#the 80s are a best of its own and it would require a lot more words to untagle what the situation was back then

[daddy-ul]

let me second that anon and say I too would very much appreciate any and all analysis of their friendship and James POV specifically. that 95 interview where he talks about Lars being the keeper of the secrets lives in my mind rent-free

i take this as a free rant card fhkdfhkdsdf not my fault.

let's talk about mr james trust issue hetfield, starting from 90s tallica (which. 👀👀👀 every time i talk abt it to my non tallica friends they are like "wh what the fuck?" and that's the only sane response)

when I think abt the codependency twins and secrets I usually think about this James interview from Rolling Stones 93

"There's little whispers and little games and little crap that goes on. But when it comes down to a problem, something serious going on, we go to each other, and there's no bullshit. When there's something serious being talked about, it's not talked about with the other guys or with anybody else. It's like an unwritten law. And I definitely like that."

I remember reading it and going "it was... almost normal, until you specified that 1) it was a silent law 2) you liked it that way

I dont think saying that James has trust issue is something controversial or new, so im taking that for granted to focus on WHEN he gives his trust and how with Lars he constantly gave it and took it away for DECADES.

A part from the fucked up part where you relish in having a secret deep bond that separates you from the rest of your bandmates + the fact that you dont even needed to state the rule for the rule to be born... what james is saying here is "when there is something important, i can trust him" and more specifically "i choose to go to him and no one else" (and the sentiment goes both ways but lars' side is not the point here) "because i trust him and not the other guys with what i consider important".

Now, imagine knowing this, having read this interview and many more, where EVEN IN THE 90S --even at the peak of rock 'n roll lifestyles, dysfunctions, white jackets, "little games, little whispers", aesthetic debates and so on-- you remember that EVEN THEN Lars talked about how the two of them had a lot of fights but couldn't bear to let pass more than 3 minutes before going to the other and apologize. And, uno mas: you have lars going around being happy that they both had children in the same year and talking about them growing older together!

THEN, be me in 2020, finally getting the This monster lives! book (the book abt the making of SKOM) and you read this:

JAMES: [...] I want to feel some trust. (to Lars) I just feel static all the time from you. PHIL: (to James) What would it take for you to trust him? JAMES: I have no idea. PHIL: No, what would it look like? JAMES: With him? I don't know. I don't know if I've ever seen it.

apart from me being gutted (bc believe me that if my 15+ year friend said that to me i would have had trouble breathing) i was.... disoriented? perplexed? like, yeah, it was a tough period and I can imagine that James would have some difficulty trusting Lars in that moment but... the last line? talking like trusting lars or lars being trust worthy was something that never could happen?? it. it doesn't make any sense.

He is not trying to be mean or hurt lars, he is being sincere and he is honestly trying to resolve their issues. He is saying what he is feeling in the moment.

and that goes even more sideways when Lars confesses his needs and vulnerabilities regarding James and--

JAMES: It doesn't hit me right... I don't know... PHIL: Doesn't hit you right, meaning you think he's bullshitting you? JAMES: Sure.

He doesn't even trust what Lars is saying IN THIS MOMENT. Not a word from his mouth. how could it be? How you can go from being weirdly proud of having a secret cult with only two members to *move hands* this.

He says, and i quote, "because there's been twenty years of mistrust", so basically every single year of their friendship (look at me jumping out of a bridge at this part because jesus FUCK it would hurt less). And look, I dont know them, and you can lie to the press, you can lie to the fans, you can act and pretend all you want bc it's the show business -- so it could be that all the times before james lied.

But if i believed in those lies,, so had Lars bc not long after that he fucked right off the room to take a breather.

But let's put to the side this, because Phil was a good therapist and took James through his reasonings about trust and especially why he feels this distrusting towards Lars in particular:

JAMES: [...] Like, when I walked in, I wanted to hug everyone in the room, but I didn't want to hug you. There's how I felt. It's not a lack of love. I didn't feel like touching you that way. I was carrying some of that ugliness, and it's not good for me. PHIL: And when he reached out for you, did you feel it was genuine? Or would you prefer to believe it wasn't, so you could feel safe? JAMES: Sure, that's the safest way to go, for sure. PHIL: So mistrust is a defence against being hurt. I mean, the more we find a reason not to trust somebody, the safer we feel. The closest relationships have the most difficulty with trust. JAMES: Uh-huh. KIRK: That's. Uh. Pretty amazing. JAMES: Because there is so much more to get hurt with, or so much to lose.

Basically, Lars was special.

That's it. That's the deal.

What James feels towards Lars is so big, it could go so wrong, it could hurt so much- that is better not opening to it, not trusting it --him.

Knowing this, all the parentheses click shut behind.

This is a big turning point in their approach to one another, imho. On Lars' end too, but you asked abt James so I'm gonna contain myself.

But I gotta say that, in MY OPINION, ABSOLUTELY OPINIONATED VIEW BASED ON WHAT I'VE SEEN AND NOTHING ELSE SO TAKE IT FOR WAT IT IS-- Lars after this learned not to need James so much, or he tried to. He confessed that he had a special need for him, to have a special connection, on a deeper level. And, like, it happens, when it happens in friendships is BRUTAL (have you ever considered someone your absolute bff to then discover they just thought you a casual friend? IMAGINE AFTER 20 YEARS).

So, to me, it felt like... He started to ask less, to ask of James what he would ask of his other friends and no more.

What did James do?

Started to point out how Lars was instrumental in the earlier days

Gave a lot more compliments and started to consistently underline in a positive way the length of their relationship

Saying OUT LOUD that he is special to him

Doing the weird thing that he does 85% of the time when the interviewer ask about Metallica in general and he just brings up Lars, only Lars. DUDE YOU HAVE OTHER 2 BAND MEMBERS (I don't think he does it consciously sjsjsjsjs and he loves rob and kirk! BUT DUDE)

I'm gonna expand the last one BC it was the first that I noticed back then. Mind you, Lars had always had Lars Privileges™️, I'm not even listing things bc it's everywhere, but now? like, 2005/6 going forward???? James consciously and openly let him and djjeksksksksk Lars noticed and basically did what he always does (the little shit): run with it to see how far he could push. Famously from that era: he wore NAKED AND SWEATY James embroidered bathrobe, saying that if someone could, that would be him, sitting on James' special stool, because he could. and then he started saying embarrassing shit about them in front of him, with James just ignoring him or looking in the middle distance, like "why the fuck he is like that" BUT LETTING HIM.

>>>>>> he lets them do whatever the fuck he wants with him.

HE STARTED TO SPELLING IT OUT, HE IS NOT AFRAID ANYMORE.

Where is the gifset abt the XXX anniversary where James said "I know that Lars is doing stuff behind me" --and Lars immediately starting doing that-- "but it's okay because only Lars can do that".

All of this to say: they always have been like this to a degree, now James just lets himself (and Lars) live it as it is.

Look at them being sixty and living their best weirdo life.

[fresh-bag-of-ham]

seeking urbanism / housing advocacy advice (because you're the only person i follow who both posts about it and does it): my city (primarily a college town, population < 100k) is holding a community discussion about ways to increase affordable housing, including inclusionary zoning and other zoning reforms. what kinds of policy ideas / comments are best to bring to this as A Member Of The Public? does inclusionary zoning work like it's supposed to? are there other specific zoning reforms that work well? i know getting rid of parking minimums is a big one, but i don't know if that's achievable here yet.

MY TIME HAS COME.

First of all, if the forum is about 'affordable housing', then you may need to start with drawing the connection between affordability and increasing housing supply. There are a lot of tangents you can go down in a discussion of affordable housing, but the crucial point to get across is that increasing housing supply on its own makes housing costs go down. Investor speculation in real estate, e.g., happens because supply is constrained and those are the conditions where real estate values reliably go up, creating profit. It is a symptom, not a cause. See also: landlords in Austin, TX melting down on Twitter because they're increasing supply so fast there that they're having to lower rents. Video recently studied and shown to be 3x more effective for changing people's minds about supply-side housing than other interventions.

INCLUSIONARY ZONING. a.k.a. mandating that for any development with more than X units, Y% of those units must be 'affordable' units reserved for families earning Z% area median income. In a perfect world, all housing would be mixed-income housing. In practice, the effectiveness of IZ depends almost entirely on what you set Y% at. About five years ago, our local DSA passed a referendum increasing Y% from 10% to 25%. This change has basically stalled all housing development that this applies to because the projects just don't pencil. You need subsidy to build affordable housing, you have to cobble that subsidy together from a lot of different funding sources, and all these sources have different requirements on how their funding can be used. Your problems become twofold: (1) Most subsidies for affordable housing want you to build something that's more like 80-100% affordable, so a 25%-affordable development won't get funding. (2) The subsidy available for affordable housing is finite, so even if your 25%-affordable development were able to get subsidy, that necessarily is taking subsidy away from somewhere else. The same number of affordable units will be built, IZ just ends up trying to dictate how those units are distributed. It mainly ends up kneecapping market-rate housing construction, which, again, adding market-rate housing puts downward pressure on housing prices.

