erin (she/her)

I feel no need to be protected in my day to day life. My partner provides love, companionship, empathy, and a listening ear. Sure, some women might care about protection and toughness or whatever you’re on about, but attraction varies from person to person. Most other women I know want to be heard and loved. People are allowed to want to fuck “fragile” men. They can be hot without needing to be “manly.” You’re putting so much stock in traditional gender norms, not realizing that it’s not women that actually care about those. It’s the men that are trying to be that. Some women will, of course, but women aren’t a monolith. Want an example? Timothy Chalamet is very commonly considered to be an extremely attractive actor, and he’s far more androgynous and “fragile,” as you put it, than your traditional masculine ideal. Just as many women might be attracted to any number of different appearances, because people are different! The days of needing a strong man to support us frail women are over. Your insecurities and ideas of masculinity are clouding your judgment.

To answer your question succinctly: No, they aren’t fragile looking, they’re just slim. No, they don’t look “dehumanized,” they look like people. The dehumanization happens in industry, not with their faces. I know people that look similar. Some women find them hot, and want to fuck them, and idolize them, because they are hot! They’re very attractive people, if that aesthetic is what you’re into! If your only metric is how likely they are to win a fight, sure, they probably aren’t at the top of the scale, but the vast majority of people DON’T CARE.

They told you to look into therapy because you have an unhealthy idea of what women are attracted to and what masculinity should be. They called you insecure because you sound insecure (why do women like the weak little boys and not big manly men :(( they look so frail and weak, don’t women know they can’t protect them??). Whether or not that’s how you’re actually thinking, it’s how it comes across. Instead of realizing that some people do like strong men, you took it to a place of jealousy and defensiveness.

TLDR: Different strokes for different folks. Don’t obsess over people you don’t find attractive still being attractive to others, as it isn’t good for your mental health and isn’t a good look.

The Barnsley Fern was constructed specifically to resemble the species of fern that it does. There are versions of it that have been modified to resemble other ferns. The fractal isn’t some secret mathematical code for why ferns look like they do, it’s more like a drawing of a fern. If someone made a fractal to look like another leaf, it would be just that, not an advancement into the secrets of botany.

The short answer: no. The two do not connect beyond the fact that ferns have a design reminiscent of a fractal, which is likely what inspired the fractal’s creation.

How “real” is it? It is a real set of functions, but if I design a set of functions to look like William Dafoe, it doesn’t mean I’ve cracked the matrix code into his genetics.

I never got into Tarkov, but I love Arma and Squad. To each their own.

Okay but I enjoy realistic milsim games. You don’t have to play them. Weird take.

If you think that this:

Replace “machine” with “film crew”, “rerun” with “do another take”, and “tweak the prompt” with “provide notes”. If they’re giving notes to a computer or a person doesn’t really change the nature of their work, only the language they use to provide those notes.

is what a director does? You have no clue what you’re talking about. They’re far more involved in the creative process on every level than you understand.

Your question about who AI helps is a valid one. I agree that that’s what’s important about AI use. I use AI in my work, but not to replace human beings, but as a tool to make easy mock ups or test ideas. I find trying to replace human creativity in a way that replaces jobs or the human spark that makes art, art, abhorrent. AI art cannot exist without humans to train on, so humans cannot be fully replaced, but I hope to never see a day where AI takes the positions of well compensated artists leeching off the work of unpaid or underpaid humans.

I’m not suggesting that the director has full responsibility for the art. They are part of a team, and the creative style of a director heavily influences the finished product. You can tell who directed a movie just by watching it. There are very important creative decisions and directions that point the team of more specialized artists in the right direction.

This is not analogous to AI art. That would be like the director of a movie telling a team of interns to cut together clips of other movies as best they see fit, within a general outline of the script. A person using AI to generate art isn’t part of the creative process in the same way; they tell a machine what to do, and decide whether to rerun or tweak the prompt after seeing the result. This takes some small modicum of creativity, but it isn’t creating art. It’s fine for fun, or to use as a stand in tool, or to mock-up designs, but it will never have the creative direction of a human being, or stand on the same level with true masters, regardless of how well it can copy their style. It can’t understand the art.

