Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
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User ID: 214
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
Damn, I hadn't heard of that. I feel bad for them, their prices are pretty high but they were the only company besides Stable Diffusion that seemed to actually want to give people what they wanted and not grandstand about keeping the tech away from the plebs or combating social bias.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
I'll recommend the OG Boomer's Gate. What many people enjoy about it is the companion characters you recruit and experiencing their stories while balancing their personalities to keep them happy. I'll admit I've never experienced that; I always make 6 custom characters and play the game with them. For me the enjoyment is purely in the well-written story and the amazing combat system.
It runs off of 2nd Edition AD&D, which is a really cool system and will have some interesting differences for players of modern D&D/CRPGs. Most of the differences are in how spellcasters work. For example, spellcasters use Vancian magic, which means they prepare spells in advance and can only use each spell as many times per day as they prepared that spell. For example, if your wizard knows 5 1st-level spells and 4 2nd-level spells but can only prepare 4 slots of 1st level spells and 2 slots of 2nd level spells, you must allocate a spell to each specific slot. Want to cast sleep more than once per day? Better prepare it multiple times. This is really cool and will satisfy that Batman fantasy. It's a lot for a new RPG player to learn, but an experienced player will really enjoy the system.
The other big difference is how casters scale. They're incredibly weak and fragile early. Most of the time they're slinging terrible darts terribly since they can only cast 2 spells at 1st level. They scale incredibly though - if you play the same wizard from Baldur's Gate 1 to the end of Throne of Bhaal in BG2 you'll watch them go from a weakling who will die to a stiff breeze to a reality-warping demigod. Newer editions try to balance casters to martials at all stages of the game, so playing a game where this is very much not the case is a nice change.
I'd recommend playing Baldur's Gate 1 then importing/remaking your squad in Baldur's Gate 2. Throne of Bhaal is an excellent finale to the series. Play Icewind Dale if you really love the combat system of Baldur's Gate, because there's very little story in that game, just lots of encounters. Ironically I liked the encounters in BG much better, but it's still good content.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
I follow some ai artists on Twitter but I’m actually not into hardcore/hentai stuff so I don’t frequent those boards.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
I've seen this said before but I don't think it's true. Game of Thrones' problem was that the showrunners started writing their own fanfiction well before they ran out of material. This was made worse by them cutting things that must have seemed, at the time, unimportant, but later led to the last two seasons feeling incredibly unbalanced. The changes start around season or 4 (it's been a while), start getting really bad by season 5, and finally compound to where the average viewer can tell things are very off by the end
By fanfiction I don't necessarily mean fleshing smaller characters out, like Tywin and Margaery — generally this was done well and didn't conflict with anything pre-existing. I'm talking about things like Jaime's storylines after returning to King's Landing being completely different, whatever they did to Euron Greyjoy, and literally everything about the Dorne plot.
An example of cut content is the ignored storyline of Aegon Targaryen landing his armies in Westeros while Daenerys is fucking around in Meereen. He kind of comes out of nowhere in book 5 but it really feels like he should have been there for the endgame in the show. What we had instead is the situation where everyone is against Cersei and the writers have to bend the story in knots to have it be an even fight. A multipolar conflict with Dany, Cersei, Euron, and Aegon all facing off would be much more chaotic and even, assuming this was Martin's intention.
Perhaps the most infamous example of cut content was not including Lady Stoneheart. As I recall, this heavily strained the showrunners' relationship with Martin and led to him distancing himself from the show and depriving it of its most important advisor.
For all the things you can say about the showrunners at least they finished their damn job. I'm more bitter now at how GOT/Martin influenced Attack on Titan's writer and caused him to run that off a cliff too.
I am morbidly-curious now that you mention this. I've only ever watched the first season of the anime and I left off in the manga when they introduced the anti-human 3DMG
You should watch at least the first 3 seasons; they really are something special.
I should be able to explain what I mean in a mostly spoiler-free way. The creator of Attack on Titan, Hajime Isayama, binged Game of Thrones in 2016 and got really into it, even saying that the ending of his story would be inspired by the show.
