videos UlyssesT • 1y ago • 100%

Average Redditor goes to the DMV

www.youtube.com

Critical support for the DMV worker not putting up with Average Redditor's shit. 

games UlyssesT • 1y ago • 100%

F-Zero 99 Review - SNESdrunk

www.youtube.com

I wish Nintendo's suits would stop giving bullshit excuses for why there hasn't been a new modern F-Zero in *decades.* The claim that they "can't find a way to innovate" is bullshit considering how many other franchises get new entries regularly, gimmick or no gimmick. That said, this mod for the first game is fantastic.

games UlyssesT • 1y ago • 100%

Waiting for CitizenCON to come out? Check out this exclusive Star Citizen insider look at brand new... mucking around a single bunker shooting NPCs, except this time you're clicking an object too!

old.reddit.com

Never been done before! Best Damn Space Sim Ever! 

the_dunk_tank UlyssesT • 1y ago • 100%

If you feel bad today, take comfort that whatever you did wasn't as pathetic as this woe-is-me cross-dragging moment from the richest vampire in the world.

old.reddit.com

Takes me back to 2016 when  marketed himself as an "outsider" when his entire adult life has been oozing around every possible "insider" establishment possible. 

ttrpg UlyssesT • 1y ago • 100%

When the DM is about to invite players in for character creation in a new campaign but has no idea that the group has already planned a party theme.

One time, it was halflings. All halflings. Pipes and breakfasts and gardening small-talk, all the time. 

askchapo UlyssesT • 1y ago • 100%

If you had the power to administer small but mildly unpleasant electrical shocks to a user whenever they used a specific word, phrase, or rhetorical tactic on the internet, what would you target?

My practical answer would be, of course, right wing shit, period. It wouldn't stop them but might slow their spread. My fun/funny/unserious answer would be commission an algorithm to monitor Reddit so I don't have to that keeps track of exceedingly popular passive-aggressive and smug ways to start and end sentences and takes the top percentiles of them and makes them the shockers of the week. It would make Lemmyverse liberals a lot less redundant as a side effect, too.   "Umm, I'm sorry, honestly, but let's be honest here. It's almost as if..."   "Wow, vitriol much?" 

news UlyssesT • 1y ago • 100%

"X/Twitter scraps feature letting users report misleading information"

www.theguardian.com

X/Twitter scraps feature letting users report misleading information Critics say decision by Elon Musk-owned company is ‘extremely concerning’ ahead of Australia’s Indigenous voice to parliament referendum Josh Taylor @joshgnosis Tue 26 Sep 2023 23.34 EDT X, the company formerly known as Twitter, has removed the ability for people to report a tweet for containing misleading information just weeks before a referendum on an Indigenous voice to parliament in Australia. Since 2021, users on X in countries including the US, Australia and South Korea had been able to flag tweets that they believed contained misleading information for review by staff at the company – separate to other processes the company has in place to report abuse or hate speech. The feature had been available in the US, Australia and South Korea since August 2021 and was expanded to Brazil, the Philippines and Spain in early 2022, with the administration of the company at the time noting the importance of such a tool during elections. However, this tool has now been removed from those markets in the past week or two, according to digital platforms critic group Reset Australia. In an open letter published on Wednesday, Reset Australia said it was “extremely concerning” that it was removed just weeks out from the referendum on an Indigenous voice to parliament and was at “a disastrous point in time for Australia’s electoral integrity” if the tool had been removed deliberately. X was contacted for comment and, in an auto-reply, said: “Busy now. Please check back later.” The site’s owner, Elon Musk, made pushing against censoring content on platforms a key plank in his reason for taking over Twitter. Correspondence between the Australian Electoral Commission and X obtained by Guardian Australia last week revealed frustration within thecommission about X’s failure to act to remove posts inciting violence against its staff and promoting disinformation about the electoral process. The AEC commissioner, Tom Rogers, said veiled threats against staff made on social media platforms had been difficult to remove regardless of which platform they were on. A spokesperson for the AEC said the commission had its own avenue to refer content to X. “There is an avenue that still exists for the AEC to refer content to X, and we utilise it,” the spokesperson said. “However, we have a high threshold for matters we report to social media platforms and are realistic about it. “The AEC understands the responsiveness of the AEC on the platform is always going to be swifter and likely more effective in countering incorrect claims regarding the electoral process than the actions of platforms.” The spokesperson said there had been a shift in responsiveness from social media platforms in the past year, not just X. “There are matters pertaining to what we would consider inciting violence, or veiled threats, that we believe should be actioned. This sometimes occurs but has not always been the case.” In a report to the digital platforms lobby group Digi on its compliance with the voluntary industry misinformation and disinformation code in May, Twitter pointed to its community notes feature – where users could fact check a tweet and, if enough users approved it, it was added to the tweet as additional context – as how the platform was combatting misinformation. “We know that misleading information is complex, evolving, and sometimes cloaked behind questions or opinions,” the company said. “To ensure that people are better informed on Twitter we launched Community Notes, our approach to offering context and surfacing credible information. “As Community Notes rapidly evolve on platform, within Twitter, and in public, this product presents a profound shift for our company and people who use our service. “It is a priority area of development, grounded in more than a decade and half of Twitter, the platform and content moderation experiments, policies, and products. It is also grounded in ongoing research, evaluation and consultation.” The change comes as the federal governmentfaces pressure from the opposition to scrap a draft bill that would grant the Australian Communications and Media Authority (Acma) powers to enforce the code on the platforms.

