We actually just got our yellow pages in the mailbox last week or the week before, I think. I was baffled. I was like they still MAKE these?

Shit was no thicker than an old GamePro magazine. Just the businesses who are still buying ads I guess.

Met my husband playing an MMORPG. It grew naturally from regular chatting in guild to hanging out and doing random stuff in-game together to feelings. We've been married for over 15 years now.

The trick was that neither of us was looking for romance and treated each other as friends until we gradually came to realize we really liked each other's company more than a friendly amount. I think that's the thing a lot of people get wrong; people get so worried about their love lives that they forget to just treat others as people instead of as potential partners.

What's the purpose of your research? Curiosity? A student thesis? A professional paper? Are you a dev actively working on improving the fediverse?

This. They should be going through insurance for this.

Of course, the insurance rates would rise, and they'd still be passing on that increase to the residents, but residents would be slightly less bitchy about it since the extra layers of opacity would make it seem like "just more of the usual greed and inflation."

Drama between Hexbear and ShitJustWorks. Have some popcorn.

It's specific to Xi Jinping. Chinese memelords started it in ~2013, and the country's censors were so offended by it that the Streisand Effect kicked in.

Bethesda the publisher does things differently than Bethesda the developer.

As a dev, they know their modding communities keep their games alive long, long past their expiration dates and will fuck with them as little as they possibly can - this takes them from games to household names to legends that everyone knows.

As a publisher pushing products that aren't intended to be modded, they drink the koolaid.

Astarion's mocap in particular is just excellent. He's so deeply weird and it's completely appropriate. I love how during most normal gameplay, his whole body is constantly on the edge between breaking into raucous laughter or total exasperation. Kudos to the actor(s) and techs that put the whole package together.

They do pay me for it actually, in in-game currency, as part of the same content creator program they use to reward fan artists and streamers and such. In the lonely "why bother" moments, it's all that keeps me editing.

Framing this solely as fear is extremely disingenuous. Speaking only for myself: I'm not against the development of AI or LLMs in general. I'm against the trained models being used for profit with no credit or cut given to the humans who trained it, willing or unwilling.

It's not even a matter of "if you aren't the paying customer, you're the product" - massive swaths of text used to train AIs were scraped without permission from sources whose platforms never sought to profit from users' submissions, like AO3. Until this is righted (which is likely never, I admit, because the LLM owners have no incentive whatsoever to change this behavior), I refuse to work with any site that intends to use my work to train LLMs.

You're posting "so what, who cares" on a community specifically dedicated to watching the reddit implosion. What do you think would be more appropriate content for this community?

(If your answer is "nothing, let it go" then maybe you should block the community instead of what's tantamount to complaining that it exists?)

There's something to be said for putting the blame where it belongs, which is likely not on you.

If your friend did something illegal that could harm others, it needed to be handled. Period. It's a natural response that any decent person should take. The blame is not on the reporter, it's on your friend for doing something so bad you felt compelled to report it.

And a bonus fuck him for putting you in that position where you now have to wrestle with self-doubt. That's not a good friend, leaving you to bear the emotional burden of his actions.