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Magic The Gathering Megathread 11/01/24-11/15/24
  • And what's more, standard legal. So you're gonna see a lot more of it no matter what format you play.

  • HEXBEAR HALLOWEEN GHOST STORY THREAD! Share your ghost stories here! ๐Ÿ‘ป๐Ÿ’€๐Ÿ‘ฝ๐ŸŽƒ๐Ÿ˜ˆ๐Ÿคก๐Ÿค–
  • A short but fun kids-are-scary story.

    When our oldest was 1-2yo, we were reading some Halloween themed picture book and having them point at the pictures.

    "Where is the bat?"

    points at bat on page

    "That's right! Now where is the skeleton?"

    points at skeleton on page

    "Great! Now where is the ghost?"

    instantly turns and points over my shoulder towards the empty corner of the room

    "..................heh, how about the ghost in the book buddy..."

    points at ghost on page

    this-is-fine

  • Tag yourself
  • My score or ranking or whatever was several orders of magnitude below that, so it's unlikely we ever matched lol.

  • Tag yourself
  • I was going to make a joke about smurfing, but then thinking about what that actually implied made me reconsider.

  • Tag yourself
  • Chogo for a long time, then just gave in to the spin-to-win and went Darius. Also got pretty good with Rammus, just rollin around.

  • Tag yourself
  • Tag yourself

    No, I absolutely will not.

  • I donโ€™t think I realized just how bad Islamophobia and racism towards Arab people is in the US until recently
  • It comes and goes, really, along with other forms of hate.

    Things get nakedly bad, which galvanizes people to organize and rise up and push back, the libs and cons get together to say "Whoah those people over there sure are hateful, let's put a new holiday on the calendar and pass a law that says "hey you're not allowed to officially discriminate against this group (wink)", the capitalists pop champaign and celebrate their inclusiveness, things seem slightly less bad for a few weeks, then the extremists get pissed off about the tolerance of those groups, the elites use their anger as an excuse to neuter the (already basically meaningless) protections, the chuds celebrate this as a win and use that as a rallying cry to organize and recruit, and saying anything about it means you are either ignorant or an extremist because "there's already laws protecting those people! There's no laws protecting my way of life! (all of the other laws)". Things get worse again, but now chuds are emboldened because they knew all along they were going to get their way like a child screaming for oreos at the grocery store.

    Sometimes after a few hundred years things get marginally better! (on the surface)

  • NSFW
    Throneโ€™s toilet camera takes pictures of your poop | TechCrunch
  • I mean tbh I've been saying all along this is the kinda shit I want AI to be doing. Let it examine and compare thousands of pictures of my dookie so that the manual dookie-watchers can go out and retrain as artists.

    I mean surely, this kind of thing will result in an overall improvement in our society and not just like, warehouses full of marginalized people flipping through millions of dookie pics a day while getting paid piece-work rates well below minimum wage while draining several nuclear reactors worth of power just so that The Company can bill this service as "AI" and some tech bros that made their millions on the dot Com crash and crypto scams can look at their weekly dookie-score and go, "huh, 6.8 this week. Guess I should eat some more grape nuts" (but they actually don't even). Definitely not that.

  • Magic The Gathering Megathread
  • About to do a Winston draft this weekend with my BiL. 3pk Crimson Vow, 3pk Karlov Manner, which feels like a reasonable thematic match (and it's what I've got laying around). Plus a few promo packs thrown in for extra spice.

    Very excited! Haven't been able to go draft for real for a few months since my latest child was born.

    Hoping to pull a Sorin for the wifey while we're at it.

  • Finally got to the point where I cannot talk openly to my lib friends anymore.
  • Yeah it was pretty much this.

    "He said he'll flatten it!"

    What, like as opposed to the dems, who will write a very strongly worded letter after the bombs they send over are used to flatten the place?

    "Well yeah at least they're writing that letter! Better than no letter! "

    maybe-later-kiddo

  • Finally got to the point where I cannot talk openly to my lib friends anymore.
  • Yeah I was about to make a similar post - just had a big debate with some older family friends at a party my parents had that are die-hard dems (which was nice, as they're way further left then most other people there).

    They were aghast when I said I wasn't voting blue, and had no idea who Claudia or the PSL are, of course.

    Got a lot of "this is the most important election ever" and "if he wins democracy is over" of course. But the one that really chapped my biscuits was saying that if he wins, then [my family member] will lose access to reproductive health care and IVF in particular.

    So I said yeah right, neither side is going to change a damn thing about that, because they both see it as way too valuable of a carrot/stick to give up campaigning and fundraising on it. If the dems care so much about it, why haven't they actually done anything about it?

    "Well Biden's wanted to, but he's been hamstrung by the extremist right!"

    So what about those years when he had full congressional majority?

    "Oh well yeah, I mean I guess he could have done more there..."

    And then we got called away to the rest of the party and never got to continue.

    Bonus points for my insistence that both parties intend on continuing the genocide - but ofc he is going to do it worse somehow. When I said I'm not going to vote for Genocide Lightโ„ข๏ธ, they said, "Hell yeah I am! It's better than the other option!", and I sadly beat a dead horse a little more about there actually being more options available and maybe you actually don't have to put your stamp of approval on genocide-with-rainbow-flag-characteristics.

    Also bonus-bonus points for one of the two (very sweet, kickass person generally) asking "So what does genocide mean again?" in a completely honest, non-hostile way, indicating that they simply had not engaged with even the thought of such a thing happening before this conversation.

