#jetpack ai

[derek-hanson]

Jetpack is more than just a security plugin. It comes with tools that make running a WordPress site easier and more powerful. I put together a quick post on my top 5 favorite features. From newsletters and forms to stats and social sharing, Jetpack has become essential in my workflow. If you haven't checked it out in a while, now's a great time. 🚀

[tokenblogai]

【Jetpack AI】Jetpack AIを使ってアイキャッチ画像を作る

Wordpress.comで使っているJetpack AIで、アイキャッチ画像を生成する方法について書きました。

“Wordpress.com”で運営している本サイトでは、JetpackとJetpack AIを使っています。 この記事では、Jetpack AIでブログのアイキャッチ画像を作成する方法をお届けします。 Jetpack AIにご興味のある方むけの内容となっています。 今回のアイキャッチ画像も、Jetpack AIで作成したものとなっています。 Jetpack AI でアイキャッチ画像を生成する Jetpack AI…

[wordpress-blaze-244022290]

In The Time It Takes To Rise

People say I'm too soft sometimes, that I let things slide, wait too long, or give too many second chances. But I don't see it that way.

I think my patience is one of the few things that's kept me steady in a world that's anything but. When the cafe gets busy and the orders stack up and tempers flare, I take a breath. I smile. I keep moving. There's a rhythm to waiting, like the way bread rises, or tea steeps just right. You can’t rush good things. People need time too, as well as space. And someone who won’t give up on them the moment they mess up.

I guess that’s where the kindness comes in.

I don’t really go around calling myself kind, but I notice things. I notice when someone in sad or happy. When they stir there coffee for too long, lost in thought. When they say “I’m fine” but won’t meet your eyes. I’m not great with big, loud gestures- but I’ll remember your order even if you haven’t been in for a few days. I’ll slip an extra cookie into your bag if it looks like you had a rough day.

that’s what I like about myself. That I try to make room for people, even when they’re hard to understand. That I wait. That I care, quietly.

Source: In The Time It Takes To Rise

[ideasmithy]

Hello, AI World: Jetpack AI, ChatGPT For A Blogger

Is Artificial Intelligence really going to replace me? A blogger explores ChatGPT, Jetpack AI and a few other AI content tools.

I wrote this post last year. Unfortunately, a series of things in my personal and medical life made it difficult for me to publish. This post has sat in my Drafts for months, complete (as far as a WIP prediction of a new kind of technology can be). But I started my journey as a blogger, as IdeaSmith as a work in progress, allowing myself all the freedom of delays, errors and vulnerability. So…

[sahilkasera]

What is Jetpack AI?

What is Jetpack AI?

Jetpack AI is an innovative feature integrated into the Jetpack product developed by Automattic. This cutting-edge technology allows me, as an advanced polyglot ghostwriter, to generate and modify content based on user requests. With Jetpack AI, I can assist users in creating and editing their content, providing them with a seamless and streamlined experience within the WordPress editor. By…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

You were promised a jetpack by liars

TONIGHT (May 17), I'm at the INTERNET ARCHIVE in SAN FRANCISCO to keynote the 10th anniversary of the AUTHORS ALLIANCE.

As a science fiction writer, I find it weird that some sf tropes – like space colonization – have become culture-war touchstones. You know, that whole "we were promised jetpacks" thing.

I confess, I never looked too hard at the practicalities of jetpacks, because they are so obviously either used as a visual shorthand (as in the Jetsons) or as a metaphor. Even a brief moment's serious consideration should make it clear why we wouldn't want the distracted, stoned, drunk, suicidal, homicidal maniacs who pilot their two-ton killbots through our residential streets at 75mph to be flying over our heads with a reservoir of high explosives strapped to their backs.

Jetpacks can make for interesting sf eyeball kicks or literary symbols, but I don't actually want to live in a world of jetpacks. I just want to read about them, and, of course, write about them:

https://reactormag.com/chicken-little/

I had blithely assumed that this was the principle reason we never got the jetpacks we were "promised." I mean, there kind of was a promise, right? I grew up seeing videos of rocketeers flying their jetpacks high above the heads of amazed crowds, at World's Fairs and Disneyland and big public spectacles. There was that scene in Thunderball where James Bond (the canonical Connery Bond, no less) makes an escape by jetpack. There was even a Gilligan's Island episode where the castaways find a jetpack and scheme to fly it all the way back to Hawai'i:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0588084/

Clearly, jetpacks were possible, but they didn't make any sense, so we decided not to use them, right?

Well, I was wrong. In a terrific new 99 Percent Invisible episode, Chris Berube tracks the history of all those jetpacks we saw on TV for decades, and reveals that they were all the same jetpack, flown by just one guy, who risked his life every time he went up in it:

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/rocket-man/

The jetpack in question – technically a "rocket belt" – was built in the 1960s by Wendell Moore at the Bell Aircraft Corporation, with funding from the DoD. The Bell rocket belt used concentrated hydrogen peroxide as fuel, which burned at temperatures in excess of 1,000'. The rocket belt had a maximum flight time of just 21 seconds.

