ggtdbz

You see, when football is mentioned online, the collective intelligence of any comment section is cut by at least 90%. This stacks with another 90% if it’s women’s football or any token LGBT acknowledgement in football. The joke is Muslim Bad.

Which is a shame. I used to make fun of le sportsball amirite until it clicked that there was immense entertainment value in these matches, which could be super tense and exciting even when an individual match doesn’t have super high stakes. There’s storylines with each of the players and managers, there’s a lot of diverging personalities among them and they all handle the same game in their own way. And unlike scripted shows, when something unexpected happens it is so much more interesting. Like the story is real in a way that scripted entertainment isn’t.

Role playing? Parading on social media?

I’m literally in Lebanon. My original hometown is being bombed, and might be annexed like in the 1980s. I’m helping the displaced folks in shelters every goddamn day. Our EMTs and their centers are being struck (100 of our medical staff killed so far). It’s an absolute apocalypse for many people, many of the most vulnerable here. Neighborhoods are gone, do you understand? One day we plan to help displaced friends get their valuable stuff out of their homes, the next day the homes are just gone. Ashes. No combatants or weapons, just homes turned to ashes. I’m lucky enough to only hear the bombs and sonic booms where I live, and to feel the occasional distant thud.

And what’s happening in Lebanon is only a fraction of the misery in Gaza.

When we see them drop a strike over the city, we don’t think “yay bingo buzzword”. We’re not selling you on feeling bad for us. Just because you live in a coddled country it doesn’t mean the real crimes happening elsewhere are buzzwords to annoy you. If there’s an absolute laundry list of crimes we are facing, how is it our fault?

If it makes you feel better, your marches in the west are what looks like role play to us. You ask your governments and supposed representatives too nicely to stop supporting these crimes and in return they make fun of you and ignore these urgent pleas. They dare you to not support them even when they do the opposite of what you want.

Don’t patronize me. I’m not the one who’s only angrily typing online. I’m blocking you.

Everyone knows if you call out a crime enough times, it becomes lame and stops counting.

Every word they used is true and every one is written in the blood of ordinary people. Take your apologia for crimes against humanity back to Reddit.

I have been fascinated with depictions of cities particularly from when I was a kid. Tall, blocky modernist buildings with illuminated yellow windows. We didn’t have too many in Beirut that fit that bill, relatively few buildings here are taller than like 10 floors. Social connotations of “the city” also seemed to be much more positive in these movies and shows.

No points for guessing why I’m retreating into the recesses of my childhood memories right now.

It’s 9 am now and they’re still bombing. An entire section of the city has been turned into ashes and a lot of people were just sleeping on the sides of the road in safer areas this morning. I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything like this in my lifetime.

I’ve been to some of these neighborhoods. They are very poor, the people there have been neglected by the authorities for generations, leading many of them to believe strongly in the alternative. I don’t see that as wrong.

I feel guilty for even having a fraction of opportunity more than these people, to just live in an area that people go to for safety. To be able to worry about infrastructure and the international response and not my life and the loss of loved ones and their lack of a proper burial.

At least I’m not one of the clowns defending this on Lemmy. I didn’t think our little network was worth the disinfo effort but here we are. I’m on this platform to get away from this shit.

I’ve seen versions of this for every other country, from Mexico and Brazil to the Balkans and right here in Lebanon and Syria.

I was getting ready to take one look at these and write them off as looking just a little too sharp, but honestly, with how bleak the visionless hyperrealism of today is, the original design shines straight through. I might use this.

I played Grim Fandango about halfway through last year and I really liked it, although something else grabbed my attention.

Thursday is like this.

I literally cannot for the life of me explain why.

But خميس? The name of Thursday in my native Arabic?

Ah but Jeudi, the French name. Sun high in the sky. Very round.

I cannot even begin to explain.

I’ve commented about this before, but I do actually miss those first few generations of image generators. The first DeepDream style stuff was interesting but didn’t go very far, but this image in particular is a milestone for what came directly after.

I would love to run VQGAN+CLIP locally, for example, in some efficient way. It was fun to play with and to see how the model interpreted the input. And it wasn’t as scary as the tools we have now (especially when those are paired with the deep fake face swap stuff, for example)

I genuinely think slop is the perfect word for the current iteration of these image generators, both the image outputs themselves and the role they’re playing in the already-bleak digital media landscape.

I thought it was another one of those meme languages at first.

My reading is that it’s not necessarily a problem with the platforms but society at large.

One example you mentioned: yes, html5 games (and just downloadable itch/steam games) exist and they fill the gap left by Flash games from a gameplay perspective maybe.

But the mainstream appeal of Flash games and animations was different to what we have now. The social phenomenon of people randomly hacking together terrible flash games isn’t the same as the current tiny indie game phenomenon. I feel like the old ones were a bigger piece of the average person’s internet usage than the new one (the average person’s internet usage being 5% LLM 5% web 5% email 25% gaming 30% video and 30% doomscrolling or something like that idk)

I’m struggling to put into words what I mean by this, my comment sounds really vague when I reread it. The specific creative outlet that Flash gave people is not equivalent to what we have now, and the specific entertainment experience of browsing and playing Flash games is different from the experience of scrolling through itch. Am I making more sense?

Like of course the different technologies are different, but it’s where it fits into our lives that it’s really different imo. Hell, we could say this about Flash itself for the last few years before it was discontinued. Just the two thoughts of Newgrounds in 2006 vs Newgrounds in 2016 and how they fit into the internet ecosystem and internet culture are enough to see the difference.

I wonder if there’s a more efficient way to have things sync in blocks or something. I honestly understand very little about server architecture, much less decentralized social network architecture. Maybe having a smaller number of “centralized” (community-run, redundant, independent) nodes distributing blocks of federated data to take load off the actual instance servers that would only need to upload bulk data to fewer places?

Maybe this isn’t very different from how it already operates. Fuck if I know.