There's a point in the story where the themes and style of storytelling vastly shift and not for the better. This coincides with the split between season 3 and the "final season" and there's an easy visual cue to tell when it happened because a different studio took over animating the show. This also coincides with around when Isayama got into Game of Thrones and it started influencing his writing.
I would summarize the original themes of the show (Seasons 1-3) as RAGE, SCREAM, FIGHT. There is something existential coming for you and it won't leave a single one of you left alive. Your 'leaders' think it best if your people quietly went extinct, and as you learn they are far from the only ones... Fight with your lives and with everything at your disposal, even if it means literally turning into your mortal enemy. There are times when good friends have to fight eachother but the mission is never in question because those are the stakes. This and the military imagery gave the show heavy nationalist themes and the series began to be criticized at the end of season 3 once certain interpretations became circulated online. I found it to be extremely refreshing compared to what I'm used to.
The post-GOT era show has heavy Martin themes. War is bad and you'll be heavy-handedly browbeaten for liking the cool parts with the sobering reality of characters you like dying. Morality is very grey all of a sudden. Killing others is wrong, even if they all want you dead... it feels quite incongruent with the earlier themes of the show, even with the story that the author laid out. These themes may sound better to you as you read this but consider that they are kludged onto a work that was saying the exact opposite things for so long. It's a different bill of goods now.
I should elaborate on the storytelling changes as well. Attack on Titan's narrative framing ties you and Eren very closely together. Later this expands so you get the POV of a few other main characters at times, but the important thing is that you and the characters are almost always on the same page. You know what they know, you discover the mystery together. This was the style of storytelling until the shift I talked about, at which point it becomes basically... Game of Thrones.
Tons of characters. You don't follow characters, you check in with them to see where they are with their story. Your relationship to Eren is completely broken as he goes from being the POV character to someone you don't see the inner world of outside of 4 episodes or so. You're catching up with his plans like everyone else is. This is pretty much exactly how Martin does it and the style has its merits... just not on something that did it differently for most of its existence. This is harder to articulate for most people but I think it's why the new seasons are so jarring.
As for the ending of Eren doing Something Crazy — this is certainly where the show was going from the start. His words to a certain betraying friend are downright genocidal in rhetoric. I think in a world without the influence of Martin it'd be framed much differently by the narrative, which would make for some interesting discourse online.
I agree with your sympathies especially when it come to cut stuff. On a show you have to cast, build sets, account for the limited ability of your core audience to follow many concurrent plotlines. On a finite budget it’s pretty easy to say “where the hell is this going” to a lot of the book 4-5 plots and cut them, especially when the books don’t have an easy answer to that question.
I’m less sympathetic in cases like Dorne where they built the damn sets and hired actors, just the wrong ones. That felt like the writers just didn’t understand what Martin was doing with Dorne at all and said fuck it, let’s add some girlbosses and put Jaime in it. Give me Arianne back
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
Link is broken for me. Did you archive the stream after you posted?
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
I'm running the fourth session in my online D&D campaign today. So far it's gone well, though I've had to onboard a few new players to replace ones who proved to not be able to commit. Right now I have 5 great players and have brought on 2 more that I'll have to test out, and would like to have 8 total. It's a West Marches style game, so 4 players from the wider group do a session at a time (I hate running for/playing with 5+ players). Each player is allowed to have 2 characters and it's given the campaign a really cool sense of scale and continuity having a large circle of players and characters that rotate in and out of missions.
Since we're all living in different locations and have different work schedules, this is just about the only way we could have gotten a group together, but I've been dying to try the format for years. It's a lot of work for me, but very fun.
I spent ages developing systems to give 5e actual exploration and interaction mechanics. I created an in-depth system for downtime that lets players use their character skills to gain different kinds of resources. Each IRL week they can choose what activity they do, though often a player will do a few weeks at a time because of scheduling. There are different downtime activities that use different skills and a lot of goals they can pursue. They can do downtime for both characters they run, so they've had fun trying to optimize the system towards their ends.