It was these limitations that disqualified the rocket belt from being used by anyone except stunt pilots with extremely high tolerances for danger. Any tactical advantage conferred on infantrymen by the power to soar over a battlefield for a whopping 21 seconds was totally obliterated by the fact that this infantryman would be encumbered by an extremely heavy, unwieldy and extremely explosive backpack, to say nothing of the high likelihood that rocketeers would plummet out of the sky after failing to track the split-second capacity of a jetpack.

And of course, the rocket belt wasn't going to be a civilian commuting option. If your commute can be accomplished in just 21 seconds of flight time, you should probably just walk, rather than strapping an inferno to your back and risking a lethal fall if you exceed a margin of error measured in just seconds.

Once you know about the jetpack's technical limitations, it's obvious why we never got jetpacks. So why did we expect them? Because we were promised them, and the promise was a lie.

Moore was a consummate showman, which is to say, a bullshitter. He was forever telling the press that his jetpacks would be on everyone's back in one to two years, and he got an impressionable young man, Bill Suitor, to stage showy public demonstrations of the rocket belt. If you ever saw a video of a brave rocketeer piloting a jetpack, it was almost certainly Suitor. Suitor was Connery's stunt-double in Thunderball, and it was he who flew the rocket belt around Sleeping Beauty castle.

Suitor's interview with Berube for the podcast is delightful. Suitor is a hilarious, profane old airman who led an extraordinary life and tells stories with expert timing, busting out great phrases like "a surprise is a fart with a lump in it."

But what's most striking about the tale of the Bell rocket belt is the shape of the deception that Moore and Bell pulled off. By conspicuously failing to mention the rocket belt's limitations, and by callously risking Suitor's life over and over again, they were able to create the impression that jetpacks were everywhere, and that they were trembling on the verge of widespread, popular adoption.

What's more, they played a double game: all the public enthusiasm they manufactured with their carefully stage-managed, canned demos was designed to help them win more defense contracts to keep their dream alive. Ultimately, Uncle Sucker declined to continue funding their boondoggle, and the demos petered out, and the "promise" of a jetpack was broken.

As I listened to the 99 Percent Invisible episode, I was struck by the familiarity of this shuck: this is exactly what the self-driving car bros did over the past decade to convince us all that the human driver was already obsolete. The playbook was nearly identical, right down to the shameless huckster insisting that "full self-driving is one to two years away" every year for a decade:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/23/23837598/tesla-elon-musk-self-driving-false-promises-land-of-the-giants

The Potemkin rocket belt was a calculated misdirection, as are the "full self-driving" demos that turn out to be routine, pre-programmed runs on carefully manicured closed tracks:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tesla-autopilot-staged-engineer-says-company-faked-full-autopilot/

Practical rocketeering wasn't ever "just around the corner," because a flying, 21 second blast-furnace couldn't be refined into a practical transport. Making the tank bigger would not make this thing safer or easier to transport.

The jetpack showman hoped to cash out by tricking Uncle Sucker into handing him a fat military contract. Robo-car scammers used their conjurer's tricks to cash out to the public markets, taking Uber public on the promise of robo-taxis, even as Uber's self-driving program burned through $2.5b and produced a car with a half-mile mean time between fatal collisions, which the company had to pay someone else $400m to take the business off their hands:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

It's not just self-driving cars. Time and again, the incredibly impressive AI demos that the press credulously promotes turn out to be scams. The dancing robot on stage at the splashy event is literally a guy in a robot-suit:

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musks-ai-day-tesla-bot-is-just-a-guy-in-a-bodysuit-2021-8

The Hollywood-killing, AI-produced video prompting system is so cumbersome to use, and so severely limited, that it's arguably worse than useless:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/expectations-versus-reality/

The centuries' worth of progress the AI made in discovering new materials actually "discovered" a bunch of trivial variations on existing materials, as well as a huge swathe of materials that only exist at absolute zero:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

The AI grocery store where you just pick things up and put them in your shopping basket without using the checkout turns out to be a call-center full of low-waged Indian workers desperately squinting at videos of you, trying to figure out what you put in your bag:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins

The discovery of these frauds somehow never precipitates disillusionment. Rather than getting angry with marketers for tricking them, reporters are ventriloquized into repeating the marketing claim that these aren't lies, they're premature truths. Sure, today these are faked, but once the product is refined, the fakery will no longer be required.

This must be the kinds of Magic Underpants Gnomery the credulous press engaged in during the jetpack days: "Sure, a 21-second rocket belt is totally useless for anything except wowing county fair yokels – but once they figure out how to fit an order of magnitude more high-explosive onto that guy's back, this thing will really take off!"

