I think people know, they just don’t give a shit because they think they’re entitled to have art and artists are arseholes for not giving them exactly what they want

When you put something out there, you allow for the possibility that people will see your work and incorporate it into their mental catalog of art and artistic process

…except when a person is doing it, they’re doing their own thing to it. They take an idea or two and filter it through their own lens and stylise it

Think about it like this - when you do data scraping, you’re still interpreting the results. You’re looking at the data and going ‘ok from this I can draw X and Y conclusions based on this and that’. AI art is like if we removed you from the process - we just shoved all the data into a black box and it goes ding “X is Y”. If you asked it why that’s so, it wouldn’t be able to tell you. You can’t see how it works so you have no idea if it’s reasoning makes scientific sense. It would not be admissible in a paper.

If you pirate shit then you have no ground to stand on for complaining about AI training.

…don’t most people kinda agree you don’t pirate from small artists where piracy is actually hurting them? There’s like, honour along thieves when it comes to piracy, and this is stepping all over the little guy who’s actually hurt by this just to get your grubby little hands on something you think you’re entitled to

Wordpress even has activitypub integration now! Hooray! Here’s hoping automattic do good on their word and bring it to their other projects like Tumblr

Also as much as I like gimp, it is unfortunately not that widely used due to super specialised and hard to use compared to the industry standard juggernaut that is adobe’s creative suite. You’re probably going to get laughed at in any professional industry if you suggest seriously using it.

The closest thing to what you’re talking about is grafting, but that’s a specific thing that only works on certain species and I don’t think can “glue” two entire halves of a tree back together, maybe just a branch at the most if you’re very careful and lucky

It’s why if you plant a seed from a random apple from the supermarket, you’re very probably not going to get a tree that produces that apple. Most commerical fruit trees (including ones from your local garden centre) tend to have a bottom half that’s hardy and resistant, and then a top half which was “glued” on that actually provides the fruit you want. The bottom half controls the genetic material in the seed, but the top half controls what the fruit will look like.

On the other hand, you can totally glue a snapped cactus back together, provided it hasn’t been too long and the two halves aren’t too damaged.

Congratulations you’re now a snake

It’s not a dedicated game and idk if servers even run these anymore, but the original popular “battle royal” was minecraft hunger games servers and they did kinda run like that - no stats obviously, but throwing you empty into a bounded world where you’d have to survive and craft and kill monsters and each other. I think some of them might’ve even had like your sponsor drops where you’d get potions or enchanted stuff

I want a modern difficult farming Sim with an in depth relationship mechanic and no fucking combat. The old harvest moon games are good, but I’ve kinda played them to death and for some idiotic reason they removed stuff like rival marriages from the remakes. Rune factory has combat, and so does stardew valley (in addition to having a relationship mechanic that’s just, really shallow), and it seems like all the farming Sim games that don’t have combat are like baby’s first farm Sim and are all cutesy and aren’t very difficult

Like it feels like this would be an easy thing to do, right?

There’s the sonic racing series which has a few ports on PC. I haven’t played them on PC, but I’ve played them on the switch and they’re pretty Mario kart-ish both in playstyle and mascot racer charm.

Also you can play as The Heavy.

Yeah if you live in like, Germany or France

More like Europe: sorry we don’t ship there lol. Oh we do? Hope you like paying twice the price for shipping that takes two weeks if you’re lucky

So’s Norway - quite a few places on the west coast (the most inhabited non-Oslo part of the country) rely on the fact that the gulf stream keeps them unusually warm for their latitude

I’m already seeing things that would normally grow fine out in the garden suffer from abnormally late and early frosts and mild summers. Rip my tomatos and onions. Everyone’s complaining about 20+ degree springs in the mainland while I’m screaming that it’s still snowing in late May.

My great grandad got a couple of cockatoos when he was in his 20s right after ww2 and they still managed to outlive him. Only by a few weeks mind you - poor things starved themselves to death out of grief after he died. He told us not to worry about rehoming them because he knew they wouldn’t be able to take the loss of loosing him at such an age.

