tempestpepper

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Thinkin about the symbolism in Pheonix viewing court like poker vs Edgeworth viewing court like chess and how it shows the difference between the defense side and the prosecution side.

Edgeworth views court as a chess match; in chess, both sides start on completely equal ground, with the same pieces on both sides, the only difference being the colors to differentiate who's who. The winner is the person with better tactics, who uses their pieces wisely, who makes less illogical moves.

Pheonix, on the other hand, sees court like poker, a card game in which the sides can never be equal, and you cannot be sure of who has the better hand, which gives way to bluffing and pretending you are doing well to persuade your opponent to back down, even if you have very little to go on. You have to weight logic vs chance, never knowing for certain that your opponent does not have a trump card on them. While being wise with your cards will get you far, luck is necessary to win.

This shows the difference between the prosecution and defense sides wonderfully, with the prosecution having all the access to the forensics, the witnesses, the crime scene, the privilege, while the defense has to catch up and do it all themselves, often in less time with less resources.

But even better, it shows why the prosecutors look down upon the defense's bluffing and conjecture, because if Edgeworth thinks this is like a chess game, then he assumes that the defense has equal information, not less information. Why do they need so much bluffing if all the pieces are the same, unless they are losing? Why do they act as though we have underhanded tricks when they use the smallest things to bring up? It is because on the defense's side, you know you have less intel than the prosecutors, you know your hand is worse, so you have to make everything count, because the only certainty you have is the trust in your defendant.

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take a break while watching this little bunny cross your dash

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pro-tip: a lot of the time, when an image off google is automatically saving as “.webp” or “.gifv” in order to stop you from using it, you can work around this con pretty easily. all u gotta do it right click and select “open image in a new tab”.

notice how this new tab’s url ends with “.gifv”? or some kind of code converting a normal image to a webp (ex: “.png?type=webp”)? literally just manually edit the url so it just ends at “.gif” or “.png”. delete the “v” or delete the code. then hit enter so the image reloads under this new url, and hit save. it should save correctly this time <3

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i know nobody here cares but i'm gonna bitch here about it anyway since this is my AI art blog: it *really* bites my ass that neuralblender, the thing that has become astoundingly popular seemingly overnight for AI art, very transparently uses several pre-made AI Art code assets without any sort of credit towards the creators who spent months of hard work on that code.

I'm genuinely a little offended that clicking on "credits" brings you to a page where they ask you to spend microtransaction money on generating stuff from other people's code notebooks (THAT YOU CAN ACCESS FOR COMPLETELY FREE, WITH MORE OPTIONS, THAT RUN FASTER, HERE'S NEURALBLENDER HYPERION AND HERE'S NEURALBLENDER CRONOS, BOTH FOR FREE THAT YOU CAN RUN AS MUCH AS YOU WANT, FROM THE ORIGINAL CREATORS), and not, like, a page crediting the original sources of their code. the website is also just lazy as hell, they didn't even change the favicon from the default react icon, so the fact that neuralblender is exploding and the original creators of the work (and the people whose shoulder's they are standing on; Advadnoun, RiversHaveWings, and DanielRussRuss for starters) don't receive a lick of credit or acknowledgement really just bothers the shit out of me.

Anyway, I would appreciate it if you felt like spreading this around and reblogging it. Here's a whole list of all the dozens of variations of CLIP+VQGAN and other generative art resources that you can be using for free instead of shelling out for Neuralblender's grift.

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oh yeah have i ever told yall of the academic war i have been an unwilling soilder in for the past two years

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if you pay for a tv license in the uk here's your reminder to cancel it right now and let the bbc know you're doing it because they hate lgbt people

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I think the Hunger Games series sits in a similar literary position to The Lord of the Rings, as a piece of literature (by a Catholic author) that sparked a whole new subgenre and then gets blamed for flaws that exist in the copycat books and aren’t actually part of the original.

Like, despite what parodies might say, Katniss is nowhere near the stereotypical “unqualified teenager chosen to lead a rebellion for no good reason”.  The entire point is that she’s not leading the rebellion. She’s a traumatized teenager who has emotional reactions to the horrors in her society, and is constantly being reined in by more experienced adults who have to tell her, “No, this is not how you fight the government, you are going to get people killed.” She’s not the upstart teenager showing the brainless adults what to do–she’s a teenager being manipulated by smarter and more experienced adults. She has no power in the rebellion except as a useful piece of propaganda, and the entire trilogy is her straining against that role. It’s much more realistic and far more nuanced than anyone who dismisses it as “stereotypical YA dystopian” gives it credit for.

