paddirn Now • 100%
🔺
paddirn Now • 100%
Yeah, in my mind, Sci-fi is more than just space ships or aliens or futuristic tech (though those are loosely part of it), it's more about exploring different questions, under the guise of some sort of new technology. "Hey, we invented this thing that can remove racism from people's brains, but it also makes people love-obsessed and creates dependency issues in people. Should we use this on the population?" It raises moral/ethical questions about what we could or should do given the chance.
Star Wars is straight-up fantasy with high-tech aesthetics, but it has more in common with Lord of the Rings than it does with anything sci-fi. It's about a hero's journey and good vs evil.
I wonder if you couldn't do a reverse Fantasy/Sci-fi story? Basically a sci-fi sort of story with fantasy trappings. Like a fantasy story that looks at some new magic development and what the implications for humanity are of that new magic process. "We perfected an alchemical process to turn poop into gold! Should we flood the market with poo-gold and crash the medieval economy?"
paddirn Now • 100%
I just saw a video on the show on the youtube channel Secret Galaxy, pretty interesting, as I remembered the show, but never knew what happened to it:
paddirn Now • 100%
I'm worried about fraud in the 2024 election coming FROM Republicans.
paddirn Now • 100%
I have thought upon it and am of the mind that he posts about it, then forgets he ever posted it, and posts it again thinking it’s still the first time.
paddirn Now • 93%
I think he could make a compelling argument justifying it if Trump were to win the election, a sort of Julius Caesar part deux. I think you could make the case that American democracy as we know it would end if Trump were elected president and that in order to protect democracy, his assassination was needed. However, in doing so, American democracy as we know it would still end because Biden would be opening the door to domestic political assassination being in a president's tool belt, so it's kind of a catch-22. We're damned if we do, damned if we don't. So really, the only thing that will "save" democracy is if people vote for Harris, that's where we're at as a country. I'd love to vote third party, I actually didn't care much for Harris before Biden dropped out, but the stakes are really too high this election to consider anything else.
paddirn Now • 96%
I grew up in a home where we just never thought about wearing, or not wearing, shoes in the house. Like, we obviously didn't track mud all over the place if our shoes were that dirty, but if we were wearing our shoes inside, nobody said anything or cared, it was just whatever. Married a Kenyan who put her foot down and was like, "Are you crazy?" It's apparently a big thing elsewhere in the world. In Kenya alot of roads aren't paved, things get dusty, and it's just common sense that you don't walk all over the house with dirty shoes, so I get it from that perspective.
paddirn Now • 100%
Hopefully this will make future war crime prosecutions easier, supposing we live long enough to ever see that day.
paddirn Now • 100%
We’re just going all in on trying to get to WW3 and the Rapture, huh?
paddirn Now • 96%
The guy who wants to ban Muslims from entering the country is doing better among Muslims than the person who will probably get accused of being a Muslim by a good portion of the country.
paddirn Now • 100%
She moved on. I was young and stupid and she had better things to do than deal with an insecure loser like me. She had a really awesome black chevy nova with a license plate ‘SPOOKY1’ and one of the most awesome things we did was make a bleeding heart cake to impress her pretentious goth friends. A few years back though, she died from a heroin overdose, her Mom had reached out to me on facebook and we talked some, she was a nice lady. Ex-gf had apparently been having some issues in her life and had not-good influences that pushed her back into drugs. C'est la vie.
paddirn Now • 100%
I’ve been the boyfriend in this situation with a hot goth chick. No idea what she saw in me.
paddirn Now • 100%
He should take a photograph of it, then he could copyright that.
paddirn Now • 100%
We should’ve been done with this shit almost 4 years ago. Trump and everyone else that participated in Jan 6 should’ve been rotting in prison cells by now.
paddirn Now • 100%
It’s an aesthetic decision.
paddirn Now • 100%
That whole album is pretty good, some amazing songs that just never seem to get much attention.
paddirn Now • 75%
We’ll see how long that lasts for before most end up having to flee to other states. Another 10 years maybe?
paddirn Now • 88%
I like Joe Biden in every other respect, but what the hell is up with this hard-on for Israel? Is it purely AIPAC and the Jewish-American vote, or is there some other calculus going into all this? I expected better, but they're just rubber-stamping anything and everything that Israel wants to do, no matter how fucked up.
paddirn Now • 93%
That the person probably won't stick around for long. I'd still give them a fair chance, but if they up and quit one day out of nowhere I wouldn't be surprised. I'm not in charge of the hiring though, so I just work with whoever I'm told to work with.