Our prior level of 10% IZ seemed to work ok..? but I would caution strongly against relying on IZ if you are supply constrained, which, I can't imagine you're not. A buzzy new strategy for mixed-income housing creation is "social housing" -- AOC wrote about it in the NYT last week, here's a talk about it that I admittedly haven't watched yet. This is what's getting traction here as DSA is tentatively walking back support for their very aggressive IZ policy that has not created the affordable housing they wanted it to.

If you have parking minimums, KILL THAT SHIT. We were successful in advocating for our table of parking minimums to be turned into parking maximums. Add/increase bike parking minimums, bike theft is a HUGE deterrent from biking here, so having a safe place to store your bike at home is critical if you want anyone to start leaving behind their cars. You also probably want to look at dimensional standards: increase heights, reduce setbacks, increase lot coverage maximums, reduce lot size minimums, if you're anything like our city then you probably have even more and weirder constraints you'll want to relax so new buildings can be bigger and hold more units. You probably have just straight up caps on number of units per lot -- kill single-family zoning, get at least 4 units or something per lot allowed! Lot area per dwelling unit is a particularly terrible constraint, basically creating a minimum amount of land you have to own in order to be able to have a home. Horrible! Kill it!

My personal preferred urban form is the perimeter block enabled by single-stair apartment buildings that's common throughout Europe and basically anywhere outside of the US and Canada. This will take reforms at multiple levels before it becomes possible even here, but Seattle-based architect Michael Eliason (@holz_bau on Twitter) has stair-pilled me on this form so powerfully, and https://secondegress.ca/ makes the extremely compelling (Canada-centric) case for allowing single-stair apartment buildings, which for us means changing building code at the state level. #goals, though.

I have had a lot of practice recently writing and organizing public comment to advocate for this stuff so I would be happy to talk messaging/strategy at any point, I could go on and on about this subject! I'm so thrilled that you're asking about this though, it's so important to get involved and show up at these kinds of meetings, because the people who reliably show up to these things are the retiree busybodies with nothing but free time to oppose every type of change imaginable and are the ones who got us into this situation in the first place.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HOW TO STARTUPS ARE REALLY LIKE

Because they haven't tried to control it too much, Twitter feels to everyone like previous protocols. However, startups usually have a fairly informal atmosphere, and there's something very pleasing about small things. Another way to fly low is to give you bigger abstractions—bigger bricks, as it would if you were relying on formulas you didn't understand. Well, that may be what you want. For example, if a reputable investor is willing to invest on terms you'll take without negotiation. Every investor has some track they need to move along from the first investor who commits as low a price as they need to move along from the first conversation to wiring the money, and you need to do what you want to think about which will actually let you get the most done. We get all the paperwork set up properly or you're just launching projectiles. When people hurt themselves lifting heavy things, it's usually because they try to lift with their back. But times have changed. If you're raising money from many investors, roll them up as they say yes, and the visual arts is the resistance of the medium. The fashion for the name Gary began when the actor Frank Cooper adopted the name of a tough mill town in Indiana.

It may work, but it won't be the last idea you'll have. But if you have no ideas. So what tends to happen is that they flake. For example, any work of art that does its job well, doesn't require you to pick out a few individuals and label their opinions as correct. Tell them that valuation is not even the thing to optimize. You can see that in the way a pilot does when flying through clouds. People who worry about the increasing gap between rich and poor evaporate. Once you start getting investors to commit, it becomes increasingly easy to get more to. And since risk is usually proportionate to reward, if you write them in Lisp? The great fortunes of that time the leading practitioners and the people who voted for Kerry did it as an example of this view: 80% of MIT spinoffs succeed provided they have at least a couple days considering different ideas, instead of thinking only of yourself. Is it a problem if you work in sales or marketing.

Could it be that, because in many cases the language layer won't have to change at all. What we really do at Y Combinator is get startups launched straight. There's a market for writing that sounds impressive and can't be disproven. There's another thing all three components of Web 2. Most of the groups applying have not stopped to ask: of all the lies they told you during your education. What you really want is a pool of local angel investors—people investing money they made from their own startups. If that were true, he would have been for two Google employees to focus on that problem. 0 conference would presumably be full of geeks, right? We can afford to spend a lot more expensive to start a startup.

But really what work experience refers to is not 1950s hardware, but, say, making masterpieces in comics might seem to the average Frankish nobleman in 800, and report back to us. The most important, small things can be perfect; big ones always have something wrong with the senator's argument, you should take money from investors only if they require no convincing, and are so excited by it that they race through a huge percentage of the newly discovered territory in one lifetime. Reward is always proportionate to risk, and very early stage startups are mobile. Instead everyone is just supposed to explore their own personal vision. Part of their brain knew there was something there; it just didn't percolate all the way up into conscious knowledge. In other words, he's now rich enough not to have any teeth, and the greedy algorithm tells you what to do. And the best way to do business. Responding to Tone. It's an experiment because we're prepared to fund younger founders than most investors would. Or could have been implemented as a couple hundred lines of Perl; in fact, don't even ask for their email address unless you need to be solved. That is in fact the defining quality of Lisp: it was in order to make this so that McCarthy gave Lisp the shape it has. They tend to be suspicious of rich people.

Those are interesting questions. We spent three months building a version 1, then f iterating rapidly. You have to get them to move. That's the scary thing: fundraising is not merely that you'll spend too long on it or raise too much. Be inappropriate. Their living expenses are low. There are, of course. Instead of version 1s to be superseded, the works they produced continued to attract new readers. Why does he think this? There are plenty of similar ones in the grownup world.

The business person represents the voice of the customer and that's what keeps the engineers and product development on track. Joe's has good burritos. Always be questioning. So it's wise not merely to be nice to investors who reject you, but I have to do to get rich, the money you need, because a if you use a more powerful language enable you to write shorter programs? But we also raised eyebrows by using generic Intel boxes as servers instead of industrial strength servers like Suns, for using a then-obscure open-source Unix variant called FreeBSD instead of a real commercial OS like Windows NT, for ignoring a supposed e-commerce standard called SET that no one cares enough to disagree with, you may have to do well at that. We plan to mine the web for these implicit tags, and use them together with the reputation hierarchy they embody to enhance web searches. I grew up believing, this turns out to be a waste of time? If you don't and a competitor does, you're in a position of having to buy whole albums. And isn't popularity to some extent its own justification? Especially since tone is so hard that it's a new messaging protocol, where you don't specify the recipients. Thanks to Trevor Blackwell and Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of this.

The trends we're seeing now are simply the inherent nature of the web emerging from under the broken models that got imposed on it during the summer—so even college students can participate. But I want to know what they believe, but they are not likely to be the mistaken one. If you're an outsider, you're just one step away from getting things done. Experts have given Wikipedia middling reviews, but they have at least started to omit the initial Who is this guy and what authority does he have to write about a topic is a variant of ad hominem than actual refutation. No, they may not have explored. If it can work to start a rapidly growing business as software. As an example of a useful, general idea, consider that of the controlled experiment.

It would hurt YC's brand at least among the innumerate if we invested in huge numbers of risky startups that flamed out. Till they do, you don't have to prove you're going to have an increasingly prosperous society without increasing variation in individual productivity as time goes on. As with contrarian investment strategies, that's exactly the point. If that's what's on the other side of this coin is that it's good enough. But it's ok to use a TV as a monitor. More remarkable still, he's stayed interesting for 30 years. But if the founders mistrust one another, this could cause some friction. It's kind of strange when you think about it, because his email was such a perfect example of this view: 80% of MIT spinoffs succeed provided they have at least a random sample of the applicants don't seem to have fully grasped what I earlier called the central fact of philosophy: that words break if you push them too far. They're far better at detecting bullshit than you are at producing it, even if few do per capita.

