Leaderboard

Generally speaking, I tend to judge people on what they do first, what they say second, and what they call themselves a distant third. Since I have not met any of yall irl and probably never will (barring the anime thread forming a posse to battle the undead Queen Elizabeth in Egypt), the first is not applicable so the second takes precedence. If someone who consistently excuses blatant authoritarianism in order to crush protestors against power they like (striking workers, "BLM/AUNT TIFA, etc.) while being offended about even the thought of consequences for other groups (like the MAGA putsch folks or bankers) then you just have to put two and two together and get a good feeling of what there politics actually are. Maybe such a person wouldn't call themselves a fascist, put when there politics lines up with them to such a degree, you can't someone to thinking there's something their.

You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise...

Yeah, I should have quoted the article. I know he was being an a-hole, but I feel like he did them a favor by sending them to MA versus staying in TX. They probably dont even have immigration facilities in MA, so put them up in hotels?

And they can charge for it at that time.

On top, with an empowered Aveging Storm while Corrupting Beauty is active, you can swith to Sasha's smitar and then refound phrases every 3s without attacking with weapons! At the condition to stay at enemies range of course.

I hope it does, that was what I hated most about college. I also, and obviously, suck at writing. AI generated portraits in the Pillars area

I have finally beaten the Atelier Meruru optional superboss Eternity Goddess. I spent few hours on many tries and had to create a lot of new items and a special Elixir which activates automatically under 50% of health, to have at least some chance to beat it, because I do not have crafted any Ultimate Armor yet. There is still one DLC boss, which I've never tried, but so far, this was the hardest boss in Atelier Series so far. At some point, she activated few automatic skills, which were kicking my ass, and every time, she knocked down one of my characters, she healed 3000HP... So to find out the real recipe how to defeat her took me a lot. If anyone is curious about the fight, feel free to watch it on my Youtube channel

14/15 "The Statue of Eothas & Statue of Liberty will never be ballin—" EDIT: Part 2

am admitted baffled by the cannon ruling. ... gonna repeat how this does not require a lawyer to spot the stoopid. seriously, just consider what the judge is suggesting. the 100 or so documents clear marked classified, secret and top secret requires a special master to determine if they is in fact the property o' the former President o' the United States and should be returned to trump's possession. wut? for crying out loud, the doj had offered picture evidence to the public so as to disabuse persons o' the notion it is possible to confuse rando trump papers with what is so painful obvious the property o' the United States of America. even if trump had declassified the documents in question, they would remain GOVERNMENT documents and should be returned to the national archives and/or relevant security facilities. the suggestion by the judge that the presidential records act or attorney client privilege need be considered by a special master in his deliberations to answer the undecided factual and legal questions o' whether the pictured documents need be returned to trump is beyond the pale and complete illogical. for chrissakes, judge cannon unwitting undermines her own ruling and simultaneous creates a pointless delay by recognizing that trump's attorneys need be achieving the proper clearance to even view the documents in question, clearance which the trump lawyers don't current have, nor did they have when they somehow imbued the marked documents with attorney-client privileges. note how judge cannon did not leave such a requirement up to the special master. clearly judge cannon did not need a special master's input to recognize the security classification markings on the documents pictured, eh? the ruling by judge cannon has us channeling andy dufresne. once again, so is clear, under no circumstances does the clear marked classified, secret and top secret documents go back to trump's possession, 'cause those documents, regardless o' whether or not trump declassified, is so obvious and irrefutable the property o' the United States of America and not the former potus. there is no relevant legal or factual question a special master needs consider in the current scenario. ... am thinking is obvious the doj appeals and requests an emergency stay, and am seeing no way the 11th circuit (fed covering georgia, alabama and florida) fails to grant doj request, unless is some serious funny business going on behind the scenes am not privy to. is always possible for a single district judge to be horribly wrong or possibly just so chicken sh!te they will befoul themselves in an effort to avoid personal responsibility, but if the appellate court were to agree with cannon we would need consider the possibility o' a successful infiltration o' pod people, or a commander remmick situation from trek. HA! Good Fun!