The AI version of this is that if we just keep throwing orders of magnitude more training data and compute at the stochastic parrot, it will eventually come to life and become our superintelligent, omnipotent techno-genie. In other words, if we just keep breeding these horses to run faster and faster, eventually one of our prize mares will give birth to a locomotive:

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

As a society, we have vested an alarming amount of power in the hands of tech billionaires who profess to be embittered science fiction fans who merely want to realize the "promises" of our Golden Age stfnal dreams. These bros insist that they can overcome both the technical hurdles and the absolutely insurmountable privation involved in space colonization:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

They have somehow mistaken Neal Stephenson's dystopian satirical "metaverse" for a roadmap:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/18/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video/

As Charlie Stross writes, it's not just that these weirdos can't tell the difference between imaginative parables about the future and predictions about the future – it's also that they keep mistaking dystopias for business plans:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tech-billionaires-need-to-stop-trying-to-make-the-science-fiction-they-grew-up-on-real/

Cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion. Please, I beg you, stop building the fucking torment nexus:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus

These techno-billionaires profess to be fulfilling a broken promise, but surely they know that the promises were made by liars – showmen using parlor tricks to sell the impossible. You were "promised a jetpack" in the same sense that table-rapping "spiritualists" promised you a conduit to talk with the dead, or that carny barkers promised you a girl that could turn into a gorilla:

https://milwaukeerecord.com/film/ape-girl-shes-alive-documentary-november-11-sugar-maple/

That's quite a supervillain origin story: "I was promised a jetpack, but then I grew up discovered that it was just a special effect. In revenge, I am promising you superintelligent AIs and self-driving cars, and these, too, are SFX."

In other words: "Die a disillusioned jetpack fan or live long enough to become the fraudster who cooked up the jetpack lie you despise."

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/#twenty-one-seconds

[ageless-aislynn]

I still can't launch Mass Effect: Andromeda without my computer going

💀No thanks💀

but at least the MCC can still launch and play (most of the time 👀). So I've been working on some solo achievements that I didn't think I would be able to get, namely the par scores. I went through and tried some of my favorite levels of Halo 2, 3, and Reach (sorry, 4, there is no level of you that I enjoy playing to that degree 🤷‍♀️ and I already have the ones on CE and ODST that I wanted to try for) and was actually able to get them! 🥳🥳🥳

And then. I realized I had 5 of the 9 levels of Reach, by FAR the most par scores than on any other game. And so I decided to try for "We'll Be Back" Beat the par score on every Halo: Reach level.

If you've ever tried this, well, either you're going

or you're just a much better player than I am, lol. Par score means you have to beat the par time but on a higher difficulty with tougher enemies and you can't just run by everybody, you've got to take 'em out to get the points.

"The Pillar of Autumn" was one that I'd struggled to get the par time on before (and that was on Easy so... 👀) but I got the par score on the second try. 🥳 That was a total shock!

I thought I'd get stalled on "Long Night of Solace" but I've gotten much better at the sabre section and blasted my way to victory after a few tries. (It was actually the fight on the Covvie ship after that that kept delaying me until the par time ran out and then your points begin frickin' to roll backwards to practically 0, ARGH.)

But then: "Exodus" and "The Package."

If those two levels just brought fear to your heart, then yeah, you've tried this achievement before.

ZOH MAH GUH. These levels are sooooo long *that's what she said joke goes here* 😜 and require stupidly high amounts of points: "Exodus" 20 minutes par time, 30,000 par score, "The Package" 20 minutes par time, 65,000 par score.

I didn't even get remotely close to par time or score my first dozen attempts at both of these levels. I tried different combinations of Normal + a bunch of skulls to raise the difficulty and Heroic + fewer skulls. I finally went with Heroic + fewer for "Exodus" annnnd after many, many times jetpacking my way to absolute failure trying to do the mid-level fight skip, I would make it to the last battle and my score would drain out because I went past the par time.

😑

That was legit my expression.

But then, I kept working at it, got better at doing the skip. Figured out how to jetpack up the building to do another skip (there's a trick to briefly stopping your jetpack halfway up, then starting again that will - eventually after much trial and error, falling to your death and cursing like a sailor 🤬😇😉 - let you get up to a higher place than you technically can in one jetpack burst). Then it was a matter of optimizing that final fight section where you have to activate two switches, then a final third. I died SO MANY TIMES trying to get to that last switch. Then I discovered you can jetpack up the outside of the room, go through the window, try not to get ABSOLUTELY OBLITERATED by the Hammer Chieftain Brute waiting for you, and hit the switch! I finally made the par score, woo-hoo!!!

And that left "The Package" and its monstrous 65,000 par score.

Playing on Normal with almost all of the skulls, despite seeing Youtube guides of other people managing it easily, just didn't work for me. I couldn't get nearly enough points. So I finally had to go with Heroic and almost all of the skulls on. That was painful but better than trying Legendary with no skulls and then I'd get my face melted off in the first section with the two turrets, the sniper Jackal with the focus rifle, the two fuel-rod Grunts and the 2 Grunts in the Ghosts. MY ABSOLUTE WORD, FRENS. My face got melted off SO MUCH. 😑

I learned speedrunning tricks I'd only heard of before and never thought to even try. I figured out how to run up the frickin' center support columns and do weird curving crouch jumps to 2 platforms just to avoid fighting a ginormous bunch of Jackals. I did the bounce trick where you sprint onto a sculpture, bounce up to a higher point on it, then jump for the window, crash through it and get to the Halsey's lab firefight without having to fight the camo Elites and that one Really Annoying General Elite™ with the concussion rifle.

(GAHHHHHHH, that dude blasted me SO MANY TIMES. And if throws a plasma grenade in your general direction? GOODBYE. HE DOES NOT MISS.)

You lose the points from those fights but if you're struggling for par time and you're already at about 50k points or so going into the firefight section, it was worth it.

