Owning a physical piece of anime history is pretty rare, but some fans will get exactly that opportunity thanks to a new auction that includes thousands of production cels from anime projects ranging from Dragon Ball Z and Akira to numerous Studio Ghibli films.
The auction is being held on the Heritage Auctions website, and is all wrapped up in the organization’s Art of Anime Volume IV event, which puts a particular spotlight on “Celebrating 40 years of Studio Ghibli.”
All of the items in this auction will collect their final bids between March 22 and March 24, so you’ve got a few days to pick out the pieces you can’t live without.
Katamari Damacy Rolling Live follows series protagonist The Prince of All Cosmos as he once again rolls up tons and tons of Earth junk for turning into stars. This time around, however, the Prince’s mission is all about boosting viewer numbers for his father’s livestream.
“As users advance, comments from in-game fans appear, and the longer they play, the larger their audience grows,” Apple’s announcement said. “By completing the king’s challenges and boosting their subscriber count, players can unlock dynamic new stages.”
Much like previous games, levels will include royal gifts for unlocking costumes as well as the prince’s hidden cousins who become playable once found. Katamari Damacy Rolling Live developer Bandai Namco recommends playing with a controller “for the best experience,” which doesn’t bode well for the game’s touch controls.
Katamari Damacy, the brainchild of offbeat designer Keita Takahashi, first debuted on PlayStation 2 in 2004. Takahashi hasn’t been involved with the series since directing the 2005 sequel We Love Katamari. His next game, to a T, is launching on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X on May 28.
Other games coming to Apple Arcade on April 3 include Space Invaders Infinity Gene Evolve, puffies., and ad- and microtranscation-free versions of RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic, The Game of Life 2, and Sesame Street Mecha Builders.
Hikers climbing the 14,055-foot Mount Lindsey in the Sangre de Cristo Range will need to sign a liability waiver though.
“The ranch has always appreciated the special role that 14ers play in Colorado with the hiking community,” said Andy Mountain, a spokesperson for the Trinchera Blanca Ranch, which is owned by billionaire conservationist Louis Bacon. “With the changes to the Recreational Use Statute last year, we thought it was a step in the right direction. The decision came down to taking that legislation and layering in the waivers, there was a level of comfort with opening the peak.”
The owner of the Trinchera Blanca Ranch in the San Luis Valley erected these “No Trespassing” signs on the trail accessing the summit of Mount Lindsey in 2021.(Provided by Colorado Fourteeners Initiative.)
The Trinchera Blanca Ranch put up “No Trespassing” signs on summit trails in 2021 in the wake of a 2019 federal appeals court decision that affirmed a $7.3 million award for a cyclist injured on a washed-out trail at the Air Force Academy. That decision prodded many Colorado landowners to reconsider public access to private land, leading to closures and liability waivers.
Last year’s reform of the Colorado Recreational Use Statute was a third attempt to adjust wording the law that allowed lawsuits if an injured person could prove the landowner displayed a “willful or malicious failure to guard against a known dangerous condition.”
Last year’s Senate Bill 58 allowed landowners additional protection from lawsuits if they allowed free access and erected signs warning visitors of dangerous structures, conditions and geographic features.
The Fix CRUS Coalition, representing nearly 50 outdoor industry groups and communities, lobbied lawmakers to amend the statute to better protect landowners after an owner closed land accessing popular 14ers in the Mosquito Range above Alma.
Access to Mount Lindsey will remain via the standard route accessed by the main trailhead with summit access also along the prominent ridge to the peak. There is an online waiver site — mountlindseywaiver.com — and hikers can scan QR codes at the trailhead to fill out a waiver.
“Please remember that the restored climbing access to Mount Lindsey is a privilege that can be withdrawn if people do not follow the rules,” reads an online post by the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative, which worked with the Fix CRUS Coalition to secure the legislative change.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed Monday in a case from Colorado to decide whether state and local governments can enforce laws banning conversion therapy for LGBTQ+ children.
The conservative-led court is taking up the case amid actions by President Donald Trump targeting transgender people, including a ban on military service and an end to federal funding for gender-affirming care for transgender minors.
The justices also have heard arguments in a Tennessee case over whether state bans on treating transgender minors violate the Constitution. But they have yet to issue a decision.
