erin (she/her)

We have more than enough resources for more than the world’s population. The problem isn’t overpopulation, it’s manufactured scarcity. Telling people to just have less kids is victim blaming when capitalism requires letting some people starve to maintain the artificial value of products.

I feel no need to be protected in my day to day life. My partner provides love, companionship, empathy, and a listening ear. Sure, some women might care about protection and toughness or whatever you’re on about, but attraction varies from person to person. Most other women I know want to be heard and loved. People are allowed to want to fuck “fragile” men. They can be hot without needing to be “manly.” You’re putting so much stock in traditional gender norms, not realizing that it’s not women that actually care about those. It’s the men that are trying to be that. Some women will, of course, but women aren’t a monolith. Want an example? Timothy Chalamet is very commonly considered to be an extremely attractive actor, and he’s far more androgynous and “fragile,” as you put it, than your traditional masculine ideal. Just as many women might be attracted to any number of different appearances, because people are different! The days of needing a strong man to support us frail women are over. Your insecurities and ideas of masculinity are clouding your judgment.

To answer your question succinctly: No, they aren’t fragile looking, they’re just slim. No, they don’t look “dehumanized,” they look like people. The dehumanization happens in industry, not with their faces. I know people that look similar. Some women find them hot, and want to fuck them, and idolize them, because they are hot! They’re very attractive people, if that aesthetic is what you’re into! If your only metric is how likely they are to win a fight, sure, they probably aren’t at the top of the scale, but the vast majority of people DON’T CARE.

They told you to look into therapy because you have an unhealthy idea of what women are attracted to and what masculinity should be. They called you insecure because you sound insecure (why do women like the weak little boys and not big manly men :(( they look so frail and weak, don’t women know they can’t protect them??). Whether or not that’s how you’re actually thinking, it’s how it comes across. Instead of realizing that some people do like strong men, you took it to a place of jealousy and defensiveness.

TLDR: Different strokes for different folks. Don’t obsess over people you don’t find attractive still being attractive to others, as it isn’t good for your mental health and isn’t a good look.

You can find that information easily. Steam reviews are by region.

If you think that this:

Replace “machine” with “film crew”, “rerun” with “do another take”, and “tweak the prompt” with “provide notes”. If they’re giving notes to a computer or a person doesn’t really change the nature of their work, only the language they use to provide those notes.

is what a director does? You have no clue what you’re talking about. They’re far more involved in the creative process on every level than you understand.

Your question about who AI helps is a valid one. I agree that that’s what’s important about AI use. I use AI in my work, but not to replace human beings, but as a tool to make easy mock ups or test ideas. I find trying to replace human creativity in a way that replaces jobs or the human spark that makes art, art, abhorrent. AI art cannot exist without humans to train on, so humans cannot be fully replaced, but I hope to never see a day where AI takes the positions of well compensated artists leeching off the work of unpaid or underpaid humans.

I’m not suggesting that the director has full responsibility for the art. They are part of a team, and the creative style of a director heavily influences the finished product. You can tell who directed a movie just by watching it. There are very important creative decisions and directions that point the team of more specialized artists in the right direction.

This is not analogous to AI art. That would be like the director of a movie telling a team of interns to cut together clips of other movies as best they see fit, within a general outline of the script. A person using AI to generate art isn’t part of the creative process in the same way; they tell a machine what to do, and decide whether to rerun or tweak the prompt after seeing the result. This takes some small modicum of creativity, but it isn’t creating art. It’s fine for fun, or to use as a stand in tool, or to mock-up designs, but it will never have the creative direction of a human being, or stand on the same level with true masters, regardless of how well it can copy their style. It can’t understand the art.

Directing is an art form of its own. The cinematography, the pacing, the set design, acting, and so much more is all influenced by the director’s decisions. It would be like saying a conductor or a music producer isn’t an artist. Easy to say if you don’t have an understanding of the art form, but dead wrong. There are a ton of creative choices at all levels made by directors, and there’s a reason we’ve been using them in one way or another since we first started performance art. I’ve worked under and beside directors in the past, and I have only the utmost respect for what a good director can do for the art.

A bad director however… I might agree with you.

That certainly is an opinion

My experience is so different, and so are the market statistics. A “forever mouse” is a dumb idea just looking for a subscription cash grab, but the PC mouse market is expanding year over year as more people get desktop computers, and especially for PC gaming, an expanding market in its own right. The customer base of people who use mice might be shrinking in some Linux communities, but stating that across the board is just incorrect.

That’s rather selfish. There is harm, but not to you. You’re okay with hurting other people for your own gain to avoid having one difficult conversation. I can only assume that you wouldn’t feel good if a partner treated you like that, so why do so to them? Either you have a general lack of empathy, lack introspective ability, or are just perfectly okay with the idea of being cheated on, and also the idea of someone else hurting because of your own actions. I’m fascinated, and also recommend you try consensual polyamory next time instead.

Yes. “Cis” is just a description, like “straight” or “white.” Calling someone “cis” is not an insult, but some conservatives take it as such. The common phrase they echo is “I’m not cis, I’m normal.” They’re trying to denormalize trans people by making an inoffensive and common descriptor an insult. The same people sometimes have a problem with being called straight by queer people because they see themselves not as straight, but normal, and anything different is abnormal. In reality, “gay,” “straight,” “trans,” and “cis” are no more abnormal descriptors than calling someone “black,” “white,” “American,” or “tall.” It’s all just “othering” those they perceive as political opponents.

