crazymachinefan

[crazymachinefan]

[crazymachinefan]

wonderful pair of posts on the dash tonight

[crazymachinefan]

Nexus Mods was acquired by Chosen, a company focused on growth and monetization of gaming startups.

Reddit thread

Dark0ne, creator and ex-owner of Nexus Mods, stepped down today in an update post:

NexusMods post

Users on Resetera were able to found out more about this sudden change of ownership:

Resetera thread

Victor Folmann, CEO of Chosen, published this "Gaming Startup Monetization Cheat Sheet" on his LinkedIn

Link to the post

Users are already sharing their fear of NexusMods allowing more bigoted mods in the future, and taking down inclusive ones to follow the current "anti-woke" trend in the gaming industry

Reseta threada bout their change in moderation concerning bigoted mods following Oblivion Remastered launch

Another User, this time on NexusMods forum, noticed queer and inclusive mods being removed following Dark0ne's post

Link to the forum post

It is also worth mentioning that Chosen and its CEO are seen using AI generated images on their website (including generated images depicting Tracer from Overwatch) hyping up ChatGPT on his Linkedin account, and are including "rewarding gamers with crypto money"

Users speculate that Chosen buying out NexusMods is to potentially train an AI model that generates mods

More about Nvidia's AI "RTX Remix" and future projects

[crazymachinefan]

“I’ll just rest my eyes” is the biggest lie you’re going straight to snorkmimimi land

[crazymachinefan]

Maid cleaning a massive chateau surely belonging to the richest people you’ve ever seen, and as she’s walking from room to room you notice that every single portrait is of her

[crazymachinefan]

Smol Kitty

[crazymachinefan]

problematic time zone gap

[crazymachinefan]

"Sex is what makes us human" is stupid. Almost every species fucks. Humans are the only species that jumps motorcycles over school buses that are on fire. Some other things too probably

[crazymachinefan]

current pet peeve: people (usually gaming youtube folks) using the term "dlc" (downloadable content) when they mean "update"

yes, updates are Content That Is Downloaded. updates, however, are a required part of the game. while in many cases, you are able to go back to a previous version that does not have that update content, the "main" version of the game is the most recent version with all of the updates.

dlc, on the other hand, is optional extra content, whether paid or free. it adds more stuff to the game but isn't required/part of the main experience. developers, players, and modders have to account for people who don't have certain dlc. it effectively creates two (or more) versions of the game to keep track of.

(for the record, this isn't a "dlc bad" post. i think if done properly dlcs can add a lot to an existing game. i just think it's important to recognize the difference. maybe this is why the term "add-on" exists lol)

[crazymachinefan]

[crazymachinefan]

Okay, so. Star Wars has all these concepts that weirdo New Left boomer George Lucas tosses in there but because of storyteller limitations it would kill the plot to fully explain them all, so later writers have to come in for the spin-off materials and bat clean-up to fully explain all this crazy crap. And I would like to talk about something that made me actively angry at first, but which I now adore. And that is the Naboo.

So much about Naboo culture is infuriating from a logical standpoint. They have a queen, okay. A constitutionally elected queen? Weird, okay. Don't know why they'd do that but... She's FOURTEEN? Excuse me? Is it a ceremonial thing or, oh no it's not? Legit head of state? Why does she dress like that? Why does she talk like that? I'm so tired.

Here's the explainer. Let me go cook.

There's this joke in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where the last living human goes back in time and finds out humans aren't actually from Earth, but an alien culture that tricked all the middle managers, pedantic weirdos, and other infuriating folk into getting in a space arc which they gave the wrong evacuation coordinates to simply get rid of them. The Naboo are like this but they're all artists and poets and hippies, but like classy ones. They fled their home planet during a war and crash landed on Naboo, then did a colonism to the Gungans because, hey, they were fleeing a war and it was do or die. This spiritual rot in their creation story is later rectified by Padmé. But it's super important to their cultural psychology. They're hippies, but will subjugate if needed. They are "peaceful" but I guarantee you every single one of them has a tiny extremely shiny pistol up their sleeve and they will draw down on you if backed against a wall.

The scene that I think says it all is at the end of Phantom Menace when Padmé is surrounded by Nute Gunray and his droids, they've got her dead to rights, but Sabé her double creates a distraction so the queen can make it to her throne. This one piece of furniture is the Naboo in a nutshell. It's richly carved with artistic details, it has two seats to the side so the queen's handmaidens can read the lips of people in the back of the room and use hand signals to communicate with the queen while she can remain focused mostly on who is speaking to her. It is hundreds of years old. And it has a secret compartment in the armrest that is FULL OF GUNS. Layers of artistic opulence hiding their true intentions.

The Naboo were created to be backwards compatible with Princess Leia. They're compassionate pacifists, but they will shot you if needed.

Why do they elect teenage royalty? It's a little creepy. It's giving "age of consent is emotional maturity". It makes no sense.