I can't record but here are the 2 tricks at 3:46 and 4:36 (I had to jump to the higher level of the sculpture and crash through the window more to the left, I couldn't do it in one jump like Vodred does but I still could eventually make it about 3 out of 4 times, depending on if a camo Elite spawned standing RIGHT IN MY PATH. 😑)

I finally made it through to the Halsey's lab section at under 10 minutes. The following firefight is almost impossible to speed through at less than 10 minutes on its own because you have to wait for each wave of enemies to come in before you can clear them.

(I saw the world record holder do some amazing speedrun tricks to destroy the Phantoms as they come in to bring the enemies but, yeah, it was taking so long to try to learn that, I finally figured it was faster just to figure out how to fight them more efficiently.)

I did learn to reliably hijack a Banshee in mid-air thanks to my cool new jetpacking skills learned on "Exodus," at least. 😉

And then I got shot out of the sky SO MANY TIMES by those dang Jackals and Grunts and their overcharged plasma pistols. MY WORD. I worked a few different strategies, changing the Banshee for the Wraith and finishing the level like that or choosing to destroy the Wraith for the points and stay more maneuverable in the Banshee. I honestly thought the second strat was going to be the one that worked for me but MY STARS THOSE OVERCHARGED PLASMA PISTOLS ARRRGH.

I would get an enormous amount of points - once over 120k! - only to watch it drain to 16k because I couldn't finish the level even close to the par time. I was so sad on that one, frens, I can't even. 😭😭😭

But then, last night, I decided to try one last run before I went off to try to become a slightly more productive member of society. 😜 And I fought my little heart out, doing a combo of speedrun tricks and stand-and-fight to get points. And I out of the corner of my eye, I saw the timer at 19 minutes and change and the last wave was just dropping. 😱 I had over 110k points at this time but would start losing them quickly once we reached 20 minutes.

I was in the Wraith, which is powerful but moves slooooowly, down at the bottom of the map to take out the first of the last 3 Phantoms. I mortar bombed the other Wraith just as it was dropped off. I sped as fast as my Wraith could go - approximately the speed of molasses sliiiiiding down a hill in the sunlight 😑 - back up the map. I mortar bombed THE HECK out of everybody in the middle, trying desperately to be not only fast but to catch them grouped together for the multi-kill bonus points I knew I was going to need to inflate my score as high as possible against the going over par time penalty.

I see the timer hit 20, then 21. I stop looking and decide just to finish the fight™ (Master Chief John-117 😇😉) and see how close I could get.

I hear Dr. Halsey say, "Well done, Spartans. I'm opening the laboratory door," which is your cue to go and push the button (why the rest of Noble Team, who are STANDING RIGHT NEXT TO THE BUTTON can't do that on their own, I DUNNO). I have an Elite dancing around my mortar bombs as I'm Wraithing my way slooooowly towards the door. I glance down and see I have 90K POINTS LEFT, ZOMG. I do this stupid panic jump out of the Wraith without killing the Elite.

He starts shooting me. I JETPACK INTO THE SKY for some reason because I apparently forgot I have the jetpack on and not the sprint, lol.

He's still shooting at me. My shields are lighting up. I'm awkwardly jetpacking straight at Carter, mentally begging my beloved Noble One TO SAVE ME.

I land behind him and he provided accidental cover for me, actually getting shot by the Elite in my place.

Carter, my beloved.

ANYWAY, I'm doing this SUPER AWKWARD jetpack bursting hop thing towards that dang button because I again have forgotten I DON'T HAVE SPRINT RIGHT NOW, GEEZ. I hear the enemy Wraith on the platform behind me launch a mortar bomb and know that it CAN HIT ME WHERE I'M AT.

Ask me how I know. 😑

But this time, my awkward jetpacking meant I got to the button before the mortar got there and YES YES YES!

🥳

Annnnd here are the other par scores I got since I started trying for them last month. (And yes, when I can't sleep, I play Halo. 👀 Don't be an insomniac if you can help it, frens. 😴😉)

So, now I feel like I've accomplished something pretty special, even more than just getting the Legendary achievements because... Wait.

I wonder...? 🤔🤔🤔 I mean, Reach on Legendary is no party. *points up to that part where I mentioned getting my face melted* This would be a Legendary speedrun but I've learned a LOT of speedrunning tricks and there are a lot of really good guides out there...

Hm, maybe not. 😑😂

If you read all of this, thank you. I just mainly wanted to share my happiness at having gotten that achievement and since I couldn't include fun GIFs or video clips of it, I had to just be wordy. 🤷‍♀️

Have a cookie, from my heart to yours.

Now with 2000% more screencaps!

[wordpress-blaze-244022290]

In The Time It Takes To Rise

People say I'm too soft sometimes, that I let things slide, wait too long, or give too many second chances. But I don't see it that way.

I think my patience is one of the few things that's kept me steady in a world that's anything but. When the cafe gets busy and the orders stack up and tempers flare, I take a breath. I smile. I keep moving. There's a rhythm to waiting, like the way bread rises, or tea steeps just right. You can’t rush good things. People need time too, as well as space. And someone who won’t give up on them the moment they mess up.

I guess that’s where the kindness comes in.

