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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: November 22nd, 2023

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  • I don’t have a recipe for mana potions, but according to my book of Eorzean recipes, a Hi-Elixir requires:

    • 1/2 a sprig of rosemary
    • Ice
    • 1 ounce (30ml) curacao
    • 1 ounce (30ml) gin
    • 1 ounce (30ml) triple sec
    • 2 ounces (60ml) lime juice
    • 1/2 ounce (15ml) of maple syrup.

    In a cocktail shaker, muddle the rosemary sprig. Fill the shaker with ice and the remaining ingredients. Shake vigorously. Pour through a fine-mesh strainer into a glass.







  • I agree to some extent, but even before then hardware was getting expensive thanks to stuff like the Bitcoin mining craze. Harddrives have been getting cheaper on a dollar per TB basis for a long time (as they should), but I remember the days when it was cheaper to build a gaming PC than to buy a new console, and those days are long gone. And after COVID hit, greedflation set in to declare what the new normal is.





  • Yeah, the things that really stand out to me on this particular example are the quotes from people in the industry saying that it’s the worst instability in the industry in the past 15 years (so since the 2008 recession) in an industry know for its lack of job stability (it used to almost be guaranteed that devs would be laid off after a project finished) and that up to 73% of developers say that they’ve been affected by the layoffs, either being laid off themselves or somebody they know getting laid off like members of their team.

    I watch a lady on YouTube who works for Sony who said that the average time to find a new job is 2 months, and that with the number of layoffs it’s very likely that many of these developers will never work in the industry again.

    It’s just another example of the situations like companies bragging about record-breaking profits while an increasing number of people making six-figure salaries are living paycheck to paycheck.




  • I would say the biggest factor is the emboldening of the people who were already toxic, because this has been progressing for decades now in the US, if not the rest of the world.

    Once the racists could hide their hatred in plain view by simply saying “it’s just a joke”, it became that much easier for them to say the quiet part out loud. And once they got bold enough with that, all bets were off. The divisiveness of media (both traditional and social) is profit-motive driven and probably comes as a direct result of the former developments. Clicks bring in the ad revenue, and nobody clicks faster or more often than an angry crowd.

    There’s plenty of other factors too, I’m sure, like lead poisoning from all the lead being spewed out by cars with leaded gasoline back in the day (one of the side effects of lead poisoning is increased aggression), and the removal of third places that had once allowed people from all walks of life and social classes have a common area where they’d meet and interact. But letting the racists get away with it is definitely a big one.



  • How close did you grow up to Boston, or did your parents live in a city for a period of time? The closer you get to a city, the more liberal the population becomes, and there are some pretty backwoods areas of Massachusetts. My dad was conservative until he went to Boston College and worked at the bank collecting loans from the poorer sections of the city. Even Cape Cod had MAGA protesters yelling at the Bourne Bridge about the plan to house immigrants on the Air Force base for all 4 years of Trump’s reign of terror, and I could probably still find the Trump 2016 flag that I used to drive by all the time.


  • Yep. I saw a fairly recent study talking about this. The short of it is that they found no correlation between age and political leaning for ANY generation, but a strong correlation between political leaning and wealth.

    As people begin to benefit more from the system, the more they support pulling the ladder up behind them.

    The correlation to age here is that it gets harder to adapt to new information the older we get, so people are more likely to double down rather than change their perspective as society gets more progressive and inclusive. The best weapon against racism is experiences that put people in situations to meet people with different life experiences than them. Get them outside their little white suburban bubbles. This is why conservatives hate college so much. It’s often the first time kids are put in a situation where they’re both out from under the thumb of their parents and exposed to kids who grew up in different circumstances than their’s.


  • If they hadn’t given people the option, I don’t think the site would be up today. I already saw one artist who wiped their account and left the site within a couple of hours of the announcement.

    And they couldn’t have picked a worse time to do this after the drama with the CEO banning a popular trans woman permanently off the site last week and threatening to sic the FBI on her for a “threat” of cartoon violence she made after the year-long harassment campaign she suffered had been ignored leading up to her being banned over a transition timeline picture of her face. The CEO then went on to spend hours going into trans women’s dms to insist how he’s not a transphobe after writing a post about how she had been banned for the “threat,” not the picture, even though it had been known for a while by that point that she had been banned for that photo being “nsfw/sexual content,” while he eventually started calling her “it.” He then topped it off by chasing her and harassing her on Twitter, still insisting that her wishing cartoon violence was a tangible threat and posting the names of accounts she had had at various times on Tumblr. All while he was supposed to be on a 3-month vacation.

    Between that and the rumors of this AI deal happening that popped up last week as well, people were already looking for alternative platforms. Allowing people to opt out is the least that they can do if they don’t want to run off the users who keep the site running. I don’t think many of them are happy that they even have to do that.


  • They made an announcement at some point after flipping the switch that noted that some people would be opted out by default based on their blog settings. I think if your blog is set to mature or has certain search parameters turned off already.

    It wasn’t on for me or several artists I sent messages to who hadn’t even heard that this had happened, and the general discourse around it was pretty clearly upset about it not being opt out by default.

    They must’ve updated the app; at the time I wrote that you couldn’t do it through the app.


  • For any Tumblr users here, this has already rolled out completely unannounced and is opt-in by default. You need to manually opt out, which can only be done on the desktop website. Odds are good that your data is already being sold to Midjourney and used to train their models.

    To do so, click on your blog on the sidebar, click on Blog Settings on the other sidebar on the right, scroll down to the Visibility section, and turn the “Prevent third-party sharing for [your blog]” toggle to ON, not off. If you have any sideblogs, you’ll need to manually do this for each of them as well. It’s per blog and not account-wide.