#MeetTheNauts

🤷‍♂️GlytchMeister - started as an Xbox live name, earned via breaking tech
ADHD, straight, cis, he/him
💍 engaged (don’t have bi wife energy… yet). We’re both poly.
🇺🇸 USA. Not proud of it. Wanna move to New Zealand.
😈 atheist, misotheist, dystheist, Satanist
💻 Logistics Analyst
🎓 trying to get a job with tuition reimbursement before college (mechanical engineer)
👥 extreme introvert
⚖️ Egalitarian, socialist, leftist, not a tankie or a parrot. Looking into MMT
…->

@kg_diamonds

Oh and there it is, folks, the tried and true “do your research.”

Congratulations, I just filled out my BINGO card.

What this all ended up doing was made me realize that this community is far more hostile to atheists and non-Christians in general than I had thought it would be, given that it is supposed to be this oasis of welcoming and acceptance and understanding and... safety.

So, now I know it’s not safe to push against Christian Privilege here.

With that in mind, I’m going to be instantly blocking anyone who belittles or attacks me based on my atheism or my related desires for how a gov should be run.

Statements said in anger are the most honest words a person will ever utter.

For the briefest of moments, in the throes of passion, a person ceases to care about social norms, religious tenets, the expectations of those whose opinions matter to them... everything else is burned away, leaving only the truth; razor sharp, pure, and inviolable.

Listen well to the words of an angry person, and you will see their soul laid bare, plain as day.

If anyone here following me thinks forgiveness is the only way to move forward in life and that retribution, revenge, or score-settling is evil and makes a person a “nasty piece of work”, and values the lives of traitorous terrorist Nazi and white supremacist armed insurgents who worship at the Golden bull altar of an asset of at least one hostile foreign power...

Just block me now, and save yourselves the aneurism.

So yeah. We’re potentially making our own BBEG as part of an overarching evil dragon-cult campaign.

While also mired in what has suddenly and unexpectedly become an overarching international political intrigue campaign.

While ALSO dealing with D&D sourcebook campaigns.

Add to this the fact that my DM is a huge fan of Star Wars, and that Sith force users are infamous for their command of lightning (the element of a blue dragon) and that they go all ugly and gross (black dragons apparently kinda lose their faces and end up with a bare skull when they’re really old)…

And it becomes quite clear that his plan is to Anakin his dragon. We’re raising him, training him, empowering him, all to make him an ENORMOUS threat when he turns tyrannical.

He is, visually, blue-scaled with the general shape of a black dragon, but he has a metallic sheen and he’s been behaving himself quite well so far, so the assumption is that he isn’t bound to be evil by his chromatic characteristics.

But.

If we park him on a city that depends on him and helps him grow really fast?

That’s a quick way to make a power-mad tyrant if we aren’t REALLY careful.

And C. Park our dragon atop the fledgeling’s state treasury, because he can help smelt the ore for free and he can use the platinum to accelerate his growth, and having a bigass dragon will be a huge discouraging factor to even attempt to take the mine by force.

So.

Back to my DM’s master plan:

His dragon character is, like… an alchemical test tube baby created by a heretical sect of a Cult of Tiamat who were trying to make a new Tiamat.

So he can gain the powers of the dragons he defeats…

As best as I can tell, the only way to avoid geopolitical and widespread economic disaster is

A. Get a shrewd but moral businessman who knows how to run a mine and how to deal with the political fuckery of a high-value mine, and who has incentive to preserve the general status quo that exists in the international political/economic landscape

B. Establish a Dwarven-style city-state that fills in the mined-out sections, to support the mining operation and to create a defense-strong military

…

Meaning Wyvern Torr is now a geopolitical powder keg just BEGGING for an excuse to blow up - nations will gladly wage wars over a native metallic platinum orebody like this. And they’ll steamroll Phandalin in the process.

My character is a Totem Warrior Barbarian, aka a Druid-flavored Barbarian, so he’s got a connection to nature… and he knows anyone other than him or someone like him will NOT be kind to nature when mining this platinum.

And it’s RIGHT at the surface. Aka basically no overburden. Aka immediate return on investment.

Now, Phandalin is a mining town, and it has a bunch of prospectors. The only reason none of them had already found this was because that cave made a really great shelter for monsters and ostracized races - the most recent inhabitants were Orcs. So the prospectors never went near it.

Platinum is worth 10x as much as gold in D&D, and it is used as, like, super-currency.

Later, I watched him roll a second Nat 20 to determine how rich was the ore he found… so that meant it was basically a huge nugget of platinum with bits of rock in it, instead of the other way around.

Because he found the rock in a dry cave set into a hillside amongst the northern foothills of the Sword Mountains, with no streams nearby… and he had intentionally painted the cave walls with a glittery paint to imply it was an orebody…

This means Wyvern Torr has a HUGE deposit of native Platinum

I just predicted my DM’s master plan

So he has a DMPC who is a very young dragon, and he’s using a fairly well-balanced progression system so we don’t have to wait several centuries for him to level up with us (basically, it’s a callback to the old Money=XP system, where he grows his hoard and sacrifices it to accelerate his growth and gain power)

This same character found a shiny rock in Wyvern Torr and DM rolled a Nat 20 to see what it was - so it turned out to be native metallic platinum…

I’m probably gonna get a couple of waterproof pillowcases, too.

Woke up this morning with a nosebleed that had soaked quite a bit of my pillow

Then my pillow proceeded to bust open in the washing machine

So I need recommendations.

I have joint and back and neck problems and I tend to fall asleep on my side and generally end up sleeping every which way.

I prefer firm, thick, I can’t stand how down pillows feel, and I like it when they have, like, airflow?

And, of course, fuck MyPillow

If aliens landed right now, I’d be embarrassed to call myself human.

“Greenhouse Effect”

http://xkcd.com/2889/

“Once he had the answer, Arrhenius complained to his friends that he'd "wasted over a full year" doing tedious calculations by hand about "so trifling a matter" as hypothetical CO2 concentrations in far-off eras (quoted in Crawford, 1997).”

Is Sergey Mironov a relatively minor politician in Russian politics?

/@th3j35t3r

For anyone who wants to read up on these tools:

https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/

https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html

Artists of COSO, I especially encourage y’all to take a serious look at these, and if you are not technically inclined, please find someone who is who can help you.

Aside from these two tools, the only artist protections being developed are via the Courts, and feeble attempts at legislation. Both of which are slow and generally not all that effective at controlling giant megacorps.

@th3j35t3r

(Unless you already did that while I was out)

I know AI’s can’t scrape here but there’s still a chance a user can manually pull an artist’s portfolio off of here and slap it into a generator to rip the artist off. Maybe a “glaze this image” and a “poison this image” button during image upload, but honestly, I think making it happen “automagically” wouldn’t cause a negative user experience, aside from additional load on your end and a slower upload.

@th3j35t3r

Feature Request:

Integrating University of Chicago’s FOSS tool “Glaze,” which attempts to prevent text-to-image AI scrapers/generators from being able to even come close to replicating an artist’s unique style in ways that are pretty much if not entirely invisible to the human eye,

and “Nightshade,” UoC’s FOSS tool “Nightshade,” which poisons images to sabotage TTIAI scrapers/generators that attempt to use poisoned images, causing chaotic outputs, also invisible to the human eye.