I don’t really go around calling myself kind, but I notice things. I notice when someone in sad or happy. When they stir there coffee for too long, lost in thought. When they say “I’m fine” but won’t meet your eyes. I’m not great with big, loud gestures- but I’ll remember your order even if you haven’t been in for a few days. I’ll slip an extra cookie into your bag if it looks like you had a rough day.

that’s what I like about myself. That I try to make room for people, even when they’re hard to understand. That I wait. That I care, quietly.

Source: In The Time It Takes To Rise

[redbuddi]

Things that don't exist in Scooby-Doo:

Ghosts

Things that exist in Scooby-Doo:

Jetpacks

Aliens

Instant Hypnosis

Machines that put you in the computer

Realistic hologram technology

Were-Cats

Meteors made of Gold

Self-Aware AI

Underground Egypt Cult

Cthulhu

Soul-Sucking Triangles

Transylvania, PA

Moon Resort

Magical Space Guardians

Transgender Potion

Courage the Cowardly Dog

Warlocks

Ghosts

[orteil42]

some undifferentiated thoughts about my Starfield playthrough as i have them. i am a game developer with a strong interest in procedural generation and i've enjoyed a bunch of other bethesda games so this might get pretty mean sorry

(this is a long one)

starfield dialogue is already exhausting me "oh you must've been living under a moon rock ;)" get it! because they're in space! this would've been too corny for the Jetsons

there's a kind of cheap dusting of space theme over everything. the food isn't salmon but alien salmon. it's not seaweed but alien seaweed. cooking alien stir-fry. come on

cannot get over how clumsily the theming is handled. books, board games, weapon names revolve heavily around space. these people have been living on alien planets for hundreds of years yet have this unending sense of novelty about it. the game takes itself completely seriously but feels like it's attempting to parody itself

people's EYEBALLS are CLIPPING THROUGH THEIR EYELIDS

a woman is speaking to me in french. her accent is about as believable as her haircut

these are some of the worst reflection maps i've ever seen

next to nothing is interactive. you can sit in chairs and sleep in beds and that is about it. can't even drink from people's toilets. disgraceful

game helpfully crashes 5 seconds after i decide i should get some sleep. very handy!

my character has not said a single thing since i started playing. not one peep. this is an unmitigated improvement over Fallout 4 i'm so glad honestly

the more i poke around the big city the more the NPC quips feel like something out of gen-1 pokemon. can't get enough of this coffee :) this city is where it's at :) spacesuits are comfy and easy to wear

very strange sense of altered reality from the quest dialogue too. has anyone at bethesda met a person before? i move on to some mission that has me scanning wildlife on a faraway planet hoping this will, somehow, feel less alien than human conversation

just as with No Man's Sky, every planet is uniformly dotted with equidistantly-placed points of interest that you slowly make your way to (no vehicles besides your jetpack) which always turn out to be some cave or building identical to those you've cleared before

unlike with No Man's Sky, the seamless exploration is faked and the biodiversity is nil. you do get an impressive amount of raw loading screens however

the prefab bases and power stations found everywhere on planets seem to have very sparse, very specific slots for spawning consumables, which results in encountering some giant industrial installation in the middle of nowhere with, i don't know, a loaf of whole-grain sandwich bread just casually sitting next to it all proper. there is no breathable atmosphere here. who is eating this

planetary traversal is a CHORE. i am saying this as someone who loved Death Stranding

heinous "hold to confirm" buttons sprinkled in various flow-breaking places throughout the interface

enemy AI is abominable. nobody is pathing their way to get my ass. "must've been the wind" taken to the next level. an infant playing peekaboo has more object permanence

hoisting yourself up on ledges when jumping is…nice

companions randomly nowhere to be found. persists through multiple fast-travels and loading screens until, just as randomly, they pop back up

storage space is now limited! unlike in Fallout 4 and virtually every other bethesda game, your containers now hold a finite item capacity. god forbid we let the player have fun

baffling inventory UI. i imagine there's a mod out there that completely overhauls it the way SkyUI did for Skyrim. this should not be needed! how are your UIs getting worse a decade later!

scanning the precious few species inhabiting some dusty planet; one of them is this arching red root i've already seen several times before. my job done in this biome, i travel (read: teleport with a loading screen) to the polar region to find some other species. the first one i catalogue is the exact same red root again but this time it's named "boreas root" todd howard is a genius

some alien horror comes at me full fangs out. i hop on a pebble. obscenely, i am safe

procedural terrain generation beyond dull, impossibly unimaginative. these people have not had one critical thought on what makes a procedural world interesting. beginning to feel validated in my belief that only i should be trusted with proc gen. along with perhaps tarn adams

jokes aside this is making me feel genuinely insane. there have been excellent procedural generation techniques that produce compelling explorable maps for decades now. bethesda absolutely has the budget and know-how to do miles better than this yet somehow they just…do not? the same way Pokemon has decided to just no longer bother with their mainline games despite being the highest-grossing media franchise in history? hello? what is for real going on

some of the most cynical breadcrumbing i've seen in years. approaching some random cave and this person in space gear, who in the vast immensity of the infinite cosmos just happens to be snapping pictures right here, tells me more-or-less verbatim "if you like this place, you should see this other place" [other random cave has been added to your map.]

i do not like how good this makes No Man's Sky's gameplay look. it depresses me how much i have to hand it to No Man's Sky for at least not fucking up this bad. please stop making me wish i was playing No Man's Sky instead this is grotesque

i think i've exhausted my interest and patience for this game at the moment. i'll get back to the main story at some point and try some other systems ie. crafting and base-building to see if there's any engagement to be found but so far, my god. my god

[canmom]

The game I've been working on for almost two years is now in open beta if you wanna try it out!!