chat UlyssesT • 1y ago • 100%

The rich need the rest of us, not just economically as a source of surplus labor, but as a mirror to reflect their vanity and as a source of validation.

Not every member of the ruling class requires fame and publicity (though some certainly do  ) but I now believe they still require our existence to at the very least position themselves favorably compared to where we stand. Or crawl. Or lay. Much of this is economic, of course. Having a labor surplus and the consequent "churn" keeps the working class precarious and struggling to survive, but there's a personal validation element to it, I believe. I have some distant relations that are wealthy. I'm talking landlords with holdings up and down the state and beyond. They don't require fame (but I doubt they'd say no to it) but they *do* want poors like me around, often asking for me by name, for invitations to wine tastings, pompous restaurants, manorside dinner parties, and other ways to flex their wealth on people that don't get to experience that every day. They won't give you money. Never. They will give you *advice* and keep insisting that if you don't like bland cold runny (but very expensive) food that it's because you have an *undeveloped* or *unrefined* palate. The crudest of such rich relatives actually told me, quote, "you can't appreciate (bland cold runny but every expensive food) because you've been *eating shit* all your life." Same attitude about wine. I have to agree with the collective consensus of wine snobs regarding the subtle accents of what year and what soil and what kind of wood the cask surely came from, or I'm an ignorant barbarian. They *want* me to be an ignorant barbarian. They *need* that. It isn't enough to be rich. Someone else has to be poor, and they have to see that difference to assure themselves of their secular Calvinist "elect" status, over and over again. I think if most rich people lost access to poor people entirely, even if they were in no physical danger, it'd make them *feel* poor after a while and give them emotional distress.

games UlyssesT • 1y ago • 100%

"Someone Made Pay 2 Win: The Game And Its Hilarious" (It actually is, but also a warning because all the funny stuff is quite real in other games)

youtu.be

I think this serves well as a cautionary tale. 

chat UlyssesT • 1y ago • 96%

I've been lurking Reddit a *lot* less since Hexbear got federated. The Reddit is brought right to our doors, whether we want it or not.


games UlyssesT • 1y ago • 100%

A brief summary of the prologue of Baldur's Gate 3, animated.

youtu.be

Shadowheart part got me 

the_dunk_tank UlyssesT • 1y ago • 100%

"It's almost like every government commits atrocities at some point or another. Reading comprehension. Learn it. I didn't imply shit, but you do you."

hexbear.net

 some baby's first anarchism take, some ancap shit, some NATObrained sophistry, or is this some outright cryptofascist apologia? You're not allowed to read any implications *and* you must practice standardized smuglord-approved reading comprehension. Pick up your No. 2 pencils and begin. You have 15 minutes. 

chat UlyssesT • 1y ago • 95%

Is the Reddity "it's almost as if" "ah yes" format just a subconscious reflex for internet liberals or is there an actual deliberate choice made over and over again?