I'm very pressed for time, since the session is at 7 and I still have a lot to get ready... along with the rest of the workday. Running a game online lets me make the production values very slick, but requires more input time to do so. It's worth it in my book, but taking the time to write this up may not have been, given the situation...
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
I considered trying other systems, but my tabletop friends have all played a lot of 5e. It came down to teaching 8+ people how to play a brand new system vs adding (a lot of) homebrew to a system we were all already familiar with. I went with the latter option. Maybe if I was running for 3 dedicated players it'd be different, but this campaign is designed for players to be able to jump in and out. Onboarding each new player with a new system was... not appealing.
5e has many issues, but ease of use and range of adoption make it hard to pass up.
So really, is the only sin of “transpeople” being early?
I wonder this myself sometimes. For trans adults, much of my antipathy comes from people who are clearly (visibly) not women forcing people to deny the reality they see in order to validate them. And you can lose your job if you don’t. If surgery were at the point where they all passed perfectly and they had all female parts and not facsimiles, this issue would probably be sidestepped.
Of course, none of this applies to children transitioning. The number of people doing irreversible damage to their bodies without knowing the true risks based on social pressure has exploded, and I don’t want to get too into it because others already have done it much better here. I don’t think it’s a good thing nor do I want it to continue.
And then the natural question is, does tolerating the first thing lead to the second? It seems like it to me. In its current state trans ideology seems to allow for no opinion besides a maximalist one. And despite their small numbers, as an influence group they are incredibly influential in tech and online discourse due to the demographics of most people who transition to women tending to be people who are very online and in tech. See the deplatformings of the Kiwi Farms spearheaded by several trans activists for a recent example.
So futurist medical procedures would sidestep a big issue of mine with transgenderism, but it is far from the only one.
Quick edit: I forgot to mention the people that will want to be considered their chosen gender without doing the work to physically pass, which is a thing now and will most likely still be even in this hypothetical future. The question of how we respond to those people is important. Is it, yes you are your chosen gender? Or will we say l: I’ll call you a woman once you don’t have to tell me you’re one. I’d be okay with the latter option, not the former, but I can’t see it going that way culturally.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
That one is interesting, because Wikipedia is claiming it affects "5-15% of women of all ethnic backgrounds," which is less than the number of women I've seen with facial hair. I'm guessing it's fairly easily managed with a razor, and in any case facial hair is far from the only physical tell of sex, so that doesn't seem to pose an issue to what I'm saying.
To be more charitable we can go with whatever rare genetic condition may cause a woman to appear extremely mannish. In which case I would probably assume she is male unless corrected. That would be very unfortunate and I feel sympathy for her having to go around life that way, but she is by definition a rare genetic outlier. We can openly say that this is not the way it normally biologically works and don't feel the need to collapse biological gender categories over it.
If it was a political issue where people were identifying with this disorder or trying to medically induce it, demanding at risk of job loss you accept it, trying to normalize and give it to children, etc. and this was all surging at once within the last 10 years? At that point it leaves the category of weird genetic outlier and I start to ask what's going on here.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
Agree and I'd possibly like to see a second upvote/downvote button that people could use to indicate "well-argued" or something like that. Even if I disagree with their points I hate seeing our resident lefties get downvoted to 0 and dogpiled every time they make a post. I would like to think that would help, but there's also the future where it becomes an I disagree even more button...
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
In practice it’s more of a popularity marker. I think Southkraut’s version of the idea is better thought out
My condolences to you and your friend. I'd like to chime in as a secular person who is against assisted suicide for young, physically healthy people but is fine with euthanasia for people who are terminally ill, elderly, or extremely physically disabled.
Some other people have put this more eloquently, but I believe by okaying euthanasia for the first group we will get a lot of people opting to end their lives who would have stuck it out and become happy, productive adults. If a healthy person wants to take their life, I'm not going to cast moral judgement on them. But they should do it on their own terms — by bringing in the state we legitimize it and widen the net of people who will be lost. Suicide may be an option, be it should remain culturally taboo.
