Mossy Feathers (She/They)

Nothing new here has been said except that enginetrap is gonna be at FWA. I’m exciteeeeeddddd. I fucking love their art.

Sure. Just make sure there’s a gate for marginalized communities who are trying to get out.

I have a lot of trans Texas friends, few of us have any decent options to leave. A fun fact: Texas ranks 2nd when it comes to % of trans people. Yet we have no voice, and a big part of that is thanks to how fucked the Texas voting districts are. That’s why a trans person in Dallas can be decently safe, but a gay person in Tyler will get their knee kicked in by a neo-nazi in broad daylight (this actually happened to someone I know, they have to walk with a cane now and they aren’t even 21); yet cities barely end up with any blue politicians at a state or federal level.

A) the game’s rating would skyrocket as it’d almost universally get upgraded to an AO rating or equivalent (not sure if that’s actually something they care about though)

B) while not technically illegal afaik, there are a number of countries that would almost certainly ban the game if it showed children being killed. My understanding is that’s why child deaths occasionally show up in movies and TV, but tend to be avoided like the plague in video games.

I wrote this and then realized I misread the post. Wew.

deleted by creator

shrug Idk if it’s really that insane. Tbh I’m not convinced the hype isn’t being manufactured. I have a cousin who’s a pretty bog standard, flavor-of-the-month gamer, and he’s said nothing about GTA VI.

Not saying you’re necessarily wrong, I guess, just that something seems off.

No, I’m honestly surprised. I’ve barely heard anything about GTA VI. Seriously. I don’t care about it, none of my friends have talked about it despite being the kinda game that they’d be into, and I’ve only seen one or two articles on it.

You sure it’s that highly anticipated? My observation is that people have gotten really sick and tired of AAA games, and this is a shift that’s occurred since RDR2 came out. Very few of the people I know still regularly play AAA games, and those who do almost never buy them on launch. I haven’t seen anywhere near the same amount of hype for GTA VI as I saw for GTA IV or GTA V.

You’re accusing me of being disingenuous? Maybe you’re the one who’s buying into the hype and overestimating public interest. Or perhaps the true answer is somewhere in the middle. Who knows. I was not intentionally downplaying your favorite series though.

Wait, do people still get excited for GTA? I thought GTA V online killed a lot of goodwill for the series.

The number one thing I’ve been missing are Spotify jams. Spotify also has a wider selection of music, but tbh it’s rare for Spotify to have something that Qobuz doesn’t. Spotify also has lyrics, playlist folders, and audiobooks; though tbh I haven’t checked to see if Qobuz has the latter.

I love Qobuz. Also for those of you trying to boycott US goods, it’s a French company. I just wish it had the same adoption and features as Spotify.

I mean, they could introduce a new character who takes shelter in a mysterious, dilapidated research facility during the 7 hour war and finds themselves in a hellish labyrinth of puzzles. Maybe said character finds Chell in the field and helps release her (there’s some speculation Chell never made it out, but was actually in some kind of biosphere based on some in-game hints).

Throw it against the ground to see how high it’ll bounce.

Honestly? I’d rather have Bowser over any real world dictator. Bowser actually gives half a fuck about his minions and domain, while looking sexy as hell in the process. That’s a step up from the “real deal”.

I’m still kinda looking forward to the Mario game where Mario goes after Peach only to discover, at the end of the game, that Peach is actually in love with Bowser and that Mario just committed mass murder out of a misogynistic, misplaced belief that Peach can’t defend herself or pick her own partners.

Yeah. It’s one of the few things the Bible is fairly consistent about, along with golden calf/bronze bull imagery. I’m pretty sure there’s a historical religious explanation for why the Bible consistently referenced gold/bronze cattle, but I find it fascinating and kinda sad that they’re so blatantly worshipping something that the Bible consistently says is wrong. Like, there’s a lot of stuff in the Bible where it says one thing and then later says, “actually, wait, just kidding lol”; but it consistently talks about not worshipping idols while using cattle imagery.

Yeah, uh, last I checked American territories don’t have the ability to vote in federal elections. Someone from Puerto Rico can’t vote for the US president despite being governed by the US. It’s one of many bullshit systems designed to keep the GOP-Democrat right-wing ratchet going.

Contrary to that Europe doesn’t have one cohesive identity, your example of Orban is multiple country borders removed from me personally.

Orban would probably be best compared to a state governor. Just a reminder that Texas is literally larger than the largest EU country with some space leftover for a city-state or two.

