as a strength user seemingly was impossible to do anything without a not strength build.

A strength build in elden ring is kind of hardmode in its own right. You get some really strong options for some bosses, but you’re still generally stuck with slow melee weapons that you basically have to already know a fight very well to use. I went into it the first time with an ultra-greatsword build and did mostly fine up until reaching some of the later bosses, while my second playthrough I went arcane with dual whips and just rolled everything without trouble.

Which makes me wonder if the game was intentionally balanced around players using them for every boss fight.

It definitely feels like it. The game actively pushes it in your face and says “here use this,” they’re a frequent reward for clearing dungeons, and there’s even some quest content that requires you to use them to make things happen. They’re not mandatory, but they seem like the expected choice. Especially since there’s the tradeoff that they make bosses more erratic and rarely do all that much on their own - they’re a force amplifier when used right, but it’s easy for them to make a fight harder and then die without contributing.

I remember trying it for some very basic TTRPG campaign prep

When I was GMing I really liked GPT-2 for just churning out some nonsense to fill in unimportant details on the fly while just riffing on ideas with my players to build sessions. Like sometimes I’d have a good idea for a run, and other times I’d just ask the players what sort of run they want and workshop ideas with them till we got an idea we liked, then I’d (openly) get some stilted and bizarre blurbs from GPT-2 to give a little backstory and flavor to that.

But that was also relying on how flawed and weird GPT-2 was and how well the absurdity of its gibbering meshed with the tone we were setting. I feel like if one were to try to use chatGPT for the same thing it would just be dull instead of producing entertainingly absurd nonsense.

I’ve actually never finished a full game of Stellaris. I usually play max-size galaxies, so that might have something to do with it,

That’s definitely a strong contributing factor imo. For as many games of it I’ve started the only one I actually stuck with all the way to the end was one minimum size galaxy fanatic purifier run with a species of adorable butterflies. Any bigger than that and eventually it just hits a point where not only is trying to stay on top of planets a chore but it stops feeling like there’s even a point to it since I’ve snowballed to such a point that I can just brute force whatever’s left while slowly waiting for that to finish.

I did have one particularly long running game with an empath tree of life spider hivemind that wound up as the permanent head of a huge federation that also became the sole galactic community security council member and made war impossible, putting the galaxy in stasis with nothing left to do but run out the clock since even the crisis couldn’t put a dent in it. That game I played extremely tall (after getting penned in by my loyal allies/federation and some fallen empires) and just relied on barbaric despoliation to capture pops (for livestock) from whoever my federation declared war on to keep my economy growing. I did eventually abandon it once it became a waiting game, though.

Maybe. I don’t know if they just kind of planned poorly and struggled to advance the plot to hit the major events they wanted or if there was executive meddling or the like taking an axe to the story towards the end. Because like I said in another comment, it almost feels like a completely different story after episode 7, like someone came in and said “nope, too gay, cut it all out” and got rid of even any more yuri bait apart from a few fragments like just what Kano was focusing on while breaking down after her fight with Mahiru.

I don’t mean to sound too bitter about it, I’m just disappointed with where it went, especially after all the glowing praise I had for it early on. It’s sad, and I do wish there were more episodes left to maybe fix this, but at the same time I know that either the writers or studio intentionally made it the way it was and I don’t believe the reason was they didn’t have the time to develop Kano and Mahiru more given they both were basically just treading water starting around the 8th episode.

Basically. There’s a trans character and that was handled reasonably well, but the sort of core storyline of both Kano and Mahiru just sort of faceplanted towards the end in a way that feels so weird and drastic that I can’t help but wonder if it wasn’t rewritten. All the themes of defiance and openly chasing what makes you happy despite social scorn just evaporated completely, it tries to recuperate and humanize the two largely-absent and irrelevant antagonist characters for no reason and with no payoff, the two main characters grew more distant in a way that was narratively unsatisfying and didn’t really lead into anything, and their reconciliation was tepid and disappointing. Like I can’t stress enough that it feels like the story was building up Kano and Mahiru’s relationship and personal character growth arcs, and then an eraser was crudely taken to the last quarter of all of that and someone else added some filler to connect the shreds of what was left.