In the case of someone with no future due to terminal illness, or for someone physically incapable of ending themselves (the example I'm thinking of is someone who is paralyzed from the neck down due to an accident), the suffering is both clear and incurable at our current level of medicine. It's a lot easier of a call and has clear limits that won't (shouldn't?) lead to healthy people being killed by the state.
I suppose my guiding principle would be: what societal guidelines/guardrails will lead the average person to happiness and produce a functional, healthy society?
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
By offering a legitimate, state-sponsored path we run the risk of turning euthanasia into a goal to be worked toward as described by this recent quality contribution by @VelveteenAmbush. He is talking about gender transitioning but uses this topic as a directly analogous example, and makes a good argument that providing a legitimate path will wind up doing more harm than good.
With women this could be a big problem, as they are more likely to attempt suicide but tend to do so with less lethal methods. If there was an accepted path to suicide that had a 100% success rate once approved, we'd probably see more deaths overall.
I agree that whatever changes we make to a system like this should be carefully tested in a small region. Then again, after seeing how easily studies are manipulated and misrepresented, part of me wants to just put a big "do not cross" line over this particular policy. Once it becomes accepted policy and people are used to it, it's a lot harder to turn back the clock than it is to just keep it taboo.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
The framing of abortion as an issue of men controlling women always struck me as odd. In my own circles at least, the strongest pro-choice and pro-life people I know are all women. Most men I know have opinions on it, but they are rarely as firm or hardline as the women in my life. When discussing abortion with another man, there is room for nuance and whatever our opinions on the subject are, we can agree that the issue is uncommonly complex and difficult to find common ground on. I think both sides are correct in their own way so trying to untangle the mess that is the abortion debate is maddening.
I tread lightly if it comes up with women because it's always personal and it's always touchy. There isn't much room for disagreement, so I avoid saying too much if that's the case. Even if we agree on policy, any attempts by me to add nuance or explain the feelings of the other side don't go over well. I don't say this to condemn women or say men are better, but the energy in the debate reads to me as one driven by women. That being said, this is my personal experience, so I'd like to hear if this is the case for others here.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
I'd love to see nuclear implemented at all, so if we have to put them out at sea then so be it. I'm a layman when it comes to this, but I guess there's the risk of contamination going directly into the sea if things go wrong. That said, we've detonated nuclear bombs over the oceans in testing before so it's probably not an existential problem, and we still run the risk of ocean contamination with traditional power sources via oil spills.
I don't think this will change the minds of many who aren't on board with nuclear already. Most of them oppose it on concerns of safety or the supposed permanence of the waste. I suspect there is a large group against nuclear because it can address power sustainability without fundamentally restructuring our economic and social system, but this is getting close to CW thread territory so I don't want to get into that.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
The admin of the Kiwi Farms, Joshua Moon, is blackballed from most credit card payment networks and large crypto exchanges like Coinbase will even block crypto transfers to his wallets if you attempt to send him money through them.
This blacklisting, as well as his site going down for months, is all due to pressure campaigns from activists and journalists, not any legal wrongdoing — he claims to have never been charged with a crime nor has he lost a civil suit.
Bringing cryptocurrency under the same unaccountable bureaucratic blob as our current financial system would further reduce his ability to operate and fund his site. It remains to be seen if the site will even remain up, as this is not the first calm period of things looking stable since the pressure campaign began.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
Shut up and drink the $2000 wine, its good because the label says it is.
OP never says anything like this. They say that there's nothing wrong with generic wine, but that there is a world of wine minutiae to explore if you're willing to get into it.
It does not matter that anyone who watched the show and read the books could identify that they are not related in any way aside from labeling. Labeling, and what it implies is POWERFUL and should affect your experience.
The impression I got was that they are willing to spend a lot on certain vineyards because the wine they produce has qualities the OP finds worthwhile, not that the vineyards are worthwhile because of their brand name.
I'm not a wine person; I don't tough alcohol at all due to a familial history/predisposition to substance addiction. But I do have hobbies, and I understand that with any hobby there are vast differences in the understanding of a layman, intermediate hobbyist, and high-level hobbyist. The same goes for entry-level versus high-end equipment. I'm not an audiophile or photographer, but I can accept that when they drop thousands on top-of-the-line equipment, they're doing it because it makes a difference to them.