It's so exhaustively smug and condescending and tiresome and it's been that way for years but it keeps coming. How are *they* not sick of doing it themselves yet?

the_dunk_tank UlyssesT • 1y ago • 98%

"15 years ago today, the global banking system collapsed. And the savings of everyday people were raided to save it. Satoshi created Bitcoin so it would never happen again."

It wouldn't be a cult without proselytizing, would it?   

FuckCars UlyssesT • 1y ago • 96%

Does anyone you know actually use "Sports Utility Vehicles" for sports or utility?

I've been wondering about that for decades. 

askchapo UlyssesT • 1y ago • 100%

What's your most excruciatingly close "almost got it but not quite" experience with a liberal take lately, where they *almost* but not quite had a good take?

hexbear.net

Here's mine. It hurts. I don't even know how to reply to this.  https://hexbear.net/comment/3998694

chapotraphouse UlyssesT • 1y ago • 100%

Not Even The Patron Stooge Of Fawning Biographies Can Make Elon Musk Look Good | Defector (Text of article inside)

defector.com

Elon Musk is not a nice person. How do we know this? Because the respected journalist Walter Isaacson has written a very moist, fawning, dumbstruck book about him. This portrait is really the best press Musk is likely to receive, the most even-handed and prestige-scented coverage he’s ever going to get, and what blows from its 600-odd pages is a great gale of nastiness. “If you were my employee, I would fire you,” Musk says to his first wife Justine. “I fired my cousins,” he tells a worker, “and I’ll fire you.” To another cowed underling, the richest man in the world asks, “Did you fucking do this? You’re an idiot. Get the hell out and don’t come back.” Musk’s favorite thing to say to anyone he considers beneath him (which is a lot of people) is a variation on the theme of “You don’t fucking know what you’re fucking talking about.” He mewls, he yells, he vomits, he lets his kids stand very close to flaming pits and heavy machinery, worries a bit about the future of human civilization, and then sticks pins into the mental voodoo doll of his father. As you traverse the yawning Sahara of cruelty and boredom that is Elon Musk the book and Elon Musk the man, you might hope that the boss of Tesla and SpaceX may at some point heed the thousands of people over the course of his 52 years on this earth who have told him that he really is an “asshole.” He does not. He yells some more. We are often told that it is impossible to condense all the rough contradictions which jangle in a soul, to trap the entirety of a life in the neat rigors of a narrative. Musk’s life and personality, it turns out, is not so hard to contain. It is flat and shallow and open for all to read. The difficulty comes when Isaacson tries to impose some fabricated complexity on a not-very-complex man, and uses that illusion of knottiness as an excuse to paper over a much truer and more interesting story. Since chucking in jobs as editor of Time and chair of CNN and firming up his reputation as the principal ventriloquizing sage of elite opinion, Walter Isaacson has written a hefty shelf’s worth of biographies: Einstein, Da Vinci, Kissinger, Steve Jobs. By offering his tape recorder to Musk, Isaacson also offers his imprimatur to the belief that the King of All Nerds deserves to be elevated to this pantheon of Great Dudes. Kitted out with his most reliable tools (bland prose, cheap pop-psychology), Isaacson believes he is unearthing the demons buried in Musk’s history. These demons, Isaacson writes, explain his success. “Great innovators,” he insists, “can be reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even toxic. They can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world.” What he is actually doing is wading through the squalor and bile to rescue the Musk mythology from the man himself: the visionary persona, the globe-bestriding innovator and disruptor and all-round cool maverick cowboy; a Columbus, a Shackleton, an Armstrong for a new age. Musk has long been followed by a traveling chorus of toadying; Isaacson joins in here as lead vocalist. He croaks the loudest. Certainly one of the most sensible things Elon Musk ever did was get out of South Africa as soon as he could. Born in Pretoria in 1971 to Maye and Errol