And the misconceptions don’t end there. The Hunger Games has no “stereotypical YA love triangle”–yes, there are two potential love interests, but the romance is so not the point. There’s a war going on! Katniss has more important things to worry about than boys! The romance was never about her choosing between two hot boys–it’s about choosing between two diametrically opposed worldviews. Will she choose anger and war, or compassion and peace? Of course a trilogy filled with the horrors of war ends with her marriage to the peace-loving Peeta. Unlike some of the YA dystopian copycats, the romance here is part of the message, not just something to pacify readers who expect “hot love triangles” in their YA. 

The worldbuilding in the Hunger Games trilogy is simplistic and not realistic, but unlike some of her imitators, Collins does this because she has something to say, not because she’s cobbling together a grim and gritty dystopia that’s “similar to the Hunger Games”. The worldbuilding has an allegorical function, kept simple so we can see beyond it to what Collins is really saying–and it’s nothing so comforting as “we need to fight the evil people who are ruining society”. The Capitol’s not just the powerful, greedy bad guys–the Capitol is us, First World America, living in luxury while we ignore the problems of the rest of the world, and thinking of other nations largely in terms of what resources we can get from them. This simplistic world is a sparsely set stage that lets us explore the larger themes about exploitation and war and the horrors people will commit for the sake of their bread and circuses, meant to make us think deeper about what separates a hero from a villain.

There’s a reason these books became a literary phenomenon. There’s a reason that dozens upon dozens of authors attempted to imitate them. But these imitators can’t capture that same genius, largely because they’re trying to imitate the trappings of another book, and failing to capture the larger and more meaningful message underneath. Make a copy of a copy of a copy, and you’ll wind up with something far removed from the original masterpiece. But we shouldn’t make the mistake of blaming those flaws on the original work.

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I dont know how to make this any more crystal clear to people:

kiwifarms was founded as an imageboard explicitly dedicated to the stalking and harassment of a specific autistic trans woman

doxxing and harassment carried out via kiwifarms has been linked to the suicide of another trans woman (chloe sagal). their thread on her, in all its spiteful original language, remains up to this day.

kiwifarms’ founder is also the former lead developer of 8chan, one of the most prolific hives of violent white nationalists online today

kiwifarms as a whole is baldly transparent about the fact that it sees lbgt, neurodivergent, and mentally ill folks as a source of entertainment because of their lgbt/nd status and mental illness. they do not hide this fact.

Sometimes, kiwifarms may host a thread about someone who is a truly bad person. They are still a hate site. Stop using them as a source, full stop. Any information worth actually calling out on someone can be gathered elsewhere and by other means. Just because they dislike someone you also think is bad does not mean kf is worth giving the time of day. Some nazis hate cops- we still know better than to rub shoulders with them or trust them as sources on why the police should be dismantled, because we recognize that the problems we have with the police are completely different from the reason they dislike them. It should not be so hard to do the same for a website like this. I know that the individual views and aims of kiwifarm users may vary, but all of them are people who are ok with posting on a website where slurs and virulently hateful language wrt trans, neurodivergent, and mentally ill people are used regularly. All are people who are ok with posting on a website run by an antisemitic white nationalist. All are people who are ok with posting on a website founded on the stalking and harassment of a single human being. All of them are ok with posting on a website that has blood on its hands.

Do not put their information on my dash. Do not link to them in your callouts. If you haven’t already, block tumblr user cat//bountry, who appears on popular posts to this day despite being a very long-term and active mod on said website.

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Apple propaganda notwithstanding, the reason tower PCs are big isn’t because they’re outdated. The reason tower PCs are so bulky is because they’re designed to be user serviceable. The case has lots of open space so your big, meaty hands can easily access all of the components, and everything is secured with friction-fit tabs and standard machine screws to minimise the need for specialised tools. A properly laid out tower PC is fully serviceable with a single Phillips-head screwdriver and no greater manual skill than your average Lego playset – heck, for some of the more modern case layouts you don’t even need the screwdriver, unless you’re performing major surgery like a full motherboard replacement.

Like, think about who benefits from convincing you that a fully modular computing device that can be serviced and repaired with your bare hands and minimal technical skill is unfashionable.

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ive been watching the holiday season of nailed it all day and in episode 6 the bakers were fucking up so badly that the camera man was repeatedly driven to literal tears while shakily filming their creations

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albedo, what in the devil are you doing?

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NFTs VS Commissions