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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: December 31st, 2023

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  • There’s a scene in the game where the character is taking a shower. The shower stall is glass, and the glass is frosted from around ankle height to neck height.

    I haven’t played the game myself, just came across the scene on YouTube several years ago, so I don’t know how justifiable the choice of the scene is in the first place. At least, from a technical point of view, it makes sense to me that they modeled the full nude body so that the frosted glass would blur what we “see” in a realistic way. It’s a lot easier to model something and then have the glass blur it, instead of directly modelling the blurred version for example.

    Personally I think most of the creep factor comes from the fact that this character is explicitly modeled after a live human being who presumably didn’t sign up for that.



  • So, a few things:

    • many of the men accused have stated that the husband pitched the idea as “this is a kink she really enjoys, being drugged and then having sex with strangers”. (Of course they never pretend to have met her in person beforehand to get her consent for the whole thing in the first place)
    • there are some that have said “what’s the big deal? It’s his wife, he gets to decide to lend her out to his friends.” (!)

    I don’t know how many of the first group are being honest, but the existence of both can give you an idea of how bad our culture used to be towards rape, and still is to a large extent.

    There’s a pretty striking moment of archival footage, from the 60s or 70s I think, of some french dude being asked in the street “and you, have you ever raped a woman?” And his response is a very matter-of-fact “well, of course!”.

    People don’t want to believe that rapists are, in many ways, just ordinary people. So they both refuse to see it in others, and refuse to see themselves as capable of even contributing to the problem. Hopefully this can be the wakeup call many men here in France need to realize they must push back when their friends make rape jokes, for ex.














  • Some choice excerpts:

    Problems arose immediately for the A-TEAM nationwide. In California’s Salinas Valley, 200 teenagers from New Mexico, Kansas and Wyoming quit after just two weeks on the job. “We worked three days and all of us are broke,” the Associated Press quoted one teen as saying. Students elsewhere staged strikes. At the end, the A-TEAM was considered a giant failure and was never tried again.

    “These [high school students] had the words and whiteness to say what they were feeling and could act out in a way that Mexican-Americans who had been living this way for decades simply didn’t have the power or space for the American public to listen to them,” [Stony Brook University history professor Lori A. Flores] says. “The students dropped out because the conditions were so atrocious, and the growers weren’t able to mask that up.”

    She says the A-TEAM “reveals a very important reality: It’s not about work ethic [for undocumented workers]. It’s about [the fact] that this labor is not meant to be done under such bad conditions and bad wages.”

    And what one dude who went through the program as a 17 year old has to say about it now:

    But he says the experience also taught them empathy toward immigrant workers that Carter says the rest of the country should learn, especially during these times.

    “There’s nothing you can say to us that [migrant laborers] are rapists or they’re lazy,” he says. "We know the work they do. And they do it all their lives, not just one summer for a couple of months. And they raise their families on it. Anyone ever talks bad on them, I always think, ‘Keep talking, buddy, because I know what the real deal is.’ "

    My reading is that it failed because there was no political will to actually provide for local-born farmers any more than immigrants. And as such, it was doomed to fail from the start.





  • the police say they are targeting the criminals responsible but cannot “arrest their way out of the problem”. They also say manufacturers and tech firms have a bigger role to play.

    Even though I fully expect the police here aren’t doing as much as they could (I mean come on, are they expecting phones to come with wiimote hand straps?) , I’m at least glad their public rhetoric is that they can’t “arrest their way out of the problem”.

    I imagine that’s poor compensation when you’ve just had your phone snatched, however.


  • The audacity to tout classism and ableism as reasons as to why people should “get to” use LLMs for their “write a novel in a month” challenge…

    Even when someone’s inability to write a novel in a month is because of their class or disability, I somehow doubt they want to let a machine write their novel for them. I mean, it’s not like NaNoWriMo is a way to put food on the table or something, right?!!

    This feels like the arguments Mid journey fellators fanboys were spouting a year ago (or has it been two?) on how not everyone can afford a school of fine arts 🙄


  • Their starting aside is pretty great as well;

    And I’m using that term throughout this post because it’s the commonly accepted descriptor, but we all know it’s not really artificial intelligence, right? I also want to distinguish it from actually-useful and ethically-produced technology like what gets used in the medical field to help humans examine and analyze impossibly huge datasets in the service of doing things like curing cancer. We’re talking here about the plagiarism machines like ChatGPT, everything it underpins, and all of its conceptual mirrors.

    Leave no wiggle room for the AI sycophants.