Colorado is among roughly half the states that prohibit the practice of trying to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity through counseling.
The issue is whether the law violates the speech rights of counselors. Defenders of such laws argue that they regulate the conduct of professionals who are licensed by the state.
The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver upheld the state law. The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta has struck down local local bans in Florida.
In 2023, the court had turned away a similar challenge, despite a split among federal appeals courts that had weighed state bans and come to differing decisions.
At the time, three justices, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas, said they would have taken on the issue. It takes four justices to grant review. The nine-member court does not typically reveal how justices vote at this stage of a case so it’s unclear who might have provided the fourth vote.
The case will be argued in the court’s new term, which begins in October. The appeal on behalf of Kaley Chiles, a counselor in Colorado Springs, was filed by Alliance Defending Freedom, the conservative legal organization that has appeared frequently at the court in recent years in cases involving high-profile social issues.
One of those cases was a 5-4 decision in 2018 in which the justices ruled that California could not force state-licensed anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers to provide information about abortion.
Chiles’ lawyers leaned heavily on that decision in asking the court to take up her case. They wrote that Chiles doesn’t “seek to ‘cure’ clients of same-sex attractions or to ‘change’ clients’ sexual orientation.”
In arguing for the court to reject the appeal, lawyers for Colorado wrote that lawmakers acted to regulate professional conduct, “based on overwhelming evidence that efforts to change a child’s sexual orientation or gender identity are unsafe and ineffective.”
One of my favorite emotions is bafflement. Well, a particular, specific kind of bafflement where whatever I’m baffled by carries no real consequence to my life, and is just sort of happily puzzling. I’m pleased to say I have encountered something that provides me with a nice, intense sense of bafflement, and I’m going to share it with all of you right now. It’s an eight-minute commercial (short film?) made in 1987 for the Suzuki Swift. I cannot figure out why the hell this video was shot or how Suzuki thought it would sell cars, or even exactly who it was for, because despite being in a number of very specific and very exaggerated American English dialects, we never got this generation of Swift badged as a Suzuki.
We only got these as Chevrolet Sprints, and then for the generation after the one in this ad, we got them as Geo Metros. But no Suzuki Swifts! You’ll also note the Swift, which is giant, has a European-style number plate.
More importantly, though, you need to watch this thing. It seems to take place in some imagined rural America, likely somewhere in the South, based on the wildly overdone accents. President Reagan shows up in here, too! Look, set aside eight minutes and just watch this thing:
What the hell did you just watch, you may be asking yourself, and I’m not sure I can answer that. It’s way too long to be a normal commercial, right? There is a version cut down to the minute, and this seems to be from the Netherlands, where I believe this ad actually ran, being a production of he Klein & Partners ad agency. Here’s the shorter, more commercial-length version:
So, the conceit here is that there is a colossal Suzuki Swift that is driving, quite fast – which is noted multiple times – on some rural Southern highways, and everyone is terrified. There does not appear to be any driver in the massive Swift, which I suppose is something to be thankful for, but the un-crewed massive Suzuki is treated as a significant threat to the population, and a whole army division is involved, complete with tanks and other formidable weaponry, and at one point even the Ronald Reagan character casually suggests that maybe nuclear weapons could be employed against the humongous hatchback, but a more level-headed army sergeant declines to accept the use of nukes.
There’s some good period cars, of course, like that K-Car and the 1954 Chevy cop car up there. The giant Swift causes a lot of panic, and its intent is assumed to be hostile, even though no attempts are made to communicate with the car to determine its goals or motives.
People are attempting to flee with televisions and other belongings, and there’s special attention paid to an elderly man unable to start his large GM wagon. The military is deployed, and finds its tanks are unable to stop the massive economy car, which rolls right through the tank’s fire. President Reagan calls in the air force to attack it from above, until at the last moment he notices, somehow, that the gigantic Suzuki is heading towards a dealer, which somehow makes everything okay?
Man, Reagan’s America sure was a weird-ass place. Aside from it being referenced as being “larger than your average UFO, more reliable than John Wayne” and “more dangerous than Sylvester Stallone (in Rocky III)” in a stirring if idiotic speech from the drill sergeant, the car is hardly discussed or described at all.
