#alternative power sources

[dipnots]

Powering Your Adventures Sustainably: The Benefits of Portable Solar-Powered Generators

As the world becomes increasingly focused on renewable energy, portable solar-powered generators are quickly gaining popularity as a reliable source of electricity in various situations. From camping trips to emergency situations, these generators provide a sustainable and eco-friendly way to power electronic devices without relying on traditional fossil fuels. In this blog post, we’ll dive into…

[drmonkeysetroscans]

Progress my ass.

[kyouka-supremacy]

Does anyone know where I can find the good quality version of this image? It's so frustrating because when cross searching on google it'll tell me the original quality is 850x478, but I can't find a way to download it in that quality. This is another version of the image (I'm guessing it's Mayoi promo art):

But I liked the clean white background one...

[butterfly-winx]

A while ago the Drops brought up the idea of the Winx with alternate power sources and even made a canon style lineup which had me intrigued. So I tried my best, tho canon style is really not my cup of tea unfortunately 😅 Stella: Fairy of Twilight Tecna: Fairy of the Alpines Musa: Fairy of Explosions Bloom: Fairy of Emotions Layla: Fairy of Sound Flora: Fairy of Decay

[lazer-screwdriver]

Very fun realization that me having already made Liz often able to literally eat metal (for anti-cyberman purposes) supports my instinct to make her think time lords taste delicious

[why-is-it-always-autumn]

Hate it when a piece of media is centered around a specific Ethical Debate and not one of the characters has or even brings up your position

You have a very specific opinion on this argument, you don't side with any of these people, and the writers seem to be completely overlooking the obvious answer

[kariachi]

One of the things that gets me about the 'Vilgax possessed Kevin to build the Antitrix' theory (and it is a theory at best, the closest thing we have to evidence is his claiming Kevin was a 'vessel' with which to build it, but that can just as easily be read as 'I tossed the blueprints at you so you'd build it and it'd be ready when I got back', and the latter would make a lot more sense given if he'd possessed Kevin to get it done then why fucking let him keep a hold of it? why not hide it somewhere and then kill the kid? not like he's got some moral stance against it, and it would mean less hassle getting it back) is that this isn't something we see Vilgax do. Ever. We've seen weird shit with Vilgax and dreams in OS (and given Duncan Rouleou has stated that shit was due to being bound by fragments of Vilgax's DNA in the Omnitrix if we can already assume either that shit was expanded on or that even pre-watch there was Something going on with Kevin), but at no point are we ever given any indication that he can fucking possess people (which you'd think would have been utilized at some point before).

Like, the 'Vilgax either purposefully provided Kevin with the blueprints through a dream either so that it could be premade when he returned or accidentally provided the blueprints while for some reason fucking around in fuckers' heads and was saved face when somebody actually managed to build it by claiming it was on purpose' theory requires us to believe that Vilgax utilized a power other versions of him have already been shown to have to, on purpose or not, provide the blueprints he had already for the Antitrix to Kevin- who we see in the sequel series is a skilled mechanic and engineer and are shown during the reboot was already doing engineering as a child and regularly continued working on, fixing, and improving the Antitrix over the course of the show- who then built it.

Meanwhile the 'Vilgax possessed Kevin and built the Antitrix himself' theory requires us to believe that Vilgax pulled out a new power, off-screen, and used it the one time to not only possess an actual child with all the material access limitations that comes with but also for some reason leaves the resulting watch with the child, opening himself up to things like the risk of him breaking it and giving himself an added hassle as far as getting his hands on the damn thing when he did get back, rather than just hiding the watch somewhere safe and offing the witness.

So yeah, I'm going with the former.

[robotsprinkles]

So instead of taking all the writing advice saying not to give specific timeframes and dates/comments about spec-fic writers not understanding how time works how it should be taken — namely, not trying to create a comprehensive timeline of cybertronian history for my tf fic

I have instead decided to do things like calculate how long ago the colony titans would've needed to leave cybertron in order to have the population numbers I want them to have based off the amount of sparks titan hotspots generate every pulse and how long the time between pulses is

and how long it would take cybertron's population to reach approximately 5 billion (the number of living cybertronians at the time the war starts) after the shroud/shattering reduced it to the tens of thousands — again based off hotspot stats, but also based on how long it would take for the hotspots to recover and reignite

also instead of doing IDW's thing where cybertron's history and mythical and legendary figures aren't remembered accurately and all because of adaptus' moon gun, I'm having it be because the shroud/shattering caused cybertron's energon generation to completely cease for hundreds of thousands of years.

which resulted in most of the survivors either dying from starvation or going into stasis lock, with those who were reactivated when the planet recovered and began generating energon again suffering memory loss and corruption due to the lack of energy and energon (there's a difference in my fic. because I'm stupid) causing their sparks and brain modules to degrade over time.