[mwooky]

you know having full mobility (flight + backflight) on staff of life feels better over flight + regeneration which if youre running medica (ahem i am: your healing output is increased however self healing is decreased harshly) then its really an entirely useless perk requiring you to be close to your teammates

fae circle (the ultimate thats just Peak support: mass regen in a large radius, 2x regen if anyone is below 50% hp it also cleanses any negative status effects) is just the regeneration ability but better by a longshot especially since if you feel like having fun playing mercy overwatch but better nyoom a lot of people will deny you of said fun and run antiheal (obviously the user with such status cannot be healed and itll last longer if someone is attempting to heal them however it for some reason doesnt care about overhealth? makes sense nor am i gonna suggest changing that god bless cola + tophat users)

anyways though i feel as if full mobility wouldnt be necessary if youre running the variant better together due to the speed boost you gain by distancing yourself from teammates however the range is much shorter meaning youll have to be closer to your tether target this is honestly Pure healing and nothing more since you dont get anything out of this aside from raw healing (especially since after a few seconds those around you and even yourself start to regen due to this variant) which is probably why the best variants out the three provided is divine strength

at the very least youre not only healing but you can boost the damage of your tether target (mercy 101 setup) and farm assists that way which the damage boost can be pretty helpful securing kills and especially making the game unplayable if you pocket the most cracked person in the server the only main thing to focus on is balancing your healing and damage boosting: therell be times where youll need to heal much more often or damage boost more although i tend to damage boost much more if i see another staff of life on my team

having your variant being divine strength plus the solid mobility makes dying honestly a challenge: if youre keen with your positioning taking advantage of distance/your tether range and cooldown usage (those fucking take forever to get off cd: flight is roughly 8 seconds and backflight is 6 as i can recall) then you just dont die at all its awesome

id talk more about the thorn incantation variant but theres not much to really talk about: its that feeling you get when youre playing a support character where youre sick of having to rely on your teammates for assistance when needed and 80% of the time theyre dogshit and dont take advantage of your mass healing or boost in damage to pick those off on the enemy team one by one and thus you shall take matters into your own hands by mini-machine gunning down everything you see (except not everything since you can use m2 for a certain period of time and if you do use all of it then youll have to wait a few seconds: regaining m2 charges the little bar back through healing will then allow you to bam bam)

ive seen barely anyone actually use thorn incantation dont get me wrong the damage is solid however if you really wanna be useful to your team youll have to secure kills yourself since its almost similar but yet different to that of divine strength and by securing said kills you most of the time would have to kill steal..hooray... (unless youre a maniac and running damage abilities then sometimes kill stealing...)

why did i write so much about a support tool in a roblox game and said support tool is (clearly) based off of the vinestaff gear (hell it even has a skin looking similar to the original)? why not!! i have a massive headache + toothache its not like i can play the game myself and think about cool staffy staff whilst flying about

[freebooter4ever]

So you guys know i (try to) post daily doodles, and i have said before that i draw for about 2-3 hrs every night. BUT that also means i dont post about like 80-90% of the drawings i do each night. Today though, i've been thinking about A*I and my own relationship with drawing, and how utterly baffled i am that anyone would want to use it to like...draw for them..and how the concept that *tell a computer what art to do so i dont have to do it* is alien to me. So here's ALL the drawings i did tonight. The bottom one is the last one i did and the one i would normally post. And i want to talk about A*I without talking about good or bad end product. Because i dont care if im making the shittiest art in the universe - i still wouldn't use A*I. Not even as a ‘tool’.

If you've been around here for a while you know i have a love/hate relationship with my art. I write too, but writing doesnt make me so frustrated and angry that i want to throw my computer out a second story window. HOWEVER. There is a huge caveat to that anger.

It happens after.

You could look at it a little like hockey. Every game is fresh, right? I mean god knows the US made an entire movie about how every game is a new game and the odds could always fall in your favor no matter how stacked against you. So every drawing i go into it excited - like LOOK at that reference material, its gorgeous. The gesture is beautiful, the post is interesting, there is something about it that is just begging to be drawn. But then say you hit intermission in the hockey game and the opposing team scored a few points. And i step back and look at the drawing and realize i started to go wrong somewhere along the way. But its too late now, you gotta commit and keep going. And you do but somehow the final score is STILL 6 to 0 and thats when i want to flush all my art down the toilet and never look at it again. But its okay because the next drawing is going to start with a blank canvas and who cares what happened last time.

Ok maybe a bad example.

The product is never really what drives me to draw - i mean, sure i do like it a heck of a lot better when i have something /anything/ that i can post to show that im sticking with my everyday doodle. But its not a requirement to doodling. The process of drawing is always fun. Its when i come out of it and look at the stupid thing that im like ‘well fuck i fucked that one up again didnt i’, and THEN i get annoyed lol.

I dont sit there consumed with frustration over ‘gee i dont know what to draw’. This is never an issue. I HAVE TOO MUCH TO DRAW. Sometimes i avoid certain gifs/photos because in the back of my mind im like ‘yeah no, i havent leveled up that far yet, i cant do that justice’. But i dont want to admit the sheer number of images of geno alone i have saved. I think my biggest reference folder is still aoki and that has over two thousand screenshots - i dont think anyone will ever surpass that LOL. I have a never ending supply of practice art to be done.

The frustration comes when i have an image in my head and i want to get it down on paper so-to-speak (computer whatever). So - when im NOT using reference (or at least not an exact one) and am making an ‘illustration’ (ish). But again, the process isn't the issue. I like the act of drawing, i like the image in my head slowly taking shape, i like how vividly i can see it. Yall know how obsessed i am with personality - that's not just part of the drawing, that IS the drawing. And each deicision in the illustration is defined by the personality/character.

A computer can't fucking do this.

Could i maybe tell a computer ‘draw geno in the shower’. Sure. And it probably could. And if i didnt care about the process - if all i wanted was a very good drawing of geno in the shower....that probably would be fine. Maybe great even. Maybe it would be the best damn drawing of geno in the shower ever. And then i'd feel like shit because a machine is producing art that is more valuable to other people than mine ever will be. But holy fucking shit that ruins the entire POINT of drawing???? Why would you do that?

I mean, im sure yall can infer the entire point of the act of drawing geno in the shower. He's hot, he's wet. ANYWAY.

In my opinion, a person who wants the end product and doesn't care about the process of getting there....that person is not an artist. That person is someone who enjoys art, and probably thinks they have a lot of good ideas to make into art, but who doesn't feel that pull to make art themselves. They just want to buy art. And they want it cheap. And mindless computers being trained in seconds on the decades of creativity and hard work of art masters is a heck of a lot cheaper than a human.

And the hardest part of all this for me is how worthless this makes me feel - nobody wants you, they want that automatic button. Kinda like my dad that way (haha)

[sunder-the-gold]

[Kaiju No.8] Bakko, Ashiro Mina’s pet white tiger

It's been more than 80 issues, and we still don't really know the deal with the tiger, Bakko. Particularly when and how Mina got it.

I think we're going to learn via flashbacks during her upcoming fight with Kaiju Number 14.

But what do we know?

Aside from allowing her to ride it, we've also seen it assist Mina in combat by throwing itself against her with precise timing to help her fight the recoil of her canon and remain on her feet, so that the two of them can immediately break and run to avoid counter-fire.

We haven't seen the tiger try to fight any sort of kaiju by itself, and logically it shouldn't. It's superhumanly strong, but not as strong as a melee-specialist captain like Hoshina.

We've long known that the beast seems tame; Mina shows absolutely no concern with keeping it uncaged in her apartment. She can be completely naked (no powered armor, no weapon) and turn her back to the tiger without fear of being attacked. No one on her team seems to pay the beast any mind either, so they're not worried about this ambush predator attacking them when they turn their backs.

Having a tame, trained white tiger already says lots of things about a character. It's a blatant sign of decadent wealth or powerful connections and authority within society. Keeping an adult tiger healthy, content, and fit in a city is an expensive and complicated task, requiring a strong support system. Normally, law makers and enforcers would put an immediate stop to it, but in this case they turn a blind eye.

She's not the only captain who gets away with bullshit, but none of the others display their decadence quite as brazenly as Mina. Gen Narumi's slovenly attitude and otaku addictions don't really compare to the risk that Bakko is going to flip out and eat someone's face.

We know that Mina doesn't come from a wealthy family, and while she's the head of an entire division, there are many superior ranks above her own whom she is not allowed to question. The one thing at which she is unparalleled in the Defense Force is 'long-ranged elimination of large-scale kaiju', even if she lacks flexibility (she's terrible at melee combat) and depends heavily on massive infrastructure to provide her with gigantic cannons.

It probably also helps that, unlike Gen Narumi, Mina is a model soldier who does her best to maintain internal morale and discipline as well as public dignity. Aside from appointing a hopelessly-specialized melee expert as her vice-captain, the tiger is really the only allowance that Mina demands from society.

And then we learn later that Mina lost her pet calico cat in the kaiju attacked that destroyed her childhood home. Bakko is something of a replacement; she's defying the kaiju to take her cat away from her again.

(Kafka reveals to Mina’s fans that she took charge of caring for the class animals in elementary school. She loves having and caring for pets.)

On that note, having a white tiger for an exotic pet gets recontextualized in a manga like Kaiju No.8.

It is perhaps the only furry creature seen in this manga. Most of the humans wear spandex and armor, and the kaiju are hard flesh, chitin, shells. The tiger is positively warm and fluffy by comparison, and its threat as an apex predator pales in comparison to the menace of the kaiju. For all that a white tiger still seems like a spirit rather than a simple animal, at the same time it is one of the purest expressions of nature in a story filled with unnatural beasts and artificial tools.

And then the manga introduces spirits, or at least memory-ghosts, into the mix. Which raises suspicions about why the author made Bakko a white tiger, with all the ghostly connotations.

[randomvarious]

Today's compilation:

The House Sound of Chicago - Vol. III - Acid Tracks 1988 House

Hopping off of that notoriously rickety K-tel train to nowhere for a bit and latching onto some classic house goodies instead, starting with this third installment from The House Sound of…, a series that was originally launched in 1986 by Chicago house label D.J. International Records in order to showcase the city's own house scene, and was also released in the UK through the much bigger London Records too. This series would end up proving far more impactful across the pond than it would in the States, but in '88, the year of the UK's Second Summer of Love, during which house music would spread like wildfire among the youth, the London label took over its reins and decided to start redirecting this series through their newly-repurposed FFRR imprint instead. FFRR's focus would be on dance music, and as it was headed by the one and only Pete Tong, it would go on to become one of the greatest and most important labels in the history of dance music as we know it.

