true0neutral - Tumblr blog

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If brains are biological computers, why don’t we lag?

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parents got a new cat they named lord montague and this morning i heard my dad in the other room say "i would have to advise against that decision, my lord" followed by a crashing sound

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Astarion knows an easy mark when he sees one 🤣

Bonus Gale reaction:

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ketchup

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I want to see a work of fiction that reverses the "vampires are snobby upper class, werewolves are brutish lower class" stereotypes

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The Mouth of Mordremoth

This Elder Dragon from GUILD WARS 2 still intrigues me to this day. The fact that it used to be corporeal, before 'growing into' the Heart of Maguuma itself, present within the vines and only physically manifest as the Mouth, makes me wonder what it really used to look like before all that.

Art Prints | RedBubble Shop

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Seemed like a good time to polish up this piece from February as well. Got the idea from a Cammy/Chun Li artwork I've always liked.

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So, Hank Green did a pretty good video where he tried to get down to the bottom of the rumor going around that EVs emit more microplastics than other cars, and finds out that the notion is based mostly on conjecture from a study that involved no actual EVs.

It kinda reminds me of people saying that global warming is inevitable because of cargo ships, based on a misreported thought experiment about the emissions of bigger ships than have ever existed constantly burning the worst grade fuel possible.

Anyway, I've also seen a lot of weird shit being said about EVs these days. For example, one person said they heard from an engineer friend that all our bridges would have to be rebuilt because EVs are too heavy. Now, EVs tend to be pretty heavy, but a Tesla Model S -for example- weighs roughly the same as a Ford F-150. Any bridge that needs to be rebuilt in the coming years will have to be rebuilt because we've neglected our infrastructure on a truly horrifying scale, not because of EVs.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not one to say EVs are the thing that's gonna save us from global warming. I want fewer vehicles on the road, period. But by pretty much any metric besides road wear, anyone asserting they're worse than a comparable ICE vehicle is probably full of shit.

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vi offers to carry caits bag after school~ 

wanted to draw @AudreyTakada ’s take on vi’s battle academia outfit, and then it became a whole scene

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One of the dominant models of magic and superheroes is that everyone has their "thing", what I would call a bespoke magic system, but is mostly just a power that sits orthogonal to all other powers. This crops up all the time, because it's really really good for having dynamic fights, for characterizing people through their powers, for having new surprises and twists, and just generally keeping things going.

It's adaptable to all kinds of genres. Superheroes are the obvious one, whether it's canonized as Quirks or just an aspect of the setting. But I'm pretty sure that the basic concept was first invented in anime, with marital arts settings, where every character had their own jutsu or whatever, or the system in theory is all about ki manipulation or equivalent exchange but in practice everyone has their own particular niche. You can slot this into urban fantasy, giving every vampire their own special Power, or you can have some magical fantasy thing where everyone has their own unique Semblance.

So this is all well and good, but it leaves us with a narrative hole, which is progression. Having a unique power is cool, because you can think of new uses for it, have unique matchups, etc., but it doesn't give you that juicy sense of becoming more, and if you're facing down terrifying villains with their own powers, then a god-tier power is just kind of ... random. Luck of the draw, rather than the consequence of a powerful will or keen mind.

You can strip out limitations and amplify effects, and this is cool and good, or you can lean back away from uniqueness and toward uniformity, which I think is sometimes the right call, depending on your narrative needs.

So you say that actually the guy who can swap places with someone and the guy who can cut people from a distance are both unwitting hyperspecialists in the same field of magic or whatever, and that in theory, with unlimited time to train and experiment and explore, each could do what the other does.

This allows for a lot of snazzy narrative stuff. Two intense rivals "learn" each other's techniques, or at least adapt them into their own technique. Maybe the guy who does teleport swaps never learns to cut from a distance, but his teleport swap incorporates a cut into it, slashing at the person he's trading places with. A widower incorporates aspects of his dead wife's power, a mentor passes down elements of his technique to all his students, a young protagonist has some angst about using the aspect he got from his abusive father, etc.

If powers are a reflection of character, then you get to physically manifest a character's relationship with other people.

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Ok I'm not going to reply to the post directly but smoking weed on the beach is absolutely different from getting drunk on the beach because:

A) people drinking booze doesn't make the entire beach stink like the ass of a dead skunk. You do not get to nickname something SKUNK and then be shocked when people hate when you smoke it in public. It smells bad, and I can assure you I don't go to the beach to smell your shit stink

B) as an asthmatic, people drinking on the beach does not pose a health risk to me

C) I cannot get second hand drunk from people drinking on the beach

I am a person who prefers getting high to getting drunk (gummies, I am asthmatic) but you can't pretend that smoking weed in public isn't straight up obnoxious, lol

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I don’t think you’re ready to have an adult conversation about politics until you’re able to admit that there are things you love and enjoy that would not and should not exist in a just world. $8 billion dollar budget movies every other month don’t exist in a just world. New 900 GB AAA video games every year don’t exist in a just world. Next day delivery doesn’t exist in a just world. 80 different soda brands don’t exist in a just world. 