They’re seismically isolated

Or much much longer. It’s not going anywhere. It can’t escape its cask, and outside human intervention the casks won’t be breached. It’s just locked-up metal that gives off some radiation, fully contained within the cask. It isn’t oozing green goo.

The casks waste is stored in would take bunker buster yields to breach.

All the waste a plant ever produces in its lifetime can be contained with ease on site. Waste certainly isn’t the main issue, though it’s portrayed to be. Cost of deployment and staffing are more prohibitive issues, and both are surmountable. I don’t think it’s a bandaid for all power issues, but it’s a powerful tool that should be used more often, not phased out.

“Doesn’t believe in transgenders”

Genuinely funny.

I think your prejudice is blinding you to something that makes good sense in context. I don’t expect to change your mind, or even that I could, but it seems odd to blanket denounce a behavior present throughout North and South America on such a weak premise as “we don’t do it here.” How can you be blind to the use in communicating shared histories in an increasingly multicultural society? I think you’ll find that the same behavior is present in many primarily immigrant nations. The US, Canada, Australia, Brazil, and others. It’s just a shortcut we make because those categories, however arbitrary, mean something to us and allow quicker sharing of information. “America bad” is such a tired argument. Americans may have a generally high opinion of themselves, but I think you’ll find similar behavior in the defensive nature of those that belittle them as well. Humans are humans wherever you go. Step down off your high horse and recognize that maybe a behavior that naturally develops among hundreds of millions of independent people from different backgrounds entirely might be due more to its intrinsic value than some bizarrely specific American thing. Because it isn’t. Americans are just an obvious example of it since they have such an overwhelming presence online.

It’s not about the overall age of the country, it’s how long on average most people have been here. The majority of Americans haven’t had family here for more than a few generations, and that number is skewing rapidly towards the shorter side as more and more people emigrate and mix with people already here. How can you expect a people where most come from a different country far more recently than the founding of the US to have a shared cultural heritage? It’s the same type of talking points the American right espouses to denounce immigrants, as though they need to assimilate into a shared culture, when they’re really just being racist.

There isn’t some shared culture; America is a very rich blend of cultures. My first generation neighbors are no less American than I am, who have had family here for three generations, and I’m no less American than my friend who can trace their family back to the original 13 colonies. The cultural heritage of America isn’t a shared one, unless you only care about the culture of the European settlers, a minority. Most countries just don’t experience this level of blending of different people from around the entire world. It isn’t the most diverse country, and doesn’t have the most immigrants each year, but it’s mostly populated by people that trace their heritage back to somewhere else. A lot of the Americas share a very similar tradition of distinguishing what parts of their past trace to different cultures, because the people that live on these continents now, unfortunately, are almost entirely not the original people that lived here.

America is a melting pot of ethnicities and cultural heritages, so it’s useful to be able to identify when those of a common background. I’m German and Jewish, and saying so lets me find common ground or complimentary differences with those I meet that are of similar or different backgrounds. I might discover that someone I met has a shared culrural heritage including foods or traditions I share, or have experiences entirely different than mine. I’d rather know the difference if the person I meet celebrates one set of holidays or another, so I might be polite and not assume. I don’t think it’s strange at all, as though culture isn’t entirely tied to ethnicity, they frequently overlap greatly. It often has nothing to do with ethnicity as well, as often someone will reference how they were raised as a cultural background and not as the arbitrary boundaries we place between people that look slightly different.

It has nothing to do with useless categorization and everything to do with a country filled almost entirely with immigrants from around the world. Other than indigenous peoples, everyone that lives here has only been here a few generations at most. The people around me during my day to day life have dozens of different backgrounds and languages, which is true in many places around the world but especially in a country of immigrants. We don’t have a long shared cultural heritage like most countries do. We bring our histories with us from everywhere else. Race is an entirely social construct, so being able to distinguish oneself as German rather than French, or Turkish instead of Armenian, or Japanese rather than Korean can help the person you’re speaking to have an idea of what cultures you’ve been exposed to, since such a blend of different ethnicities means it might not be apparent. I certainly don’t have any of the common traits of anyone of my heritage except my skin tone, so when I meet someone with shared heritage we can connect by simply saying so.

I’m not religious, but I grew up in a religious home. It’s worth noting that “everything happens for a reason” and “God has a plan for everything” are not in the Bible and are not doctrine, as far as I remember. These are platitudes people with a poor understanding of their religion say, but not actually part of the belief system. This pastor likely has a more nuanced, and possibly more painful, view of this event through the lens of their belief.

It really fucked me up when I realized that “picture this” wasn’t an entirely figurative saying, and everyone else does actually see stuff in their “mind’s eye.”

Authoritarian doesn’t mean exercising authority. Banning slavery did exercise authority, of the law, over slave owners, but it was anti-authoritarian. It took power, and authority, condensed wrongly in the hands of a few and, in theory, distributed it to the many, however effective it actually was.