#RomanceReviews 7 is some more #ChristmasSmut , Eat My Moon Dust by Etta Pierce. I'm going to keep reading these things until I get sick of 'em or it's 2024.
I'm hoping this will be a good palate cleanser. We have aliens, we have my favorite trope (grumpy & sunshine), and we have Christmas.. FFS, what else could one ask for!
I think this is going to be straight-ish with some creative anatomy nonsense. Here for it.
Eat My Moon Dust was the #ChristmasSmut I needed. We had found family, we had romance, we had hunky single dads (Hallmark, natch), and what Christmas romance would be complete without alien tentacle sex. Obviously.
I liked both of the main characters, which is no surprise because I. Love. Sunshine/grumpy. Grumpy quote of the book: "no one would ever measure up to my little cyclone of chaos and rainbows." D'aww.
Do recommend for those interested in consensual alien relationships and not averse to steamy creative anatomy scenes. I would read more by this author.
The author has content warnings here: https://www.ettapierceromance.com/content-notes and I would add that puberty is also a minor theme, there is an incident where a tween crosses touch boundaries with another tween but it is resolved, and somnophilia.
We had some crazy weather in Boston today (ominous pic of the crows is from last week), but at least I had some talks for my #AcademicPlaylist to keep me company while helping my neighbor clear a downed tree from their driveway! (1/9)
Next was an incredible talk by William Merrill on the limitations of transformer models at the SAIL workshop. Using complexity theory Merrill proves that transformers are fundamentally incapable of a number of critical reasoning tasks, such as inherently sequential reasoning, and workarounds impair scalability. This talk should be required listening for folks using/developing these models. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLHuwjeSf1Y (5/9) #AI#transformers
@bwaber by far the most interesting/informative thing I saw with respect to #LLMs all year is this talk by William Merrill which came from Ben Waber’s great regular digest of online talks - watch this, follow Ben…(money back guarantee)
(passing familiarity with the Chomsky hierarchy and complexity theory will help, but you only need to understand what kind of thing they are for the talk to be interesting)
Does Playnite have a year in review setting/feature?
Seeing some of the Steam year in review posts here & there made me wonder if Playnite has a feature like this stowed away somewhere. Another more offline app I use for music has it to where you can share an image of your most played music from the past year, so I'd think similar might be possible with Playnite.
It’s not a full-blown ‘Year In Review’ feature, but the ‘Game Activity’ extension does add a lot of interesting stats. Don’t know if it can create those charts retroactively though.
OK so #Reddit search has always sucked.
It has sucked especially in the New Reddit era.
Now, they have deployed the Even Newer Reddit user interface.
One of my biggest use cases of Reddit was "what are people in various communities talking about this particular video"?
In Old.Reddit, you could at least see crossposts in the unlikely case that the YouTube URL was somehow equivalent to the actual URL posted to Reddit. You know, because YouTube videos could be called upon by many requests, and Reddit fucking gave no shit about any URL normalisation.
But they at least let you see if anyone had crossposted shit.
Apparently, the New New User Interface fucking doesn't even let you do that. I tried searching for a particular video that was already posted in particular communities. Nothing.
Tried Google Search to find this particular thing. OK, found it.
Slapped "old." to it. "6 discussions."
That's it. Reddit was already shit at finding discussions about particular YouTube videos if you didn't use old.reddit. The new Reddit interface at least pretended the crossposts were there. Crossposts no longer are there. Why the fuck do people even follow the site any more.
My issue is on Mobile is the past is long as hell breaking down the mechanics of something I can’t even view the full thing and I refuse to use the app. I’ve tried tapping scrolling and other things too.
Why the fuck do people even follow the site any more.
Unfortunately, that's where all the content is. Things like this don't bother a lot of people — for example, discussion about YT videos wasn't something I ever used Reddit for — and as long as Reddit is the only platform providing what they're interested in, they're going to stay.
