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[yb-four]

"Vehicle" for the purposes of this poll refers to cars, bicycles, etc.

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We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[yb-four]

Liking Jean Vicquemare is a canon event. Those of us who liked Jean Vicquemare as a Disco Elysium fan carry it with us long after we leave the fandom. I feel like it cannot simply be encapsulated in words like “problematic fav” because he’s not even a villain or a mass murderer or anything he’s just kind of a shitty guy and not in a cool or even significant way. I propose we name this category of underwhelming sad characters after him, and use it the same way we use phrases like Roman Empire ex. “My Jean Vicquemare is Marcus from Arcane”

[yb-four]

Skeleton shrimp :]c

Ummm sorry I don’t remember people’s handles :[ but please please reblog this with your answer! Would love to see all the beautiful shrimps that the world has to offer

I am starting a small tag chain for funsies and I do hope y’all indulge uwu

It’s just this: https://www.montereybayaquarium.org/stories/shrimp-personality-quiz

And post your results as such:

Hehe

Tagging: @fishyfishyfishtimes (duh), @phillycheesesteakcore, @lemonofthevalley, @philcoulson-redtapeninja, @serikyl, @darlingmissmoth, @writingrobinsblog, @greiiliss, @anxious-mess19, @nutria--oscura, @liminallylost , @theitalianscribe, @thetiniestastronaut, and anyone else who wants to join ( @postal-inspector-groat I’ve seen your results already but you should join my game bc >:3)

[yb-four]

i love the sonic adventure 2 battle intro cause of that stupid animation knuckles has in it

i can’t find a gif of it can somebody please post it

[yb-four]

[yb-four]

TEETH - Zine Bundle

This bundle contains three softcover standalone modules for TEETH, a comic-horror tabletop roleplaying game set in the remote, wind-blasted moors and sopping bogs of northern England. The full ruleset and setting is available as a separate book, but you won't need it to play these: each comes with its own cut-down rules.

These standalone adventures are:

NIGHT OF THE HOGMEN, in which players attempt to escape a ravening horde of pig-monsters. This is designed as a single-session adventure, accessible to newcomers.

BLOOD COTILLION, where the aim is to infiltrate a society ball and assassinate the cultists among its attendees. This is a short adventure designed to be played across a couple of sessions.

STRANGER & STRANGER, wherein players battle to remain human while trying to save their favourite pig. This is a mini-campaign, designed to be played across multiple sessions.

As well as physical softcover zines, this bundle also gives you access to digital materials, including PDFs, full-colour maps and more.

[yb-four]

chilchuck doesnt care chilchuck can reclaim

[yb-four]

my headcannon is that jon is fucking terrible at making tea. completely dogshit.

[yb-four]

Elf TV: exclusively 300 season-long soap operas

Dwarf TV: How It's Mined followed by a 4½ hr documentary about salt

Gnome TV: those sensory videos for cats where bugs and mice and birds crawl around on the screen. they really like this

Orc TV: Mythbusters and Top Gear reruns

Halfling TV: the most incredible impassioned storytelling you've ever witnessed always neatly contained in 2 seasons max

Fairy TV: imagine Impractical Jokers except theyre capable of stealing people's faces . this is the only show that fairies have

[yb-four]

The biggest problem I have with “AI” right now is that it’s seen as this monolith, with genAI models like chatGPT and DALL-E being incredibly overly prevalent to the point where it’s THE representative of an entire area of technology. No matter which side you’re on, when most people talk about AI they mean genAI. In many online leftist spaces especially, “pro-AI” automatically has connotations that imply someone’s stance on the issues surrounding genAI, and specifically openAI both as a company and as the idea of an “AI company”.

And so when people hear the words AI they don’t think of it as what it actually is: an UMBRELLA TERM for a field of computer science that, by definition, “focuses on developing computer systems that display the features we associate with intelligence in human behaviour”. This includes things like reinforcement learning, where instead of a dataset, the computer is being trained in an environment (think robots). As for the variety of AI technologies like Machine Learning (another buzzword and another umbrella term) that operate on datasets, all they do is use statistical techniques to gain information from data. The only new thing is that ML is highly efficient (in terms of time, not resources) at the cost of losing traceability of inbetween layers, where computational techniques have developed to the point that the tradeoff is worthwhile in many applications. At its core, ML isn’t some type of special secret other thing but simply a novel data analysis technique. THE COMPANIES YOU HATE HAVE ALWAYS COLLECTED, STORED, AND USED AS MUCH DATA AS THEY CAN. ML only makes it faster to process them.

So the “issue with AI” in this sense isn’t really an issue with AI at all, but an issue with data collection as a whole. This is important because when people have discussions about ethics and regulation with regards to personal data, it has to do with every single business that leverages data, not just the AI companies.

