ilinamorato
@ilinamorato@lemmy.world
- Comment on Top D&D designers join Critical Role after quitting Wizards of the Coast 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, I guess that’s pretty subjective overall. In any case, they’re not so great now.
- Comment on Top D&D designers join Critical Role after quitting Wizards of the Coast 2 weeks ago:
Ok, I’m not familiar enough with any of those to know what that means in this context. But in any case, weren’t his contributions to those games all ages ago? M&M in particular came out almost 30 years ago, right?
- Comment on Top D&D designers join Critical Role after quitting Wizards of the Coast 2 weeks ago:
WotC was already pretty awful before the Hasbro acquisition, as I recall.
- Comment on Top D&D designers join Critical Role after quitting Wizards of the Coast 2 weeks ago:
People have been complaining about WotC’s executive meddling in D&D and MTG for as long as I can remember, since before the 1999 Hasbro purchase. D&D 3e, mostly written after WotC acquired TSR but published shortly after Hasbro acquired WotC, was panned so badly that they dropped 3.5 just a couple years later. And 4e (including the first OGL fiasco) happened when Hasbro didn’t care about WotC because they were all-in on the Michael Bay Transformers movie. In fact, up until Stranger Things and Critical Role, Hasbro seems to have considered WotC the “Magic: The Gathering Money Printer” and done most of their meddling on that side of the house.
- Comment on Top D&D designers join Critical Role after quitting Wizards of the Coast 2 weeks ago:
How much do we actually know about what Crawford is like outside of the WotC machine? He might be perfectly competent but held back by executive mismanagement.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
We’re already predisposed toward a bit of iconoclasm just being here instead of Reddit. The “normies” are still elsewhere, so we get it into our heads that the echo chamber around us is the norm, rather than a self-selected group of people for whom Greta Thunberg is a centrist. On those rare occasions that a normie gets here, we find ourselves shocked at how they live their lives.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
Just because not everyone goes through each one doesn’t mean they aren’t stages. Not everyone goes to high school, or doesn’t sleep through the night, or catches a ball thrown from a meter away, or has trouble with adolescent relationships; that doesn’t mean those aren’t stages.
“Stages” are entirely theoretical and hotly debated, and you shouldn’t think of them like video game levels where you have to go through all (or even any) of them. Think of them more like theatrical stages: it’s where the action happens for a time, the set upon which the action of your life occurs. You’re almost always going to be on multiple stages at a time, and the people around you are probably going to be on a different set of them.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
Creepy? No, probably not, but it does present some potential problems: You probably don’t have a whole lot of things in common at this point. You might not be particularly compatible with regard to your friend groups or your desires for your future. You are in a situation where it’s going to be difficult to get on the same level. These are not insurmountable obstacles, but they are potential obstacles.
That said, if you and she are both okay with it—and your daughter, who is clearly someone whose opinion you care about—then have a great time! Don’t have high expectations, but enjoy yourself and see what happens.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
Life definitely can have stages once you’re an adult. Relationships (married/divorced/remarried), family (babies/kids/teenagers/adults), work (entry level/senior/management/retirement). Think about if you’re on the other side of a big party than the other person; then you’re probably on different life stages. Not all of them are weird to date between, but most of them are weird to date across big differences.
- Comment on 4 different "blogs" with the same content? 5 weeks ago:
Definitely fake, imo. They don’t pass the sniff test for me.
-
The design is identical on all four sites, with the exception of the logo. Now, this in and of itself isn’t a smoking gun: the design appears to be the WordPress default design from 2024. But it was the first thing I noticed, and with everything else…
-
The subjects are all the same but the copy is conspicuously different–if you and I were to each write an article about the same ramen, we wouldn’t write the same article, but we would probably come up with a couple of similar sentences or sentence fragments. These are intentionally making an effort to be as different as possible, but with the same title and topic.
-
I checked the Whois of each site you linked, and they’re all registered through Reykjavik despite having nothing to do with Iceland. Three of them are even pointing to the same Cloudflare servers.
-
The relationship between the “writers” and the content here make no sense. I could potentially see the Alabama Delta Gamma chapter posting some of these reviews, but Ninjago? Men’s shirts? Shadow the Hedgehog soft toy? “Evan Feinberg” says that he’s an advocate for “limited government,” and “his” photo is of a white dude, so why is “he” “reviewing” women’s fashion and Korean music? What does Cap City Energy have to do with any of this stuff?
-
By looking into the RSS feed, you can see that most of the articles on a given site were published within the same hour: Evan Feinberg’s articles were all posted between 0800-0900 UTC on June 13, 2024. There are only seconds in between them.
-
Subjective: The content feels very much like slop. Not even current slop, either, but year-ago slop.
-
Also subjective: The Cap City Energy site doesn’t seem to know that “Cap” is probably supposed to be short for “Capital.”
If you look in the Internet Archive, you can see that a few (maybe all?) of them used to be real, legitimate sites. Bama Delta Gamma has an archived version that even links to an Instagram that certainly seems to actually be for a sorority. I think that whoever is behind these waited for a URL to become available, snagged it when it expired, copied some of the details (maybe the logo and some images), then fed it along with a list of topics to an AI, and plugged the output into a WordPress site.
-
- Comment on Gaming Website Polgyon Sold To Valnet And Hit With Layoffs 2 months ago:
There’s also a complete rehash of the Wikipedia article about the game, its release and reception, and maybe even a slideshow of memes before you get to the “No confirmation” part. And then a list of all the times the developers have said, “yeah, if they want to do another one, we’d take their money.”