Is this how Dutch people saw Americans? I mean, it’s not so far off, really. And was an all-English commercial something that was common on Dutch television at the time?
A few years later, there was a similar ad from 1992, where three giant Suzukis emerge from space, scare some astronauts, and then do their usual thing of freaking out yokels before landing at some airstrip in what looks like the Southwest?
What a wonderfully strange way to sell cars, Suzuki. To Dutch people, it seems. With the crudest American stereotypes and a giant version of a small car. Maybe this worked! Maybe Suzuki’s problems in America were because we lacked bonkers crap like this? Who knows? I guess just enjoy this very strange ride.
I’ll be honest with you: I don’t want our site to become a place that just posts about every Tesla Cybertruck wreck, just because (and David’s review of the truck was actually fairly positive; it’s an impressive machine) — even the wrecks that may be at least in part caused by Tesla’s Level 2 semi-automated driving software, still confusingly-named Full Self Driving (FSD). But sometimes there’s just a perfect storm of irony and eye-rollery and embarrassing fanboyism and powerful, important lessons about the sometimes serious limitations of Level 2 driving systems. This is one of those times, thanks to a tweet that is going viral which hits all of these key points, and has a dramatic picture as well. It’s really the total package. We have to talk about it, at least a little.
I should mention that while the Cybertruck here looks pretty badly messed up and is likely totaled, nobody was actually hurt, so that’s good. Modern cars are very good about not killing the beings inside them in wrecks, and we’re seeing a great example of that here.
In fact, that’s one of the key points of the tweet, which has been seen by 2.4 million people:
Here’s a bigger screenshot of the text:
Screenshot: Twitter
Complimenting The Car That Helped Cause The Crash To Keep The ‘Haters’ Away
What many seem to find amazing, and the reason the tweet is going viral, is that the poster seems worried about what the dashcam footage of his wreck will do for the “bears/haters” after his car crashed itself into a pole.
There’s an awful lot here to unpack. Of course, the first thing that jumps out to most people is how the Cybertruck owner thanks Tesla for “engineering the best passive safety in the world.” I don’t know if that’s actually true, though the Cybertruck does have some impressive passive safety features, and like many modern vehicles, it is generally safe in a wreck, and it is genuinely amazing that the owner here came out without a scratch. And then in the next sentence the owner states that the Cybertruck “failed to merge out of a lane that was ending (there was no one on my left) and made no attempt to slow down” which resulted in the Cybertruck hopping a curb and smacking right into that large streetlight pole, as you can see in the photograph included with the tweet.
Notice I said “owner” there instead of “driver,” because that leads to the next, far more important point. There’s the irony, of course, of thanking Tesla for making a vehicle that’s so safe in a wreck, and then going on to mention that the very same vehicle caused the wreck. It’s very good at dealing with the problem it created!
It’s Proof That These Level 2 Systems Are Problematic
Now, where this gets more complex, and leads to the owner/driver distinction I mentioned before, is that exactly who or what was in control of that 6,000+ pounds of Cybertruck is not clear. The tweet definitely makes it seem like Tesla’s FSD software (noted in the tweet to be version 13.2.4, which is less than a month old) was in full control of the car, which made the decisions that led to crashing into that light pole, and the fact that despite the car heading towards the pole, the human inside did nothing to stop the situation, pretty clearly showing they were not in control or paying attention.
This, of course, is precisely how one is not supposed to use a Level 2 system, which requires constant driver vigilance, and is also the fundamental reason why all semi-automated driving systems are doomed: because people are terrible at using them. And, even worse and more paradoxically, the better a job the Level 2 system does, the worse it is for people to actually use and the more likely it is to be abused, as we see in this situation.
By the way, if you don’t remember what those automated driving levels are, here’s the chart. Remember, the levels don’t indicate how good or advanced the system is, but rather dictate the relationship between the human and the machine when it comes to how the driving responsibility is shared:
All Tesla FSD systems on the road today are Level 2 systems, meaning the human is always responsible, no matter how well the system works or how long it’s been since your last intervention. Under FSD, you have to be ready to take over at a moment’s notice, unless you’re cool with, say, smashing your $100,000 stainless steel truck into a huge post.
