chris-in-eugene

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SUPERMAN (2025) dir. James Gunn

+ Kara

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Honestly, a lot of people, especially actors, voice actors, and singers/musicians, depend upon autograph sales at conventions to supplement their income, and to help pay for the people that work for/with them.

At a convention, only a few of the celebrities there are being paid for by the convention itself. So the cost for travel, hotel, food, pretty much everything, is paid for by autograph and photo op sales.

If they aren't so big that the lines get crazy, really fast, then many of them are happy to say high for free, but if you want something from them, like signature or you taking a selfie with them or your friend getting a picture of you 2, then you have to pay. If they are spending something around $1,000 to be there (travel and hotel is the largest 2 costs), then they need to make that much and more back to make it worth going.

So usually there are expenses you don't see, that they are covering, and the fact that this is a job to them, and they need to get paid. If you don't have the money, many are still happy for you to say high and tell them how much they, or a character they have played, mean to you, at no charge. Some can't do that, because if they tried, the line would go out the building, but that is only the really "big names."

Low key very curious because I freaked when I found out Angie Harmon was doing the autograph live stream thing and if i have enough I'm gonna get myself one for my birthday.

But my mom thinks under no circumstances should you pay someone for an autograph. So I'm just really curious what yall think.

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Two stunning winners ✨️

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there's a jewish story about a rich man who goes to his rabbi to ask him about building an orphanage, and the rabbi is like "yeah duh go for it!!" and then later the rich guy comes back and is like "actually I've decided not to... I was just doing it for my own image and not coz I cared about orphans" and the rabbi was like "bitch the orphans don't care why you're building the orphanage!!!" and sometimes I wish I could say that to lefties who haven't unpacked their christian upbringing. sometimes motives don't matter!! who give a fuck why a politician wants to do a good thing? bitch the orphans don't!!

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The first asexual person I met outside of the internet was a 65 year old woman.

I’d been interning with her as an artist/executive assistant for some time. To put a long story short she’d developed a tremor that kept her from doing a certain amount of studio work, so in between sending emails and invoices for her I’d chip in and help with line art or drafting on longer projects. A lot of it was the two of us sitting in her basement studio, doing our own thing, waiting for the phone to ring. We got to talking a lot. I’d just moved across the country and was still finding my footing.

There was a handyman she had over occasionally — he was a personal friend who enjoyed her company more than she enjoyed his. She didn’t dislike him by any means, but he definitely had feelings for her that she didn’t reciprocate. One day, after he’d come over to repair something-or-other and left, she and I started talking about relationships.

She asked if I had a boyfriend. I told her I wasn’t interested in being in a relationship with anyone and that I’d never had a desire to be in a relationship. Admittedly, I was bracing for the “You’ll meet the right person someday” response. I knew it generally came from a place of care, but it never changed how much I dreaded to hear it. I really respected my mentor and I was prepared to nod along to whatever response she gave me. Instead of anything I expected her to say, she just kind of nodded and said, “Me neither. I think I’m — what’s the term — asexual?”

I was ecstatic. I told her I was asexual, too. I saw her sigh in relief, the same way I did. I couldn’t believe it.

We didn’t get much work done that day, we just started talking about our experiences. She’d been married once when she was younger and even during that period of her life her disinterest in a sexual relationship didn’t change. She had a roommate after graduating college who confessed to having feelings for her and she had to tell her “It’s not that I don’t like girls, it’s that I don’t like anybody.” The roommate harbored enough bitterness over this that they had to split ways. Her mother told her that she would quote “rather have a gay daughter than a daughter who didn’t fancy anyone at all” unquote.

I didn’t have nearly as many experiences as she did, but I was able to share my own for the first time. I shared how it was easier to say I was taking time to work on myself than to say I had no interest in being in a relationship. We talked about the words “You’ll meet the right person someday” and “You’ll know when you’re in love” and “Don’t worry, one day you’ll meet some guy that changes everything.” As if something was broken.

“I’ve been alive for sixty five years,” my mentor told me, “and I’ve never felt like I was missing something, even if everybody told me I was.”

Currently, my mentor lives with her parrot, her cats, and her backyard-wildlife pals in a house that she owns. She makes art and hosts community art groups and volunteers at care homes and is the most self-fulfilled woman I’ve ever met. And she loves her life. She loves the people she knows and they love her, too. If I could be half as cool as she is when I grow up, I think that’d be pretty amazing.