It’s really disappointing. Not specifically because it wasn’t queer enough, but because the first seven episodes are great and poignant and sweet, and then with the exception of Watase’s story in episode eleven the last four episodes are really weak and have the other three main characters in a sort of narrative stasis. It would have been fine for Kano’s clear feelings for Mahiru to not be reciprocated, if that had at least been acknowledged. It would have been fine if it had been cut short by a dramatically meaningful conflict between them. But instead just a whole lot of nothing happened, emotions were flat across the board, and then it got a lukewarm ending without even the level of the earlier yuri-baiting moments.

That can be expanded to any “the hero nobly denies doing something ‘unethical’ to get what they want/decides to sacrifice their own desires for the sake of someone else, only for reality itself to turn around and reward them with exactly what they wanted/were going to sacrifice as a special good boy treat for doing the right thing” situation, I think.

The tacit acceptance of monarchism and aristocracy as normal and legitimate things. Even when there’s intrigue like “oh no, the bad scheming sneaky nobles are doing a heckin scheme against the good and pure and charitable main character friendly nobles, we must make sure the good landed gentry come out on top!” it’s just treated as drama within an inherently legitimate system.

Childish ontologies of good and evil where the good guys are rightful property owners who are nice and good and the villains are disruptive cartoon villains who squabble and betray and do silly cartoon villain things. Further, in that framework the villains are always either barbarous underdogs scheming to take power from the legitimate powerful land owners, or are some sort of fever dream expy of aUtHoRitArIaNiSm that’s either styled as Napoleonic liberal meritocracy as seen by British monarchists or some absurd caricature of the Soviets/China.

Yeah, the whole story just sort of fell apart completely there, losing any sort of drama. Kano and Mahiru just going completely radio silent on each other after their fight even as they just sort of got over it on their own was just so narratively empty and unsatisfying. There was no conflict resolved with the climax, nor was there any real character growth. Kano just sort of got cheered up a bit, did a show, and that was that.

It’s just so disappointing, both in narrative quality and lack of acknowledgement for LGBT themes.

It was great, right up until the last episode which fell so flat it retroactively ruined the rest. Like the climax of the series is what? One main character getting to play second fiddle to the worst people in the show, the other main characters getting to go “oh that was cool huh” and that was it, time for a timeskip montage that gives each of them some little extremely individual moment of further character growth. Kano and Mahiru’s arc just sort of fizzled out without any sort of acknowledgement, and then it was over.

Damn, I really hate when my cynicism get vindicated. I feel like that’s even worse than the disappointment with how badly it ended, just knowing that I shouldn’t have been right to be cynical, but I was.

Yep. Extremely disappointing end to an otherwise great show. After all the poignant moments and emotional highs of early episodes, “and then things were just normal and ok, there was some further character growth in montage form, and Kano and Mahiru’s obsession with one another fizzled out without ever actually being addressed” was an extremely flat ending.

Another win for cynicism and never daring to expect anything good from an anime series, no matter how promising it may look to begin with.

lucifer demanding equality with God

That is itself a medieval heresy. The biblical satan is a fucking angel cop trying to put humanity on trial for suspected disloyalty.

Death Stranding.

I’ve seen more of them around my back yard this year, and I’m wondering if something in the garden is attracting more of them. I’ve seen a bunch of them sheltering on a newly grown yucca plant during the day, at least.

That photo looks AI generated, something about the colours just seems off.

I think it’s just good old fashioned overexposure for the lighting conditions, or someone fucking it up in post. It looks like contrast, brightness, and saturation are all a bit too high. I’m guessing all their shots were all awful and maybe they’ve fired their expert photo editors so they’re just left with an intern dicking around or a failson nepobaby writer just using some automatic setting.

AI generated images do get the same burned look when CFG is turned up too high for a given model, though, so it’s a good soft tell to add on to other weirdness.