All of those things come from exploitation on some level, and if you wouldn’t trade those for a world where everyone can eat and have a home no matter who they are or what they do, I don’t know what to tell you. 

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Squirrel Girl: Infinity Comic #1 (2022)

written by Ryan North art by Derek Charm & Rico Renzi

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Thess vs The Big Corps, Again

Dear gods, every time I turn around, one of these big corporate jackasses is saying or doing something trying to force "generative AI" into the public consciousness as something positive ... and failing ... and doing it anyway.

The best one so far was Chris Corps, of Amazon, who actually straight-up said that there's not really any acting in video games. Yeah, tell that to Neil Newbon - the guy who did that scene (you know the one, after a very character-defining stabfest moment?) in one take, unscripted. Yeah, tell me AI's going to do something so glorious that the director's going to go, "No, we are not trying this again, we're just getting this lightning in the proverbial bottle and running with it!" I will laugh so hard.

(See also - one of the biggest reasons that SAG-AFTRA is currently on strike.)

Then we had EA at this big investor's conference, talking about how "We already use it, we're going to use more of it, this is what it looks like in use, it's great! It's a tool for our creatives!" ...And then they had someone basically pretending to have AI generate architecture. Which ... feels more like putting a pink slip in the hands of "their creatives" instead of a tool. I know people who do that kind of work and it's a lot more than slapping together a few bits of skyscraper and coming out with something that not even London would allow in its skyline. I may have a thing about the Lloyds Building being the ugliest bit of modern architecture in the world. Not to mention this one building that's largely glass and somewhat curved and they had to stop people parking in certain places on the street outside because on sunny days, the light reflecting off that fucking building would set people's cars on fire. And yeah, I don't think even London's whole avant-garde architecture bullshit of the Gherkin and the Onion and the Shard (... well, okay, the Shard's pretty cool) would have some of the shit AI generates in its skyline. Seeing the "AI assistance" Google puts on search results if you don't take some very specific steps to not have it there (which I have on my PC but not on my phone, so...), I feel like AI would design a building like Tesla designed the cybertruck. It's like ... some games are only really as memorable as they are because of their skybox, and you want to outsource that to a machine? Really?

I cannot begin to express how tired I am of this whole AI thing. Video game companies are just the loudest motherfuckers about the whole thing, same as they seem to have been with NFTs and all that shit. The entire industry is going, "How can we get more money?" So they went to "live services" and subscription services and "recurrent user spending", and that wasn't enough. So they laid a whole bunch of people off (and are still doing so, I am aware) in the usual boom-and-bust cycle that Chris Deering was talking about awhile back when he was whingeing about how no, really, layoffs aren't about corporate greed! The cycle we're talking about is how they lay off a bunch of people to look their quarterly earnings sheets look good, and then have to hire them back to get anything done. Thing is, they always hire fewer than they need and then they get a reputation for crunch and "stress casualties" and all the rest of it. And now they seem to be pushing AI as The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread in the hopes that people will leave them alone and let them replace all those people they don't want to have to pay wages for with a plagiarism-and-climate-crisis machine.

I think they know there'll be a loss of quality. Thing is, I don't think they care. See, they don't really want us to love games. Or movies, come to that. It's what Matt Damon said awhile back - they don't want entertainment to be loved, because things that are loved, we watch (or play, or read, or listen to etc) again and again and again. They want us to consume it and then throw it away to leave our metaphorical decks clear for the next thing they want us to buy.

It's the meme, isn't it. "NO WAGE! ONLY BUY!" This is not sustainable. This kind of thing is entirely terrifying in the context of Texas, where a judge appointed by Trump ruled a labour board as "unconstitutional". We're expected to tolerate any kind of abuse - being overworked, being underpaid, being treated like shit, the whole nine yards - and we're increasingly not being paid enough to live, let alone spend the kind of money these CEOs want us to spend on what they seem to be deliberately making into homogenous forgettable crap so we'll have room in our hearts and minds (and wallets) for The Next Big Thing. It's supposed to be bread and circuses, but both are increasingly too expensive for what we're getting.

Honestly, I don't know what happens next. This will get increasingly unsustainable, because these jackasses in the money seats are convinced that unlimited exponential growth is possible and nothing but the loss of their fortunes will convince them otherwise. But before they lose theirs ... well, they won't lose theirs because a lot of it is probably in an offshore bank account somewhere ... anyway, the people who work to make them their money will suffer long, long before they get so much as inconvenienced. So Chris Deering can bite me about how hard layoffs are for managers.

All that to say that AI is just highlighting the absolute worst of corporate policy, and I hate it. But I point you to an interesting article titled "Challenging the Myths of Generative AI", which might help if you're anything like me and end up in arguments about things like, "using someone's AI voice after their death is ghoulish and gross and I don't care how much you want George Carlin to read you your homework".

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