Musk, Elon’s childhood was unusually violent. A dog tore a chunk out of his cheek. He wrestled in the street with his brother and cousins. Bullies broke his nose. His father was a bully too—a real old-fashioned stand-up bastard, still today a vicious racist—and would, Isaacson reports, barrage his son with insults for hours. It does not take much effort to guess that Elon’s own personal harshness was first learned in the family home. Isaacson accepts this sad state of affairs as the inevitable product of his father’s corrupted personality. But—and this is his first fault of omission—is it possible that a nuclear-armed regime of white minority rule combusting in fits of extreme brutality also had something to do with it? As the beneficiaries and maintainers of a system built upon the banal and everyday meting out of savagery, the Musks were surely not immune from rebounds and ricochets. Build a state on the principle of absolute power, and that absolutism will in time turn up in the living room. Isaacson isn’t much interested in any of that. Isn’t interested at all, in fact. He prefers to trace Elon’s retreat from his father’s domineering into the comfort of distant worlds: comic books, Asimov novels, video games set in space. Though the Musks were never poor, they weren’t exactly slap-up rich either. A jibe which has followed Elon for a while, that the Musk dynasty was made wealthy by ill-gotten blood diamonds, has never been true. Errol Musk was a failure at many things and the Zambian emerald mine with which he traded (but never owned) was kaput by the time Elon was a teenager. Still, as he fled for university in Canada, Musk didn’t mind giving the impression that his pockets jiggled with gems. Arriving in Silicon Valley at the cresting wave of the Dot-com boom, Musk and his brother Kimball built and sold Zip2, a city-mapping guide for newspaper advertisers, within four years for a crisp $307 million. Elon collected $22 million and dumped a chunk of it into a new obsession: the letter X, which he thinks is the quintessence of cool. He’s named his kids X, his companies X, and since buying Twitter has tried to remodel it in the image of a business he started in 1999 called X.com. Everyone—friends, fellow bosses, focus groups—thought X.com sounded like a porn site, because it does. Musk wanted it to be an internet bank fused with a social network—“the place where all the money is.” It would have died a pauper’s death had Musk not merged it with the much friendlier-sounding PayPal. Enter here, through a very wide door, the unhappy question of Elon Musk’s character. His colleagues thought he was cold, abrasive, intrusive, meddling, and unstable, and whenever he attained any degree of control over a company, his partners would attempt a coup d’état. His mentality was much the same at work and at home. At the Musée de Cluny in Paris, his first long term partner Justine Wilson was moved by The Lady and the Unicorn tapestry; Musk called her interest “stupid.” As they slow-danced at their wedding, Musk whispered in Justine’s ear: “I am the alpha in this relationship.” Later, as the marriage fell apart, he called her a “moron” and an “idiot.” Isaacson suggests Musk lacks an empathy gene, or might just be wired differently. At multiple points he implies Musk may be autistic. Musk himself has claimed that he has Asperger’s, though he hasn’t revealed whether a doctor told him this. (Asperger’s is an outdated diagnosis anyway, its characteristics since folded into the autism spectrum.) Again, Isaacson is asking the wrong question. It is not a trait or feature of the condition of autism to be cruel. Not all inventors are unpleasant to their core. There is evidence that when Musk wants something badly enough—a new business opportunity, say, or a new wife—he is capable of being sweet, charming, enthusiastic, and smart. “Flip a switch,” says J.B. Straubel, a longtime Tesla guy, “and suddenly be this incredibly effective, charismatic, high-emotional-intelligence business person, when he has to do it.” (My emphasis). This looks more like cheap and dirty cynicism. From his earliest success with Zip2 and PayPal, through SpaceX and Tesla up to the present, by driving himself to the point of exhaustion, by wielding the whip hand as a company boss, by cleaving a machete through