I noticed this Summer I started transitioning my morning walks to pre-sunrise hours to try to escape the heat (since even mornings in Ohio are getting to be hot). Since global warming (or climate change in general) is happening and there's apparently nothing to be done to fix it in our lifetimes, it made me wonder if our overall society might move towards more nocturnal working hours instead of the standard 9–5, just to escape overheating during the day? There's probably no incentive currently, since workers aren't dropping like flies yet, but I could see it coming into play as global warming gets worse over time and it causes legitimate production issues. Probably some jobs wouldn't have the option, but most I think would be able to benefit from it. Does this sound like something realistic, or are we cursed to have to endure extreme temperatures because we've always worked in the daytime and we can't/won't change now?
I'm wrapping up a project and I had an idea to mix matte with glossy elements. I've got a spray can of Testors Spray Dullcote and then was wanting to paint the glossy elements by hand with a different gloss coating/finish. How well would those interact with each other? I'd obviously let the matte finish dry first, but would the matte "cancel" out the glossy effect or does it have some other interactions that basically make it not worth pursuing?
Whether it's a sense of superiority or just to be funny or asinine or out of a genuine need to spread the truth, people online generally try to be contrarian as often as possible because it gives them some sort of personal gratification or a sense that they're correcting something wrong in the universe.
  
prompt: "generate an image of Patrick Bateman as Batman"
Copilot: "create a picture of Marvel's Fantastic Four in Leonardo's the Last Supper painting" alternates:   
www.polygon.com
Streamer Perrikaryal uses an electroencephalogram (EEG) device to play games
I settled on using [Zotero](https://www.zotero.org/) (meant for academia, but whatever, it does what I need) for cataloguing/organizing my ttrpg pdf hoard and I'm trying to set up some top-level tags to make it a bit easier to sift through what I'm looking for. One set of tags will be genre tags (fantasy, sci-fi, horror, etc), with another level below that for sub-genre (cyberpunk, supernatural, low fantasy, post-apocalyptic, etc). Another set of top-level tags will focus on the actual types of books/products one might see for an RPG. These are just all the terms I've come across before, setup in a hierarchy that makes sense to me, though sometimes terms aren't used consistently across different RPG lines. Since some products can straddle multiple genres/categories, I'm hoping tags will help make it easier to sort through everything. Does this set of categories/sub-categories make sense? I'm still at the early stages of just importing everything into a library, so I'm sure there's categories I've not thought of or considered. - **Core Rulebook** (*books required to play*) - Player Handbook (*this might straddle the line between core and supplement*) - **Supplement** (*books that expand the rules/setting*) - Sourcebook - Bestiary - Splatbook - Adventure/Scenario/Module - Campaign - Setting - **Accessory** (*mostly non-book related items*) - Cards - Maps - Fiction - Music/Audio - Screens - Sheets - Character sheet - Rules/Cheat sheet - Misc sheet - **Resource** (*more for general books on RPGs, system-agnostic*) - GM aid - Player aid - Educational - Tables
I've been searching around for a way to organize my TTRPG collection of pdfs (numbering in the thousands to tens of thousands) and haven't really found a silver bullet for it yet. Everything I've looked at has some sort of weird thing that's off about it that doesn't seem to make it ideal. Is there something out there that others are using that works well? Here's what I've looked at so far: - **Folder system**: This is what I'm already using and it's serviceable (PC), but it really doesn't give me any tagging function and so it's hard to organize based on genre or come up with really any categories outside of just alphabetically naming folders based on the RPG name, then putting whatever subcategories I need as folders below that. It just feels so clunky going about it like this. Being able to organize/search via tags just seems like the way to go. - **Calibre**: This gets recommended everytime, but honestly I'm not interested in duplicating my library of +10,000 pdfs and following their organization system. The desktop app looks ugly (which is apparently fixed with Calibre-web but still requires the desktop app). - **Jellyfin**: Really not geared towards books in general, it's functional but not great for it. This may end up being what I fall back to if I can't get anything else working. - **Kavita**: Looks nice and works nice EXCEPT it has some weird ass naming convention with regards to numbers in the folder/file names. Only top-level stuff can contain numbers, everything below has to have roman numerals? Such a weird thing that just breaks it for me. - **Komga**: It looks nice and works nice, but is more geared towards comics, and thus doesn't work so hot with RPGs with multiple categories (Core rulebooks, Scenarios, Settings, etc), since I tend to break those out into different folders. It ends up treating sub-folders as a different series altogether, so it sort of demands that you just keep everything in the same folder. - **Ubooquity**: Tried it, it ran like ass on my machine and didn't seem to do as good a job. Making updates in the folders themselves took awhile to propagate and it just overall didn't seem to work well for how I wanted to use it. I just didn't particularly care for it. - **Zotero**: It's actually more meant for academic journals and such, but it could be used for organizing TTRPG pdfs, though not sure how well it scales up once you start throwing thousands of pdfs at it. Downside though is that it's not as flashy as some of the others, it doesn't display book covers and you have to create additional objects for each item. You also can't just add tags to the PDFs themselves, you have to create an additional 'Book' object and attach the pdf to that item, then add whatever tags/notes/metadata you want to add. I haven't figured out how to automate the process and the one item I tried where it automatically found it, it created a 'Journal Article' and renamed it based on the authors of the book (which it did correctly find), which is not ideal for going through thousands of items. I just want it to keep the file names in most cases as I've already gotten most file names where I want them.