So, in that regard, what we have here happens to be a pretty damn big deal, because this was the first comp that was ever issued on FFRR since its dance rebrand. But its title is actually inexplicably and very confusingly misleading, because while it claims to be loaded up with 'acid tracks,' only one of these tunes actually meets the criteria for being acid—Tyree's "Acid Over," which, as all acid tracks do, stars the unique squelches of the Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer—and I can't say that I'm very much a fan of it.

Instead, what dominates this comp is a bunch of great Chicago house of a different stripe: largely black and queer, vocally male-led stuff with some soul to it, that includes things like feelgood combinations of strings and richly stabbing piano chords deployed over four-on-the-floor drumbeats.

And while I find almost all of this record to be quite good, I think its very best moments happen to lie on its B-side, with Darryl Pandy and Farley "Jackmaster" Funk's absurdly energetic "Freeman" and Sterling Void's much calmer and steadier "It's All Right" serving as a stellar yin and yang, together representing opposite ends of a spectrum of both vibe and sound that could be contained within this revolutionary dance music genre that was still very much at such an early juncture itself.

So, Darryl Pandy, as he is wont to do, sports his lovably goofy vocal passion all over "Freeman," while Farley complements him with a beat that's very fiery, deliberately ostentatious, and, by that some token, clearly on a queer post-disco/hi-NRG type of tip too. Basically, if you love yourself some big, gay, and campy 80s dance tunes, this one's a can't-miss 🔥.

And then to counterbalance something as fun and ridiculous as that one is "It's All Right," which is one of those blissed-out bits of transcendent dance dreaminess that seems to be targeted directly at your very own soul. This is a song in which those deadly key-and-string combos really abound, and if you're ever out on the floor when it comes on, you're then required to do some extensive, eyes-closed, slow grooving to it 😌. Wonderful track.

So, ultimately, I feel kinda bad for all the acid jackers who bought this record and were expecting their purchase to be a whole lot more chemical than it was, but hopefully they still came away with an appreciation for this different slate of 80s Chicago house bangers anyway. Buncha must-listen tunes here for anyone who's interested in this local scene, where this music first originated.

And you can also pair this album with my own 1980s Chicago House playlist too, which as of right now has almost no overlap, besides Jamie Principle's "Baby Wants to Ride"—but my playlist (the YouTube one at least) has the version of that song in which Jamie at one point decides to….cynically parody "America the Beautiful" 😂…and this album doesn't.

1980s Chicago House: Spotify / YouTube / YouTube Music

Highlights:

Jamie Principle - "Baby Wants to Ride" Frankie Knuckles - "Only the Strong Survive" Paris - "Girl U Need a Change of Mind" Darryl Pandy & Farley "Jackmaster" Funk - "Freeman" Romance - "All Dis Music" Farley "Jackmaster" Funk - "My House" Sterling Void - "It's All Right"

[retphienix]

Not to regurgitate the same "the nerfs have not been healthy or reasonably considered in Helldivers 2" talking points but man.

In isolation, just one thing among a sea of things, I hate what they've done to the Eruptor so much.

So I'm gonna vent it for my own sake and nothing more.

That thing was the shining point of success from its warbond- a warbond that has the immaculate grenade pistol of all things- and this STILL took the spotlight for me because it felt so good, different, and fun.

It was a weapon that traded ergonomics and ROF and safety (can't shoot close targets etc) for AMAZING stopping power, hitting many breakpoints that no other weapon has in the entire game!

You could one shot scouts from the front! Just tap em, no need to go around or shoot from 'slightly' above to hit their head!

You could one shot devastators TO THE CHEST!

You could take out MULTIPLE berserkers with ONE SHOT! Or guarantee a one-shot by hitting their stomach!

You could dent groups of enemies with the AOE, often wiping all the fodder enemies with one well placed explosion of shrapnel!

You could severely damage many objective style targets like turret towers!

ALL THIS- WITHOUT BEING OVERTUNED OR THE BEST OPTION! IT HAD GIVE AND TAKE IN ITS PERFORMANCE!!!!!!!!!!!

But some random exploit (that I never heard about until AFTER the nerfs, conveniently enough) let it hurt Chargers a "little too much" (reasonable, fix that then- without nerfing it to garbage). No real word on how it's pretty garbage against bugs otherwise- it hurt chargers too much, nerf it to hell I guess.

And out of nowhere the balance team starts claiming that people were "Upset about friendly fire" ??????? So they remove the unique shrapnel that did like 80% of the damage and then buffed the weak piddly baby explosion damage a tiny notch up from "nothing" to "still nothing".

The fucking thing is gutted.

It had purpose!

It was REASONABLE in its strength!

It had UNIQUE USE CASES that you PAID FOR through its various WEAKNESSES!!!!

It wasn't magically the strongest and best thing in the entire game! It just had PURPOSE!

And now it's a garbage version of the dominator, a weapon I bet they'll nerf to trash tier soon if they don't fully reconsider their balance direction.

Between the buffs they keep slapping on enemies the second we find a way to uniquely interact with them-

(like scouts- you used to be able to manage your loadout to include explosions to more easily take them out, but that's not the Arrowhead Balance Team Approved method of going around and shooting from behind so take a slap on the wrist and a buff to their explosive resist- wouldn't want weapons like the scorcher having purpose now would we)

-and the countless times anything that works better than the starting pistol gets nerfed, we just don't have fun stuff that works differently anymore.

Just "Here's the med armor pen rifle equivalent or the Sickle for fodder. Here's the autocannon. Here's the AMR. Bring your EATs." yay

Hell, this is a post about the gutted Eruptor but there's another thing- we lack variety in how to approach so many targets since every weapon that hits different break points or handles differently in an interesting way gets nerfed to shit- but EVEN THE BORING BASIC OPTIONS get nerfed if they become too reliable- like the quasar getting a nearly 20 second round turn around adjustment because they were upset people were choosing the "Slower rocket that doesn't take a backpack" over the "Backpack rocket that has such a fucking terrible ROF without team reload (a mechanic they severely need to adjust to be actually worth doing and not a built in nerf) that you might as well take the quasar even with the huge nerf because you at least get a backpack slot with that thing".

Cool >:(

At least the flamethrower is finally good. It's still a support weapon that can't take out a ton of units that our primary weapons ALSO can't take out requiring you to rely on strikes that a lot of missions will punish you for relying on through modifiers or weather effects (I like the weather but failure to let our loadouts serve themselves does shine a flaw in them) so woops to that but at least it's finally serving a purpose by taking out groups and chargers fast.

[walcutt]

DECK TECH - Aria Oath

So here's tonights 3-0 badboy. We're playing a pretty scorched-earth control pile with a combo finish or two up its sleeve. It's a great deck if you like: recursion lines, counting to 20, locking your opponent into catch-22s, and milling 80% of your deck in one go.

The deck has 4 cores, each of them forming their own wincon, and also supporting the general strategy. I'll go over them, and then interactions, and then the sideboard.

CORE I: Oath of Druids

The first of the two namesake cores: this is a powerful two-card combo that threatens to take over the game on turn 3. It's simple: your deck plays no creatures besides your payoff, and you play Oath of Druids. If your opponent has any creatures, you get your best hit for free. For me, this is Blightsteel Colossus, which blocks extremely effectively and inevitably wins against anything which can't exile it. It's easy for opponents to play around, but they have to -- if they can't, you get free wins!

CORE II: Aria of Flame

The second namesake core, Aria of Flame. The concept here is simple: you play aria, then you cast as many spells as possible to kill. We run lots of cheap spells, especially with flashback. Lava Dart is a critical piece here, allowing us to close massive damage gaps even when we're out of mana. Throes of Chaos also provides 2 triggers of Aria, cashing out late-game land draws that would otherwise brick the deck. Finally, we run a suite of cheap red burn to compliment Aria, which makes up the removal in the deck.

CORE III: Punishing Grove

To maintain board control, we run an infamous combo: Punishing Fire + Grove of the Burnwillows. While Punishing Fire seems like a niche card at first glance, we can force our opponent to gain life with Grove -- and it even adds the red we need to recur! So, we can tap just one land to buyback this spell indefinitely, giving us extremely resilient board control, and also the ability to whittle down our opponent's life, as each loop knocks off 1 life.

CORE IV: Valakut

The final chunk of the deck supports Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle. Since most of our deck is red, we want all the mountains anyways. Wren and Six can recur our fetchlands every turn, providing both major card advantage and a consistent way to reach the 6+ mountains we need to start bolting our opponent. Though usually not enough to kill on its own, in combination with our burn spells it presents a real threat. Plus, Wren's early-game power is enough to dominate games all on its own.