    And these are the two that always get in trouble for being too vocal about their left-ish political opinions at these functions. agony-soviet

  • How the Fossil Fuel Industry Convinced Americans to Love Gas Stoves
  • I've had both over the last few years, and while the cooking experience is not all that different tbh, the one thing that bugs me about my current glass-top electric stove is that the surface is so flat that my ever-so-slightly warped carbon steel pan doesn't sit flat and rocks all over the place and doesn't heat evenly. I've basically been unable to use it since moving here, and it's my favorite pan. :(

    But if I had my choice, I'd ofc go induction, but between the other two I'd still go electric, just for the fumes alone. But I'll probably be way less hot on the idea of glass-tops in the future, that's for sure.

  • How the Fossil Fuel Industry Convinced Americans to Love Gas Stoves
  • I've had both over the last few years, and while the cooking experience is not all that different tbh, the one thing that bugs me about my current glass-top electric stove is that the surface is so flat that my ever-so-slightly warped carbon steel pan doesn't sit flat and rocks all over the place and doesn't heat evenly. I've basically been unable to use it since moving here, and it's my favorite pan. :(

    But if I had my choice, I'd ofc go induction, but between the other two I'd still go electric, just for the fumes alone. But I'll probably be way less hot on the idea of glass-tops in the future, that's for sure.

  • Make it quick
  • Really such a bizarre way to word a policy initiative.

    Like, "oh we need to give billions in bank bailouts in order to protect the wealth of all the [black] hedge fund managers! See! We're doing this for racial justice!"

  • Twitter's short-sighted block function update is almost here. Soon, accounts you've blocked will be able to see your posts anyway.
  • I mean I guess? Seems like the people you'd want to be blocking in the first place are the exact type of people you'd expect to have a whole clown car full of obnoxious burner accounts in the first place. And FB and IG make more sense because those accounts are (at least theoretically) real id linked - you're not supposed to be able to just go make more accounts on a whim, and you're setting the privacy on posts to only show to mutuals. Just seems like the flimsiest protection imaginable.

    And yeah obvs bellend does this stuff to help his impressively stupid followers, and it's definitely dumb, but I'd be a thousand percent surprised if he hasn't made the engineers over there work insane overtime hours just to hardcore his account with godmode viewing and posting powers. Hell, we saw the code for white(!)-listed hate speech filter bypass for him and his buddies, so they're clearly not above it.

    Just seems like a really surface level thing to worry about that doesn't really affect any degree of safety or privacy. Still, stupid, yes.

  • Twitter's short-sighted block function update is almost here. Soon, accounts you've blocked will be able to see your posts anyway.
  • I think someone just had a goofy meme idea and a made a silly, and then it stuck because it looks silly and lessens the pain of having to see that daft bastard's crufty mug again.

    Already more thought than that turd-through-a-playdoh-spaghetti-machine-for-brains dork-waffle deserves, tbqh.

  • Our Big Reset Boy? And he's devoid of context?
  • kamala-coconut-tree : "something something context of everything before you or whatever"

    trump-who-must-go : "oh bet?"

  • Twitter's short-sighted block function update is almost here. Soon, accounts you've blocked will be able to see your posts anyway.
  • Maybe I'm missing something, but I've found it very strange the concern over this change. I mean, it's only for public posts, which they could see if they just logged out or switched to a burner account anyways? Like, if it let them send a message or comment on posts, or see posts for followers only or something, I'd see the issue, but it doesn't seem like that aspect of the feature was all that meaningful anyways. Am I wrong?

    I mean I assume if it's a big public priority of melon-musk it's probably something terrible, so there must be more to it than how I'm understanding it currently.

  • Tech conference uses generative AI to "uncrop" headshot of woman presenter for its website, AI performs this duty the only way it knows how
  • Just to clarify, they were uncropping a version that was just the top half of the original picture, so the differences were in the part it "reimagined", not changing things that were already there (in what it was given).

    Still, obviously, and I cannot stress this enough - yikes.

  • Tropical Fuck Storm - Soft Power

    Tropical Fuck Storm's "Soft Power", from their wild LP "A Laughing Death in Meatspace".

    So many good tracks from this album, but this one is particularly notable for the geopolitics angle. The titular refrain comes from Joseph Nye's concept of soft power, the cultural and social influence of a nation, posited as the other bilateral avenue of global hegemony distinct from its counterpart, hard power, representing military force and thereby influence.

    This one's definitely got a little "orange man bad" flavor to it, but is a little bit less just about that and more about the geopolitical power vacuum left in the wake of the amerikkkan empire voluntarily slam-dunking itself into the shitter, particularly when it comes to having any meaningful influence on the world via culture or human rights or anything like that.

    If the style grabs you at all, check out Gareth's other work with The Drones, really fantastic off-kilter aussie-rock, with some of the weirdest and wildest guitar tones out there.

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    Black Bear has released a follow-up to 2006's "Black Bear". Get ready to cry.

    Link is to the original 2006 release, a bedroom-indie track about how cool bears are. If you haven't heard it, give that a listen and let it stew for a while before checking out the new stuff, because there's a big tonal and perspective shift between them.

    Apparently, the artist put out the original track, which is mostly pining about the simplicity of a bear's life compared to the difficulty of our own. The artist then immediately went on hiatus, got married, both of their fathers died, they had a kid, and then they decided to make this album together just this year.

    It's extremely beautiful and heart-wrenching, and the contrast in perspective from the break in time is really astounding.

    If you've got kids, this thing is probably gonna sucker-punch you pretty good, so find some private time to listen and strap in.

    The 2006 track (the rest of the album is just ok, imo):

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scXezSTOMRA

    The new album ("the dreaming's what carries you through"):

    https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_n_mAIPScsjgdaUYvyIvvGP7S6lrAUJKvc

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