Other tweets by the owner seem to suggest a pattern with taking FSD at its name and just treating it like an actual Level 4 or 5 self-driving system – which, again, it isn’t – as you can infer here:
Sometimes I decide to go somewhere and turn on @Tesla FSD and then I forget where I decided to go and then it starts turning into Taco Bell or whatever and I'm like wtf is it doing and then I'm like oh right Taco Bell
So, the Twitter-poster here gets in his Cybertruck and turns on FSD and is so distracted he doesn’t even remember where he asked it to go? Even when there’s Taco Bell at the end? Bizarre.
We’ve known this would be a problem since 1948, when Mackworth’s famous study “The Breakdown of Vigilance during Prolonged Visual Search” demonstrated that intense and prolonged vigilance to a mostly independently-operating system is simply not something people are good at. At all. Tesla’s FSD not only calls itself a “Full Self-Driving” system, which sets up unrealistic expectations, but it’s also generally quite good at what it does, which means it is very easy for people to end up in the same situation as Mr.Pole-Pegged Cybertruck over here: too comfortable and then ultimately fucked.
Because no matter how good FSD may be most of the time, it’s not actually a Level 4 or 5 system, and even if it’s been doing fantastic for months, you have no idea when it may suddenly decide to not realize a lane is ending and crash into a pole. I know it’s tempting for ardent defenders of FSD or other automated driving systems to blame these sorts of wrecks on lighting or weather or confusing environmental setups, calling them “edge cases” and suggesting that these circumstances are uncommon, and not worth making a big fuss about.
But here’s the thing about “edge cases”: the world is full of edge cases. That’s what reality is! Messy, chaotic edge cases, with some veneer of order slapped down over everything. Look at where this wreck happened, for example, on that map of a section of Reno, Nevada there. That’s not a particularly challenging area, really. It looks like it was dark, but we’re not talking about some labyrinthine narrow, crowded streets in an ancient European city or anything like that: these are big, well-lit roads that aren’t even particularly dense, traffic-wise. I’m sure the FSD instance in that very same Cybertruck has navigated far more complex situations than this (FSD is a thoroughly impressive system). But, this time, for whatever arcane reason made up of ones and zeros, it got confused and drove right smack into a pole, like an idiot.
The owner should have been able to see this coming with plenty of time to react. If I understand what happened correctly, then the wreck is his fault, no question. He was using this software in a stupid way, and thankfully that stupidity didn’t hurt anyone else. But while the owner is likely entirely to blame, at the same time, that blame is shared with the very concept of a Level 2 driving system itself, which has been shown time and time again to foster this sort of dangerous inattention.
Yes, it appears our Cybertruck-lover wasn’t being particularly smart here, but he was guided to that idiocy by a technology that is technically very advanced, but practically crude and foolish. You can’t ask a machine to take over 90% or more of a task and then expect a person to remain alert and vigilant, at least not all the time. This wreck seems stupid on pretty much every level possible, the driver’s stupidity and the inherent stupidity of Level 2 semi-autonomy working hand-in-hand to make sure this person no longer has a working car.
We’ve reported on these sorts of wrecks before, we’ve told you about the studies and findings and research, and we will continue to do so, because wrecks like this show that the message is still not being heard. FSD, no matter what version number, no matter how few interventions you saw on some YouTube video of a drive, does not drive a car by itself. There still must be a human there, ready and able and willing to take over when it screws up. Which it may never do. Or it may do in the next minute. The point is, you just don’t know.
It’s sort of ridiculous we still are letting all this happen without really trying to find better solutions for the goal of self-driving. Sure, L2 is a great way to get self-driving data, but the way these systems are set up is kind of backwards. When the concept is that the machine is in more control and the human is watching or observing or monitoring, the tendency will always be less vigilance on the human’s part. If this was reversed, and a human was always in control with the software being ready to assist in emergencies or to compensate for driver failure, you could get all the data without introducing these vigilance-induced problems.
Of course, that’s a lot less sexy, and people want to not pay attention if they don’t have to. So here we are.
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There’s some good period cars, of course, like that K-Car and the 1954 Chevy cop car up there. The giant Swift causes a lot of panic, and its intent is assumed to be hostile, even though no attempts are made to communicate with the car to determine its goals or motives.
