youtube is plagued with these bots that either copy someone else’s comment (normally positive of the video creator in order to avoid being auto deleted) or use some chatbot to come up with phrases, the picture is always some attractive woman or sometimes just straight up images from porn, when you click on the profile the banner image or profile links will contain a link to either a scam site or an onlyfans page. They generally also bot upvotes on their comments in order to get better visibility

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There’s also the privilege of living in a location where vegan alternatives are readily and frequently available, vast swaths of the US are in what’s known as “food deserts”, locations where “residents’ access to affordable, healthy food options (especially fresh fruits and vegetables) is restricted or nonexistent due to the absence of grocery stores within convenient traveling distance” (https://foodispower.org/access-health/food-deserts/) these locations also tend to have high obesity or diabetes rates due to the fact that the only food easily and cheaply available is high in sugar. Add in things like the increased price for even simple vegan foods (like rice and beans) and you might be starting to see the picture, as much as some people would LIKE to be vegan it is literally not possible for them without either taking on substantial additional costs or completely upending their life.

A lot of the reason people who are otherwise pro-vegan (like myself) tend to dislike online vegans is that they will, consistently and smugly, while in a location and economic position where its easier to get vegan options, berate people for eating animal products without ever considering the possibility that its MUCH harder to get non-animal product based foods in certain areas

That certainly seems to be the way disney is going, I’m just so perplexed by them having Scorch be a reoccurring background character in the bad batch if they aren’t going to do something with him.

Personally, I’d say yes, it hasn’t aged well on PC (your cursor will move at Mach 2 in menus even on the lowest possible sensitivity for example) and the graphics could certainly use an update, but the squad combat & banter still feels great. The game also does a great job of feeling like it fits into the universe, it came out about 3 months before Revenge of the Sith, and includes tons of references and hints to its plot that feel like something an actual in universe clone would see.

I will warn you however, if you end up playing it, the game is very hard at points, and the AI can be pretty stupid at times.

That’s a smart solution, I’ll have to look into trying it on my work PC (where they force me to use windows 11), thank you for the recommend!

Windows 11 introduced start menu ads recently in update KB5036980, thankfully they can disabled, but I’m not 100% sure it will stay that way

relevant article from The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/24/24138949/microsoft-windows-11-start-menu-ads-recommendations-setting-disable

Lol welcome aboard the DF party ship!

I still remember my most recent fortress mode cyclops, even though its been almost half a year. I had 2 squads who I had been training using training spears, but forgot to change equipment before sending them to kill it, by some miracle, they dodged all of its attacks for about 20 attacks despite having no dodge skills at all, then one of them either punched or bashed the cyclops in the face and got lucky, knocking it out. What followed was around 20 in game days of a circle of 14 dwarves mercilessly beating a puddle of bruises that was once a cyclops, as training weapons do next to no damage, occasionally it would wake up, then immediately give in to the pain again, with the only non bruise damage coming from whenever a dwarf would decide to punch, kick, or bite instead of using their main weapon. It FINALLY ended when one of dwarves punched it in the head, tearing the brain through the skull, putting the poor thing out of its misery.

My dwarves went in competent speardwarves and came out around grand master level, all very dehydrated.

Yeah but its great! Best book game ive ever read!

No. There are hundreds of entirely valid reasons to be wary of AI, especially the fact that the word AI has just turned into a corporate buzzword, when I hear that (insert thing) has had AI added to it, that can mean anything from a single static image that was made using “AI art” , to a large language model being used, or maybe they just grafted chatGPT to it.

Maybe if people and companies stopped labeling everything even tangentially computer related as AI I’d be less dismissive of it, but as it is now, whenever “AI” is mentioned in relation to a product it feels like a “corp wants to artificially increase percieved value by using latest trend” moment

A lot, as in a large amount, its hard to put a finite number on something like a large part of a large community I am not a part of nor interested in.

