Training is great and everything, but a starter bird wouldn’t win in a matchup with any fully evolved mon, let alone a legendary.

Ironically I was just thinking “like what if evolution trees were more fleshed out and went further, so some filler trash like pidgey ends up having a path to turn into the legendary birds or something comparable.” And the more I thought about how, mechanically, that would work I came to the ironic conclusion that instead of pokemon being looter-shooter weapons, they should be more like the weapons from Monster Hunter in having trees and upgrades.

Then again all of the Pokemon values they express in the series falls apart when you look at the fact that it’s possible to trade a Pokemon, and there’s an incentive to do so. It really fucked me up as a kid seeing ash trade his Butterfree and then later feeling sad when Butterfree left on his own accord and was sad. Pokemon are depicted as sentient and it’s bizarre at this point they still incentivize trading with the tagline: Gotta Catch’em All!

Yeah, that disconnect between how the story is just “they’re real and smart and your friend” and everything else is “so we gotta sell two identical versions of the same game but with different collectables, and we gotta move all these gacha card packs, and…”

It’s frustrating to think about the proposed ideology of Pokemon about stewardship, compassion, and working together when the franchise itself is just that, a franchise.

Tangential to that, it always annoyed me growing up with the media and the games that key to all the stories is the idea of individual pokemon actually being important and growing meaningfully as part of a largely static team, but in the games they’re just disposable type, stat, and move pools that get switched out or binned indefinitely and your static team at the end is a bunch of stuff you caught in the last fifth of the game or less. The one, singular exception to that in my experience was when I caught a shiny vulpix in one of the gym challenges in Sword (of all places), and that became my sweeper for the entire rest of the game and both DLCs, but that’s the most edge case of all edge cases being something that was insanely rare and special in its own right, that was also a very strong and viable pokemon, with nearly perfect stats on top of that.

Like there’s a huge disconnect between the sort of collecting gameplay and the story about growth and whatnot, since you’re basically playing a looter shooter and the pokemon are just new weapon rolls to be evaluated and kept or tossed, and none of the franchise’s mechanical attempts at fixing this have worked because they’re always just limited gimmicks that can’t get in the way of that core looter-shooter progression loop.

Consequently, I’ve always wanted to see something where a given pokemon’s progression is more fluid and has higher peaks than just “this is a one stage low-stat trash mon and that’s all it will ever be, bin” or “this has one mid-tier evolution that comes super early, good early game bruiser and then trash as soon as something better comes along,” as long as you actually invest in it and keep it around. But I don’t think Pokemon could ever do something like that, because that turns it into an RPG where pokemon are mechanically characters instead of weapons and the evolutions or whatever are like classes they prestige into instead of fixed forms.

a situation of using ai and shit like this that is a threat to workers in creative industries.

Isn’t the case here just traditional asset ripping and plagiarism against a notoriously litigious huge corporation? There’s no way AI was involved given the models are all literally just official pokemon meshes with some changes here and there.

It only takes a very small pinch, speaking from experience. Like less than an eighth of a teaspoon will almost eliminate the bitterness in a large mug of coffee, without adding a salty taste.

At least to my tastes, but then I’ll literally eat coffee beans so my scale for that may be a bit skewed, though if you drink black coffee already you’re probably similarly acclimated to it. It wipes out that sort of sour-bitterness coffee can have, which is the specific thing I find unpleasant in black coffee myself.

New bit idea: doing great man theory but it’s about washed up comedians who haven’t actually done anything notable in like 15 years and whose bits have aged extremely poorly.

It was the firefox that came preinstalled in the distro and I only ever ran it from the icon on the panel, but someone else’s advice to install the flatpack version worked so I just swapped to that. Thanks for taking the time to try to help, anyways.

I saw a post of someone testing out nightshade to see what it even does, and apparently it leaves extremely visible distortions on the image that look like a cross between jpeg artifacts and an ocular migraine.

There’s no proof of ai generation being used in palworld itself

Also the timeline for that doesn’t line up. AI generated art was absolute dogshit at the point in the dev cycle where it could have been used, and by the time it reached the “maybe make some concept art to be reimagined as a 3d model” level they’d have to have been in the final stretch towards making it playable. Even now, “AI art” for a 3d game is theoretically using it to upscale, clean up, and detail a rough sketch, something that’s only been done in proof-of-concept things AFAIK.

They did seemingly just straight up rip pokemon 3d models and then change them up in blender though which is extremely funny and literally stealing directly from Nintendo is laudable in almost any circumstance, but they are probably going to get completely fucked in the courts over it, lmao.