safety rules and financial regulations, Musk gained fame and riches very quickly. Experience taught him that total control was viable, and the more money he accumulated, the more bloated with puffery his reputation became, the more he was able to get away with it. And how does Isaacson sum all this up? A “visionary who didn’t play well with others.” Elon Musk, Isaacson writes, has “an enthusiastic but awkward attraction to publicity.” This, again, is putting it much too gently. A large part of Musk’s business ethos is to publicly promise extraordinary, magnificent, life-changing inventions, watch the stock price shimmy upwards, then abandon that promise to the dogs and the ruins of time. Who now remembers Robotaxis, the Hyperloop, or Pravduh? In the early days of Zip2, Musk cultivated an impression of size to investors by hiding a small computer inside the frame of a much bigger one. Hoping to build a battery plant in Nevada but lacking the cash, Musk hired a squadron of bulldozers to shuffle some dirt around near Reno, then invited a Panasonic executive to survey the scene and pretended as if the factory were actually being built. Almost every year since 2014, Musk has teased some kind of self-driving or autopilot mechanism in Tesla cars. It’s not happened yet; test models keep killing people, catching fire, and ramming into emergency vehicles. The 2016 video demonstration that was supposed to prove the cars’ self-driving capability was staged. The launch of his humanoid robot project Optimus was a woman in a white skin-suit dancing on a stage alone. At one point Isaacson catches Musk realizing that “you could build roads in 3-D by building tunnels under cities.” That’s a subway. Isaacson lets this stuff slide, and his admiration for Musk, like his prose style, grows wet and hack-like and embarrassing as a result. He describes Musk as “a master of memes” even though his entire vocabulary is pinched wholesale from Monty Python. He reflexively compares Musk’s stature (a shade over six-foot) to a bear. As a teen he was already sprouting a “bear-like frame.” Hunched gaunt under stark office lighting, Musk looks “coiled like a bear searching for prey.” On the production line at Tesla, he would “walk with the stride of a mission-driven bear.” That last phrase calls to mind Winnie the Pooh looking for hunny, but is undone by the fact that we’ve all seen those photographs: Musk gasping on the back deck of a yacht, in tugged-up soggy trunks, being playfully hosed by Ari Emmanuel (impresario brother of Rahm), and looking for all the world like a clammy piglet. Less ursine, more porcine. Isaacson isn’t the first writer to put up a brick of a metaphor. But at moments where it matters more, Isaacson can be misleading and even flat wrong. Sometimes these mistakes are funny. He describes Joe Rogan, for example, as “a knowledgeable and sharp-witted pundit.” Other inaccuracies are matters of pedantry. Case in point: he welcomes the return of a space race, not between rival superpowers, but between capitalists indulging in healthy competition “like that of the railway barons a century earlier.” This is fatuous in a familiar way, but also wrong: the American railway boom was 150 years ago, and brought about not by “competition” but continental-level corruption, kickbacks, bribes, and unfettered monopoly—all of it built on the backs of ruthlessly abused workers. (The injury rate at Tesla's Fremont, Ca. facility, per a report from 2017, was 31 percent higher than the rest of the industry). There is a morbid photograph which occasionally circulates online showing Elon Musk at a Vanity Fair party alongside the noted sex pest and child-trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell. Musk believes that he was “photobombed” by Maxwell. Isaacson has fealty enough not to question this line, and vehemently insists that Musk had “no connections with [Jeffrey] Epstein.” But he did: Musk went to his mansion on East 71st Street with his then-wife Talulah Riley after Epstein had served his (very short) time in jail on solicitation charges and after his reputation as a predatory deviant was well known. This may not be a substantial connection, but it isn’t “no connection.” Even the release of Elon Musk was marred by one of Isaacson’s howlers. The biography was launched