As someone who recently started getting into digital art, I’m genuinely shocked at how good Krita is.
This is a raster graphics editor that could could potentially rival the likes of Photoshop, Affinity Photo and Paint Shop Pro in terms of features. GIMP by comparison is dogshit.
To people downvoting GaMEChld, I invite you to read a blog post Okcupid once published on how women judge male attractiveness on their own site.
Obviously this was archived from 17 years ago, because this blog post was published two years before Match bought out the platform, and several more years before they would begin monopolizing and enshittifying the entire online dating landscape in the wake of Tinder’s popularity.
It’s very understandable why a bunch of greedy corporate fucks who want to sucker you into a £40/month subscription to see what fake accounts liked your profile would want to bury the truth that women rate 80% of guys as below-average attractiveness.
Might want to cancel Strong Bad then…
Sadly the current status quo is the best solution.
How often do you see or hear “male” used without any of the descriptors attached in casual contexts?
Honestly, only in the context of plugs, sockets & input/output cables in nerd circles, or in wildlife documentaries when describing animals in nature, to the point where I cannot read the word without hearing it in David Attenborough’s voice.
That’s besides the point though. I gave an example of men referring to themselves as males. If you couldn’t already tell by my use of “lean six ligma”, I’m kinda taking the piss out of the manosphere and its influencers like Andrew Tate.
But the common use of the word “female” in informal contexts, without any other descriptors attached, does exactly what the article author says it does and isn’t nearly as pervasive for men or boys.
TIL that Strong Bad is a misogynist.
This is the earliest example online I can find of a woman being referred to as a female, dating back to 2003. And it was literally from a Flash animated web series 23 years ago where the word was deliberately used as a rhyme to “email.”
It’s a weird term to use other than “woman” or even “girl” (but apparently that’s problematic now, even though it’s everywhere in pop music.) But honestly the red pill, incel and MGTOW circles have come up with a whole lot worse which I won’t even repeat here.
Requiring large social media platforms to regulate and moderate hateful speech would be a start. Big tech has been largely dropping the ball in this regard.
Cases-in-point, Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Threads), X Corp (the App Formerly Known As Twitter) and Alphabet (YouTube.)
X’s Grok AI has been used to generate millions of sexualised images. Sometimes women get objectified and undressed without their knowledge nor consent by people promoting Grok. Sometimes the victims are minors. The fact that X hasn’t been shut down speaks volumes about how much billionaires have been able to get away with crap that would land anybody else behind bars for a long time.
YouTube… Have you also noticed more hateful content being posted to the platform. This isn’t an example that I think I can link to here, but there is a far-right ragtime musician called Foundring who was previously banned from the platform years ago for hate speech. Either due to ban evasion or his ban being lifted, he came back two years ago and recently started posting piano covers of old vintage ragtime and folk music from the late 18th Century. One of his videos, which contained the word “N*****” in the title (yes, hard-R) got catapulted by the YouTube algorithm and is currently sitting at 1.2 million views. It’s 37 days old and still up.
Consider the use of the word “female” in these posts. It is not a neutral term here, it is a term of abuse. It’s used by teenage boys to degrade us and equate us to animals. Boys are never described as “males”, but girls are always “females” – the equivalent of sows or calves, creatures that are less than human.
Erm… Alpha male? Beta male? Sigma male? Lean six ligma male?
If National Rally were in any position of power, this easily could have become France’s Reichstag Fire moment.
The tech and entertainment industries have slowly eroded any and all moral arguments against piracy.
Streaming and digital distribution have led to situations where we no longer own the media we buy. We could buy a licence to access an app, song, show or movie and then have our access revoked at any time for any reason, and maybe we’ll get a refund if we’re lucky…
Landmining terms of service with clauses banning class action lawsuits and imposing forced arbitration have become increasingly common and is further eroding our consumer rights so if a company does fuck us financially, we’re SOL.
Then we have companies like Nintendo that have litigated hard against emulators, ROM sites and third-party flash carts which have given access to old games that Nintendo otherwise have little interest in making available on modern hardware - in some cases bankrupting people like Gary Bowser for life with seven-figure judgements in the process.
We now have a substantial risk of more shows, games, songs, movies and other forms of media becoming lost because of this.
But the biggest kick in the teeth has come from the AI industry.
Hosting pirated streams of PPV events or sports matches locked behind expensive cable channels, or even selling modded Fire Sticks that enable piracy can earn you significant prison time and a massive fine. Yet training LLMs on copyrighted works without the rightsholders’ knowledge, consent or compensation is apparently perfectly fine and not landing people like Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg behind bars?
I also see it as a cruel reminder of my ineptitude with women, and I write this as somebody who lost their virginity on Valentines Day last year.
That being said, my hatred for the holiday has diminished over the years. You don’t really need a special holiday to justify going on a spontaneous date or showering your SO with sexy lingerie.
Eww, Voat and Ruqqus.
If somebody pisses me off or upsets me, I need to stop brooding about it like a little bitch and call them out directly.
Over the last few years I’ve learned that I avoid confrontation to a fault.
Bonus: how did this past year’s go?
Shit.
This time last year I was meant to be moving into my own apartment, then I was laid off, my mortgage offer expired and I had to pull out of the purchase. I now work in a shitty purchase ledger job as a temp, where my office is 50 miles away. The pay sucks and I question why I’m torturing myself working in this role just for some recruiter to earn commission from my misery.
Halfway through the year I had a (kinda close) friend disappear for roughly two months after a rough breakup. I met up with her at a karaoke eve when she reached out because I was worried about her wellbeing. She came on to me pretty hard, we kissed at least a dozen times, dirty danced a few times and made out once, but then she apologized and friendzoned me via text after I got home. And to make it clear, she was the one initiating all this.