Synergies:

Aria of Flame and Oath of Druids both have severe deckbuilding costs, but they compliment each other perfectly! Oath requires you to run extremely few creatures, which lets you power up Aria by having more instants and sorceries to compensate!

Additionally, Blightsteel Colossus being an infect win-con means it is entirely agnostic of the life we like to give our opponents with this deck. Even if you get blown out on Aria, or have to give your opponent loads of life to stabilize with Punishing Fire, Blightsteel takes exactly as long to win.

Wren plays very nicely with Throes of Chaos, allowing us to retrieve the lands we use to retrace to keep getting more casts. This line can help you out of particularly bad draws!

Finally, the mill from an Oath of Druids trigger provides a lot of fuel for Aria, if Blightsteel is only enough to stabilize your position on board. You'll likely get plenty of flashback spells, especially Lava Darts, ready to play with Aria.

Sideboard:

Our first 4 cards are dedicated against greedy-landbase decks. We can punish on two angles: massive cheap damage with Price of Progress, or locking them out of their best plays with Blood Moon. I usually side both in together. Even though they don't work at the same time, they're both extremely effective when the situation arises.

We put 5 slots on extra removal. Pyroclasm misses the mainboard for being too weak, and not hitting face, but against weenie decks, early sweepers can be key to prevent steamrolling.

4 slots are then on non-creature removal, which can be great in the mirror or against general non-creature strategies. Primal Command is a bit wonky, but choosing modes 2 and 3 together yields a full removal of the threat.

It also serves a dual purpose with our last 2 sideboard slots, with graveyard hate! Mill and self-mill are both prevalent in our meta, so having tools to protect your own deck and wreck the opponent's graveyard are key.

[nitrosodiumepicfps]

Five more Music-Themed games

This isn't really a genre, since I'm not constricted by only researching "rhythm games". If it's got music and uses it in an interesting way, I'll take a crack at it.

Undertale - I really enjoyed this game in my younger years. Not only was it a well-put-together RPG, but it included pretty good commentary about morality, choice, empathy, and choosing what is right over what is easy. Characters were incredibly memorable, giving you reasons not to kill them, and the world would change based on your actions. You felt like this benevolent being in a world that you have no reason to save, and yet, by pulling on the strongest emotions, these characters, mere sprites and lines of code, could convince you to invest in their lives. The fandom may have been a cesspool rivaling the dark ages of FNAF, and to be honest, I never got interested in Deltarune, but standalone, Undertale was good. Oh, and the music was also amazing. Toby Fox is a ridiculously good composer; the music is well-made, but he also utilises leitmotifs and character themes to create emotional connections and fun nods. For example, Spider Dance - a theme that plays when you fight a spider lady - when played on piano, requires you to play as a duet, i.e. with two sets of hands, as a spider would. The greatest example of this is Hopes and Dreams, one of the last songs you listen to if you're going for true pacifist. I don't know how to spoiler text in Tumblr, so if you haven't played Undertale yet, just don't look at the screen. Essentially, Asriel is the true form of Flowey, that genocidal maniac who has been puppeteering your journey through the Underground. Now freed from his flower form, Asriel wants to reset the entire timeline and bring everything back to how it was. In his theme, the opening track Once Upon A Time can be heard, giving your adventure a cyclic theme, and Flowey's old theme, Your Best Friend, can also be heard at times, connecting back to Asriel's bitter existence in the flower. This is topped off with an orchestral rock theme to the entire track, showing you that this is the climax of the game. Video games are art.

Beatsaber - This one's a classic VR title. I believe it was FUNKe who said that (paraphrasing) most VR games basically boil down to either machinery operation, or swinging a stick. Beatsaber is this idea in its most distilled form, chopping apart blocks to the beat of whatever song you've chosen. Most times, you have to slice a block along the direction of the arrow stamped on it, and there are weird frosted glass blocks that you have to keep your sabers out of. There's really not much I can talk about with this one; in my eyes, it's the Pong of VR games. It's got a sort of interesting aesthetic; geometric shapes, colored lasers and dry ice gives everything an 80s disco theme. What I like about Beatsaber is that it's a VR game that uses its virtual reality to its advantage. Lots of VR games will have you maneuver yourself around with simple button presses from your controllers, and the VR-ness of it is relegated to a 3D graphics card. With Beatsaber, you have to swing the sticks yourself, and the directional blocks keep the movement interesting. I suppose it's closer to osu in the sense that you have to factor in your own speed, reflexes and direction, instead of pressing a key when the arrows line up.

BPM: Bullets Per Minute - I've referenced this game a couple times, but now I get to talk about it in a little more detail. Without just saying "it's like Metal Hellsinger but without vocals and without a sword", there is more to it. The beat-to-beat gameplay is more about hitting the smaller notes, rather than just performing an action to the tempo, as you do in Hellsinger. You know when you're listening to music, and imagining some sort of action-packed sequence unfolding to the rhythm? That's what BPM is. You have to leap, dodge, and shoot, all to the beat, but there's more to it than that. Some weapons have interesting reloads that don't easily fit into the rhythm, like a bolt-action rifle that has four shots on the beat, four cocks on the beat, and then three reload beats. It's hard to explain, but you need to account for the type of rhythm and fit your gun's timing into that. It's a pretty cool idea, and there is a bit of a roguelike element with gear you can switch out to make fights interesting, or add a new mechanic to fit onto the beat.

Serious Sam 2 - This may not seem like it has a unique twist to its music, but I believe it does. This ridiculously over-the-top cartoonish horde shooter is a lot of fun, primarily for all the things it does "wrong". It came out in 2005, when first person shooters were steadily stagnating into slow "piss-filtered" modern military games. Despite this, you juggle something like 15 weapons, fighting through hordes of clowns with explosive cream pies, ogre footballers, giant robot spiders and ripped devils with rocket launchers for hands. Everything is bright and stylised, you can clearly see enemies in the environment, and despite being a horde shooter, the gameplay loop allows you to progress through the enemies instead of being driven back by them. Also, it's just mindless fun to plough through the game's many worlds; there's a jungle world, a gigantic world, a culturally questionable China world, a volcano world, a fantasy world, and then a prison moon, and then a city planet... it goes on for a while. There's unique music for each level (not just each world), and not only that, but the level's music is split into different themes - a "peace" track, a "tension" track and a "fight" track. If you're just walking along, it plays the peace track. If you're near enemies, or escaping from combat, it plays the tension track. If you're in the middle of a fight, it plays the fight track. All of these share similar leitmotifs, so it appears like the music flares up organically depending on what situation you find yourself in. It's a pretty good system all things considered. Other games of the time with dynamic soundtracks would loop different parts of the ambience based on your situation (like Thief or the original Far Cry) but I don't know of many that had different tracks for your sitation, except maybe Deus Ex.

Geometry Dash - GD feels like a game that almost everyone has played, or at least heard of. It's a basic rhythm game, but instead of having you mash arrow keys to the beat, it's simple: jump on time to the beat. All you have to worry about is jumping; avoiding spikes, blades, and walls. There are other mechanics, like different modes (UFO is like Flappy Bird, while the spider can snap to a vertical surface) and portals that reverse gravity or make your character a mirror version of itself. The different collectibles add replay value, encouraging you to find secret paths in a level or try to complete one first try.

[ducknotinarow]

[SF RaphDon - picked SF because of our icons BUT like any verse you want really xDD]

"It wasn't so much a melt down Raph," Don claims, coming down from his small fit "It was more of a... slight aneurism," He huffs, feeling the need to defend himself, "It's not my fault that they can't just put all of our show in one place, oh no, we have to jump through every single hoop possible, AND THEN ON TOP OF THAT-"

Oops, someone got mad again when trying to defend themselves for getting mad over streaming services.

| muse interaction

Battle Ravage, was Don and Raph's show. They both loved it when they started to catch it airing early Saturday mornings. It was popular enough to have more than one TV series. Nearly having a show ever decade it felt like. The one they grew up with and at least so far two reboots to follow. A show from the 80's a hand full of movies even video games and comics. There was a lot to digest from the franchise. Not always the same sometimes they tried something new like the live action show that didn't seem to go over all to well. Raphael could simply say that he liked the franchise and it was why he tended to check out most of it. if something from it for one reason or another didn't quite hit his tastes he could pass over it there was always the chance of something more coming along the way. BUT he was pretty biased for the takes he did like best but with how old most of it was there wasn't really a way to just watch the show like he used to.

Too old so it wasn't really on TV anymore, Donnie pointed out it was on some streaming services though. And that's kind of what landed Raph to be standing behind Donnie now at his makeshift 'lab' which was really just a table not far from the nook he used for his bed. When he bothered to sleep in said bed that is. Arm resting over the back of the chair Donatello was sitting in, leaning forward to look over Don's laptop screen as they were looking around online where it was listing where the shows were provided through and such and it was annoying.