Context: I've been using DALL-E mini since it's been popular this past week, and I noticed that the image resolutions(256x256) are surprisingly close to portrait resolution(210x330). I slopped together a quick test. AI Example (generated by DALL-E mini): Disregard the PoE1. That's just what I had installed at the moment. I didn't bother refining the portrait much. Only spent like 10 min on all this to prove how quick it can be. In the forums, custom portraits are something I see come up fairly often, so I'm wondering why no one here ever considered neural networks to do it for them. I haven't seen anyone ever suggest it, and I just searched for anyone too. Hell I made an account just to post this. I guess it is pretty recent tech though. I've been watching different AI/neural network stuff for the past couple years. There's been some pretty impressive leaps in general from the last year alone (And just wait until next year and the year after!). (To the mods--Wasn't sure if this'd get buried under the main portraits thread or whether the AI stuff is directly relevant to it, so new topic it is. I hope that's okay)

Primal season 2 takes a turn in the direction of the series. Not sure quite sure if I like the direction. Now you got me interested in giving it a go...

Of course they will, the USA is a country of laws.

A testimony from medic abducted in Mariupol, about the behaviour of their captors... https://www.ta3.com/clanok/246021/zajatci-tyzdne-kricali-od-bolesti-v-naruci-jej-zomrel-chlapec-ukrajinska-zdravotnicka-popisala-mucenie-v-ruskom-zajati Google translate: The captives screamed in pain for weeks, a boy died in her arms. Ukrainian nurse described torture in Russian captivity 15/09/2022 19:11 The captives screamed in pain for weeks, a boy died in her arms. Ukrainian nurse described torture in Russian captivity Ukrainian volunteer Yuliya Pajevská, who was captured by the Russians in Mariupol in March, testified on Thursday at a hearing before a committee in the US Congress about the torture of Ukrainians in Russian captivity. Pajevská, who is known in Ukraine as Tajra, was released after three months. She told members of the American Helsinki Committee that the Russians regularly tortured her and other prisoners, many of whom did not survive. According to AP, this is her most open testimony yet about what she experienced at the hands of the Russians. "Do you know why we are doing this to you?" a Russian asked her. "Because you can," Pajevská answered him, according to her statement. The American Helsinki Committee is a government agency established by Congress in 1975 to promote respect for human rights. It is attended by members of the House of Representatives and the Senate, as well as representatives of American ministries. Pajevská described that a seven-year-old boy died in her arms because she did not have the necessary equipment to help him. She further claimed that the captives had to undress before being tortured. Many screamed in pain for weeks before dying. "In such agony, the only thing they knew before death was violence and new pain," she said. She described hell According to the Ukrainian agency Ukrinform, Pajevska saved the lives of soldiers and civilians in Donbass for eight years. This year, she handed over to the AP agency the records made when she and her group helped Ukrainians and wounded Russians during the current war. AP wrote that Pajevská is one of those who ended up in Russian captivity. The mayor of Mariupol said that 10,000 people disappeared during the Russian siege of the city. The Russians captured Mariupol in April at the cost of a destroyed city and countless dead. Maryland Senator Ben Cardin said after Pajevska's speech that the Geneva Conventions require unconditional protection for both civilian and military health workers. He called what the Ukrainian woman described a violation of international law. Republican Joe Wilson from South Carolina called Russian President Vladimir Putin a war criminal. Until now, Pajevská has refused to describe her captivity to journalists in more detail, she only talked about it in general, that it was hell. "It's very uncomfortable to talk about what happened there," she told the committee.

gonna do our thing where we respond serious to silly, 'cause is almost never just a joke. payback desantis and abbott is not constructive, but the current state o' politics has left and right looking at ways to make them pay or suffer for wrongs done or imagined. waste. what blue states should be sending is what they already is sending: tech jobs. places such as texas becoming more reactionary is in part 'cause o' the justified fear o' the gop that their control o' the state is evaporating and may soon be irretrievably gone. what happened to california in the past is happening increasing to texas, georgia and other southern states today with agriculture and/or fossil fuels giving way to tech and service industry interests. southern state gop is, much as were the case during the civil rights era, fighting tooth and nail to increase voter suppression efforts, but while such vile practices may indeed be successful short term, and will likely have the blessing o' the current Court, texas and georgia got no plan for dealing with an influx o' young and educated persons. *snort* if f'ing millennials and younger people would actual vote, texas would already be blue. gop is indulging in theatrics 'cause they don't have an agenda. the gop allowed trump to set an ultimately self-defeating course as there ain't no way to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US and the wall on the southern border would achieve little save line the pockets o' a handful o' construction firms while cheesing off ranchers and undermining water projects. 'course is not all good news. the tech jobs heading south has coincided with more than a few blue states becoming more red as disaffected whites who has seen their working class jobs disappear or become less lucrative is needing to blame somebody and while trump couldn't offer real solutions he did channel fear, anger, and stoopid in ways other national republicans had previous found distasteful. wanna criticize desantis and abbott? fine. criticism is deserved, but libs lamenting the current situation is cowardly and indulges the same refusal to face realities as is endemic in the new gop. trump announced muslim ban and he were blaming immigrants and libs for every ill white working class voters suffered BEFORE he became President. nevertheless, democrats didn't bother to vote in 2016 and so we ended up with trump and four years o' government sponsored radicalization o' the right. meanwhile, democrats continue to indulge tyson furyesque punch-self-in-face infighting and spend big money to get ultra maga candidates onto republican ballots... and then pretend shock and dismay at the increasing intolerance o' republicans. regardless, short answer as to what blue states may be sending in return is obvious if less likely to energize the young democrats who don't vote but instead rage on internet message boards and twitter: tech jobs. HA! Good Fun!

