This song feels like the the sun on my face. Lajtha Lassu by A Hawk and a Hacksaw

Absolutely. At work I man a tech desk for a big box store (aka helping people who don’t or can’t understand what email is activate phones), and at home I share responsibility caring for two people who don’t have the mental capacity to shut the refrigerator door when they’re done finding food. That’s…a bigger can of worms than what we’re talking about here, but encountering open-and-shut thoughts on how things ought to be (on here) feels like whiplash compared to how I usually have to think through my actions in a day.

Speaking as a professional artist myself, I’d wager that many of the responses you’ve run into are emotional ones. Supporting oneself as an artist was already difficult, and AI generation is an astoundingly powerful tool. For a long time there was a sense of financial security in quieter/grunt background and asset design work such as the WotC backgrounds in this situation. WotC in particular was touted as “one of the companies that actually pays artists to make neat things” in fantasy art circles, and so their fans and artist clients (often one in the same) feel betrayed.

I’m personally a sad-bitch about it because my peers and I have been posting art for one-another and fans online since 2002, our work was scraped, and now people can click a button to ape the look of all of our work without having run across it organically, knowing our names, or being able to, like, say hello to us. I really don’t mean that out of self-importance or ego- the community I grew up in online was all about discovering working artists by word of mouth this way, and getting to know them. So it’s a weird (albeit unintentional) dismantling of a community and “a way that was”, so to speak.

More practically one of my specific worries regarding AI generated images: Illustration in the literal sense of the word means ‘to illuminate’, to make clear’. Think along the lines of technical illustration- biological in my case, but this extends to mechanical parts, manuals, diagrams, medical books. These are situations where clarity is seriously important, and I feel like the deluge of generated images (and the general public’s lack of information about how the image gen works and how to decipher them) will cause harm.

Hopefully that wasn’t too much of a ramble. 🫤 TLDR: It isn’t necessarily immoral, but people are emotional, it’s a big change, and it’s happening really damn fast.

I haven’t been around much (work, life, you know the drill) but I’d like to say a continued THANK YOU for running Mander. 😄

I use mine consistently, and the presence of one will be a dealbreaker when I choose my next phone. I use it with an AUX cable in my car, wired headphones I already own, and (most importantly) with a Square point of sale thingamajig at shows. Bluetooth options exist for the last thing of course, but they have their own disadvantages- and I’d rather be able to use both options than just one!

I’ve always yearned for something like this too. I wonder if, from the dev’s perspective, balancing the years and years such a thing would take in real time conflicts with other aspects of gameplay? Or maybe soil chemistry is too difficult a thing to gamify for a casual player (including myself in this- unfortunately I don’t grasp chemistry or physics easily).

A colony sim/resource management game in early access I played recently tries to touch on this actually- Farthest Frontier. As you might imagine from what I typed above, I’m heinously bad at grasping the system, but the building blocks are in there! None of the procgen ideas you’re interested in though.

Argh tone on the internet- I’m not mad or anything, just wanted to state my opinion since ours are so wildly different, and it’s interesting that all of these ideas will have to coexist in gaming spheres.

Speaking strictly as a player, this is the opposite of what I would want in a game. The…intention, I guess, is what I want when I play anything story-driven. Chatting with ai on purpose feels upsetting to me and I think I would feel tricked if I encountered it as a par-the-course kind of thing (knowingly or especially unknowingly) in a game.

But- I haven’t encountered it yet, and perhaps it could really, really work!

Biologists and science communicators are being conscientious and thoughtful about the history of their professions. “The dumbest shit” indeed.

I think it’s always good to see such things enacted, and it’s rarely done on such a broad scale. Common names are a big bucket of chaos for joe schmoe anyway^*, so I’m all in favor of adopting anything more descriptive or in relation to field marks. I feel that the changes being broadcast so publicly will lead curious people to learn more about the history of birding, too- and hopefully lead to understanding why this sort of thing matters.

* Often broad species names, even. I’ve found that the general public has no idea of the difference between a mouse, mole, vole or shrew, and has even less of an idea that there are multiple species of all of them.

Unsure if this is OP’s angle, but I have pretty chronically bad anemia/ferritin levels. In my layman’s research, I found that both dairy (calcium) and tea (oxalates) inhibit the body’s ability to absorb iron when consumed alongside one-another. My list also included peas, coffee, eggs, and just about every other damn thing I like to eat, so that was a fun discovery. 😅 Link to kickstart research for anyone curious.

Popped in here to say FTL and was delighted to see someone had already mentioned it. Absolutely love that game.

For years now I’ve done what I can to encourage use of other sites, but the fact remains that my specific community of friends and peers (many of whom have known one-another for over two decades now) have used twitter as a stomping ground since 2008 or so. It’s extremely difficult to establish that sort of intersection elsewhere, and it gets particularly ugly when folks’ livelihood and income are tied into the matter.

Having the main hub for communities torn apart because of one fool’s antics really, really sucks, and then I’m/we’re called garbage on the sites we try to establish on, for clinging to that lifeline. It’s all a frustrating feedback loop.

I found it extraordinary- I’m unsure if another movie has made me feel the whole gamut of emotion like this one did, and each heartstring was tugged differently. Skillful stuff.

Great find- Cerement’s ID is on the dot. They’re delightfully bizarre to stumble upon for the first time, aren’t they?

Loads of oddball relatives out there as well. I haven’t seen this one due to the range being restricted to the west coast (US), but it’s completely absurd (Allotropa virgata).

I’ll be honest: regular ol’ bulk Folgers. Having three coffee drinkers all working from home became too labor-intensive for my French press habit and too expensive for my wallet.

Living vicariously through everyone else’s brews, here! I may have to whip up some cardamom cold brew this week. 😄

I’ve never been able to budget in the literal sense due to how utterly unpredictable my income is (artist sole proprietor kind of thing- don’t do it, kids!), and how wildly the structure of my months vary…but getting wise to tracking all incoming and outgoing transactions on my own spreadsheet has brought such peace of mind.

It came naturally after dealing with self employment income records, so it’s frankly silly that I never applied the same ideas to my personal finances.

You may enjoy reading about this linguistic offshoot, Missouri French!

Yep, seconding what others have said, this looks exactly like my ground cherry plants (aka husk cherry, aka Physalus genus). 😄

I LOVE their coloration at this stage. What a good find. 😄

Good article- I like that first map a lot. The basic point applies to so many of our relationships with nature.

My personal example: Grew up in a house with some attached greenspace in the Midwestern USA, and the woods and riparian areas are terribly overrun with amur honeysuckle, which was originally imported and planted to prevent erosion. It grows fast, early, and tends to form a bit of a monoculture, blocking light from other understory plants and hardwood saplings. Anyway, over the last 10-15 years I’ve been helping my parents clear the honeysuckle from the little patch of greenspace near us, and there’s far more biodiversity now. Tiny hardwood saplings are surviving germination and growing!

Ofc this opens up all sorts of discussions on like…nostalgia, invasive vs endemic vs naturalized, how much to even consider what things “ought” to look like vs what we’re capable of doing.

But it was wild seeing the effect of futzing with one plant, in one tiny area, happen with my own eyes. Making sweeping changes to waterways would be unreal to see.