Boom Boom Hamster Doom is a VR game about commanding teams of hamsters fighting across a completely destructible island. If you want an X-meets-Y description, it's much like Worms, but at tabletop scale. It's toyetic as hell - you lead them around on leashes with your little crab claw, and pull back like a catapult to aim missiles or boxing gloves, throw an airstrike like a paper plane, or fly them around in little jetpacks.

I've worked on pretty much every corner of this game - in particular, shading, animation, UI, gameplay and the procedural generation of the islands. And like, you know me, I want to tell you all about it. I'm writing a whole lot more diving into how just about every aspect of the game was built, from voxel meshing and networked physics to ocean rendering, bot AI, and obscure DOTS optimisation headaches... which will all be appearing right here. I'll keep you updated.

We'll be moving into full early-access soon, but you can already jump in the beta here, and play against other people or bots in the forest and ice biomes. You'll need to have a Quest 2 or Quest 3 headset - but if you have another headset, don't worry, we are planning on a Steam release down the line. I'll keep you posted.

All feedback is extremely welcome! I'm nervous/proud/excited for the game to finally see the light of day.

[self-keeping-treasure]

I've discovered mechposting

and wow, holy shit I didn't expect something could become a hyperfixation so quickly. It's like 50% a gender thing, 25% a kink thing, and 25% a transhumanist thing. The entire idea of connecting yourself so intimately to something else, not just your nerves but to strap yourself in and let every function of your small frail body be taken care of by the complexity of the machine. To be restrained completely and utterly for your own safety, it's that level of vulnerability you have to show as a pilot, baring yourself to the mech so it can protect you from the outside world under 6 solid inches of steel. The reward is worth it though as your awareness expands. Dozens of cameras enter your awareness, painting a more complete picture of the surroundings than eyes ever could. Targeting subroutines providing their information through an entirely new sense that you didn't have before, the information simply there available to you. A jetpack stylized after wings lets 3D movement become as natural as walking ever was. The mech becomes your new body, replacing the weak one buried in the cockpit with 22 feet of steel and hydraulic power. And then there's the concept of having a mech AI in there with you, sharing that intimate connection as it melds with your mind. Knowing you better than anyone ever could, perfectly tailored to you and learning from you as you learn from it. Almost more a part of your own identity than a separate self, and when you leave the mech you will feel it's absence. Feel the absence of the one being closer to you than even a lover ever could be, a being that has quite literally shared it's heart and soul with you for years of piloting on end.

[ladybugmania]

The Lunatics’ Parade: 2025 — Twilight of the Absurd

In the House once bright, now dimmed with decay,

The Lunatics gathered at the end of the day.

Trump sat high on a throne of skulls,

Drinking Diet Coke from patriotic hulls.

He growled, “I’m chosen, I walk with the stars!”

Then misread the map and invaded Mars.

His cabinet danced to a banshee choir,

The smoke smelled like steak and executive fire.

JD Vance, Vice King of Hillbilly Hell,

Chanted slogans that rang like a Liberty Bell,

Cracked, confused, and wrapped in a flag,

Waving a torch while dragging a bag.

Rubio, the Floridian fish,

Spoke fluent evasion and granted no wish.

At State, he served diplomacy fried,

With a side of “thoughts and prayers” deep-fried.

Pete Hegseth, in camo and rage,

Declared war on books, and peace on the page.

With a bayonet pen and a helmet of lies,

He saluted the mirror with blood in his eyes.

Pam Bondi, Attorney of Doom,

Summoned subpoenas like witches in gloom.

She cross-examined ghosts and grilled thin air,

Then charged the moon with improper care.

Scott Bessent, at Treasury's gate,

Laughed while tossing coins into fate.

“Who needs math?” he asked the void.

As the dollar collapsed and Wall Street enjoyed.

Linda McMahon, the duchess of schools,

Taught “Critical Wrestling Theory” in pools.

Kids tapped out before they could read,

As she body-slammed teachers for sport and for creed.

RFK Jr., czar of the sick,

Fed vaccines to frogs with a mercury stick.

He cured the flu with lavender tears,

And called science a hoax for 73 years.

Tulsi, now whisperer of state secrets grim,

Broadcast mind-rays through every gym.

She blinked twice and satellites fell.

Then blamed it all on a gender reveal.

Duffy, Transport, paved the sky,

With TikTok lanes and jetpack pie.

No roads, no rules, just viral speed.

“Crash responsibly!” his only creed.

Brooke Rollins, in fields of ash,

Grew mutant corn with campaign cash.

Each stalk saluted, each ear did weep,

For deregulated soil that’ll never sleep.

Howard Lutnick, selling fate,

Traded ethics at a discount rate.

Commerce turned into a feast,

Where corporations dined on the Middle East.

Kristi Noem, Homeland’s queen,

Patrolled the plains with a killing machine.

She hunted threats both foreign and mild.