Today is the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. Stop rolling your eyes, this isn't a patriotic post! You know me better than that.
This is about spilling the tea... about the British East India Company's spilled tea, and what that had to do with Bengal, textile workers, and famine.
See, BEIC was using its private armies to open markets around the world to their trading policies, and to install local rulers who would keep the goods and money flowing. They did this in Bengal, one of the world's biggest producers of textiles in the mid-1700s.
Then, in 1768, drought hit Bengal and crops failed. People began to go hungry, but the BEIC's puppet rulers and agents just continued to collect taxes--and, in some cases, to profiteer off the sale of food. Over the next two years, these practices exacerbated the food shortages, leading to the Great Bengal Famine of 1770, in which 7 - 10 million people are estimated to have starved to death. That's at least 25% of the entire Bengali population of the time.
This put a big dent in the profits of the BEIC (oopsie, who knew famine profiteering could have negative economic impacts?), leading to a financial crisis in England. This is also why BEIC was unloading tea for cheap in the American colonies, to get some of those revenues back.
So yeah, "no taxation without representation" was the rallying cry, but isn't it interesting that we (USians, I mean) were never taught that the REASON colonists were worried about this is because they felt they had something in common with starving Bengalis: namely, the vulnerability to a multinational corporation which clearly demonstrated its depraved indifference to human suffering in pursuit of profit.
Couple of little nuggets I left out because I'm trying to be concise (ha), but they're so interesting:
The BEIC was able to unload tea in the American colonies because the English parliament, rather than let the company fail, bailed it out. Part of the bailout conditions were that they got a monopoly over tea sales in the colonies. Same as it ever was, eh?
BEIC agents who wrote letters and contacted the media (such as it was) to spread the word, and the outrage, about the completely unnecessary famine, were possibly the world's first whistleblowers.
Need some last-minute gifts? Books are the greatest. Here is me frolicking in a park with some of my books, which all want to live on your bookshelf. You can get them at your local indie bookstore, or get signed and personalized copies from @foliosf at foliosf.com/annaleenewitz -- plus, you can pre-order my new nonfiction book, Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, which I guarantee your future self will be glad to have in June.
I know a LOT of the community absolutely love both Idris and Keanu, but I think one reason why I feel so disconnected to both their characters is that I never cared about either actor all that much.
In short I am one of the few players who do not have an emotional commitment towards either character just by hearing their voices.
@WhyNotZoidberg I'm the same way...Except I respect the work of Idris and Keanu; I don't immediately become committed to the character they play. Unless they show me with great acting that there's a reason for me to care about their characters in game! A flat performance will net absolutely no response at all from me. I ended up liking Johnny Silverhand deeper into my playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077 only because Keanu put a lot of work into portraying him. It felt authentic to the point my impression of the chaotic, rocker bad boy who made dumb freaking choices...Made me begin to adore the deeply flawed Johnny. I've yet to experience Idris's character because I haven't bought the DLC. I'm intrigued though based on the marketing material, at least. I love a great mystery thriller!
Everyone looking forward to PS5 Pro is actually a PC gamer in their heart, dreaming of having an option to spend money on a more powerful graphics card.
@sharan I actually agree. I think PC remains what it has always been for people who prefer it that way, but consoles distanced themselves SLIGHTLY from what they used to be. There is now too much emphasis on resolution, framerate, options, etc in console space.
Digital Foundry has a million YT followers talking about console games running at 25 fps in certain scenarios. This kind of content has changed console gamers to be like PC gamers, but it doesn't work. 🤷
@nazokiyoubinbou console game developers used to create game for particular hardware and you would always get fluid gameplay. Nowadays developers fail to optimize their game and hope that more powerful hardware gets released. And users support this way of doing things...
Hi I’m Nika (they/them) and my hobbies are gaming, cooking and baking, knitting and crocheting. I bake my own sourdough bread since 2015. I organise my life with a bullet journal.
I speak German and English.
My posts will be written in English most of the time.