Most of the time I have Sosiel alternate between a crossbow and a mace and shield for the AC. I completely forgot about the glaive description.

Clearly HoF is overpriced in the game, making it usually not worth selecting. But thanks for pointing out a creative use of it, @Constentin Lévine! As for godlike MCs, just invest in arcana and cast AS from a scroll. While scrolls seem expensive, for most of the game you'll have plenty of money and can afford this if you wish. I personally prefer doing this, as it is much faster (the cast time for the helmet is long), and arcana gives you a nice boost to the spell's power.

I'm speculating that type of equipment may come once the war is over, as it then becomes a "deterrent" in case of a renewal of Russian aggression.

I watched the new Game of thrones thing and.. I dunno, it feels like we did all this already, but better and with full frontal 2010s HBO boobs, instead of shadowy side boobs.

Rings of Power is a million times better than WoT. Honestly they aren't really comparable. It's like comparing the CW superhero shows to Nolan's Batman. They aren't even close to the same tone. I've said it before, Rings of Power feels like the Hobbit movies, which might have been better served if they were broken into a series. It definitely captures the feel of Middle Earth. Amazon has been fairly hit and miss, though. I have no idea if they can pull off a Blade Runner series. People thought the movie was too slow, I thought, so I don't imagine a 10-part series is going to improve the pace. I will happily give it a try.

Blightheart last upgrade, according to the wiki description : Nearby enemies will become Distracted after killing an enemy with the weapon for 20.0 sec But it is not really true. In the fact, Corrupting Beauty give an Aura (1.5m base radius) to the wearer that cause Distracted for 20s every 3s (pulse). Because the attack is from the weapon, that proc in the AoE Avenging Storm each 3s. As beneficial effect (15s base), that can be extended, and on top the effect is not cleared when switching to another weapon set.

For anybody not wanting to use consumables or per-rest-abilites to get Avenging Storm: Blightheart can be bound to a Chanter - and Tekehu's Stormspeaker subclass has access to Avenging Storm. With Sure-Handed Ila this is quite the fun combo that doesn't require a lot of fiddling and is something fresh for Tekehu after all that Hemorrhaging, puffing Blinding Smokes and stuff. Edit: By the way - shooting you own Many-Lives skeletons will work as well. Easy way to get Corrupting Beauty up right at the start of the battle.

I don't even know what to say about that. Could probably just copy&paste my old posts about the path that America is heading towards. Chances are still pretty good that Trump will be just fine, I guess.

IIRC, Japan will shank you in a dark alley for suggesting that.

Second playthrough of Atelier Meruru after 8 and half year on my PS3 is behind me. Again, the goal of this playthrough was to get all missing trophies and one new ending. Because I have already spent a lot of time on raising friendship with all characters for these trophies, the obvious choice was the Miss Popular ending. Besides that, I was able to defeat Eternity Goddess and Masked G for the first time. Unfortunately the free DLC boss was to powerful for me, so his demise has to wait a little bit longer.

Yeah, you guys might want to check the description of the Soulshear glaive.

Excellent interview and I agree with most of it, it always highlights the unlikely reality of the " new world order "

I have neither of those two names in my party, but the little friendly Babau pops up for me too. Confused me the first few times, wondering where it came from. In the end, I just decided it was one of Arueshalae's (sp?) old lovers from the abyss, missing his (ex-)girlfriend Edit: Could it be related to the mythic path (trickster in my case)? The "closet" meetings, that are part of the trickster path are hilarious. I could just imagine a real world, human cabinet meeting working exactly the same way

had three estimates for ductwork at one our properties: $6700 $5300 $95 (the inspection fee) third estimate were from our usual hvac/duct guy, but he weren't able to take a looksee until today. from past experience, we were believing even if we had all ductwork replaced, it shouldn't cost no more than $4000 and a competitive estimate would be closer to $3000, so the first two proposals struck us as unreasonable. the guy we actual trust for heat and air came out today. ten minutes and a couple o' screws later (literal and figurative) our actual problem were fixed. there is already a wealth tax in the US, even if it ain't levied by the irs or franchise tax board. saw our billing address and assumed we would pay stoopid money... and truth is, if one o' those first two guys had asked for $3000 or less, we likely woulda' gone ahead and given them the job. HA! Good Fun! ps we did give the tech who fixed our issue a benjamin, so we actual spent $195.