- Comment on Gaming Website Polgyon Sold To Valnet And Hit With Layoffs 2 months ago:
Looking through their portfolio, I honestly don’t know how XDA and Android Police maintain their quality levels. Everything else is Taboola-level click farming junk.
- Comment on Gaming Website Polgyon Sold To Valnet And Hit With Layoffs 2 months ago:
Mass layoffs, though. That doesn’t usually presage a great time in a news site’s life.
- Comment on Gaming Website Polgyon Sold To Valnet And Hit With Layoffs 2 months ago:
Aftermath is the only gaming site I really pay attention to anymore. I still have Kotaku and PCGamer in my RSS reader, but I don’t really read any of their articles.
- Comment on The BBC deepfaked Agatha Christie to teach a writing course 2 months ago:
Deepfakes predate the current AI craze, if I recall the timelines correctly.
- Comment on The BBC deepfaked Agatha Christie to teach a writing course 2 months ago:
The editor of The Verge tends to be fairly neutral-to-negative about AI, at least on his podcast.
- Comment on I hate this image because idiots will see it, not understand what its showing, and make up some crazy shit based on it. 4 months ago:
Yeah that outer edge is called the firmament.
I mean, it’s not the worst name for the CMB.
- Comment on Chat, is this true? 4 months ago:
Looks like “not exactly,” but it’s cool nonetheless:
- Comment on Indiana is a great place to hire child labor 4 months ago:
Wrong Christmas color.
- Comment on Indiana is a great place to hire child labor 4 months ago:
You’re not wrong.
- Comment on Indiana is a great place to hire child labor 4 months ago:
Hoosier here. We’re trying to fix it. But guess which party has had a supermajority in state government for decades?
- Comment on Balatro wins formal appeal to reclassify poker game as PEGI 12 4 months ago:
In college, circa 2005, I played about three hours of WoW during a free weekend. I installed the game (from a CD!), started it up, and played for an afternoon. When I got up to go to the bathroom, I realized that I was at a crossroads: I could either make this game my life for the next indeterminate number of years, or I could leave it behind forever. Those were literally the only two options for me. My brain would accept no third option.
I deleted the game and went out to get pizza. Since then I’ve never picked it up again, and now it’s so big and unwieldy I’m not even tempted anymore. But that was a touch and go situation for those few hours.
A few games have given me similar pulls over the years, but I’ve gotten better about it. Balatro is the most recent one to grab me, since I got it only when it came to mobile. And yeah, it grabbed me pretty hard, but I also know that once I unlock all the Jokers I’m unlikely to go much further in it.
- Comment on Balatro wins formal appeal to reclassify poker game as PEGI 12 4 months ago:
Addictive, yes, but non-extractive. There’s a big huge difference.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 months ago:
It’s an illusion. Not that many people care (which was the problem in November), but the ones who do are loud about it.
The issue is one of education. The Republicans have been spewing non-stop misinformation, and the populace is too uneducated to understand the difference. When people actually know what’s going on and understand it, they overwhelmingly oppose conservative policies. Which is why Project 2025 wants to take a sledgehammer to public education.
If Democrats diverted all of their advertising budget toward remedial education of the electorate, I think they’d find themselves in a much better state in 2028.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 months ago:
It’s not exactly 0%. Their ineptitude is still fully on display, and that’s always been our greatest hope. But it is pretty bleak, and pinning our future on the hopes that the other side makes a mistake only makes it bleaker.
- Comment on You'll never see it coming 5 months ago:
Also true!
- Comment on You'll never see it coming 5 months ago:
I don’t believe it’s unfalsifiable, its just fundamentally true. You cant observe yourself in any reality where you are incapable of onserving yourself.
As you note, it’s the only logically-consistent framework through which to view the world we live in. But are there other ways in which the universe could’ve formed that we might be able to falsify it?
Imagine two universes, A and B. They’re entirely disconnected and independent from one another; no matter or energy can flow in either direction, except that through some exotic process, a small window exists in universe A through which universe B can be observed without affecting it in any way (Heisenbergs HATE this!). Universe A is just as our own is, including our existence, with the single exception of this window. In universe B, however, the laws of physics do not permit carbon atoms to form in stars, so no sentient life has ever formed.
In those universes, then, the Anthropic Principle would be falsified; as the residents of Universe A could observe a universe in which they could not have arisen.
Or consider a Boltzmann Brain (or a simulated universe). Were we to discover that our existence was of either nature, that too would falsify the Anthropic Principle, as we are not actually observing a universe.
Anyway. It’s not falsifiable in our reality, as far as we can tell. But we can imagine ways in which it could be falsifiable.
- Comment on You'll never see it coming 5 months ago:
I’ve never heard of that name for it, though the “observation selection” principle might be what you’re thinking of. They’re synonyms.
- Comment on You'll never see it coming 5 months ago:
There’s a principle, I can’t remember the name of it, but basically it goes that the universe exists in such a way as to support life, because if it didn’t, there would be no one around to discuss the ways in which the universe might have formed.
The Anthropic Principle. It’s a mind-bender, especially because it’s fundamentally unfalsifiable.
- Comment on You'll never see it coming 5 months ago:
We don’t really know what consciousness is, so we can’t really be sure that it is subject to entropy.