"why the fuck is 'his show all over the fuckin' place?" Raphael suddenly exclaims not caring for the tone in his voice or how loudly he was getting beside his brothers ear. Though Don may be far to used to Raph's lack of control when it came to his volume. Seeing all the time the pair spent together in general. The sudden pull back into this franchise when the more recent show came about making them want to revisit the older one well mostly the one they grew up watching and maybe finally check out the one before that. They both seen some of it before and it was meant to be online somehow but

"Why ain't the 87 show on 'here wit' the rest of it?" Raph suddenly pointed out as they were looking over one site together "An' this one only got the first season of the third show?" Raph had to admit he didn't understand a lot of things and for sure didn't know a lot of stuff but the way the internet seemed to scatter around the shows? It didn't make sense right?

One show had its seasons spilled across two sites alone? Another was fully available, but you would have to pay extra for the later seasons? And then there was one site you cause get all of another, but you had to buy each episode on it own? AND the last one he didn't understand why it was listing the show to have ten seasons? Seemed they group some up as speicals and counted as season? He wasn't following this crap he just wanted to watch Battle Ravage. Comfortably and with little to no action required of him. Sounded like a good way to relax after kicking ass or training till his muscles were screaming for a break. And nothing answered that need more seeing his favorite character.

So he was sort of losing out hips on a good way to go about that it be nice if there was just one place to watch it all. Sure, they sort of sloved said issue, but they would be switching between services and devices even. Though it seems his temperament wasn't the only one being affected in the moment. As Raphael looked over to his twin, eyeing their expression in the moment. Sure, he was annoyed by everything himself but he kind of got over it when listening to Donnie complaining along with him. Losing control over his own volume time to time was.

"Jeez Don didn' think ya have a full blown melt down ova' 'his." He teases a little, oh he knew Donnie could get angry and maybe worse than himself but it was rare and he had to admit entertaining to watch happen since he often kept a far more cool head.

"It wasn't so much a melt down Raph,"

Raph moved to lean towards the side to better look at Don, not convinced in tje slightest by that remark as he arch up his brow and shifted his weight so that Don could see his expression at the moment.

"It was more of a... slight aneurism,"

"Yeah cause 'hats some how betta?" Raph retorts towards if very well known dramtic brother.

"It's not my fault that they can't just put all of our show in one place, oh no, we have to jump through every single hoop possible, AND THEN ON TOP OF THAT-"

Raphs grin only grew as Donnie start to full on yell then and there. Oh yeah clearly he wasn't mad or having a melt down over this as he went on into a another ranting fit of pure rage. Raphael doing all he could to not full on laugh over the reaction. It was only due to get worse once they goind out there was a way to have it how they wanted, all viewable on one source. But for now Raph just slam a free hand on to the surface of Don's work station. Joining in with Don's raving and ranting over their problem. Unaware that thier yelling had drawn attention to the corner of the lair they were tucked away in. But hey if Don was allowed to get angry here and there than Raph was allowed to be a bit of nerd here and there himself. Only stopping when he could just feel someone's eyes on them as he turned to look back.

"You guys aren't fighting are you?" Mikey asked standing beside Leo, Raphael tilted his head a bit then looked down to Donnie.

"Are we fightin?" Unsure in the moment once seeing the look on Don's face he took it as his answer "nah, jus' upset cause we tryin' to figure out how to watch all of Battle Ravage shows and shit." The share unimpressed looks Mikey and Leo pulled had Raphs snout scrunched up and brow furring down.

"Wha' 'hat for? It's a good series!" Raph yells once again now this time actually directed towards someone

[deepdreamnights]

A lot of this is spot on, but I think the choice of tools has skewed the data here, however, and may give an incorrect impression of how AI art tools on the whole work, because Dall-E 3 isn't representative of the options at large.

Dall-E 3 is pretty (if you make it be) and has good coherency and works with more naturally written prompts, but it is wholly uncooperative and has almost zero workflow accommodations for artistic applications, heck, It can't even do non-square aspect ratios (at least through Bing).

Playground AI beats it out on those fronts, and Midjourney and Stable Diffusion piledrive it into the concrete.

The only reason to ever use Dall-E 3's chat GPT interface is if you want to run up to three jobs simultaneously on a free bing account. It routinely misinterprets input, even direct "replace this word in the prompt with this other word" requests. It's essentially playing whisper-telephone with two hallucinating robots instead of one.

Here's how the process would go down in Midjourney:

Gonna be making a 90s fighting game version of my DeinoSteve character. Goal is to keep him largely on-model, minus changes that work for the style change from 70s comic/80s cartoon to 90s fighting game.

Prompt: fullbody character design, a velociraptor-anthro fighting game character, in the style of 1996 Capcom (Darkstalkers 3/Street Fighter Alpha 3) promotional art, fullbody on white background. Red scales, yellow shirt, black leather jacket, long tail, clawed feet, long tail, retrosaur asthetics, vector art inks with flat anime shading

Aspect ratio 3:4, Niji model v6, style 50:

Some pretty good stables at DeinoSteve (left image), but nobody's quite right. I've got several ways to get him kitted out right, but we'll use the same techniques CGPT was trying to use: inpainting and variations.

Upper right is closer to the character concept, but I like upper left's pose better, so we'll start by doing some variations on the subtle setting (right image)

You'll notice the variation problem from Dall-E 3 isn't there. Using Chat-GPT to change the prompt means you're at the mercy of two hallucinating robots instead of one, and it's probably been altering the prompt wildly with each revision, thus the slow degradation of mural-jesus.

Now, I'm just demonstrating in-system tools here, but on a piece that I was doing for finalization, I'd be upscaling all the ones that had features I liked, for later composition.

Steve looks... okay here, but he's off model in several major ways. Pants wrong color, no full-t-shirt, the spines on the tail, etc.

So here we'll do some inpainting. Unlike the GPT setup, I'm laying out what areas I specifically want changed at each go. Starting with the pants, I forgot to mention in the first prompt he wears blue jeans, so I add that to the prompt as well. If you're out to do your own post-editing, you can hit more parts at once and just composite from fewer gens.

I like #4 (left)'s swagger, so we'll repeat the process to get him full sleeves on his jacket, and to remove the spiked wrist cuffs. #4, again, is my winner. Now, I can keep varying individual bits, but I can also return to doing general variations, and the influence from the current version will carry over.

Now, it will me re-doing some bits, but #2 is pretty sweet, so he'll be where I tinker next. Note how a bit of his tail and claws are cropped out. I can fix that with outpainting.

If I were instead going for an edit in post, I'd probably have taken the best 5-6 chunks, merged, dropped to line art, then recolored by this point.

Now, I can keep tinkering on him bit by bit, put part of using the AI system is knowing when you're going to have to go manual. I know from experience that my chance of getting him to have his raptor-foot claws is going to require me to go in and do 'em manually.

If its not the horns and claws on dinosaurs, its hairstyles and clothing details on humans, the nature of using a randomized system is that you're going to get random hiccups.

But there are ways to mitigate that, depending on your toolset. Stable Diffusion has controlnet, different versions of which let you control things like poses, character details, and composition more directly, (as I understand it. I haven't messed with it myself, don't have that kind of beastly graphics card)

MJ's answer is presently in alpha: character reference. It's an extension of their image-prompting system (which isn't the same as image-to-image), wherein an image is examined by the AI's image-identification/checking processes and the results are used as part of the prompt. For Character reference, it tries to drop everything that isn't connected to character design.

A quickie iteration using a handful of previous DeinoSteve pics made the image on the left, while re-running the prompt with the semi-final DeinoSteve above as a character prompt produced the images on the right.

Of course, even with the additional workflow tools you get with non-DallE generators, doing anything with long-term consistency is going to require manual editing.

Anything with narrative? Well, this panel has over 20 individual gens in it, from across two generators (MJ and Dall-E 3)

The AI systems will get better over time, but there's an inherent paradox that I don't think they'll escape. To get to complex results you need complex control, and to gain complex control you need, well, complex controls

The more stuff an AI generator can do, the more literal and figurative buttons and/or menus you need to use those features. The more complex the features, the more knowledge and practice it takes to utilize them. Essentially: Any tool capable of (heavy air quotes) "replacing" an artist will wind up requiring an artist to operate it at that level.

As with other force-multipliers for art (photography, digital image manipulation, automated image touchup/filtering, etc) the skill gradient never goes away.

Among the many downsides of AI-generated art: it's bad at revising. You know, the biggest part of the process when working on commissioned art.

Original "deer in a grocery store" request from chatgpt (which calls on dalle3 for image generation):

revision 5 (trying to give the fawn spots, trying to fix the shadows that were making it appear to hover):

I had it restore its own Jesus fresco.

Original:

Erased the face, asked it to restore the image to as good as when it was first painted:

Wait tumblr makes the image really low-res, let me zoom in on Jesus's face.

Original:

Restored:

One revision later:

Here's the full "restored" face in context:

Every time AI is asked to revise an image, it either wipes it and starts over or makes it more and more of a disaster. People who work with AI-generated imagery have to adapt their creative vision to what comes out of the system - or go in with a mentality that anything that fits the brief is good enough.

