Mossy Feathers (She/They)

shrug Idk if it’s really that insane. Tbh I’m not convinced the hype isn’t being manufactured. I have a cousin who’s a pretty bog standard, flavor-of-the-month gamer, and he’s said nothing about GTA VI.

Not saying you’re necessarily wrong, I guess, just that something seems off.

No, I’m honestly surprised. I’ve barely heard anything about GTA VI. Seriously. I don’t care about it, none of my friends have talked about it despite being the kinda game that they’d be into, and I’ve only seen one or two articles on it.

You sure it’s that highly anticipated? My observation is that people have gotten really sick and tired of AAA games, and this is a shift that’s occurred since RDR2 came out. Very few of the people I know still regularly play AAA games, and those who do almost never buy them on launch. I haven’t seen anywhere near the same amount of hype for GTA VI as I saw for GTA IV or GTA V.

You’re accusing me of being disingenuous? Maybe you’re the one who’s buying into the hype and overestimating public interest. Or perhaps the true answer is somewhere in the middle. Who knows. I was not intentionally downplaying your favorite series though.

Wait, do people still get excited for GTA? I thought GTA V online killed a lot of goodwill for the series.

I’m a trans woman living in Texas. How do you think I feel? No one’s having a good time right now, buddy. I fully anticipate that I will be dead or in a concentration camp within one or two years because, as of right now, I have no way to escape and I’m still working on trying to find groups to organize with.

As far as I’m concerned, my days are numbered.

I have no future.

At least there’s a chance that they’ll get distracted by some shiny new thing and won’t invade Canada.

No one’s having a good time right now.

WHY ARE PEOPLE ON THIS GODFORSAKEN SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM SO FUCKING INTENT ON USING ENDEARING TERMS AS INSULTS!? FIRST I CATCH SOMEONE CALLING A PEDOPHILE A GREMLIN, NOW I CATCH YOU CALLING TRUMP A “GIRL DICK” LIKES IT’S AN INSULT. YOU WANNA KNOW WHO HAS GIRL COCKS? TRANS WOMEN. FUCKING STOP IT.

Just refer to that thing in the Whitehouse as subhuman trash like the rest of us. Calling that thing a girl cock doesn’t do anything except make trans women feel degraded.

As someone who has gremlins in her life (and sometimes engages in gremlin activity herself): don’t refer to that thing as a gremlin. Gremlin is a playful and endearing term, not something that should be applied to questionably-human pieces of shit.

The number one thing I’ve been missing are Spotify jams. Spotify also has a wider selection of music, but tbh it’s rare for Spotify to have something that Qobuz doesn’t. Spotify also has lyrics, playlist folders, and audiobooks; though tbh I haven’t checked to see if Qobuz has the latter.

I love Qobuz. Also for those of you trying to boycott US goods, it’s a French company. I just wish it had the same adoption and features as Spotify.

I mean, they could introduce a new character who takes shelter in a mysterious, dilapidated research facility during the 7 hour war and finds themselves in a hellish labyrinth of puzzles. Maybe said character finds Chell in the field and helps release her (there’s some speculation Chell never made it out, but was actually in some kind of biosphere based on some in-game hints).

I had a fascination with dreams, especially lucid dreaming, several years ago. I don’t have a specific article about it anymore, just some info I came across a while back.

God, I love this comic. Thank you for A) making me aware that it got a continuation and B) compiling it into an easier-to-read format.

It makes the opossum in me very happy.

Okay, there’s actually a speculated reason for this: while you’re dreaming, your body is paralyzed but your brain is not. When you go into fight-or-flight when you’re dreaming, your brain starts trying to take sensory input from both your dream self and your real self. As a result, your brain is receiving mixed signals: your arm is moving and it’s not moving; you’re successfully controlling your arm but you can’t control your arm. The result is that it feels like it takes a significant amount of effort to move your arm, and your arm moves slowly.

My own personal experience seems to support this: if I casually run or hit something in a dream, then it happens as expected. If I’m in fight-or-flight mode, then my actions occur in slow motion. However, I got lucky and became lucid during one such moment, and decided to try consciously focus on just moving my dream arm, and I was no longer moving in slow motion.

“This video should challenge us all to commit to making the Kennedy Center a place where everyone is welcomed,” writes Kennedy Center President Richard Grenell, a Trump appointee who is also the special presidential envoy for special missions, on X. “It troubles me to see that so many in the audience appear to be white and intolerant of diverse political views. Diversity is our strength. We must do better. We must welcome EVERYONE. We will not allow the Kennedy Center to be an intolerant place.”

Hold up. What did you just say?

“It troubles me to see that so many in the audience appear to be white and intolerant of diverse political views. Diversity is our strength. We must do better. We must welcome EVERYONE. We will not allow the Kennedy Center to be an intolerant place.”

W-what? I’m sorry, what!? What the actual fuck do you think you’re saying with those words? Those words have no business coming out of your mouth.

Throw it against the ground to see how high it’ll bounce.

Honestly? I’d rather have Bowser over any real world dictator. Bowser actually gives half a fuck about his minions and domain, while looking sexy as hell in the process. That’s a step up from the “real deal”.

I’m still kinda looking forward to the Mario game where Mario goes after Peach only to discover, at the end of the game, that Peach is actually in love with Bowser and that Mario just committed mass murder out of a misogynistic, misplaced belief that Peach can’t defend herself or pick her own partners.