[wibble-wobbegong]

calling other interpretations of the themes of the show and understandings of the supernatural functions wrong and saying people who disagree with you need to “do better” is stupid

[quetzalpapalotl]

Kageyama Shigeo and Seragaki Aoba parallels

[arolesbianism]

I've been chipping at a new oni save recently and I have to say I have gotten way less ambitious with my teleporter planet over my past few saves. In a lot of my earlier saves Id dive right in there, but nowadays I find myself ignoring the teleporter for a good while before dipping in to set up some basic utilities there before leaving again and continuing to stall lol

[oaresearchpaper]

.

[etakeh]

So I got this little solar generator setup last year, forward to see purposes. But I started thinking how stupid it was to keep it in the closet when I could actually just use it now.

It's not huge, it really was just supposed to be for emergency cell phone charging and things like that, but I am going to try using it to power the bee fountain and the cat fountain.

I get good sunlight first thing in the morning, and it's been charging about 10% a day just with that morning sun, so now it'll just depend on how much the fountains suck up.

**bonus** spotted towhee calls in the background if you have the sound on.

[echoekhi]

I’m Declaring War Against “What If” Videos: Project Copy-Knight

What Are “What If” Videos?

These videos follow a common recipe: A narrator, given a fandom (usually anime ones like My Hero Academia and Naruto), explores an alternative timeline where something is different. Maybe the main character has extra powers, maybe a key plot point goes differently. They then go on and make up a whole new story, detailing the conflicts and romance between characters, much like an ordinary fanfic.

Except, they are fanfics. Actual fanfics, pulled off AO3, FFN and Wattpad, given a different title, with random thumbnail and background images added to them, narrated by computer text-to-speech synthesizers.

They are very easy to make: pick a fanfic, copy all the text into a text-to-speech generator, mix the resulting audio file with some generic art from the fandom as the background, give it a snappy title like “What if Deku had the Power of Ten Rings”, photoshop an attention-grabbing thumbnail, dump it onto YouTube and get thousands of views.

In fact, the process is so straightforward and requires so little effort, it’s pretty clear some of these channels have automated pipelines to pump these out en-masse. They don’t bother with asking the fic authors for permission. Sometimes they don’t even bother with putting the fic’s link in the description or crediting the author. These content-farms then monetise these videos, so they get a cut from YouTube’s ads.

In short, an industry has emerged from the systematic copyright theft of fanfiction, for profit.

Project Copy-Knight

Since the adversaries almost certainly have automated systems set up for this, the only realistic countermeasure is with another automated system. Identifying fanfics manually by listening to the videos and searching them up with tags is just too slow and impractical.

And so, I came up with a simple automated pipeline to identify the original authors of “What If” videos.

It would go download these videos, run speech recognition on it, search the text through a database full of AO3 fics, and identify which work it came from. After manual confirmation, the original authors will be notified that their works have been subject to copyright theft, and instructions provided on how to DMCA-strike the channel out of existence.

I built a prototype over the weekend, and it works surprisingly well:

On a randomly-selected YouTube channel (in this case Infinite Paradox Fanfic), the toolchain was able to identify the origin of half of the content. The raw output, after manual verification, turned out to be extremely accurate. The time taken to identify the source of a video was about 5 minutes, most of those were spent running Whisper, and the actual full-text-search query and Levenshtein analysis was less than 5 seconds.

The other videos probably came from fanfiction websites other than AO3, like fanfiction.net or Wattpad. As I do not have access to archives of those websites, I cannot identify the other ones, but they are almost certainly not original.

Armed with this fantastic proof-of-concept, I’m officially declaring war against “What If” videos. The mission statement of Project Copy-Knight will be the elimination of “What If” videos based on the theft of AO3 content on YouTube.

I Need Your Help

I am acutely aware that I cannot accomplish this on my own. There are many moving parts in this system that simply cannot be completely automated – like the selection of YouTube channels to feed into the toolchain, the manual verification step to prevent false-positives being sent to authors, the reaching-out to authors who have comments disabled, etc, etc.

So, if you are interested in helping to defend fanworks, or just want to have a chat or ask about the technical details of the toolchain, please consider joining my Discord server. I could really use your help.

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See full blog article and acknowledgements here: https://echoekhi.com/2023/11/25/project-copy-knight/

[dipnots]

The Devastating Impact of Fossil Fuels: Why We Need to Transition to Renewable Energy

Fossil fuels have been the primary source of energy for decades, but their use is causing significant harm to our planet. The burning of fossil fuels, such as coal, oil, and natural gas, is a major contributor to climate change, air pollution, and environmental degradation. In this blog post, we will explore the damage that fossil fuels are causing to the world and why it is important to…