That seems to work, thanks.

Linux Mint 21.3, and Firefox is version 121.0.1 with the build id 20240108143603, and is what came already installed in the distro.

Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: ServiceWorker script at https://hexbear.net/service-worker.js for scope https://hexbear.net/ encountered an error during installation.
Uncaught (in promise) NS_ERROR_FILE_ACCESS_DENIED: 

Twitch is the same error message. A private window works for both, safemode doesn’t work for either. So this is, what, a usergroup permissions issue with where it wants to cache something, and the private window avoids that by not trying to write anything?

Didn’t fix it. Actually the problem may be more specific than this: I was able to login, check inbox, and come to this post in firefox just fine, but on the main page the little bear just spins forever and none of the dropdowns work.

fascists and excusing their crimes because ‘they made the trains run on time’

The dumbest part of that is that Mussolini’s policies “made the trains run on time” by placing enormous pressures on the rail workers and eschewing maintenance and safe operating procedures, causing some marginal increase in normal punctuality at the cost of massively increasing deadly accidents and shutdowns from trains derailing.

This is a wild tangent, but for some reason that idea reminds me of the novelization of Myst of all things, where a plot point around the whole “creating worlds by describing them in detail” thing involved the protagonist going into obsessive detail about every minor detail of the setting and being scolded for not being minimalist and exclusively focusing on the functional parts like “there’s air” and “this place is useful and also not on fire or made of poison or some shit like that” by his father who erases the added lines, yielding worlds that are shitty and don’t work right.

For all that it’s a rather on-the-nose allegory for writing and scene setting in general, it’s eerily similar to how stacking the right added details in a prompt can massively impact the entire image, including unrelated parts, in stable diffusion. Like left without them it just sort of fuzzily makes a generic average that might be ok if generic or it might make a limb fold back in on itself, disappear behind a narrow object, and reappear somewhere else entirely like it’s a fucking looney toons gag. But setting up something to painstakingly describe the color and texture of the literal dirt on the ground in the picture can somehow impact and fix the detail and perspective of figures in the scene, like it’s trying to make everything match the intricacy and so not falling into the weird impossible contortion and melting zones.

Open source AI image generator that runs locally on consumer GPUs (best on nvidia, but surprisingly usable even on AMD albeit with worse performance and a bit more work required to make it function). I’ve been using the automatic1111 webui which sets up a local server that you interact with through a browser tab.

I did, and so has everyone I’ve ever warned to not do that exact thing, lmao. Make sure to get back to me on how that goes for you.

There are the super complex ComfyUI setups with conditioning and segmenting and other stuff I don’t understand

That reminds me I should try to get comfyui setup. I’ve just been using auto1111, although that still has weird stuff like cross-attention control which I haven’t even started to fuck with.

the new turbo models that can give you a new wacky image as fast as you can type

Yeah, SDXL Turbo is wild. I’ve heard it’s down to like .1 seconds per image on a high end consumer card, and on my (mid range AMD) card it’s a few seconds. The only downside is the comparative lack of community assets for it (for a variety of reasons), and the lower overall quality than SDXL or SD1.5. Well, that and the fact that SDXL Turbo is apparently proprietary and more strictly controlled than the older models. Still, the fact that a model can generate results as good as that with so few sampling passes is just absurd.

The simplest way to describe them is to imagine the taste and sensation of licking a 9volt battery, and then layer in the scent of an extremely floral perfume but as a flavor. Both of those get toned down when it’s used in food, and the cooked flavor is still a little floral (and hard to pair well with other flavors, I’ve found) but in a more sweet/savory food way if that makes sense.

Do not eat whole szechuan peppercorns on their own, especially not if they’re relatively fresh. They’re good to cook with, and I recommend crushing one up and tasting a small piece of it to see what they do and taste like, but if you just pop a whole one in your mouth and chew it up your entire mouth will go numb, begin overproducing saliva which will just spread the effect and overpowering floral taste around and start it running down your throat, and then you’ll start retching and struggling not to vomit.

They’re a great spice to use, but they’re extremely strong (and have to be, because the numbing chemical in them is heat sensitive and breaks down a bit when cooked, meaning you have to use a lot when cooking to get the effect to come through, not to mention how diluted it gets when mixed into food).

I regularly add whole peppercorns to my soup, and eat them along with the rest of it. Ironically that makes the soup hotter, because I’m extremely desensitized to capsaicin so despite using a very hot curry powder and a lot of hot sauce I notice the heat of the piperine more.