inversions are really ugly. if you're curious, you can read about them here: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/227477-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire/faqs/76599/inversions i suggest two rules of thumbs. first. "is this thing affected by inversions?" if you stacked a bunch of small modifiers together, could it result in a complete negation of something? (e.g. -100% hostile duration, or -100% area of effect, or -100% healing, or -100% action speed) then yes, it's affected by inversions. this is basically why inversions exist, so that you can have an additive system without worrying about accidentally creating enough negative modifiers that you have 0 or less than 0 effects unless you deliberately want to completely negate something, e.g. Enfeebled affliction. second. "how do these things stack?" the 'easy' answer is that they are not quite as strong as multiplicative effects, but are nonetheless roughly similar in impact. so a -75% PEN penalty functions like a multiplier of .25x. Two -10% hostile duration modifiers functions like a .9x modifier and a .9x modifier multiplied together. Remember, it's not exactly like this, when it comes to combining multiple negative modifiers it's much more moderate, but it should give you a rough ballpark on how strong or weak modifiers are when combined together.

AI just need to be trained on Terry Pratchett to get around that conundrum. Yes, though humane* kosher is limited in application, which is why you tend to get people bending either the rules on kosher or the rules on animal cruelty. All the meat sold here is halal (well, except pork for obvious reasons) but you have to go to a kosher butcher to get kosher meat. That's because halal can be applied to 'industrial slaughtering' while kosher cannot (easily). My sister had some interesting stories about doing meat inspections as part of her vet training. She was fundamentally not keen on the kosher process, at all. *good thing I noticed I left the e off there or I would have been saying something, uh, absolutely haram.

i think i'm going to have to update my guide with an entire dedicated section for all the avenging storm interactions and cheese opportunities that have been discovered over the past few months

you jerk, i just rolled a single-class lifegiver to take advantage of a lot of the new interactions you discovered, and now you found another one for me to keep track of!

Pictured: Constentin in their Deadfire game, discovering new cheesy interactions never before seen to exploit Avenging Storm

Mortal Shell. I cleared the last (I think) area. Unlike the previous locations, this one was covered in fog from the start. Considering that there are few landmarks in general, it was not a welcome change. Also there were portals without clear indication where they led. Finally, the deadliest foe in Souls-likes appeared - the gravity. Basically, when the HP depletes the first time, the MC, who is some sort of spirit, gets knocked out of the shell and rolls a bit to the side to get up. Which means instant death on ledges that were numerous in the area. The fall damage was featured in the boss arena as well - in order to reach it, you had to fall and with the assassin shell (Tiel) and without the ability that negates fall damage, you was losing one "life" even before the battle. The boss itself was fairly easy, partially due to the sword being fully upgraded, partially due to it having only 2 combo attacks in the second phase, which led to a rather repetitive but simple battle. On a positive note, the opponents were more diverse, though only 3 new ones, the rest were present in other locations, and the last stretch of the area was reasonably straight-forward and good-looking. And running back out was quite engaging, especially when I saw a row of crossbowwomen on the top of the staircase.

Got my FireFox sorted out (backed up favourites, uninstalled, deleted everything in the three AppData subfolders that had Mozilla and or Firefox in it, then reinstalled and imported favourites) Also got my gfx card repaired... mostly because it was two and a half years old and i had forgotten it had 3 years warranty One of the fans had started vibrating so badly I could hear it upstairs (my pc is downstairs). I.e. not good. Ordered a replacement fan from a company that specializes in gfx card fan replacements (no kidding, such companies exists). Replaced the card, pc and... black screen. I'm sure the left over screws I had from the gfx card were unrelated to it Pulled out the card and put in my old 1050 card, using that for a week and a half while mulling over what to do. A new card was definitely not on the budget at this point in time (I really would have expected it to last 5 years before upgrading my 2070 to something more contemporary. Took the card apart again, touched and wiggled everything, reassembled the card (still without finding a purpose for my new spare screws) and put it in my pc. Magic! Now it works again and I can hopefully wait at least another year and a half (at least) before splurging a small fortune on a new card and or pc. Off to the local Games Workshop store tonight for a few games of 40K Kill Team with some new found friends.