That is, have you ever started getting into a game, only to discover that the community is much deeper than you initially ever suspected? My kids and I started playing **PlateUp!** for funsies, it's a 4-player co-op kitchen/cooking/restaurant simulator that has you doing fun things like cooking food, taking customers orders, and washing dishes. We kind of play it for laughs and barely make any headway in it, usually as a result of all the chaos that comes from multiple people trying to run a kitchen. I started looking deeper into it because apparently there's ways to automate your whole setup and have the whole kitchen run itself. The amount of diagrams and setups that people have created are just insane, way deeper than I ever even considered with this innocent-looking game and it's made me reconsider what I thought was just a quirky little party game.
I literally only wanted to use Instagram for looking up porn star accounts and viewing softporn material, yet SOMEHOW I seem to mostly see non-porn material. Artwork and craft projects and whatever, everything but porn. Whatever, one thing I've noticed though is that if I make a comment on a porn star account and it's something lewd and inappropriate, it will never get removed for any reason, no matter what language I use. YET, on multiple occasions, I've made completely G-rated comments on non-porn posts, the most recent one about the difference between Star Wars & Star Trek (fantasy vs sci-fi), and that comment will get removed, there's not even any curse words being used. I have no idea why it's happening, is it that I'm writing too much and using too many big words? I'll write the most offensive horny things on porn accounts, and nothing, but as soon as I write up a semi-intellectual comment on a non-porn posting, it gets removed. I'm just mystified as to what's happening and what's triggering it.
   
I woke up well-rested after getting plenty of sleep. I’m taking my car in for service, then I’m gonna sit around all day drinking coffee and alcohol, while playing games and working on hobbies.
en.wikipedia.org
Eugene Debs, a Socialist leader in the early 20th century, ran for President five times. His fifth and highest vote count came in the 1920 Presidential election, in which he was running while in Federal prison for sedition. He received about 3.4% of the vote at the time (which included women for the first time since the Nineteenth Amendment was passed in 1920 as well). Not naming names, but yes, it's possible to run for President while in prison, though results may vary.
I just got done with a chat with Sony Customer Service regarding fraudulent activity on my account, I figured I'd share my experience in case anyone else has the same issue come up (I assume it's a relatively common experience). Somebody apparently got access to my account a few days ago, changed the email address linked to the account (so that I couldn't reset the password) changed the password, activated 2-step verification, then started buying up a few games on it (as my Sony account had been linked to my paypal account). Of course I discovered all this on a Sunday, when their phone lines are closed, which left me having to go through their "online assistant" (ie chat bot). It took me about 30-40min to finally get transferred to a live chat rep, but because I had keyed in my "online ID" wrong in the chat form ( misremembered it), he was unable to help me, because that chat instance is restricted to whatever info I entered originally. So I then had to start a new chat instance with the correct info, which left me waiting for another 30-40min, which by that time put me into about 1.5 hours and I just closed out and resolved to get to it today. Fast-forward to today, the wait this time was only about 20 min. Everything seemed to go fairly well, I got access to my account and changed the password back out. I then went ahead and activated 2-Step Verification for myself, to improve security to hopefully prevent this kind of thing in the future. After verifying my email address, this action apparently flagged my account for suspicious activity and my account is now suspended. I'm now having to wait for another specialist to resolve that issue. And because of that issue, the refund on the two games that were fraudulently bought is on hold because the agent can't process it while the account is suspended. After all of that, I requested to know what the email address had been changed to during the time that my account was hacked, as I want to file a police report at least and give that information out if I can. However, I was told that they could not give that information out for security reasons. In my mind, that email address became part of my account record, did it not? Why wouldn't I have access to that info for my account? The agent literally just gave me back access to my account, I'm obviously the account owner. Overall, I appreciated the help that CS gave me, I've worked that kind of job before, so I understand some of what they go through, but Sony's process for resolving these issues was just kind of a lot of needless waste on my end and infuriating that I don't have access to my own account information. There was some other strange things about the whole experience that I won't go into here, so just be prepared if you ever have to contact Sony about this. Thank you for reading my long rant.