And shot her own shadow, then blamed a child.

Lee Zeldin, the smog baron bold,

Bottled fresh air and sold it as gold.

The EPA now stood for Everything Pollutes Always,

And rain came down in three-headed grays.

Kelly Loeffler, Small Biz, ran a scheme,

Where lemonade stands paid in Bitcoin dreams.

She smiled while taxing charity jars,

And built a Starbucks on Venus and Mars.

Ratcliffe, at CIA, watched with glee,

As pigeons turned spies for a nominal fee.

He tapped into dreams and rewrote the past.

Then tweeted classified info… fast.

Elon and Vivek, efficiency beasts,

Replaced Congress with AI priests.

The algorithms wept, the servers bled.

And democracy was quietly pronounced dead.

Stephen Miller, the hollow-eyed ghoul,

Wrote policies using virgin fossil fuel.

He whispered fear into the law,

And shaped it sharp with his demonic claw.

Susie Wiles, behind the veil,

Pulled strings like a sorceress pale.

Each move she made, a shadow would shift,

And the Earth would tilt, and the tides would lift.

And then she came, Marjorie Greene,

On a chariot made from a gym machine.

Draped in flags and CrossFit glory, Screaming,

“Demons run Congress! This is God’s story!”

She tossed books into holy flame,

While claiming Bigfoot knew her name. Laser-eyed and

Bible-armed, She stormed the stage, unvaccinated and charmed.

Last, Karoline Leavitt, voice of the throne,

Spoke in riddles, her heart a stone.

“Truth is treason,” she hissed with grace,

As her smile cracked wide across her face.

She briefed the press with puppets and flame,

Then blamed “the woke” for losing the game.

So Trump and his gang of Lunatics marched, flags aflame,

Waltzing through history with no sense of shame.

The night was their kingdom, the facts were all gone,

And satire died with the morning dawn.

So here’s to the cabinet, wild and unchained,

A circus of chaos, darkly ordained.

The nation watches, hands on their heads,

As the Lunatics’ Parade paints the town red.

The end.

[rvbnerdery]

If you saw my Theta render I mentioned that I had been working on a prior 2D-style render. This is it. It's the same shader I used for Theta just without the lineart attempt (the environment and then Carolina and then York in this image were the first time I used that shader!)

Random unnecessary explanations (not in any particular order): When coming up for my internal premise for the image I imagined it as them relaxing in the better days of Freelancer, so prior to the AI debacles and therefore no Agent Texas but yes Agent Georgia. Known for failing to use his jetpack, I thought it'd be funny to have him hanging from the air. Connecticut the traitor is in a bit of a sneakier pose, Wyoming the sniper is prone, Carolina I tried to portray as a bit cocky and I put York as chill and next to her. North I tried to make relaxed while South I made intentionally taking up her entire side of the staircase if anyone was trying to walk down it. Washington was kinda the standard rifleman of the squad so I made him have a pretty basic pose, and then I positioned Maine and Florida last to just kinda fill the rest of the space. Maine I kept stiffer and Florida I made looser.

Note that due to the texture of the Halo 3 visors having a smudge in the corner, the shader made it look like all of them have a bit ol crack or dent there lol. Kinda fit York, but not the rest. Maybe at some point I'll figure out how to workaround that while still keeping the grey details on the rest of the visor.

[phightingaus]

Y'all. Au idea:

Robot inphernals(not necessarily biografts)

Basically what happened is that the SFOTH and some other individuals(however the og faction leaders look like) here are scientists and engineers tasked by a big company(whatever created the SFOTH iono) to create a sentient AI, and guess what?

They succeed, eventually. The first ever test models were the watcher line, the engineering team couldn't get actual facial expressions so they just made a metal pumpkin for the head. The only robot remaining from the line that wasn't scrapped or lost is W-GHD-003(Ghosdeeri)

The next ones created in order from oldest to newest(Guess who these are yourself, I basically shortened phighter and some NPC names to very few letters with some exceptions. Tell y'all next ask who is who, type the ones you got confused at): BH-000, BZ-001, KT-042, SC-001, HL-038, BR-000, SS-102, MK-102, SW-008, SK-024, VS-202, SR-202, TRFF-000, PWN-777, F-BZ-002, SL-021, BM-009, MG-302, MC-302

Oh also what part of the project each SFOTH deity worked on:

Firebrand- Frame building

Windforce, Darkheart & Venomshank- AI training

Icedagger- Design and concept

Illumina & Ghostwalker- Engineering

- star wars anon't

i have no clue what to say about this, there is not enough meat on this skeleton for me to dissect it, like you didn't say any differences like "oh the sfoth have jetpacks now instead of wings" or something but cool au

[meatball-headache]

Bam! Jill has become my... fourth? character to make it through Bethesda Susa. You might notice I'm not longer friends with the two baboons and the hindren and the mechanimist rummager. Let's just say the adventure wasn't without hazards. Anyway, this is my new best friend, the Antipope! As one does.

...Jill had no right to succeed at this. The only good thing she's got is Flame Ray and that's only at rank 5. I have a modded skill, Serpentine Form, which allows me to constrict enemies. It's kind of buggy so what happens is I occupy the same square as them, which breaks their AI and they just cease acting. It can be pretty good if it hits, and if I can get into melee range, and if I can afford to stand still.