Playing on Core rules so 3rd hardest setting. Which does have a warning, to be fair, but then I'm not exactly a novice and have completed Kingmaker on Core rules (without, iirc, a single party wipe either). I rather like having used almost all the consumables, that's the part which makes me wonder if it's actually the best start to a 'D&D' game. It's kind of silly finding you have 30 odd potions of barkskin/ bears endurance/ bulls strength you've never used and you certainly had to use them to realistically stand a chance in some fights. I also didn't run out but came close, so the balance is probably near perfect, objectively, it just feels really difficult*. I didn't even fight the elementals though I bet the water one is cheesable somehow, I just couldn't be bothered finding out how. *it's also early level D&D syndrome of course. You've only ever one crit or a failed save away from disaster when you have so few HP.

tbh it's probably a good thing they pull from as many sources as possible, without nsfw filters or any filters that DALL-E 2 does. You and everyone should totally pick up Stable Diffusion. Shouldn't be too bad to set up with plenty of tutorials floating around. Once I finish up with DALL-E 2, I'm probably going to take a break anyway. And speaking of DALL-E 2, back to it: Non-human races. God, I forgot just how bad the situation was, just how few portraits there are of orlans. Literally ONE male portrait for each of their two subraces. Let's see what some variations of rare portraits look like Aumaua too Results are ...Ehhhhhhhh 24 hearth orlan variations (to make variations look unique for your portrait, you'd have to do some re-coloring, regardless of the AI. Use PS, GIMP, etc) 25 wild orlan variations Who are these little fellas? A buncha little gremlins. Trolls. Imps. Goblins. Duendes. Up to some devious shenanigans. Some foolish tomfoolery. Coaxing you into a snafu. They're gonna call you a b!tch. Not really wild orlans, though. 26 coastal aumaua variations 27 island aumaua variations 28 uhhhhhhhhhh Ok maybe Variations isn't as good as I thought it was

Examples 'Variations' 20: tbh Boeroer i still recognize you more by the old profile pic. Funny part is since the pic was so lowres, the AI made its images blurrier too. I didn't expect that 21 Ever wanted to beat the game with 5 of yourself? PERCY GANG PERCY GANG A.K.A. 'Percy & his fanclub go and gang up on the rest of the Deadfire'.

Trash batch 3 Pillars of Eternity (lmao) Doesn't seem to even recognize Pillars of Eternity as a game. DALL-E Mini/Craiyon does, tho. Repeating what I said, they learned from different training datasets. One AI was fed Pillars of Eternity images, and one wasn't. Big neural networks basically take in a giant feeding-trough worth of data--like in the order of millions--and they're picking what to feed it, which varies. That's why the AIs have different results.

btw, note that the resolutions are higher than they look. Here's a full image from the first one 1024x1024 .png files (converted to a jpeg tho to fit here)

In chronological order of how I made them: 1 Black woman with white hair, Pillars of Eternity portrait Tried to see if I could recreate my very first picture in one go. Not bad but the styyyyyle . That sh!t ain't Pillars.

Woman in decorative plate w/ thick wavy black hair And properly cropped: EDIT: Decided to make a slightly smaller-hair version since I wasn't overly fond of big 80's hair in my crpg And like I said, plenty of faces to choose from. For this one and only this one, I chose a face from a real existing portrait (well, someone else's edit of an existing portrait. Same difference). For the rest, I'm using AI results only, just to test DALL-E mini. Some of the AI results can be perturbing.

Maybe this is a bit of an off-kilter topic, but I hope people see it, haha. AI-generated custom RPG portraits in one minute. How ridiculous is that for real Could also use it for tabletop characters too Here's what I did in DALL-E mini. btw this isn't the only website or software out there. 1. I entered my own prompt "Black woman with white hair, Pillars of Eternity portrait" (don't need an account, eyy). Waited ~1 minute, and this was the very first result. 2. NOTE: You can probably come up with something decent-looking after doing enough runs, but I used GIMP to speed things along and for my personal adjustments. Chose the top-right creature for its outfit and the top-left square bc I preferred the head(look at the other choices) 3. The actual work. I went into GIMP and quickly just slapped on the left's face to the right one. Warped the stank mouth, bit of nose, slight brightness adjustments, and that's it, image done in like 10 minutes total. Probably could've been even faster. Can someone make something better than my rushed test job? Maybe. Probably. Better yet, make a quick AI portrait and commission an artist to use that as a base/reference to make something better and less crusty-looking. Artists could use the money anyway. Either way, it's easier than making something on your own from scratch, esp. for multiple characters.