Yeah, uh, last I checked American territories don’t have the ability to vote in federal elections. Someone from Puerto Rico can’t vote for the US president despite being governed by the US. It’s one of many bullshit systems designed to keep the GOP-Democrat right-wing ratchet going.

Contrary to that Europe doesn’t have one cohesive identity, your example of Orban is multiple country borders removed from me personally.

Orban would probably be best compared to a state governor. Just a reminder that Texas is literally larger than the largest EU country with some space leftover for a city-state or two.

The idea that the US has a cohesive identity is just… unbelievably ignorant. I’m actually amazed that you believe that considering that no one in their right mind would say the same thing about places like Africa, Europe, or South America.

I didn’t have a choice to be born here, and, had I had the option, I wouldn’t have defaced a Native American monument in the first place. This is on top of the fact that the US is currently trying to find ways of disowning/executing me (trans).

Quite honestly, maybe I shouldn’t be offended by being lumped in with other Americans, because maybe I’m not actually being included in these kinds of sweeping statements. However, it rubs me the wrong way when people imply that Americans as a whole are responsible for the things our government has and is doing.

Again, I didn’t ask to be born in the US. I don’t like that I’m “American”. No one asked me, please don’t lump people like me in with the others.

I mean, they have closed caption devices you can borrow. They fit into the cupholder and display captions for you.

Eh, I personally think it is, but you have to temper your expectations. It’s absolutely not Artificial General Intelligence, nor is it as flexible or capable of rapid learning as human intelligence (or likely most forms of living intelligence in general). However, I’d challenge the notion that it lacks intelligence entirely.

AI still “learns” from what you shove into it; it’s still creating algorithms to adapt to the information stream(s) it’s being exposed to which is not unlike how the human brain is believed to function. As such, I personally view it to be intelligent, but not anywhere near as intelligent as people think it is, and absolutely not in the way people want it to be.

One of the big differences that I see is that, afaik, AI is unable to learn while it’s running. You have to train it, run it, train it again based on user input, run it, train it again on more user input, and so on. Humans are more efficient at learning when they sleep and take breaks, but are still capable of learning things without “shutting down”, so-to-speak (not that we ever truly shut down outside of death, but that’s tangential).

Another difference is that, unlike “natural intelligence”, AI ends up being hyper focused on a specific task. It’s a bit like grabbing an ice cream scoop and removing a very specific part of the brain, let’s say the part responsible for imagining images, and then letting people interface with that alone. Yeah, it’s not gonna be good at parsing text because that’s not what it was designed to do. That’s a different part of the brain. The one you’re playing with right now is only good at visualizating images, so you’re gonna get pretty images, but good luck with getting it to do proper text, understanding proper body language, etc.

Finally, AI hallucinates like crazy. This is one where I’m not sure if we’re really that different from AI (I’ll explain in a moment); but it is a big issue when it comes to try to get AI to factually report information or perform logic tasks. You can ask an AI what 2+2 is and get 4 one day, 5 the next, 3 on Saturdays and then -2027346 on Christmas.

But wait! Doesn’t that make it unintelligent?

No.

Going back to the previous statement about AI being hyper-focused, it just means you’re not interacting with a part of the brain capable of logic; you’re interacting with something else. Maybe the speech center, idk.

However, there’s another element to this where AI doesn’t have a persistent “reality anchor” like we do. To an AI, fact and fiction are purely conceptual because it doesn’t truly exist in our world, it’s off in its own little digital world. Furthermore, the experiences it can gain from the training set are heavily limited compared to what living creatures experience. We have a constant stream of information that reminds us about what is real, who we are, what things look like, how things move and so on; and we get that data stream in 3 dimensions (arguably 2.5, but I digress) instead of 2. It’s like expecting a plant to thrive when given a trickle of water when it normally grows exclusively in a swamp. We ourselves tend to begin hallucinating when our senses become cut off from the outside world because our brains make up stimuli when the expected stimuli is missing. So… I’m not sure if the hallucinations are totally unreasonable, unrealistic or all that different from how we’d behave if subjected to the same environment; but at the very least it’s something that makes AI appear unintelligent.

That’s not to say that AI is a good thing or that it lives up to the hype. Fuck AI for being wildly overhyped, overused, and destroying people’s livelihoods in a world where “earning for a living” is still required for some god-forsaken reason (just a reminder that the phrase, “earn a living” implies you don’t deserve to live if you aren’t able to make money or have someone doing it for you). At the same time, however, it kinda is intelligent. I think people are just expecting way more from it that it’s capable of doing. It’s like people expect intelligence to manifest in grayscale when it’s more like RGBA or something.

Edit: sorry about the massive wall of text; I was fascinated with AI and its potential for a while, which meant it lived rent-free in my head at a series of philosophical questions about things like intelligence and what it means for humans that something designed to function as a series of virtual neurons would behave so similarly yet differently to humans. These were the kinds of conclusions I came to.

(For context, furspa is a local furry spa gathering)

(Also, yes, those are dildos. Sorry to any mods if it’s too lewd. I was on the fence about whether or not that image would be appropriate considering they don’t look like dildos. I downloaded it to show a friend how absurdly large they are because I’m kinda tempted to get one of the huge ones, stick it in a corner and see how long it takes for someone to realize that it’s a faux penis. Those weren’t even the biggest ones on the site.)