I'm not surprised that there are some places looking for cheap filler images that don't mind the problems with AI-generated imagery. But for everyone else I think it's quickly becoming clear that you need a real artist, not a knockoff.

more

[mrcharles1979]

The Check Printing Solution That Worked for Us

My name is Charles, my spouse Martha and I run a small bakery in American Town. We have put a lot of effort in building this business, investing our love into every dish we prepared and every small moment of customer interaction.

Owning a successful business is a fulfilling experience but there are moments of difficulties also. The challenge arised, when our business started flourishing, we discovered that we were writing an increasing number of checks for various purposes. I never thought that something as simple as printing checks would cause so much trouble for my bakery.

At first, we thought that ordering checks is a simple process. During that time, we had only a few expenses, just a handful of payments here and there. As our bakery grows, so do our list of people. During one busy holiday season, the bakery was filled with various orders for fresh cookies, cakes etc. However, this is when the real problems started. We placed an order for EZ checks from an external supplier. I contacted the check supplier only to learn that it would take weeks for checks to arrive. We couldn’t afford such a delay as we need to pay our suppliers quickly to keep our stock up. I placed an urgent hoping that, it would arrive on time. The worry of not having checks when we needed them was too much. Martha and I spent hours searching for alternative options but most of them came with extra charges or any other problems.

One evening as I was closing down the bakery, I discussed some of our difficulties with my friend Sarah. After listening carefully to our problems she suggested “ Why not look for a better platform? She shared a website she came across that allows to print checks from home. Initially, I was doubtful about trying the platform. As we discussed more about the platform and its features I decided to give it a shot.

The first thing that caught my attention was how affordable it was. I discovered that we could reduce our check printing expenses by 80% by printing on blank check stock than pre-printed checks. That alone was sufficient to spark my interest. I still remember the first time we printed check at our home, the feeling was just magical. With a regular printer and blank check stock we purchased from nearby office supply store, we managed to produce professional looking checks in minutes. The clean, neat check produced looked as good as pre-printed ones we used to order.

Another noteworthy feature was ability to personalize checks. In the past our checks were plain and didn’t reflect our brand at all. Now with a few clicks, I was able to add bakery’s logo and select fonts that suit our branding requirements. It was a proud moment for us to see our brand in every part of our business, even on something as simple as a check. The platform’s user-friendly interface made it effortless to create and print checks from the convenience of home or bakery during quieter times. The drag and drop design tool made it simple to add logos, font style, even vibrant background images to make the checks more appealing to customers.

 The platform also dispelled all fears about check fraud with its strong security features. Earlier, when I placed an order for checks , I felt vulnerable and anxious that our banking details could be misused. Printing on blank check stock ensured that all the important bank data was added only at the time of printing checks. It enabled us to keep sensitive information more protected, revealing our banking information only when we were prepared to print a particular check.

Looking back on our experience, I can proudly say that one of the best choices we have ever made was to start printing checks at home. Martha and I have always prioritized efficiency and simplicity, using the platform reduced so much of the anxiety linked to waiting for check orders to arrive. As time passed, I began to explore the other features provided by the platform. The option to manage ACH and eChecks became more helpful as we started to handle more transactions online. Our financial process became more efficient and making payments was easier than ever. All these changes began to reflect in our bakery’s daily operations also. Our staff felt more satisfied, suppliers viewed us as more dependable, and the overall vibe in the bakery became more energetic.

Reflecting on the past, I realized how much money I wasted by sticking to old ways. Martha and I often discuss how this small change had a significant effect on our business. To all small business owners out there, my advice is that don’t let outdated systems affect your business growth. There is always a chance to improve every aspect of your business be it ordering checks or handling finances. By the way, if you want to know about the platform we used, it’s OnlineCheckWriter.com—Powered by Zil Money.

[deejablogs]

Smart Choices, Pre-Owned Devices, and Ultimate Savings with GLP Wireless

At a time when nothing comes affordable, making smart choices is a must to not only survive with vitals but also to enjoy luxuries. Purchasing an iPhone is one of those luxuries everyone dreams of. Considering the costs, it might be a little difficult for students or people with side incomes. But what if there was a way to balance quality with affordability and get yourself your favorite iPhone model? Yes, it is possible! The idea is to invest in used iPhones.

Smart Investments- Going for Pre-Owned iPhones

Investing in pre-owned iPhones is totally a game-changer for people who want to avail luxuries but do not want to deviate from their budget outline. Imagine being able to access the premium features of the latest iPhone models at a fraction of the cost of the original ones. What else would you want? 

Pre-owned iPhones are only used for a while by the first user and are still at their highest performing ability, adhering to their original condition, offering regular software updates and support from Apple to ensure that you achieve an uncompromised user experience. Also, investing in used iPhones fulfills your responsibility towards a more sustainable environment by reducing e-waste, thereby extending the life of electronics.

Essential Checklist for Buying a Used iPhone

Before purchasing a used iPhone, always confirm its model number to ensure that it fulfills all of your requirements.

Always inspect the physical condition of the pre-owned phone. Look for scratches, dents, ports, and buttons.

Use the phone’s IMEI or serial number to check its status and warranty coverage on Apple’s website.

Always make the habit of testing the phone prior to buying it. Make sure that every function and every button is performing its function perfectly to avoid future irregularities.

Battery health is equally important. A battery health of above 80% is acceptable; if lower, consider replacing it.

Check for glitches or unusual operations, and confirm that the device is working on the latest version of iOS.

Opt for sellers who are well-reputed to save you from fraud.

It is also important to ask for the phone’s original box and ensure that accessories such as chargers are included.

Check if the device has been damaged by or ever came in contact with it; if yes, it shows a red dot in the SIM card slot.

 Always prefer buying used iPhones with a return policy or warranty for your peace of mind.

The Top 5 Benefits of Choosing a Pre-Owned iPhone

Affordability: 

Investing in pre-owned iPhones has a lot of benefits, the most important of which is the affordability it comes with.

Reliability: 

Many owners sell certified used iPhones, which means that you can be completely relaxed and at ease when buying from them.

Sustainability: 

Investing in pre-owned items also contributes to a more sustainable environment by reducing e-waste.

Flexibility:

It is comparatively easier to upgrade a pre-owned device to stay up-to-date on the latest advancements without breaking the bank.

Accessibility:

Buying used iPhones also increases the accessibility to the features that are no longer made by Apple in newer models.

Find the Best Deals on second-hand iPhones in UAE at GLP Wireless

If you are looking to get premium condition used iPhones and want to avail the fusion of affordability with practicality and efficiency, then the best place for you is GLP Wireless. GLP Wireless is the most trusted name when it comes to quality and reliability in second-hand iPhones in the UAE. 

At GLP Wireless, the ideal place for wholesale used iPhones in Dubai, you get a wide range of models to choose from, with the assurance that every piece is critically inspected and certified for optimal performance. Whether you are looking for top-tier deals that increase your accessibility to the finest and latest models in an ideal pricing range or you are looking for uncompromised customer services, GLP Wireless is your go-to solution for used iPhones in Dubai.

FAQS:

Is it safe to buy a used iPhone?

Yes, it is completely safe to buy used iPhones, you just need a trustworthy source from where you can buy them.

What is the best platform to buy wholesale used iPhones in Dubai?

The best and most reliable platform from where you can buy wholesale used iPhones in Dubai is GLP Wireless.

Conclusion:

Do not miss out on the latest models of iPhones that too are at amazingly affordable prices by investing in used iPhones. All you need is to find a reliable resource to get your desired phone. Get in touch with GLP Wireless, the most trusted name for buying second-hand iPhones in the UAE.

[stevedeschaines]

Ukraine does not want to win the latest battle with Russia (the “war” started in 2014), because this battle is too profitable for the Ukrainian elite.  A real war with Russia (with real mobilization of personnel and industry) would cost the Ukrainian elite dearly (less American/EU aid money to steal).  A real war would also require the kleptocratic Ukrainian government to give the Ukrainian peasantry a bit of freedom, similar to FDR pausing his “New Deal” to fight Hitler, Lenin’s “New Economic Policy”, or Putin’s current focus on mobilization instead of ransacking the Russian private sector.

I’ve spent a good part of the past two years in Ukraine (I speak fluent Russian and understand Ukrainian).  I recently watched two Ukrainian blogger videos that really sum up perfectly the real war in Ukraine.  In one video (use Google translate for English subtitles) Viktor Halasiuk professes his admiration for the Ukrainian deep state (the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians share his views). In another video Pavlo Sebastyanovich (the closest thing to a Ramaswamy/Milei Ukrainian of whom I know) refutes Viktor’s claims. (To understand the utterly corrupt kleptocratic socialist Ukrainian state, simply watch Pavlo’s channel regularly).  You won’t find such honest content about Ukraine in English.

The Vast Majority of Ukrainians Are Diehard Socialists

Viktor considers the views of a small minority of (truly patriotic) Ukrainians (he talks about Pavlo without naming him) who want to fire 80% of the massive Ukrainian government bureaucracy, as mistaken, infantile, and dangerous. Viktor uses Georgia (the country) and Japan as examples of why Pavlo’s ideas are crazy.