Directing is an art form of its own. The cinematography, the pacing, the set design, acting, and so much more is all influenced by the director’s decisions. It would be like saying a conductor or a music producer isn’t an artist. Easy to say if you don’t have an understanding of the art form, but dead wrong. There are a ton of creative choices at all levels made by directors, and there’s a reason we’ve been using them in one way or another since we first started performance art. I’ve worked under and beside directors in the past, and I have only the utmost respect for what a good director can do for the art.

A bad director however… I might agree with you.

That certainly is an opinion

My experience is so different, and so are the market statistics. A “forever mouse” is a dumb idea just looking for a subscription cash grab, but the PC mouse market is expanding year over year as more people get desktop computers, and especially for PC gaming, an expanding market in its own right. The customer base of people who use mice might be shrinking in some Linux communities, but stating that across the board is just incorrect.

It was a general assumption, and apparently not an accurate one. I don’t presume to actually know how you think from one comment. There are dog whistles on all sides, because it’s essentially a term for an “inside joke,” minus the humor (usually). It comes up most often with Nazis and racists not because they’re the center of attention necessarily, but mostly because dog whistles are needed primarily by groups that are not socially acceptable. You cannot be openly racist except with other racists, or openly a Nazi except with other Nazis. Dog whistles allow people to declare allegiance and signal to others that believe the same without needing to openly state it. Usually, we still know anyways, but it gives them plausible deniability in their eyes.

What? They used the word correctly. How are you gonna pull out “both sides” when they’re correct? It hasn’t lost its meaning, you just don’t like hearing it so often because, surprise surprise, there’s an awful lot of dog whistling going on in the current political cycle. It means a signal used to communicate loyalty or belief to an idea, group, platform, etc, that is understood by other people who agree, and not necessarily obvious to the neutral observer. In this case, the word “woke” is a dog whistle for bigots. It was applied correctly.

Yes. “Cis” is just a description, like “straight” or “white.” Calling someone “cis” is not an insult, but some conservatives take it as such. The common phrase they echo is “I’m not cis, I’m normal.” They’re trying to denormalize trans people by making an inoffensive and common descriptor an insult. The same people sometimes have a problem with being called straight by queer people because they see themselves not as straight, but normal, and anything different is abnormal. In reality, “gay,” “straight,” “trans,” and “cis” are no more abnormal descriptors than calling someone “black,” “white,” “American,” or “tall.” It’s all just “othering” those they perceive as political opponents.

They’re seismically isolated

Or much much longer. It’s not going anywhere. It can’t escape its cask, and outside human intervention the casks won’t be breached. It’s just locked-up metal that gives off some radiation, fully contained within the cask. It isn’t oozing green goo.

The casks waste is stored in would take bunker buster yields to breach.

All the waste a plant ever produces in its lifetime can be contained with ease on site. Waste certainly isn’t the main issue, though it’s portrayed to be. Cost of deployment and staffing are more prohibitive issues, and both are surmountable. I don’t think it’s a bandaid for all power issues, but it’s a powerful tool that should be used more often, not phased out.

You saw it too huh

It’s a reference to Noah’s Ark, where God supposedly flooded the whole world except two of each animal and Noah’s family, then put a rainbow in the sky as a symbol that He’d never do it again. Young Earth Creationists and their like take the story as fact, despite the fact that such an event would have put humanity well below the number of people needed for a stable gene pool, and that two of an animal likely wouldn’t repopulate an entire species. I digress.

Authoritarian doesn’t mean exercising authority. Banning slavery did exercise authority, of the law, over slave owners, but it was anti-authoritarian. It took power, and authority, condensed wrongly in the hands of a few and, in theory, distributed it to the many, however effective it actually was.

I’ve never seen any sort of logical response to this argument.

Person A: Maybe we should reduce harm

Person B: But Biden is bad and evil!

Person A: I agree, but Trump is worse and more evil.

Person B: These are both the same!

Clearly, there are people that will be under attack under Trump that won’t under Biden. I’m not voting Republican or Democrat in the primaries, but I’m voting against Trump in the general. Not for Biden, but against Trump, because he’s far more dangerous in the same ways that Biden was, and spreads out his harm to others as well.

Expressed well or not, you didn’t use any logical fallacies or resort to ad hominem attacks. I could disagree on every point and still enjoy the discussion just for the sake of respectful debate. Hope to run into you again.