I would be surprised at the absolute stupidity of that, voting for the absolute corpo party in some bizarre protest, but you guys already voted him in for a first term so nothing is really surprising when it comes to the US anymore.

Valorant?

I just started myself, after missing Overwatch 1 and thinking it was similar. To my surprise it is like an Overwatch with a Counterstrike feel to it, which I quite enjoy.

Has he now come full circle and lied so much that he accidentally told the truth?

As a non American I just can’t comprehend how any of you even have to think about this.

On one hand, an old man, who, despite his age and stumbling over his words, has ran the country relatively successfully for the last four years.

On the other hand, another old man that was a global embarrassment, cosied up to Putin and Kim, spent most of his time golfing and shitting his pants, stole classified documents and likely sold state secrets, he is a sexual abuser, an actual criminal, clearly has corrupt justices on his side with crazy plans, chummy with epstein and took multiple trips to pedo Island, promoted racism at every opportunity, many of the people connected to him for his first term were imprisoned, refused to accept your democratic process, contributed in instigating a fucking coup attempt, and that’s likely not even the half of it…

Like, how the fuck can ANY of you look at that and say “Yeah but Biden stumbles over his words so I’ll just throw my vote away/vote for trump…”

I feel like I’m going insane just watching this shit unfold. It is all so bizarre.

Oh, look, another old comedian jumps on the bigot bandwagon. It’s an incredibly transparent trend now for when they can’t write the same material that got them there in the first place, or when they are no longer working with the person that wrote their material for them.

Take a few shots at trans people, purely for publicity, then use that sudden boost from the circle jerking media to secure yourself a Netflix special, where you can talk about how you’ve been cancelled for an hour and a half for a big payout.

It’s just a marketing ploy for using peoples own outrage against them.

Since the whole API fiasco and losing reddit is fun, I wiped my reddit account, downloaded my comment history and then used a bot to wipe all my comments and posts, doing so got me banned from commenting on a lot of subs, something to do with the speed that the comments were edited at or something. Either way, I don’t really care.

I still use my reddit account for lurking, there are some niche active subs that still have good information/discussion that unfortunately haven’t been picked up elsewhere, but I have those subs opened in old reddit on Firefox and I don’t venture outside of that, and I’ll never contribute or comment again.

I get that I’m contributing to their traffic still, but I was an active member for 12+ years, and I’m still pissed they fucked the entire community to profit from our fucking content. Definitely won’t be contributing to their content again.

I have a “world bible” that I created on onenote with all of my characters, locations, lore, etc. As part of that I have my stories plotted out in rough notes, then chapter by chapter in a table, (this often changes when actually writing but it’s a great foundation).

Lots of people use Obsidian or Notion to do the same thing. I already had onenote on all my devices, so it was easy just to add notes to my notes section if an idea came to me on the move that I could return to later.

I’ve tried to move to obsidian or notion a couple of times, but I think I have a certain efficiency now with my crude system, and it just seems to work for me.

Not sure if YouTube links are allowed here, but if you just search for automatic 1111 install tutorials, Sebastian Kamph’s channel is excellent and pretty much everything you’ll need to know is on there!

Keep an eye for his updated videos though, as you can imagine the tech moves so quickly that some of his more popular videos have been remade and updated!

Hahaha, I hadn’t considered it that way. Touché.

Short form content platforms aren’t going anywhere, Instagram Reels and YouTube shorts are just a carbon copy of tiktok. No problems with them, of course, because they’re American.

I’m still unsure why anyone would pay for AI image generation purely because of the trial and error it takes. I get that not everyone has a GPU that can do it, but I use stable diffusion through automatic 1111 and I’ll likely be about 2-300 generations of text to image, image to image, some inpainting and editing, then some more image to image and upscaling before I get a representation of what’s in my head down.

I love the process of it all, but paying for tokens would completely limit me. Is there a specific reason that people use paid models? Or is it just because a lot of people are limited by their gpu?

Currently in Tokyo from UK, paid for an Airalo esim before I arrived, and I was pretty impressed with how cheap and easy it’s been- and that’s with 20gbs data, which I’ve barely used.

My service provider O2 would have charged me £7 a day with their O2 travel bolt-on, but would have still been my usual contract of unlimited calls, texts and data, just that the data would have been throttled a fair bit. This is a lot more reasonable than it used to be, but still would have amounted in a large bill compared to the one off $18 esim.

Yes I did, wasn’t paying attention while I typed it! Fixed now.

Yep, had it the wrong way around! Oops, was typing while walking.

The bizarre thing about Rowling is her hatred for trans people only extends to MtF trans people. She has no problem with FtM.

*Apologies, I did have these mixed up, I typed this while walking and only just read it back now.

Peddled by disaster capitalists and Russian money/propaganda.

And now the Tories want to pull us from the ECHR, to tear away workers rights and further privatise everything to funnel money into their own bank accounts.

It’s damn sad there will never be a “we fucking told you so” moment, because the useful idiots that were used as fodder in this whole mess are too fucking thick to ever understand the gravity of it all.

You are, and that’s by design, as the core of your country from the education right down to the media and pop culture, all revolve around the financial system, designed to keep the wealth in the pockets of the few while everyone else argues over the same pointless and divisive issues that are pushed every single day. It happens in most countries, but the US is the best example due to how transparent it all is.

Capitalism has really done a number on these poor Americans, the right wing have managed to push the compass so far in their favour that even a lot of the most basic items in this list are considered “far left” to them.

One prime example of the extremes of propaganda within the US has to be the mass opposition towards unions (which has thankfully began to ease in recent years.) I could never comprehend why so many people would argue against having a union to protect their own rights as workers. it was bizarre to me.

No offence to any Americans that read this. But I’ve done my fair share of arguing for you over the years, and some of the opposition I have come up against is just completely bewildering. Almost like some sort of capitalist Stockholm syndrome.

So many amazing characters throughout the series.

Some examples I’d say:

Stetzer, Edgar & Sabin, even edgelord Shadow has a fantastic backstory. VI had such a large cast with such unique stories all round, I only wish a few were fleshed out a little more, Locke felt a little bland in comparison, but that could simply be translation not giving him as much of a personality, or maybe I’ve played it too many times.

Vivi in IX will always have a really touching story, the whole concept of trying to understand the world and his own existence from a very naive perspective. The fact that they still managed to portray that with wisdom and grace within that naive framework was just pure poetry, imo, and very much a staple of Japanese cultural fable/storytelling.

Sure, those are good examples of negatives, but that is just the way of it. This happens all the time when new technology emerges. Just think about the audio industry, all of a sudden people could produce music from their spare bedrooms- jobs weren’t needed anymore. But the music industry is now far more saturated than ever as a result, as it is so much more accessible to people, without the need for specialist equipment and stacks of cash.