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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

If you are curious, and don't happen to follow such things, you can see some work he was involved in, in the form of the RWBY series on Crunchyroll. (I'm not associated in any way with Crunchyroll.)

The combination of Blocks World style AI with Machinima has the potential to change human culture in radical ways. (It already is, IMO.) What would it do to language, if we could just think of a video scene in our heads, and our mobile computer could just synthesize it and show it to others? I suspect the use of "like" is related to the effect video media has already had on language.

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The Red Trailer is just spectacular. It's some of the most action-packed elegant violence I've seen choreographed. It's also one of the few times we have an answer to how a hundred pound anime teenager can become a whirlwind dervish of mayhem. Add very large bullets. (I mean, it explains where the force comes from... She's also apparently a world-class ballerina-clutz).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYW2GmHB5xs

And also the creator of the "Dead Fantasy" fan work, where Final Fantasy characters are opposed to the Dead or Alives characters in a serie of videos.

That's not the best of his works, but I first heard of him when he was still working on it, and it always impressed me how well made they were for something that he didn't get any money for.

RWBY is now on Netflix I believe.

> I suspect the use of "like" is related to the effect video media has already had on language.

I'm not sure what you mean by this, can you explain?

Well, like, when people use "like," it's like they're narrating a video scene in their own heads in a way that would cause another person from a video-soaked culture to, like, make it play in their heads too. ;)

It's the same as how such narration worked before, but it's also different in that we have a corpus of video culture to make references to. Before widespread video, we were always referring to the imagined "movie scenes" evoked in our heads by narration. Now, we can refer to a corpus of specific pre-rendered movie scenes.

> Well, like, when people use "like," it's like they're narrating a video scene in their own heads in a way that would cause another person from a video-soaked culture to, like, make it play in their heads too. ;)

The syntactic filler likes, or the "its' like they're..." like? Those are very different. Syntactic filler such as that is universal in human speech and languages, but tends to be different depending on the language and speaker. There's nothing unusual about Americans attaching to the word "like" as syntactic filler.

Or do you mean "like" as a synonym for "such as"? Like/Such as in this example here? I don't see how that has anything to do with video culture. People have spoken in hypotheticals since long before video.

The syntactic filler likes, or the "its' like they're..." like?

If you pay close attention, you'll find that it's not always filler. Often, people are prefacing references to visuals from the common culture.

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