That doesn't mean you can't get enjoyment out of things at a laymen or entry level. To be honest, the effort to reward ratio of many hobbies seems better at the entry level, when you know enough to enjoy yourself but not enough to know what you're missing. But I can believe someone when they say the 2000 dollar camera has qualities the 200 dollar one doesn't. Same goes for this subject for me. I don't think this makes someone a slave to brands or whatever you're saying.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
I'll say their search system is impressively bad lately. Every search gives you maybe three results for what you're actually searching before recommending you things you've already seen that are completely unrelated. The only explanation I can think of comes from my experience in a completely different field. My boss will often have me make adjustments to our site or ad network that, without getting too into it, essentially trade a little bit of the system's health or user experience for a short-term bump in impressions/clicks.
With the search problem I described, it's possible that a PM had a bonus or other incentive to increase the clickthroughs on the "recommended" tab. Not being able to make this increase through genuine growth, they tell the engineers to cannibalize the search feature to also promote recommended videos to the user. The engineers ask "are you sure about this?" before just doing their job. And then another part of the user experience is shortsightedly consumed.
Any other ideas/explanations as to why this happens?
If we could produce meat indistinguishable from the real thing at a competitive cost and scale, I would eat it. This seems a ways off to me from what I've read in the thread so far, with the most viable solutions being mere facsimiles of this. I don't eat the Impossible stuff and the current leading synthetic meat seems unappetizing to me. I want to emphasize that this isn't due to fear of synthetic meat per se, but the idea of replacing genuine meat with an inferior product. If we can make synthetic meat as good as real meat, that's an amazing feat and should be celebrated.
Supposing we manage to do this, I'm mixed about some of the second-order implications. I don't like the centralization of food production that would likely result from this. Also, the potential banning of hunting and fishing as you said, or of consuming actual animals. I'd still want to pursue the lab meat. Making more of something for less time, money, and resources is how the species has avoided its Malthusian limits for so long. Any big advancement brings about issues we couldn't have conceived of before, but the tradeoff has almost always been worth it.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
Even if Trump loses the primary, I don’t think his ego will allow him to not run as an independent. It’s looking like he either wins the primary or nukes the winner’s chances of taking the general by splitting the vote.
So… four more years of a Democrat in charge of the White House or four years of him playing the perfect boogeyman to the left while failing to get anything meaningful done*.
I can accept that in a lot of ways, he was genuinely sabotaged by lawfare and trumped up criminal charges that made it difficult to keep competent staffers. But if there’s someone who can fight back against that, it’s not him.
Trump opened a lot of doors, but I wish he were capable of stepping aside and letter more competent people build on that, rather than forcing it to live (and die) with him. But that’s his whole thing, isn’t it? He does not back down on stuff like this. It’s his biggest strength, but also the biggest weakness of a political movement that is tied to him.
*To be fair, if you were motivated by Roe v Wade, he really did deliver on this.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
I don’t expect it to be easy, or for them to get it right until at least a few decades are out.
I agree with your concerns. Still, a lot can happen between now and then and I’d hate to reject an amazing breakthrough due to our current dysfunctional relationship with capital and our countrymen.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
You alluded to this in your last paragraph, but I want to stress that Gacha games have penetrated the Western market and are here to stay barring legislative changes. If you aren't familiar with the term, it refers to a type of game that requires players to roll some kind of slot machine to unlock items or characters that they use to play the game. The games are almost always free and allow progression with ingame currency that can be unlocked with time, but the credit card allows for much faster progression and the games are designed to get you to pay. This is often done by throttling progression once a player has invested time but not money. Some games are "better" than others with regards to this, but playing them is on some level adversarial as the developers wage psychological warfare against you in an attempt to get more of your money.
The main incentive to spend money is to unlock new characters. Many Gachas are built off existing IPs with lots of characters and a built-in fanbase, like Fire Emblem or Fate. Newer characters are typically mechanically better to encourage a treadmill of spending and unlocking, but I would say power is probably only half the reason people will try to whale (Gacha term for spending a lot of money) for a character. A large part of the draw is feeding on the emotional attachment a player has to a specific character, whether through waifuism or some other draw. This is also the reason so much Gacha art is highly sexualized.
