This one I’m not such a fan of. The number of times I’ve found an interesting bulletin board community, and been told I had to wait 48 hours before I could comment once on the introductions board, before waiting another 24 hours to comment once per day on another small set of allowed forums, but only if my introductory comment was approved by the moderation team….

Yeah, the alternative is a bot and troll riddled mess of a site like reddit, but at least I can usually ask for the source of that furry scat porn without being instantly banned for speaking out of turn to the ruling elite of the forum.

Always a bit of a shock to realise that Bob is still chucking along, angry as ever.

Might have to catch up on 15+ years of comics.

My eyes drifter right past the words “daughter of” in the headline, and I was very confused why “dead man doesn’t eat chocolate” was newsworthy.

Selling their house for $4,500,000 and paying $750,000 in taxes still leaves them with $3,750,000 for an over-55s, healthcare, and investing.

I think the multi-millionaires will be fine.

“He’s not that bad, he’s only actively choosing to be a nazi in order to reach his own selfish goals”

I would argue this would make him worse than he seems.

Musk isn’t taking you to mars with him, no matter how much you try to fellate his ego.

It’s a stereotype. Why do many people instantly think of Texas when talking about conservative states?

“Scientists are still racing to understand the causes of devastating marine heatwaves.”

It’s a real head scratcher.

You’re assuming these are their own thoughts, and haven’t been paid for with crypto or threats of violence.

The process involves numerous steps, including tests of physical coordination; checking the driver’s blood pressure and pulse; squeezing the driver’s limbs to determine if the muscle tone is “normal” or not; and examining pupil size and eye movements.

Steps not mentioned:

• is the suspect Black?
• does the suspect fail to defer to you as an infallible authority?
• have you hit your quota of arrests/citations today?

Nobody who is mad at this situation thinks that taking inspiration, riffing on, or referencing other people’s work is the problem when a human being does it. When a person writes, there is intention behind it.

The issue is when a business, owned by those people you think ‘demonised’ inspiration, take the works of authors and mulch them into something they lovingly named “The Pile”, in order to create derivative slop off the backs of creatives.

When you, as a “professional”, ask AI to write you a novel, who is being inspired? Who is making the connections between themes? Who is carefully crafting the text to pay loving reference to another authors work? Not you. Not the algorithm that is guessing what word to shit out next based on math.

These businesses have tricked you into thinking that what they are doing is noble.

No I don’t, but we’re not talking about a single copy of one book, and it is grovellingly insidious to imply that we are.

We are talking about a company taking the work of an author, of thousands of authors, and using it as the backbone of a machine that’s goal is to make those authors obsolete.

When the people who own the slop-machine are making millions of dollars off the back of stolen works, they can very much afford to pay those authors. If you can’t afford to run your business without STEALING, then your business is a pile of flaming shit that deserves to fail.

You’re right, each of the 5 million books’ authors should agree to less payment for their work, to make the poor criminals feel better.

If I steal $100 from a thousand people and spend it all on hookers and blow, do I get out of paying that back because I don’t have the funds? Should the victims agree to get $20 back instead because that’s more within my budget?

“Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” “Israeli and US support”

My nose started bleeding, trying to unify these concepts in my mind. Its like the “Bird and Small Mammal Support Foundation”, run by house cats.

These are my feelings too. I loved the trilogy when each came out, and return to them at least once a year. But nice graphics aren’t enough to make me support Konami.

If Joe Bloggs next door agrees with war crimes, he’s just an arsehole.

If the head of the United Nations General Assembly agrees with war crimes, I think there’s a case to be made…

Doom Eternal? The game with a soundtrack that was made up of butchered parts of Gordon’s work, welded together by a novice, at the command of an egotistical dickhead who slandered Gordon after the fact?

https://medium.com/@mickgordon/my-full-statement-regarding-doom-eternal-5f98266b27ce

Eternals original OST was very poor compared to Doom 2016. Big reason I never bothered with the game.

I would like to know the plan here. They mention following in Australia’s footsteps, but as far as I can see, Australia is still trying to figure out how to implement this ban as well

The best they seem to have come up with for determining age without requiring an onlineID is letting AI look at your hands (NPR link.

Also, what is a social media? Because if you lock it down to specific sites and ban ‘Facebook’ and ‘X’, Musk or Zuck will just launch MashFace or Z, and get around the ban for a little bit longer. If you make it too broad, then kids could technically be excluded from text messaging.

All of this also assumes that a simple vpn won’t bypass all of this, the same way you can still watch pornhun in Texas that Ms to this weeks sponsor: SurfAtlus VPN.

At least it gives people who are using their switches a chance to buy one, instead of them selling out in seconds to a network of bot accounts before winding up on eBay for $300+ the following week.

It’s not the perfect system, but I can understand why they are doing it.

There have been a few in here, but the real “hear me out”s are Few and far between.

Someone mentioned Hexxus from Fern Gully (a tar monster voiced by Tim Curry), or the Hydra from Hercules.

I still think it holds true that men’s HMOs are conventionally attractive women (Jessica Rabbit, Tinkerbell, Gadget). Women’s HMOs are things like The Brave Little Toaster; the dog monster from The Thing; and the abstract concept of ennui.

Is DuckDuckGo still the best alternative at this point, or has Bing been toiling away in the dark to improve itself?