He only had them because he took up conservation work and they’re just, native to Australia. They lived out in a big aviary he’d built with trees and bushes and even a water feature along with other birds he ended up aquiring. I adored those birds, but I genuinely can’t understand how or why you’d keep such a big beautiful intelligent bird as a pet in a cage on the other side of the world and it always weirds me out when I see these birds I grew up watching roam free eating all our damn lemons in someone’s house as a pet. It’s like if you an American saw someone keeping a racoon as a pet.

A cheap fountain pen like a Lamy safari. Maybe some brightly coloured ink too.

Growing up I loved pens and my dad had some vintage Watermans he used all the time which were unquestionably Cool Pens but also really “fancy” so I wasn’t allowed to touch them, and we just didn’t know that way cheaper and less fiddly fountain pens existed because all of his came from the op shop with ink from borders and not an actual pen store. 8 year old me would’ve been estatic that not only do easier to use cheaper options exist, they’re bright yellow and also you can put any colour in them, not just boring black.

…I feel like everyone answering “Powerball numbers” or “apple stocks” is completely missing the spirit of the question

Nearly - a single bacteria is a bacterium. There’s some Latin rule going on here but I’m not sure I’d reccomend going into those weeds

That’s because it’s actual cult propaganda. As in “it’s literally made by the church of Scientology, based on the founding literature of Scientology as written by Scientologist leader L Ron Hubbard, by Scientologist actors”

In a vacuum? Yeah it’s cheesy sci fi. With context? Hoo boy…

You could probably back this up by looking at the alcoholism rates in Scandinavia (especially Norway and Sweden)

Scandinavia had their own prohibition and still to this day have a strict 18/21+ drinking age with booze only being sold during very specific hours (and never on Sundays or religious holidays), with anything above I think 12% only available at the government run bottle shop

Demons are real and they live inside your computer delivering your emails and internet. Before computers they used to screw around with physicists and mathematians and break their theories but now they’re too busy to do that anymore.

Not religious in the slightest, my dad just saw me asking what Beastie on his BSD machine’s screensaver was and decided to fuck with me when he realised I didn’t know what a demon (in any sense of the word) was

It’s one of those things that feels really obvious if you cook a lot of east/south Asian dishes - shrimp sauce and mushroom soy sauce have a pretty similar aftersmell to them because they’re so concentrated

Niche hobby website from the 90s that’s both really useful and still updated (somewhat) - the Parker pen penography. Look at all those pens! Genuinely the most useful source of info on the topic of old Parkers that isn’t a big hefty coffee table book. Most of it probably isn’t too interesting to non-fountain pen people, but there’s some articles about the history of Parker and their decline that might be interesting if you like economics and buisness (like the one about the Itala

Stardew valley - it sells itself as a harvest moon inspired farming Sim but as someone who grew up playing a lot of harvest moon, I really can’t help but be super disappointed in it. Harvest moon games have a complex and more importantly moving relationship system - you start to go after one marriage candidate, the others will pair themselves up and have kids alongside you. People move in and out and you need to really get to know people in order to progress the game and unlock things. Stardew valley? Super flat in comparison. All the candidates you don’t marry feel super flat once you lock yourself out of them. There’s not much locked behind friendship so there’s less reason to get out there and really work on befriending everyone.

Also fucking combat - it’s a supposedly nice and peaceful farming Sim, yet combat is an unavoidable part of the game. I didn’t sign up for combat! It’s not fun it’s just annoying.

I’d also add to the discussion that the reason why Norway (and I think Iceland too) eat it as “tradition” isn’t because it’s some sacred animal or traditional or something, it’s because up until very recently both countries were dirt poor and neither country is particularly great when it comes to arable land that you can grow veggies or animals on. Whale is a physically big source of red meat that lives not that far off the coast, and has tons of other uses besides food too. They’re also small countries so using them as a food source isn’t that damaging (hell I’m pretty sure out of the entire Norwegian fishing industry the whaling part is probably the least environmentally destructive part of it)

Also grilled whale is like, really nice. It’s like if tuna was a red meat.