If you haven't heard of Genshin Impact, it is a Chinese Gacha game with stunningly gorgeous visuals, music, and character designs. To say it is huge is an understatement. It has generated almost 4 billion in revenue on mobile platforms alone since its release in late 2020 — keep in mind this is not including numbers for Playstation or PC. Beyond the money, it's hard to overstate how big this game is right now. It boasts about 60 million+ active monthly players, and the player demographics are also not what one might immediately assume for the genre. In the West, 45% of the players are women, and many of them are young.
Anecdotally, at the last few conventions I've attended, I would say about half the teens and 20-somethings were dressed up as characters from the game, with the next-most popular IP being Demon Slayer. Trends come and go obviously; 10 years ago those same people would be painting their skin gray and wearing orange horns. But it's worth mentioning to illustrate the game's relevance. It's probably China's first true cultural export in the modern age. It also puts to shame the deliberate ugliness in many of our local cultural products.
It's worth talking about Genshin because the game is both an outlier and a portent of things to come. The Gacha genre has a (deserved) reputation for being cheap, tacky cash-ins of existing IPs with little artistic vision or compelling gameplay. Genshin Impact is none of those things. It is clearly a labor of love and has inspired huge swaths of people to get into its story and world, create art and fanworks, and dress up as the characters. In terms of artistic vision, it really puts most of the Western AAA scene to shame. And other companies will be taking notes.
The format is here to stay, and you will see more of the design principles exported to more Western games, whose developers are hungry for new ways to monetize. The Western AAA market has been aggressively pushing monetization for years in the form of money-based upgrades, cosmetic lootboxes,and season passes (the current dominant scheme). Why let your customer pay $60 once if you're going to go through the trouble of developing a game? Why do that when you can make so much more money? The troubled release of Cyberpunk 2077 was likely the last gasp of the old ways for AAA. Games as a live service and money-based progression are here to stay.
So it goes. It's a shame that a game like Genshin Impact can seemingly only be made nowadays using these monetization practices. I have a disposition towards addiction, and my way of managing it is to not allow predatory temptations to enter my environment. Having to treat an increasing number of video games the way I treat alcohol is certainly interesting. There's an argument that modern development costs are so high that you need to fund games this way, but I don't see how that sausage is made so I can only speculate whether this is true or not. For games with ultramodern graphics, this may be the case, but if you're willing to look past that, the AA and Indie game scene is much less myopic. Our local Rimworld dev-turned fearless leader can attest to this.
I'm having so much fun with NovelAI. It's basically StableDiffusion but trained on danbooru, which is an anime art booru. The AI has some limitations - you can only really do one character at a time, it has some issues with anatomy, and my god does it struggle with the hands. That said, if you work the prompts and iterate on the generations you like, it generates some really good stuff. It's also remarkably consistent at depicting the same character once you have the prompts figured out, at which point it's a matter of generating until you get something that looks good and doesn't have the typical AI shortcomings. I've shown some of the fanart of characters I've generated to friends and then dropped that an AI made it to near-universal shock.
I'm also using StableDiffusion to generate assets like scenery and enemies for my online 5e campaign, which it has done very well. I'm on the browser model for that since my graphics card is AMD and I haven't had the time to jump through the hoops to get everything working yet.
I'm sympathetic to the issues this will cause for artists, but at the same time these tools are incredible. I dislike the "soulless" description I've seen thrown at the tech. My main creative strength has been with words and fiction. I've tried my hand at digital art and made stuff I'm proud of before, but I've always considered it a massive bottleneck in terms of time, talent, and resources. What I can't depict by hand vastly outstrips what I can depict, so being able to convert words into illustrations is both delightful and mindblowing to me. This isn't soulless AI vomiting images to drown out human intent, this is AI allowing human intent to manifest more easily for many more people.
In short, AI art is very cool, try out StableDiffusion, or NovelAI if you're a weeb.
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