if you ever see one of these dudes on the subway or whatever you gotta go like "ARE YOU RECORDING US?? WHY ARE YOU RECORDING US? IS IT FOR THE NEWS? I DIDN'T FILL OUT A CONSENT RELEASE" and they'll say no and then you can pull out "OH SO IT'S FOR YOU PERSONALLY HUH" and watch everybody get worried

Trump really ought to walk through the Senate chamber buck naked tomorrow and demand that Thune conduct a vote on whether he’s clothed. The vote would be 52-47 yea, with Murkowski joining the Democrats as a no and Collins saying she’s too concerned to vote.

Point blank in broad daylight

Must read on the scale of the Musk threat. "Musk is playing a crucial role in the global fascist resurgence. He represents at once one of its loudest megaphones, the organizing space for its paramilitary wings, a fifth column of sorts inside the apparatus of many states, and the movement’s bank."

me @ the US government and DHL seizing and destroying packages with doll related HS codes

Four Senate Democrats voted for the proposed $1.15 trillion defense budget, including: - Jack Reed (RI) - Jeanne Shaheen (NH) - Angus King (ME) - Jacky Rosen (NV)

Japanese developer says Steam rejected an all-ages visual novel demo after flagging even a pitch-black shower scene as sexual  https://automaton-media.com/en/news/japanese-developer-says-steam-rejected-an-all-ages-visual-novel-demo-after-flagging-even-a-pitch-black-shower-scene-as-sexual/

The Nakamura-kun finale was very cute. Glad the manga got such a thoughtful and loving adaptation.

This is legitimately one of the stupidest decisions ever when Gundam X has very recent and very good professionally made English subs that Bamco has already been using.

Admittedly, I think the “fake fan” discourse is dumb as shit and isn’t very useful framing for any kind of productive discussion. But I really don’t like that we have to pretend that engaging with art/media yourself isn’t meaningfully different than consuming it pre-chewed by someone else.

I don’t really understand how there are people who are vehemently anti-piracy but are into watching monetized full streams/LPs of games

Thinking about this unnamed US official's quote from yesterday

I was thinking about doing homebrew stuff to my old PS2 since it had the network adapter from FFXI in it already but… I think I donated it because I had a fat PS3 orz

Holy shit. The government is conceding it willl pay some amount of fees to the Broadview Six. They are DESPERATE to stop further inquiry into the case. Never heard of such a thing.

We did order more fans but when it's over 33 degrees in the library I can barely move or think. Taking my breaks in the parasites room which has AC. Ah, to be a parasite in a room with AC...the dream...

Tuesday at work

Personally I think it’s really cool that all the people in charge of the big video game companies seem to hate video games

Game File: Microsoft already planned to shut down or split with Ninja Theory when Senua was announced. "The thinking was that the promise of a newly announced game would help draw investor interest in the studio" www.gamefile.news/p/xbox-studi...

After hearing feedback, we disabled downloads for machine translated content. Downloads are available upon request for those wanting to use these patches as bases for a fully human-done script. This was the primary motivator of serving this content, and it is not our intent to go into AI discourse

none of this is true and the place where this is going is potentially very awful

They hate gender studies for the same reason they hate legitimate journalism: They don’t like people pointing out what they’re doing.

it's pretty on the nose for modern american life that a company that doesn't really do anything at all is on track to be the biggest company in america

I heroically foiled an alleged alien plot to kidnap the entire population of St. Paul. Trust me bro.

Maybe the dumbest bit that still seems to have purchase in American politics is “that really rich guy can’t be bought!” I assure you, his wealth is *proof* that he can be bought, despite a weird elite class of Americans who want you to believe they won their fortunes in single combat or something

"ai can't write good stories, but it's useful for concept art" "ai slop can't replace real artists, but it's fine for programming" "ai can't write maintainable code, but it's good for translations" everyone assumes their own field cannot be replaced by ai, but fields they understand less can be

You'd think there should really be laws and rules saying you can't use national parks as a commercial billboard, or federal resources generally to pimp a company's brand, and especially not the military. Good news: we already have those laws! Bad news: the regime in power is literally lawless.

Part of the calculated desecration here isn't just symbolic. It's that there a dozen ways this is already explicitly illegal, black letter no-question unambiguous statutory prohibition, but he can flaunt how nobody's going to tell him no or do anything about it.

this is doubly funny because if you need mood-setting images for that particular place and time period *the entire Rijksmuseum catalogue* is available online to photobash or paint over, THERE'S LITERALLY NO EXCUSE

my god

People in power, as it turns out, have power. Nobody is pointing a gun at Satya Nadella's head and making him strip Microsoft for parts to feed to Copilot.

Several people have expressed this idea to me and like, no actually the c-suite at these companies has enormous leeway to set strategic priorities; and to the extent that "investors" demand AI returns, it's because those same c-suite executives have propagandized AI returns.

evil people tbh

anyway, you should read this important piece about how elon is, in fact, a killer:

no big deal, just elon musk saying he would've killed journalists at @theverge.com if he was, in fact, a killer

so many people approach gen AI from the angle of what specific kind of work they don't care about and thus are okay to replace, because surely they don't take any REAL work

Back before truck-kun or just randomly dying in your sleep was the norm for being sent to another world, we had being flushed down the toilet.

Looking forward to en nakamura-kun fans crashing out this week because they rage baited themselves MTLing vague impressions from the prescreen

I see Kyou Kara Maou propaganda is doing numbers on the bad site. Good.

There is no argument for machine translation that can't also be used to justify AI art / writing / whatever else you like. Stop being a fucking hypocrite just because machine translation is useful to you and you don't understand / don't value the work of translators.

Fuck off, no it isn't. Stop throwing translators under the bus.

love to elevate story in games as the most artistic aspect of the medium but then also treat the actual text as basically disposable what an embarrassing and ignorant thing to say

Monthly rent has increased 37% since 2019. From 2019 to 2024, rent increased 55% faster than household income. www.stephensemler.com/p/nearly-1-i...

that's very funny and also legitimately evil shit

Tony Bourdain taught us all that a place is full of good food, good people, and good experiences despite very shitty politics and I think it’s kind of classically American to have thought we were excluded from that Venn diagram

I can never get over how sad and pathetic it is that an entire political party has just been subsumed into a personality cult around the biggest asshole loser in the world

Every so often, some washed up sitcom dude do this sort of thing where they pretend that they made some truly edgy and controversial comedy that couldn't be made today, and it's just like... you're saying this about THE OFFICE?

did you guys know they still allowed good news