Additionally, the debate about “AI” in terms of human creativity is really just a debate about genAI (generative AI i.e. AI that comes up with new stuff). In reality, the vast majority of AI applications (and in my personal opinion, the most important/beneficial ones) are NOT generative. Their goal might be categorical identification, or task automation, or risk analysis, or human-computer interaction. And there’s very important ethical discussions to be had about these too! For example, a lot of companies already use AI to scan the files of potential candidates to determine their chances of success. Is that okay? What if it only parsed each candidate’s profile and summarized them, but didn’t evaluate them? Why or why not?

The takeaway is that it’s important to understand what the word “AI” actually means. There’s plenty of awesome AI application examples like folding DNAs, or revealing ancient text, or the bread AI that learned to detect cancer that we all know and love. “AI” should not be controversial, but opt-out data collection should be; “AI” is not unethical, but specific types of AI models can be abused by businesses, just like with any other tool under the sun.

We all know how companies and politicians frequently rely on keeping the masses uneducated, so they can control the spotlight and the narrative. Yet unlike with other topics, most people feel confident in their opinions on AI without even understanding what it is in the first place. This includes the dismissal of AI because of chatGPT’s mistakes or DALL-E’s fingers or whatever - “Everyone who believes in AI technology is stupid or evil and I, someone with common sense, could never be fooled” is the exact same logic utilized by anti-vaxxers and transphobes. Like any other topic, it’s important to actually learn about “AI” before speaking out about it.

[yb-four]

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[yb-four]

Okay but the very basis of this post is incorrect. The reason we have words such as “tasty”, “smelly”, “noisy” is precisely because these are NOT the default state for things to be. Each of these sense adjectives usually means “the sense is triggered strongly by this object”. Then the adjective takes on a positive or negative connotation depending on whatever is most common/useful.

For example, when an object’s smell is prominent, it usually smells bad, which usually means potential for harm (expired/unclean/poisonous/etc). Therefore, “smelly” = “noting the smell of this object comminicates useful information about this object” = “the smell is bad”. On the flip side, the few things that smell notably good are already expected to smell good, and even fewer things have the potential to smell unexpectedly good, so “smells good” is not as useful to convey. (Ex. “he’s wearing perfume” = “he’s wearing perfume that smells good” in most cases)

Noisy, touchy, etc work in similar ways. Tasty and slightly are exceptions because if a thing really Tastes or Looks, usually important context is needed, so we have specific words like sour/bitter/etc. This is true especially since our standards for these senses vary greatly from person to person. On the other hand “tastes good” and “looks good” tend to be more universal and more commonly communicated. For example, if your friend says something “tastes bad” you’ll probably need more context before making a decision based on your own preferences, but if your friend says that a thing “smells bad” you know that you probably shouldn’t sniff that thing.

This is why few things come to mind when we try to think of something that matches all of these criteria. If it does, then it deviates as far away from the default object as possible!

the default way for things to taste is good. we know this because "tasty" means something tastes good. conversely, from the words "smelly" and "noisy" we can conclude that the default way for things to smell and sound is bad. interestingly there are no corresponding adjectives for the senses of sight and touch. the inescapable conclusion is that the most ordinary object possible is invisible and intangible, produces a hideous cacophony, smells terrible, but tastes delicious. and yet this description matches no object or phenomenon known to science or human experience. so what the fuck

[yb-four]

aghhhhhhh. okay I will persist

[yb-four]

what does it mean if people keep tagging my personal posts harry dubois

[yb-four]

I think my take on the amount of yaoi vs yuri (and more generally male characters vs female characters) fancontent in fandoms is like. It’s all good and fun to complain about the disparity between the two, and it’s especially justified in cases where it’s clear that the the yaoi/male-centric content is spun out of very little or ooc.

But it’s a thin line between “ugh I wish people can start caring about the women” (valid) and “ugh I cwish people stopped caring about the men” (questionable) because like. Hey guys we’re all supposed to have fun here and going out of your way to yuck on someone’s yum is not cool. Making someone feel like they’re morally inferior for liking a harmless thing is shitty, and this especially applies to fanartists or fanfiction writers. Fancontent is unpaid labour and made out of passion and fan creators deserve respect no matter their subject of choice. Just because you don’t like a thing doesn’t mean it’s evil, the prevalence of one thing doesn’t take away space from another because fandom space isn’t limited, everybody can do whatever they want forever, peace and love on planet earth <3

[yb-four]

dungeon meshi yaoi should be illegal

[yb-four]

turning this into a poll because i am just so beyond baffled right now.