewn together without any technical skill or artistic merit.
Despite acknowledging the fact that anime is about tying visual language to a story through stylized metaphors and art direction, Pueringer revealed that Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors’ visual style was made by feeding their Stable Diffusion AI model background art and character images they took from the early aughts fantasy anime film Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust.
“We tried to grab frames of like different people, some face shots, some torso shots, full body shots, hands, hair, even some abstract things like flowers because, with all these different objects—with each picture effectively being a different object and a different character—when we train the model, it’s not going to learn any single subject. Instead, it’s going to learn the style in which all of these subjects were drawn,” Pueringer said.
Ultimately, Corridor Digital’s trained model shat out a TikTok filter-looking mess in which over-the-top shadow effects constantly clipped through character models, despite their technologies’ best attempts to prevent any kind of uncanny valley flickering you’d see in an anime-filtered Snapchat video. Claiming that you understand the visual language that anime studios strive to portray while blatantly copying the art style of anime studio Madhouse’s work literally frame by frame isn’t a “democratization” of anime creation. That’s just being a hack.
Corridor Crew
While many of Corridor Digital’s YouTube commenters see Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors as a means to make content creation more accessible, others viewers thought the video was an insult to human animators.
“This just seems like a way for tech guys to force their way into the artist’s circle while simultaneously stealing actual artists’ work to use for their ai to learn off of. They should show this to the actual animators that visit them, I wonder how they’d react,” YouTube commentator SouperRussian wrote in response to Corridor Digital’s “Did We Just Change Animation Forever?” video.
Many workers within the animation industry hate it
Unlike many of Corridor Digital’s social media fans, fellow YouTuber animator Ross O’Donovan thinks Corridor Digital’s AI anime is walking on thin ice with professional animators. O’Donovan advised Corridor Digital to find “a first aid kit” to prepare for the discourse that would transpire should it talk to an actual group of animation industry professionals. He specifically suggested Corridor Digital sit down with folks like the team behind Netfllix’s Castlevania series to hear what they think about the creation process of Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors.
Turns out Corridor won’t need to hit Castlevania director Samuel Deats’ line, because he’s already made his opinion known to the public. Deats disagreed with Corridor Digital’s claim that their AI tool was “one step toward true creative freedom,” that would democratize the animation industry. Instead, Deats tweeted that Corridor Digital are just “lazy thieves spitting on an entire art form.”
Deats wasn’t alone in his sentiments toward Corridor Digital’s advocacy for machine learning models in the animation industry. “This absolutely sucks, hope this helps,” Toonami co-creator Jason DeMarco wrote in a tweet. Ralph Bakshi, the legendary underground animator behind Fritz the Cat and the 1978 Lord of the Rings animated film didn’t dignify Corridor Digital’s claim with a response. Instead, Bakshi simply replied “no comment” in response to a tweet cheerleading Corridor Digital’s “incredible” AI-powered anime.
Despite the online backlash Corridor Digital received from folks within the animation industry, Pueringer believes that Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors isn’t any less ethical than the other pop culture-related YouTube videos they’ve uploaded to their channel “to tell their story.”
In a post on the r/Corridor subreddit, Peuringer noted that while sudden change can be a scary thing, “especially if it feels like your passion or livelihood is on the line,” Corridor Digital is exploring the use cases of their AI model as a means to “help shine a light into the fog for everyone” wanting to bring their imaginations to life.
“I see potential for tools like these to let an animator let this process propagate their ink and color easily across [an] entire shot, for example. It’s potential like that that gets me excited about this tech, and why we do these experiments in the first place,” Pueringer told Kotaku.