I am not the only one who has noticed this, here is a skit video from 4 moths ago demonstrating this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTBCzH1UyNY

As for sources there are TONS, it takes 5 seconds of googling to find a whole page, including:

https://medium.com/illuminations-mirror/where-are-the-nft-bros-c6571ba4f1fd

https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhochberg/2023/03/18/at-sxsw-it-was-goodbye-nfts-and-hello-ai-music/?sh=5f3e442e54c6

https://www.businessinsider.com/the-crypto-bros-are-coming-for-ai-2023-12

https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/2/23582772/chatgpt-ai-get-rich-quick-schemes-hustlers-web

https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/ai-generative-art-trend

Hell, just open one of the NFT marketplaces like opensea, I went to the art tab and the top trending is AI “art”

Also, a large amount of those NFT bros have lately been pushing to allow AI companies to steal artist’s works and otherwise generally licking big AI companies’ collective boot, so not exactly a great look for the future of the industry

It’s in the article.

On Friday, the San Bernardino County district attorney announced that Refugio Jimenez Jr. had pleaded guilty to one count of involuntary manslaughter and two counts of recklessly causing a fire to an inhabited structure. He will be taken into custody on Feb. 23 to serve a year in jail. His sentence also includes two years of felony probation and 200 hours of community service.

Angelina Jimenez pleaded guilty to three misdemeanor counts of recklessly causing fire to property of another.

She was sentenced to a year of summary probation and 400 hours of community service. The couple was also ordered to pay $1,789,972 in restitution.

Thank you for your response! I must apologize firstly for the late reply (I do my best to be on social media as little as possible lately) and secondly for giving off the impression that I am in favor of using terms like “all men are trash”, I am against them entirely, not only do they create situations that are easy to manipulate and spin, but they also tend to give power to genuinely awful groups within the feminist movement (TERFs, anti-masc homophobes, misandrist, etc)

My response was intended to give an example where the phrase could be taken out of context to be more negative than its original context.

Believe me, I know the hate all men type feminists exist, and it’s baffling to me that they aren’t called out more often by people who care about equality

Gladly! I’ll use an example that I myself witnessed (and helped pull me out of the alt right pipeline, funnily enough) but unfortunately no longer have the link to corroborate my story, as it was deleted by the original post author some time afterwards, I’ll also include a timeline of how it gets into the right wing circles and gets spread around, bolded part for those who just want to know the context:

A young feminist makes a post on a personal blog that includes the text “all men are trash” as part of a larger critique on masculine culture and how it negatively everyone, including men. IIRC it was something like “all men are trash, they do bad things [other examples, leading paragraph type stuff]” and then continues in the next couple of lines “That’s what men are supposed to be and are lead to be under a patriarchy, but these values are harmful to everyone, them included, that’s why the men who don’t end up like this, and end up kind and nice, are demonized by those men who did end up evil and cruel, they disprove the need for a patriarchy, [the rest of the article]” (again, this is just what I remember, it may not be fully correct)

Effectively, the author was pointing out that a patriarchal masculine society demonizes men who are kind and help others, while rewarding men who are ruthless and cruel, with the statement “all men are trash” probably being used as an inflammatory statement to make the reader keep reading.*

At some point in the following year, someone in the alt right circle of twitter picks up on this blog and screenshots the paragraph with “all men are trash” and some other minor details that don’t include the part about how the feminist actually critiques the negative influences on men

This screenshot then spreads to right wing indoctrinators, who happily run with it and use to to paint a picture of how feminists hate all men and think they are trash, so as a man you shouldn’t be a feminist, and should hate feminists because they hate you!

Fringe right wing content creators see the indoctrinators takes on this and edit it together with similar examples, some of which are genuine ‘hate all men’ people, others are also taken out of context.

Right wing & right wing adjacent content creators release videos using the edited content to make videos with titles like “FEMINISTS think ALL MEN are trash?!”, where it eventually reaches me,

I find the original blog in order to try to understand why they could possibly think I’m trash and read the rest of the article, I question why the content creator left this out and then start questioning what else they lied to me about, I start watching left wing content creators for alternate perspectives and end up the way I am now: hard core left wing gay guy who cringes at the fact I was ever even right wing adjacent

Almost none of it is created to stoke anti-feminist attitudes, but it is certainly spread to do so.

There was this great tumblr post a couple years ago that I can’t seem to find anymore about how when feminists spread phrases like ‘all men are trash’, even if in context it doesn’t seem offensive or bigoted, people who dislike feminism will spread it to people offended by it without the additional context and say “look, see! Feminists hate all men! They hate you! Why would you as a man want to help people who hate you unconditionally?!”, and unfortunately the people most vulnerable to that type of manipulation are teenage boys, who aren’t exactly likely to seek out the context that’s been removed