I avoid this by not watching porn that makes me sad. There’s plenty of consensual, happy, joyful sex-positive porn out there.

While your point is valid about this particular situation (which is horrible and criminal on multiple levels), your overbroad generalization of porn and the implied assumption of guilt in the viewers is what’s led folks to react negatively to your statement.

On a larger level, this kind of statement plays into the puritanical doctrines towards sex that paint it as a negative force, and subsequently leads to the twisting of a positive, creative act into a negative expression of power and rape in those that accept those doctrines.

Porn is not at fault here, nor are its viewers. Those at fault in this crime are the producers and publishers, who were well aware of the abuses happening under their watch, and deceived their viewers into believing they were observing consensual performance acts. I hope that these women get every cent and more, and it would be excellent to see a class action suit from Pornhub’s subscribers arise in tandem to and in support of their complaint.

It is on Kbin. Lemmy doesn’t have that capacity yet as far as I know. It’s one of the main reasons I recommend the former - Kbin bridges the gap between Mastodon and Lemmy, and includes functionality from both types of instances. Following users increases your feed content here exponentially.

Great username. Worth a follow.

"I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Spezymandias, Admin of Kings;
Look on my Reddit, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

The news here is that, contrary to popular belief, 5% of NFTs actually still hold some value.

Silently hoists the Jolly Roger…

Agreed. Spez’s support of The_Donald was the beginning of the end (although as he was a mod of jailbait before it was banned, it was clear that Trump wasn’t the genesis of Spez’s sickness), and now there’s nothing left of the communities that made it great. There’s hasn’t been anything rewarding about contributing there since about 2014.

The greatest challenge with AI is not how to make it, but how to make it better than us.

No worries & thanks for the suggestion.

Pretty much, although these days a lot of folks find it more convenient to have the rules in .pdf for easy access. There’s hundreds available. Here’s a listing I had posted last night on the @13thFloor magazine I run over here on kbin - happy to crosspost if you feel it fits.

Oh boy, have I got some treats in store for you…

Question - is it just video games, or are you looking for tabletop RPGs too?

It looks like the key in the ruling here was that the AI created the work without the participation of a human artist. Thaler tried to let his AI, “The Creativity Machine” register the copyright, and then claim that he owned it under the work for hire clause.

The case was ridiculous, to be honest. It was clearly designed as an attempt to give corporations building these AI’s the copyrights to the work they generate from stealing the work of thousands of human artists. What’s clever here is that they were also trying to sideline the human operators of AI prompts. If the AI, and not the human prompting it, owns the copyright, then the company that owns that AI owns the copyright - even if the human operator doesn’t work for them.

You can see how open this interpretation would be to abuse by corporate owners of AI, and why Thaler brought the case, which was clearly designed to set a precedent that would allow any media company with an AI to cut out human content creators entirely.

The ruling is excellent, and I’m glad Judge Howell saw the nuances and the long term effects of her decision. I was particularly happy to see this part:

In March, the copyright office affirmed that most works generated by AI aren’t copyrightable but clarified that AI-assisted materials qualify for protection in certain instances. An application for a work created with the help of AI can support a copyright claim if a human “selected or arranged” it in a “sufficiently creative way that the resulting work constitutes an original work of authorship,” it said.

This protects a wide swath of artists who are doing incredible AI assisted work, without granting media companies a stranglehold on the output of the new technology.

“When the committee held an initial hearing on broadband permitting streamlining, including a draft of the American Broadband Deployment Act, no state or local government was invited to testify.”

If you’d like to make your feelings known on this omission and the bill in general, here are the members of that committee - clicking on a rep will give you their contact information.

I’m sure this will will end well

I buy games based on the following tier scale:

Gameplay > Performance > Price > Expected time playing > Graphics

I agree with your point in the post, especially after playing Darktide, which chucked performance out the window for fog and lighting effects. It doesn’t matter how pretty your game is if it’s rendering at 3fps.

Actually, when William Hearst originally started the campaign in the 20s to take out the hemp farmers that were competing with his timber business (he bought up most of Humboldt so he could corner the paper market), he targeted Hispanics (primarily Mexicans) with Marijuana in his articles about drug crimes and how they were ruining America. Henry Ansligner bought it hook, line and sinker, and he set the tone until the 40s, when hemp was briefly made legal for the war effort. Note that Jack Herer’s The Emperor Wears No Clothes does an excellent job illustrating this historical relationship.

Once the Beats started smoking weed in 50s, hemp was criminalized again, and the prohibition was expanded to felony status as law enforcement started targeting the evolution of the Beat movement, the hippies.

The subsequent prohibition on cocaine products was targeted at black neighborhoods (as per the GOP intention during the Nixon/Reagan era), and was built upon the “successes” of the previous marijuana prohibition.

This is why I don’t think they’ll stop at porn.

This is not going to stop porn. All it will do is criminalize the actors, producers, and viewers.

I’m reminded of the drug war, where they took a relatively harmless narcotic used disproportionally by minority populations at the time (Marijuana), and used it to criminalize and imprison large swaths of the population, especially within the black community.

It’s no coincidence that most of the folks targeted by this effort are women and sex industry workers, which skew liberal by a large degree. Note I’m not just talking about prostitution or porn actors, but the entire sex industry, including toys and books.

The GOP is scared shitless of the rising power of women in modern society, and being able to criminalize and consequently attack the revenue stream of sex industry workers is a way to blunt it. There’s also an element of class warfare involved, as OnlyFans or similar sites are often the most economical way for a young woman to lift herself out of poverty if she has no other marketable skills.

This reduces the minuscule interest I had in replaying Paladins to a negative number. Smite’s been nothing but frustrating garbage, but I thought that with a bit of polish and a lot more character development, Paladins had promise when it came out. Starting a labor dispute to begin a practice that will degrade the overall quality of the game means it’s not worth my hard disk space to install their products - it’s clear things are only going to get worse for Hi-Rez titles from here.

I’m looking for a rendition of the Sistine Chapel with God as Danny Devito and Christopher Lloyd as Adam, like it was in the Taxi days, ideally done in oils. All I’ve got is a buck, but my social account has followers. If I post it, you’ll get exposure. What can you do for me?

NFT’s were actually a very clever plot put together by us starving artists to combat the hordes of choosing beggars that infest the internet. We all knew it was a scam, just like limited edition glichee prints, but there hasn’t been a time in history when artists made enough money not to have to scam folks to survive, so we figured we were more than justified taking the tech-bros for a ride.

No more Githankypanky?