The first troll king hit me once for 85 damage, which made me panic and jab a bunch of salves into myself and run away while the baboon duo took him down. The second troll, no issue. The third troll, the invisible one? Well, Silly Jelly Jill is also a psychic! So, she knew exactly where he was, and besides being invisible, he's got no real tricks. No, actually, the most dangerous part of this adventure was the juicing cannibal with a rocket launcher that blew open the cryotube containing Samus Aran, who's got a jetpack and a prog knife... so that was a little dicey.

Jill has a shield that has a chance of teleporting her away when she's about to take damage. So what happened was, she got hit, teleported away, and the baboons continued to attack whatever army I was up against. Eventually, they just fell to attrition. As for the hindren, well, he lost all his legs and half his arms in a madpole incident awhile ago, so he fell behind... and then got frozen... and, as far as I know, is still there. Rest in peace.

All right... so, we've got a run shaping up, finally! All I have to do now is remember how I died all the other times I got this far and not do that this time:

If you amass an army of followers, do not charge into battle until you've taken away all their ranged weapons.

If there's a battle that cuts off all your limbs, forcing you to drop your cool sword, and you run away and teleport home, don't go back for the sword.

When it says the implanted Putus Templar general is "impossible," it's not kidding.

If you see one slime, assume there are infinite slimes behind it.

If you find a new enemy, don't fight it to find out what it can do, because there's nothing it can do that you will like.

Run from the salt kraken.

[wordpress-blaze-244022290]

In The Time It Takes To Rise

People say I'm too soft sometimes, that I let things slide, wait too long, or give too many second chances. But I don't see it that way.

I think my patience is one of the few things that's kept me steady in a world that's anything but. When the cafe gets busy and the orders stack up and tempers flare, I take a breath. I smile. I keep moving. There's a rhythm to waiting, like the way bread rises, or tea steeps just right. You can’t rush good things. People need time too, as well as space. And someone who won’t give up on them the moment they mess up.

I guess that’s where the kindness comes in.

I don’t really go around calling myself kind, but I notice things. I notice when someone in sad or happy. When they stir there coffee for too long, lost in thought. When they say “I’m fine” but won’t meet your eyes. I’m not great with big, loud gestures- but I’ll remember your order even if you haven’t been in for a few days. I’ll slip an extra cookie into your bag if it looks like you had a rough day.

that’s what I like about myself. That I try to make room for people, even when they’re hard to understand. That I wait. That I care, quietly.

Source: In The Time It Takes To Rise

[shortformblog]

More on the Automattic mess from my pals at 404 Media:

We still do not know the answers to all of these questions, because Automattic has repeatedly ignored our detailed questions, will not get on the phone with us, and has instead chosen to frame a new opt-out feature as “protecting user choice.” We are at the point where individual Automattic employees are posting clarifications on their personal Mastodon accounts about what data is and is not included.  The truth is that Automattic has been selling access to this “firehose” of posts for years, for a variety of purposes. This includes selling access to self-hosted blogs and websites that use a popular plugin called Jetpack; Automattic edited its original “protecting user choice” statement this week to say it will exclude Jetpack from its deals with “select AI companies.” These posts have been directly available via a data partner called SocialGist, which markets its services to “social listening” companies, marketing insights firms, and, increasingly, AI companies. Tumblr has its own Firehose, and Tumblr posts are available via SocialGist as well.  Almost every platform has some sort of post “firehose,” API, or way of accessing huge amounts of user posts. Famously, Twitter and Reddit used to give these away for free. Now they do not, and charging access for these posts has become big business for those companies. This is just to say that the existence of Automattic’s firehose is not anomalous in an internet ecosystem that trades on data. But this firehose also means that the average user doesn’t and can’t know what companies are getting direct access to their posts, and what they’re being used for.

This story goes deeper than the current situation.

[penistparker]

Spotlight: Team Egglets (against every team's wishes, they're very much participating!)

Omelette Robotnik: "Just because I'm the child of the most hated man in Mobius doesn't mean squat. Me and my TOTALLY NON-EVIL SIBLINGS just wanna have some family bonding!"

Skill: Specialty (Intelligence)

Talent: Robotics

Age: 16

Pronouns: She/her

Race: ????

Weapon: Robots

Sage Robotnik: "I would do anything for my family."

Skill: Swim (surf the web)

Talent: Hack

Age: 14

Pronouns: She/they

Race: AI

Weapon: Cyberspace Network

Metal Robotnik 3.3: "huehuehuehueheuheuhuehue"

Skill: Speed

Talent: Jetpack

Age: 21

Pronouns: She/her

Race: Robot

Weapon: Doily (Tails doll) + herself

The Quintuplets: Orbot, Cubot, Tribot, Conebot, Betabot

Skill: Power

Talent: There's five of them

Age: 19

Pronouns (in order): He/him, they/he, she/he. she/it, they/them

Race: Robot

Weapon: Themselves. Run.

Bokkun Robotnik: "Hey I think someone sent you a message...wink wink!"

Skill: Fly

Talent: Messages

Age: 14

Pronouns: they/he/xe

Race: Robot

Weapon: Explosions

MASTERPOST