My love life wasn’t all bad though. I did date someone at the beginning of the year and while that relationship didn’t last, the breakup was amicable and we’re still really close friends.
Still not sure what I’ll do NYE tomorrow…
Down in the workshop all the elves were making toys
For the good Gentile girls and the good Gentile boys
Too bad we got dragged kicking and screaming out of the EU five years ago. Securing a job offer and work visa is going to be really difficult, and I don’t speak another language.
At the moment, everything.
This time last year, I was meant to be buying my own apartment and finally moving out from my parents’ home. Then I got laid off, spent seven months struggling to find work and then landed a temporary purchase ledger job which I fucking hate. Partially because the commute takes me about 2 hours each way, partially because I work an 8-5 shift and have to get up at stupid o’clock in the morning on office days, and partially because we use Oracle Fusion which is the biggest crock of shit I’ve ever used.
Unfortunately that means I have to live with my parents for even longer. Renting somewhere is out of the question because Bristol is the second-most expensive British city to live in, and I basically can’t get a mortgage without a full time job.
Sometimes I question why I chose to pivot towards accounting. I have a History degree, I’m fully AAT qualified and I’m halfway through my ACCA and I’m earning £13.50 an hour, or just £1.29 above minimum wage on a zero-hours contract. I can genuinely earn nearly as much from stacking shelves, flipping burgers or pouring pints, not that there’s really many hospitality or retail jobs available. Office days genuinely take 13 hours out of my day. 8 of these are working, 4 of these are the commute and 1 is the lunch break I get.
My future is uncertain and I feel like there’s no point in bothering. Best-case scenario, AI is truly a bubble that’s going to burst, crash the stock market and leave us in a recession. At worst, it takes all our jobs and the rich leave us to starve.
Despite a brief relationship with a woman who finally popped my cherry (we’re still really close friends and I’m grateful she took my virginity), my love life is practically nonexistent. Online dating is an absolute void where I only seem to match with GPS-spoofing South-East Asian and African women either pulling love scams or trying to find a Western spouse and the means to a green card. Two ladies messed around with my feelings and led me on big time this year and that’s left me exhausted.
I have a lipoma on my neck which is going to cost me a lot to remove, and good luck actually finding the time to get the consultation and surgery/liposuction booked. The NHS won’t do it because it’s not cancerous, even though this thing has grown to the point where it’s 5.5cm in diameter and sticks out like a sore thumb.
Nah, I can relate.
Worst experience I had was with a property management firm who made me go through three stages of interviews, kept me waiting for weeks for responses about next steps, sent me a bogus offer acceptance letter, then tried to lowball me by insisting the role I applied for was £5k lower than advertised.
And apparently this is a major property management firm that has BlackRock as one of their big clients.
Job market is shit right now for accountants.
Geoengineering: Whether through launching solar shades into space to block sunlight and cool the planet down, pump aerosols into the atmosphere, cloud seeding, or anything else. I think this is where our research should be going. I think it’s too late to avoid the worst-case-scenarios of climate change from merely cutting emissions, so more drastic measures to alleviate or even reverse the effects may be necessary. Plus it’ll help us with any future colonizing and terraforming of worlds outside of Earth.
Public transport infrastructure to reduce our reliance on cars & planes: While I don’t think hyperloops or a transatlantic tunnel are feasible, building tens of thousands of kilometres worth of overground and underground railway routes to interconnect towns and cities with high speed maglev trains is. China have the right idea.
Right to work from home: Remote working reduces our dependency on cars and frees up real estate to address the various housing crises we have.
Right to repair and outlawing planned obsolescence: Should we have to buy a new smartphone every 3 or so years because Apple or Samsung want to maximize profits? Do we care at all about the amount of electronic waste we’re producing?
Accelerate our efforts to reverse desertification and plant trillions more trees: If we can turn parts of the Sahel, Gobi Desert and the Australian outback green, that could have a very beneficial effect on the environment.
I’ve had loads last night.
Sleep paralysis demon that looked like someone I knew climbing into my bed and choking me.
Playing through a video game where I fall through multiple traps, fall off the stage and then have the devil turn towards me (looking like a more realistic black-haired version of Alastor from Hazbin Hotel and say “You told them, didn’t you?”
One where I was working an evening shift at my local supermarket, had to close up and help clean up the store.
I use Firefox because Google killed Manifest v2 support and (with it) uBlock Origin. Unfortunately they seem to be heading towards the AI slop route.
Yes, Edge and Brave exist but one is maintained by Microslop and will likely also follow in Google’s footsteps, and the other I don’t particularly trust because they have a homophobe as CEO and did some crypto token shit with their ad system.
The last time I used Linux as a desktop OS was around 2008. Back then the state of FOSS was absolutely dire.
I used to have a shitty Packard Bell PC at home which was weirdly partitioned, 20GB dedicated to the C:\ partition and 100GB dedicated to D:. An asshole “friend” at school goaded me into pirating Norton PartitionMagic and using it to merge the two partitions and pretty much totalled my Windows installation. As I didn’t have a backup CD I had to use Ubuntu for a few months.
The only game I genuinely got working on Linux was World of Warcraft and even installing that was a pain. WC3 was supposedly “Platinum” on Wine’s AppDB but would often freeze and didn’t support using the mouse to move the camera. Some versions also couldn’t connect online.
Fastfoward to today and gaming on Linux has evolved by leaps and bounds, in large part thanks to Valve. The only games you genuinely can’t get running are those with kernel level anticheat software.