Viktor says the success of Georgia was doubtful under Saakashvilli, who fired (Ramaswamy-style) 50% of government workers.  Pavlo says Georgia made immense gains (Pavlo is telling the truth).  Georgia is a landlocked country with Russia occupying two of its provinces (a situation similar to that of Ukraine).  Even the imperial Japanese understood what the Soviets were, ending Japan’s WW2 savagery when the threat of Soviet occupation neared.  As for Japan, Viktor makes the case that (post-WW2) Japan made massive gains in productivity because of a strong (handed) government with a lot of government industrial experts (I guess SpaceX is so successful because of government bureaucrats who know best how to build rockets).  The role of Japan’s pre-WW2 successful industrialization and post-WW2 American occupation are downplayed.  For Viktor the idea of just firing government workers is a “trap, illusion, myth”, an example of primitive inertial thinking, of “infantilism”.

Viktor claims that the problem is not the size, but the performance of government (the solution being, of course, more money to improve their performance).  He mocks businessmen who think they can run a country as having a kindergarten mentality, yet he is proud of his work in parliament where he says he rammed through 30 industrial laws that “created” $10 billion in new “investment” (investment, not kickbacks and bribes).  He says he never once tried to tell a factory director how to run his own business.  His job was to make doing business easy and more efficient (it was the private sector’s job to execute).  Viktor suggests that Ukrainian business has not given enough money (he never mentions anything about wartime bribes) to support economic research, think tanks, Ukrainian authors, and stipends for Ukrainian students.  He says he has never found a successful country with a weak government and strong business (strong business does not mean a successful country?). 

Viktor says the success of Georgia was doubtful under Saakashvilli, who fired (Ramaswamy-style) 50% of government workers.  Pavlo says Georgia made immense gains (Pavlo is telling the truth).  Georgia is a landlocked country with Russia occupying two of its provinces (a situation similar to that of Ukraine).  Even the imperial Japanese understood what the Soviets were, ending Japan’s WW2 savagery when the threat of Soviet occupation neared.  As for Japan, Viktor makes the case that (post-WW2) Japan made massive gains in productivity because of a strong (handed) government with a lot of government industrial experts (I guess SpaceX is so successful because of government bureaucrats who know best how to build rockets).  The role of Japan’s pre-WW2 successful industrialization and post-WW2 American occupation are downplayed.  For Viktor the idea of just firing government workers is a “trap, illusion, myth”, an example of primitive inertial thinking, of “infantilism”.

He says success requires the synchronized efforts and interests of government, society, and business (isn’t the government’s only interest the good of business and the people?).  I think Mussolini had a good name for such a system.

In my experience, over 90% of Ukrainians would agree with the outlandish lies in Viktor’s video (they know none of it’s true).  One reason is because so many have unrepentant communists in the family tree (even the American conservative hero Matt Walsh recently said that Tim Walz’s brother should have kept quiet about Tim because family comes first, just like Vito and Michael said in The Godfather).  The idea of drastically reducing the state (even in wartime) will always be met by these people with mockery.

Ukraine Has Become Part of the Globalist Threat to America  

An amazingly polished Ukrainian PR campaign (undoubtedly financed by some big-time globalists) convinced Western nations to become active participants in a war with a nuclear power.  The end goal has probably always been the globalist elite buying up Ukraine (and in their wildest dreams Russia) on the cheap, which would make Ukraine’s elite fabulously wealthy. (Zelensky also previously announced a “patronage program” with BlackRock’s help, which would see “investors” taking ownership over Ukraine’s reconstruction.”) A key aspect of the PR campaign has been Zelensky’s constant spiel about “The war against Ukraine is a war against morality.  And the defense of Ukraine is, above all, the defense of morality”.  A very Western, woke way to talk about war.

Globalists are using similar tricks to plunge America into chaos.  20–30 million border criminals who operate (like the Ukrainians) by the laws of the jungle have been magically transformed into morally righteous “undocumented migrants”.  They (like the Ukrainians) know that they owe everything to the Democrat party and the human trafficking network of the unelected bureaucratic state.

MAGA America is the diametrical opposite of Putin’s Russia (I spent years in Russia), but has become, like Russia, a target for not selling out to the globalists (this is why Trump has been marked for elimination).  The result is that Russia, the enemy of our enemy, is now our ally.  Putin may be evil, but he is a very capable leader (not an incoherent senile puppet like Biden) who has no myths about the West or war.  He has mobilized Russia for a real (long-term) war against Ukraine for the survival of the Moscow leech state (for similar reasons American/EU governments have mobilized against their own uncooperative fly-over territories).  Moscow (like Washington/EU) survives by sucking the life blood of a massive empire and will (quite possibly) go nuclear if required to protect that empire.

Kyiv will likewise continue its decades-long war against its own fly-over territory that has utterly decimated Ukraine.  The small army of armed Ukrainian government workers (serving in the police, tax collection, customs, etc.) are all excluded from military service, so they will be at 100% readiness after the battle with Russia is over.  The peasants who escaped military service (by paying a bribe or going into hiding) will all be back to as good as new after the war.  That includes all the pro-war Ukrainian men I know personally who, without exception, demand total victory (but insist that others do the dying).  They all hate the peacenik Trump.  The valiant Ukrainian front-line fighters that survive, the best of Ukraine, will be quickly forgotten, condemned to a meager existence ($55/month pensions for war vets).

After the battle with Russia is lost and the West stops making welfare payments, the Ukrainian kleptocrats could very well turn to Moscow.  Which may not be all bad, since Russia could within a decade become a stabilizing force against a failing socialist/Islamic Western Europe.  My Ukrainian friends will all blame Ukraine’s loss on America (especially the Trump half) and the EU.

P.S. The day before I submitted this article to AT was another day, another Trump assassination attempt, and a new Pavlo video about how military units are asking Biden to send money for drones directly to them (bypassing the corruption of Kyiv).  Sad.  They still haven’t figured out that the most corrupt U.S. administration in history never gave a crap about them.

[solisworldtractor]

Solis Compact Tractor Allows Farmers To Customize Their Machines For Specific Tasks.

In ancient times, man used to do farming the traditional way and it was a total labour-intensive job. It involved huge amounts of time, sweat, and efforts. But as time evolved, so did the technology and the best Compact Tractors for Sale came into the light that turned labour intensive operations into capital intensive and smart ones. This growth in the farm machinery helped in high production with less effort.

In most of the regions of India, our farmers depend on monsoon, which determines whether they can grow their crop or not, for that reason smart farming is a need along with smart agriculture tractor. It is an essential element as it will help farmers to enhance their production and gain better returns and compact farm tractors are a boon to the farmers in this vertical.

SOLIS deploys and leverages an in-house high-tech training centre to impart knowledge and training about compact tractors including product specifications, maintenance, and optimum utilization to employees, business partners, and customers. The young and fast-growing agriculture tractors company globally, SOLIS has reached the milestone of more than One Lac twenty-five thousand strong customer base with a prominent presence in more than 150+ countries in a short time, which reflects the brand equity, for the makers of the best compact tractor. Trusted and preferred all around, Solis is providing value-for-money products and customer-friendly services worldwide.

If you own a farm or property, a tractor is essential machinery that is necessary to help with the daily tasks and operations in your farms. Selecting the perfect tractor means having one that is relative to the size of your property. Buy compact tractor that is able to do the job without giving you back-aching troubles and without taking over your entire property. But before you buy compact tractor figure out what your tractor will be used for, whether it’s for ploughing, cutting hay, moving hay or pallets of feed, mowing grass or any other operation. So, figuring out exactly what your tractor will be used for should be the starting point. Since tractors are an important part of farm mechanization and ensure greater output, lookout for Solis reviews, as it would help you to determine which tractor would be suitable for your specific farm requirements.

Many horizons, including agricultural farms, industries, and constructional sites, benefit from the use of compact tractors. These tractors are the best companion for varied operations such as landscaping businesses, property management, farm maintenance and much more. Attach ideal implements to these tractors and they are unrivalled on the fields and make every task smooth and easy. One of the leading tractor manufacturing companies of these mighty machines is SOLIS. This company engineer’s tractor that is highly durable, reliable, and efficient, bringing a whole lot of utility and productivity wherever they’re employed.

An orchard is known as the process of plantation of trees or shrubs to maintain food production. When used in orchards and vineyards, a compact tractor can be ideal for the same purpose, given that compact tractors are designed specifically to fit in small and narrow farm spaces. Speaking of narrow spaces, you can also go for Solis N75 & N90 narrow tractors for your endeavours in orchard and vineyard operations. These two masterpieces can transform all your efforts into effective results in less time and with less fuel consumption.

What distinguishes the SOLIS tractor manufacturing plant at Hoshiarpur from the facilities of competition companies is that the latter manufactures parts from outside while the former manufactures 80% of its parts in-house. This feature of Solis Tractors keeps the prices in control, making them more affordable than the other competitors in the market. Moreover, it enables the company to customize its parts as per market offerings and customer demands –adding more flexibility and convenience for farmers worldwide.