The explanation they give outsiders is they want youthful idealism untainted by cynicism. What they don't tell you is that they take kids with stated interest in politics and put them in an advanced highly competitive Leadership Academy which is like Model UN mixed with Battle Royale. Well, they don't kill each other but it's intense. It's like what the clones went though just all diplomacy training and tea ceremonies all the time. Which is crazy but so Naboo.

Oh, and all the delegates for the royalty election run using pseudonyms for security. Imagine voting for the head of state but you can't run a background check. It's so crazy.

Why does Padmé dress like that? Well, fashion is one of Naboo's major industries so it's like she's wearing the entire Fall line catalog at once. To advertise not only the talent of her people, but to show how much they favor her. BUT that dress has multiple layers of padding and resin armor. And aforementioned spots for those little silver blasters. And it breaks up her silhouette making her harder to shoot. And it's so elaborate you pay more attention to the crazy dress and not if the person wearing it is really the queen or a decoy. Everything about Naboo is like this.

Queen Amidala has that weird accent while Padmé does not. Because all her handmaidens helped create the accent together so they all can imitate it. It's like if you gave girls at a rowdy sleepover the job of federal counterintelligence. That's what they came up with.

The handmaidens wear colorful identical clothes so you can't tell them apart, hoods to partially conceal their identity, and they don't wear the queen's fancy makeup. So one of them can be the queen and spy on people in the audience. Because the Naboo don't trust shit for shit.

Their public face is so silly to hide all the truly weird shit they do behind the scenes.

They use their reputation as artist hippies to conceal multiple layers of subterfuge and disguise their methods of self defense and assuage their paranoia due to wartime trauma and their disturbing colonial past. All of them are completely off their rocker even by Star Wars standards. And I love them so much. They put on a show so everyone thinks they have them figured out but what they have going on is far more weirder and more sinister than meets the eye. You know how catty, neurotic, and competitive art school students stereotypically are? Yeah, planet art student. Love them!

There you go, @charmwasjess

[crazymachinefan]

So, something I learnt the other day. So, you know how dinosaurs supposedly can't see you if you stand still? Well that myth is based on real-life lizards/etc and how eyes in general work. So, once my dad starts infodumping, here comes some other cool information. We, humans, can in fact, also not see something unless it's moving. We fixed this by having our eyes constantly shake. And then our brain compensates for us, so we don't have to have shaky vision.

What if aliens don't have this? Like. What if they find out when one of us was looking at something in the distance, and they walk around this thing that's in front of them, and the alien is confused so they bob their head and oh, there's a thing there, but how did the human know that, and then we explain and they're like, horrified.

Humans are apex predators. They can hunt in packs. They can hunt in pairs. They can hunt on their own. They're persistance predators, which is unheard of. They get stronger when they're mad or scared. They have this thing called 'body language' which acts like a type of hivemind, even if they'll claim it isn't. And. They can see you. When you're not moving. They can still see you. If you ever find yourself in a fight against a human, for whatever reason? Run. Run as fast as you can. And hope, pray if you have a religion, that they won't follow.

[crazymachinefan]

“average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

[crazymachinefan]

sorry, it's a GOOD thing if cishet people use non-conforming pronouns or dress in non-conforming ways or whatever else. for one, that person may not be cishet. but more importantly, living in a society where more people feel comfortable exploring their relationship to gender and sexuality is an undoubtedly GOOD thing

[crazymachinefan]

If memory serves, there is a reason for this: the Office key. It's a thing they pushed a while ago, and still sell keyboards with today (last i checked). Here's one of their marketing renders:

It's bit like the stupid Copilot button they've been pushing more recently, except arguably less stupid in certain contexts. People who use Office products a lot would probably find the Office key useful as it can open any of them, including LinkedIn.

...except registering keycodes is more effort than it's worth, so they just made it input Win+Shift+Ctrl+Alt and let you press the last key yourself. Has the nice advantage of making it available on keyboards without the Office key as well.

As I mentioned, this works with the whole Office suite. Just pressing the modifiers will open MS365, WSCA+W opens word, +P opens powerpoint, +X opens excel, you can probably guess the rest. (Or look them up.) LinkedIn is the one everyone (rightfully) memes about because it's the stupidest. If you want to disable/rebind any of this behavior, PowerToys lets you do all of them except the generic one.

As for why this still exists, I don't know. Compatibility, I guess, but I have no clue why it's on by default. They could just have first press pop up a little "hey, do you have an Office Key™®©™?" and disable it if you say no. Who knows, I'm not John Microsoft.

(If you're wondering, the Copilot button I mentioned does what you think it does. Open Copilot. I have a laptop with it because of college. It inputs win+shift+f23.)

i used windows+arrow keys the other day to pull up two documents side-by-side and my boss looked a me like i was a space alien

[crazymachinefan]

How come semi trucks in Europe look like “toot toot :)” and in North America they look like “HONK HOOOOOOOONK >:|”