with a much-trumpeted “exclusive” published by CNN, Isaacson’s old haunt. The story, based on reporting in the book, detailed how Elon Musk personally ordered the Starlink internet service used by the Ukrainian army to be switched off as they prepared for a strike on a naval base in Russian-occupied Crimea. If you turned that upside down and tickled its tummy it would still not resemble an exclusive. The details of the story had been reported six months prior by Oliver Carroll in the Economist, and were repeated by Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker in late August along with the tidbit, missed by Isaacson, that Musk may have turned off Starlink after speaking to Vladimir Putin. Isaacson subsequently issued a correction (on Twitter, of all places), clarifying that the Ukrainians “asked Musk to enable [Starlink] for their drone sub attack on the Russian fleet. Musk did not enable it.” Musk himself is now on to a third version of this event—it’s hard to parse, but he blames U.S. sanctions—but whatever was claimed in the biography is now, by its own author’s own admission, apparently untrue. On top of this, Musk gave Isaacson encrypted conversations between himself and Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov. Isaacson published the messages without Fedorov’s approval. In 2008, Tesla’s veins were open. The company was hemorrhaging cash, struggling to produce cars, hurtling towards bankruptcy. To keep it afloat, Musk scrounged some money by raiding the deposits paid for Roadsters yet to be built. Then he went further. Not for the first time and certainly not for the last, Musk played truant with the truth in order to fend off annihilation. He announced, in early 2009, that Tesla had been awarded a lifesaving loan from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Program. But the DOE did not publicly announce Tesla’s successful application for another four months, and it would be another year before a deal was actually signed. The stock went up anyway. How, then, did Musk prove to the DOE’s loan officers that Tesla was viable? The California Air Resources Board operated a regulatory credit scheme designed to encourage automakers to shift to electric vehicles. At least one percent of a manufacturer’s yearly sales had to be cars with zero emissions. If they failed to make this target, they would be fined. To avoid being fined, car companies could buy Zero Emissions Vehicle (ZEV) credits from other companies that were meeting the requirements. Like Tesla. Musk set up an extremely profitable sideline trade in ZEV credits with the huge Detroit-based car makers, who found themselves liable for serious penalties in California. From 2009 until as late as 2016, Tesla was being propped up by hundreds of millions of dollars in ZEV credit trading; in pivotal quarters, when the share price decided the company’s existence or destruction, it was ZEV credits which made the difference. As Edward Niedermeyer put it in his (excellent) book Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, “none of Tesla’s recorded profits would have been possible without the ZEV program.” In short: no ZEVs, no Department of Energy loan; no DOE loan, no more Tesla.

games UlyssesT • 1y ago • 100%

"SIGNS OF ARMAGEDDON: BLIND S.T.A.L.K.E.R. #3" (Civvie 11)

www.youtube.com

Get out of here, S.T.A.L.K.E.R....  and watch the video. 

the_dunk_tank UlyssesT • 1y ago • 93%

How do you know someone is a wine snob that sees scary Hexbears everywhere? Don't worry, they'll tell you.

hexbear.net

"Noooo! Someone forgot to lock the wine cave! Defederate! Defederate! Defederate!" 

movies UlyssesT • 1y ago • 100%

"The Creator:" "Against the backdrop of a war between humans and robots with artificial intelligence, a former soldier finds the secret weapon, a robot in the form of a young child."

www.imdb.com

That sounds like quite a slop smoothie of plot elements (grizzled soldierface mcshootyman, dae le war against robots, pathos-maximizing daughter figure that soldierface mcshootyman needs to protect) *so* cynically combined that I actually wonder if it was conceived and written by chatbots.  then I read that it was directed by the director of Rogue One, and I admit I enjoyed Rogue One. I guess I'll have to wait and see how this cliche-ridden slop is prepared.