Liberals think that if you put enough intermediate steps and performative civility over the direct violence part that it stops being violence. So because the ships aren’t being fired on with rockets or cannons if they try to go to Cuba, that’s not violence. Instead if someone breaks the terms of the embargo while in the US they’ll be arrested (which is violent, but liberals don’t think it is), if a ship docks in Cuba it’s barred from docking in the US for a long period of time (and if it tried it would presumably be impounded and its crew arrested, all of which involve violence or the threat of violence), if a company outside the US violates the embargo it gets blacklisted or sanctioned by the US (all of which is ultimately enforced by the US ability to enact violence), etc.

The capacity for violence is the foundational force of state and geopolitical hegemony, and every layer of power on top of it is backed up by the threat of violence or carried out by people who are under the threat of violence if they don’t comply. Even things like fiat currency are basically just operating on the hegemonic violence standard: liberals think fiat currency runs on magical thinking and vibes, libertarians think it’s fake altogether, and only occasionally will you see some honest admission that the US dollar (for example) is actually based on America’s capacity to enact violence globally and domestically.

A big part of how indentured servitude was replaced with chattel slavery involved things like land being provided to white former indentured servants as part of establishing a larger white property-owning class to entrench the new system of racialized slavery, so in practical terms many of the Irish indentured servants in the Americas got their reparations centuries ago.

In contrast former slaves were suppressed, subject to hyper-exploitation from new systems that aimed to recreate chattel slavery as much as possible, and terrorized with both legal and illegal violence from state and paramilitary actors, and these things have been ongoing to one extent or another for over 150 years now.

Both of those different approaches were used to reinforce the concept of whiteness and establish the cult of white supremacy as hegemonic in the US and globally. Sort of like the practice of emancipating and adopting the most loyal and skilled slaves even as arbitrary and indiscriminate terror was applied to slaves as a class in antiquity but scaled up to an almost industrial level, making the most conformist white workers into yeoman farmers whose material interests suddenly align more with other property owners while at the same time applying arbitrary and indiscriminate terror to black slaves and former slaves. Thus workers get divided, cronies get empowered, and hyper-exploitation is enabled through violence and systemic exclusion and othering.

Ireland on the other hand should get reparations from the UK because of the centuries of violence and extraction the UK has imposed upon it. But that’s distinct from indentured servitude in the Americas.

They’ll oversweeten everything that shouldn’t be sweetened and then not sweeten things that should be sweetened. Sugar (or something like sweet rice wine) is a useful spice when used correctly and sparingly and things like certain fruits mix very well into savory dishes, but it’s like people will chug a bottle of literal syrup and then eschew naturally sweet ingredients in food for “health reasons,” or chow down on multiple snack cakes that are 90% fat by mass in between meals and then avoid using cooking oil because “that’s unhealthy.”

When these things are used in the correct place you get an overall diet that’s both delicious and healthy, but instead the norm is just that any given thing must be the opposite extreme of what it should be.

*tinny midi jingle begins playing* “In hard times like this…” *slideshow of pictures harvested off social media of likely family members of employee begins playing* “It’s important to remember all the people who are relying on your employment, and how failure to meet your quota could affect them.” *midi jingle continues playing on repeat for several minutes as part of a pavlovian training of the employee* “Your mood control break has now concluded and in compensation to your employer for this unscheduled break ten more call resolutions have been added to your target quota.”

Fascist propagandists on the payroll of the Kochs and Mercers told libertine gamers that women and minorities were coming for their precious fun time treats and were going to make them less tasty, which caused their waveforms to spontaneously collapse into fascism with 4chan characteristics.

There’s IPadapter for SD models which only requires a single photo at runtime, though I don’t know exactly how strong its adherence is. There’s also training a LORA which would only require a few images and take maybe a day at the most, which would be an easy investment of time and resources for someone who wants to churn out tons of images with that one face on them. And of course there’s the simplest method of all: just crudely pasting the desired face into the image and then sending it for a low denoise img2img pass to make the inscrutable machine integrate it into the image better.

That level of extremely basic and rudimentary technical knowledge is probably beyond the influencers themselves, but certainly not beyond whatever flunky they pay to maintain their brand like that, at which point it’s probably self-preservation and not wanting to create an automated process that can replace themselves that stops them from using that approach.