Shurimal

In the big picture, more conflict, more human rights violations, more fascism. While crisis brings people together locally, when the going gets real tough for everyone, tribalism and us vs. them will inevitably rear its ugly head.

Tens of millions of people needing to migrate because the areas they live now will become literally uninhabitable (as in not “it’ll be a little uncomfortable and hot” but “you will die if you stay there”) will be an absolute horrorshow. Genocide, really—I’m fully expecting criminalization of all rescue orgs, “sink on sight” orders for migrant boats and absolute ban on saving any migrant castaway on the Mediterranean.

Briar.

At least Oblivion, unlike Skyrim, had actual classes (let’s not talk about the leveling system, shall we?) and spell making. Plus some really, really good questlines (including the main quest, and the whole Shivering Isles expansion was rad AF). The cities also felt larger than in Skyrim and the Arcane University was an actual university, not a random village school with 3 students. Role-play wise Skyrim was the weakest of the three modern ES games.

What I don’t get, is why you’re being an apologist for Apple?

I fucking hate Apple, their walled garden and questionable engineering practices. But USB port speed is the last of the reasons to hate them. I really don’t give a shit about whether the USB-C port on my phone is USB 2 or 3 or whatever. Be it “normies” or “techies”, I can’t recall anyone in my social circle who uses the port on the phone for anything other than charging. Cloud storage, whether self-hosted or by some big company, is the norm and way more convenient. Especially considering that properly set up, everything is backed up and synced in real time automagically.

Frankly, who even uses the USB port on their phone for data transfers unless it’s an emergency? I just stream media from my NAS using Navidrome and Jellyfin, use Syncthing to back up my photos and sync files I need, and mount the SMB shares I need to access. The eMMC and SD cards are slower than USB 3 speeds, anyway. Most SD cards don’t even max out USB 2.

The only sensible real life use case for USB 3 for phones would be external monitors.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/09/with-nothing-on-joe-biden-republicans-move-toward-impeaching-him-anyway/ a pretty good overview of what’s been going on with Hunter Biden (who, frankly, has done some shady things) and why and how republicans have nothing on Joe Biden.

It’s a grift, pure and simple.

Generally the term cRPG is used for specifically tabletop RPG-s adapted to digital realm. Action RPG-s take those classical RPG concepts and adapt them to a first- or third-person action game—basically Doom with leveling systems.

Well, one is a linear, turn-based, 3rd person party cRPG.

The other is open world, real-time, 1st person with optional followers, sandbox action-RPG with space shooter elements.

Utterly different animals and any comparison is as invalid as comparing BG3 to Elite, DCS or RaceRoom. I’ve no interest at all in BG3 because turn-based party RPG-s are not really my jam. And I’ve never cared much about story-telling, either. I like good worldbuilding, sandboxing, looting, crafting, trying different builds, doing whatever the hell I like at any moment while completely forgetting that something called “main quest” exists, getting technical and modding the crap out of a game and this is where Bethesda shines.

Bullshit. Nuclear waste (more precisely, spent fuel that can be reprocessed for new fuel or other useful radionuclids) is the only waste we have actual good solutions for. It’s not an engineering problem, we know very well how to safely dispose of the small amount of ultimate nuclear waste.

All the other waste, including waste from producing new and retiring old solar panels and wind turbines, basically just gets thrown into the landscape with no containment whatsoever. And some of that stuff is toxic, some will never degrade (plastics used in composite materials the wind turbine blades and towers are made of).

Plus, if you only used nuclear energy throughout you life, the amount of ultimate waste can literally fit into a coke can. That’s how efficient and energy dense it is.

An small modular reactor. Off-the-grid energy for the whole town!

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I haven’t tried nor will I want to try Apple products for the following reasons:

Apple products seem to always have some critical design flaw under the surface, or even something I can only put down to deliberate malicious designed-to-fail, not-repairable shenanigans (soldered SSD, serializing even trivial parts like screen opening sensor, having high voltage backlight pin right next to low voltage signaling pin that connects directly to the soldered CPU etc).

The software is extremely locked down, I simply cannot function without Fdroid and installing packages straight from Github (how else am I going to extract the necessary encryption keys to use a gadget with an unofficial FLOSS application instead of the official spyware?). Android is not perfect, but at least I can hack it and mutilate it as I see fit and there are custom ROM-s. My next phone will probably run /e/ OS.

Plus Apple lacks the critical-to-me hardware like 3.5mm analog audio output. IR blaster is also nice to have when working with AV stuff that may not have the remote with them.

Last, but not least, they’re simply too expensive for me. I’m not willing to pay more than 300…400€ for a phone, and I don’t want to buy a mobile gadget used—demons only know what that thing has been through. And Apple desktop/laptop computers—yeah, well, just no. I like my standardized x64 architecture, where I can upgrade RAM and storage as I see fit for cheap and install whatever opsys I want, just fine thankyouverymuch.

Right. Now, please, an Expanse space sim where I can pilot the ships and engage in battles. Because that was the best part of the show.

Apollo 18. It just has the atmosphere, sense of isolaton and impending doom.

Also Life which is thematically similar, but higher production value.

And in the same vein, Europa Report, though it has critic score of 80. One of the best hard sci-fi films ever.

Almost forgot Pandorum—that one was decent, too.

As was Prometheus (I know biologists and geologists IRL, studied biology myself—the films depiction of these folks is spot on!).

AI art is art, period. Just like with any method of creation, there will be good and bad AI art, and as with any method of making art, there is human input and intention behind it. Internet is chock full of same-looking fan drawings of popular characters—everyone can pick up a pencil, do a 15·minute sketch of Joker; or grab a camera, shoot a landscape, and upload it on Deviantart. Same for boring, uninspiring, mass-produced commercial art.

Fundamentally generative neural networks are no different from “oldschool” procedural generation tools like Mandelbulb3D or Terragen—with both of which I have tinkered a lot in the past. With AI you use a verbal prompt to generate; with “oldschool” generative processes you use a numerical input or different math formulas.

As for AI somehow “stealing” art, well, every artist who studies the works of other artists to learn how to make good art, is “stealing”, then. At the end of the day, a human brain is literally a neural network that can be trained using various inputs. No input; no output other than random noise. From my own past a decade ago tinkering with digital art—one of my renders with Mandelbulb that was well recieved on DA (ended up in some curated collection, even) was based on someone else’s input formula that I tweaked heavily and used different render parameters—and I’m sure someone else took my version of that formula and made their own version.

That’s the nature of art, nothing is created in vacuum; nothing is original. Every artist “steals”. Those who claim different, who believe art should never draw from other art, are either delusional or pretentious elitists. Or lawyers.

That was a pretty good bad movie. Though not as “good” as Robot Monster.

Frogmen, revolt!