The idea that the US has a cohesive identity is just… unbelievably ignorant. I’m actually amazed that you believe that considering that no one in their right mind would say the same thing about places like Africa, Europe, or South America.

I didn’t have a choice to be born here, and, had I had the option, I wouldn’t have defaced a Native American monument in the first place. This is on top of the fact that the US is currently trying to find ways of disowning/executing me (trans).

Quite honestly, maybe I shouldn’t be offended by being lumped in with other Americans, because maybe I’m not actually being included in these kinds of sweeping statements. However, it rubs me the wrong way when people imply that Americans as a whole are responsible for the things our government has and is doing.

Again, I didn’t ask to be born in the US. I don’t like that I’m “American”. No one asked me, please don’t lump people like me in with the others.

I mean, they have closed caption devices you can borrow. They fit into the cupholder and display captions for you.

Gender euphoria just be like that sometimes.

I want Hitman but with Mr. Bean.

Eh, I personally think it is, but you have to temper your expectations. It’s absolutely not Artificial General Intelligence, nor is it as flexible or capable of rapid learning as human intelligence (or likely most forms of living intelligence in general). However, I’d challenge the notion that it lacks intelligence entirely.

AI still “learns” from what you shove into it; it’s still creating algorithms to adapt to the information stream(s) it’s being exposed to which is not unlike how the human brain is believed to function. As such, I personally view it to be intelligent, but not anywhere near as intelligent as people think it is, and absolutely not in the way people want it to be.

One of the big differences that I see is that, afaik, AI is unable to learn while it’s running. You have to train it, run it, train it again based on user input, run it, train it again on more user input, and so on. Humans are more efficient at learning when they sleep and take breaks, but are still capable of learning things without “shutting down”, so-to-speak (not that we ever truly shut down outside of death, but that’s tangential).

Another difference is that, unlike “natural intelligence”, AI ends up being hyper focused on a specific task. It’s a bit like grabbing an ice cream scoop and removing a very specific part of the brain, let’s say the part responsible for imagining images, and then letting people interface with that alone. Yeah, it’s not gonna be good at parsing text because that’s not what it was designed to do. That’s a different part of the brain. The one you’re playing with right now is only good at visualizating images, so you’re gonna get pretty images, but good luck with getting it to do proper text, understanding proper body language, etc.

Finally, AI hallucinates like crazy. This is one where I’m not sure if we’re really that different from AI (I’ll explain in a moment); but it is a big issue when it comes to try to get AI to factually report information or perform logic tasks. You can ask an AI what 2+2 is and get 4 one day, 5 the next, 3 on Saturdays and then -2027346 on Christmas.

But wait! Doesn’t that make it unintelligent?

No.

Going back to the previous statement about AI being hyper-focused, it just means you’re not interacting with a part of the brain capable of logic; you’re interacting with something else. Maybe the speech center, idk.

However, there’s another element to this where AI doesn’t have a persistent “reality anchor” like we do. To an AI, fact and fiction are purely conceptual because it doesn’t truly exist in our world, it’s off in its own little digital world. Furthermore, the experiences it can gain from the training set are heavily limited compared to what living creatures experience. We have a constant stream of information that reminds us about what is real, who we are, what things look like, how things move and so on; and we get that data stream in 3 dimensions (arguably 2.5, but I digress) instead of 2. It’s like expecting a plant to thrive when given a trickle of water when it normally grows exclusively in a swamp. We ourselves tend to begin hallucinating when our senses become cut off from the outside world because our brains make up stimuli when the expected stimuli is missing. So… I’m not sure if the hallucinations are totally unreasonable, unrealistic or all that different from how we’d behave if subjected to the same environment; but at the very least it’s something that makes AI appear unintelligent.

That’s not to say that AI is a good thing or that it lives up to the hype. Fuck AI for being wildly overhyped, overused, and destroying people’s livelihoods in a world where “earning for a living” is still required for some god-forsaken reason (just a reminder that the phrase, “earn a living” implies you don’t deserve to live if you aren’t able to make money or have someone doing it for you). At the same time, however, it kinda is intelligent. I think people are just expecting way more from it that it’s capable of doing. It’s like people expect intelligence to manifest in grayscale when it’s more like RGBA or something.

Edit: sorry about the massive wall of text; I was fascinated with AI and its potential for a while, which meant it lived rent-free in my head at a series of philosophical questions about things like intelligence and what it means for humans that something designed to function as a series of virtual neurons would behave so similarly yet differently to humans. These were the kinds of conclusions I came to.