“Asexuality” isn’t a problem to be fixed or a phase to grow out of. Sometimes you’re fifteen and sometimes you’re sixty-five. I knew in my heart that older asexual people existed but it changed me completely to meet one. We were here before and we always will be.

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ChatGPT, and all of the other AI tools, are just Mad Libs on steroids... cocaine.

You know, Mad Libs. This thing:

Now, imagine that instead of getting a page like this:

(note, that is a parody, not an actual Mad Libs )

Now, instead of the sentences having blanks where you use the context of the sentence to either fill it in with a "normal" answer, or a silly one, you just had a setup message, like a prompt, and then it was just a bunch of blanks with word types beneath each, and punctuation already there.

When you give an LLM a prompt, it looks up those words in all of the web pages/books/fan fiction/etc... that it has stolen copied into it's database, and then does a few things:

identified the common sentence structure used with those words

identifies the other words used with those words, and what types they are (noun, adjective, verb, etc...)

Now, using the list of sentence structures used, the LLM generates a list of most likely sentences (by structure) that would be in the answer to give. This includes the number of words, and the type of each word. Then it starts filling in those blanks using the data returned and some probability options.

Probability options include stuff like: Mary has a pet, it is a ____.

and now the LLM decides which pet to fill in, and looks at all of the nouns used and their % in the results it has, which will include the word Mary and pet together, or the nouns that are used when just the word pet is used (although those incur a penalty, since Mary isn't present in that returned data). Then it selects form the most likely list of nouns.

The LLM doesn't understand what a "Mary" is, or what a "pet" is, it just has a dictionary that says "Mary" is a "proper noun" which is a noun that refers to a specific "person", and "pet" is a noun which can be any one of those other nouns which have had the word pet nearby (insert long list of possible nouns associated with the word pet).

The LLM doesn't "know" what any of this means, just that those words are of a type (noun, verb, adjective, adverb, etc...), and that they show up together or not. That's it.

CHATGPT IS NOT A SEARCH ENGINE

CHATGPT IS NOT A SOURCE OF INFORMATION

CHATGPT IS NOT STUDY NOTES

CHATGPT IS NOT A WRITING TOOL

CHATGPT IS NOT YOUR FRIEND

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CinemaSins often just goes into nitpicking, which is just so annoying. CinemaWins tries to embrace the fun in each movie; and while I may not agree with every "win" at least it isn't infuriating, just a little confusing sometimes.

shoutout to the guy who created a parody account of cinemasins where instead of pointing out every single flaw in a film, he just pointed out things he liked about the movie. you're so right cinemawins its so much more fun to like things

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+1 to all of your energy checks for the next 24hours

Reblog to give the person you reblogged it from the energy to do one (1) chore or maybe many

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i cant believe that there's still gamergate STANK on games that women enjoy. NASTY misogyny residue. stardew valley is in fact a video game. animal crossing is also a video game. so are otome games and dating sims and twee little cozy games. sometimes a bitch doesnt wanna play bloodborne that shit's hard

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loafing on your dash

Sits on your dash

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Just in case!

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Today is the anniversary of the worst memo in history https://robertreich.substack.com/p/today-is-the-anniversary-of-the-worst

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I love how Pa Kent doesn't get to it quickly, with really well-worded arguments, just a little rambling here and there, a quick message, and boom. Because he isn't eloquent, he's just a farmer, but he has heart.

just watched Superman a second time and I think my favorite line is still when pa kent says “what you wanted that message to mean says a whole lot more about you than what anyone meant that message to mean” bc I truly think it best captures the message of the movie. Clark Kent finds out he’s a nearly indestructible high-powered alien and gets a vague message from his parents saying he’s “where you can do the most good and live out krypton’s truth” and it does not for a second occur to him that that could mean anything other than serving and helping humanity. Like, that’s the core of Superman that people like lex don’t understand—it’s not just that he wants to help, it’s that he would never even think to do anything else

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Beating people up in little rooms . . . he knew where that led. And if you did it for a good reason, you’d do it for a bad one. You couldn’t say ‘we’re the good guys’ and do bad-guy things.

-- Terry Pratchett - Thud!