In the show just before these were taken, Omni-Man got in a fight with another hero named The Immortal, where The Immortal went for the eyes and tried to blind him by gouging them out. It definitely hurt him, but it didn't work, and Omni-Man ripped The Immortal in half shortly afterwards. (He got better.)

Seriously, ever since I drove alongside one of the new 2024 GMC Sierra Denali trucks and realized its hood was as tall as my entire car, I've been utterly terrified of being anywhere near them. You probably can't see anything less than 10-15 feet in front of you, which is absolutely bonkers for a noncommercial vehicle. To say nothing of how getting hit by one is going to be like getting smacked directly in the face like a brick wall, because there's no way you'll be knocked up onto the roof to dissipate the force of the impact.

Car companies have absolutely lost the plot with this whole arms race of BIGGER BOXIER TALLER MANLIER trucks ever since Ford got made fun of around 2000 or so for making a car that was too "feminine" because it dared to have a more rounded exterior. The next generation refresh made it bigger and boxier, slapped a 12" Ford badge that was 2-3x the size of the badge on the previous generation, and it's been all downhill ever since.

I see you read Piers Anthony too.

I'm no game designer or coder so I'm just going off what I read on Wikipedia, but... Apparently the Saturn was a mostly 2D focused system, so it had a processor that could do warping and manipulation of sprites. So when it drew a "polygon" it was really drawing together a bunch of sprites and manipulating them.

...yeah.

if you even ask a person and trust your life to them like that, unless they give you good reason they are reliable, you are a moron. Why would someone expect a machine to be intelligent and experienced like a doctor? That is 100% on them.

Insurance companies are already using AI to make medical decisions. We don't have to speculate about people getting hurt because of AI giving out bad medical advice, it's already happening and multiple companies are being sued over it.

My thinking in regards to the humor is that it's very strongly late 90s/early 00s edge humor. A lot of the game's humor is based in cute, cartoony characters swearing, drinking, fucking (off-screen), and being maimed and blown up into gruesome chunks of low-poly meat. It's also very British--Rare is based in the UK, and it really shows through in this game, from the characters' accents, to the whole game's plot being kicked off by Conker getting lost while drunkely stumbling home from a pub that wouldn't be out of place in an English village.

If you're a fan of, or nostalgic for, the style of edgy shock humor animation from that period--things like classic South Park, Happy Tree Friends, (jfc how do I say this without getting automodded) R-worded Animal Babies, or Scoundrels (a British skit comedy show starring puppet animals), this game will be right up your alley. Even if you're not, I'd still say to give it a try--underneath the swearing, poop jokes, dated movie references, and low-fidelity gore, it's still a platformer by Rare while they were at the top of their game.

My first ever car was a 95 civic 2-door. Beat it to hell, fucked up a wheel so that there was a 1/4" of clearance between tire and wheel well, the exhaust fell off, the computer was starting to act up, and I still kick myself for letting my friend talk me into selling it for a 2003 ford escape. That got sold for a song after I fucked up the engine head trying to fix the second popped spark plug it had...

I don't think that most of us are outright fascist, but I do think most of us are not just apathetic, but also willfully ignorant. For one reason or another--lack of education, viewing politics as "boring," no energy to pay attention beyond headlines, a lack of media literacy--most Americans simply cannot see the impact an administration has on society beyond their immediate experience. For these people, Trump was a guy who said stupid shit, lowered their taxes (ignoring the sleight of hand where the 'tax cut' was almost entirely due to changes in tax withholding so the extra money on their paycheck was counterbalanced by a lower tax return), and held a rally when he lost. They're not explicitly fascist--if the tanks start rolling down their town's Main Street, they'll wail and moan about "I never wanted this, how could this have happened"--but to them, things like "economics" or "human rights" or "democracy" or "equality" are boring toys that nerds play with. They're the type of person that complains about crumbling roads and potholes and bad traffic, then turns around and complains about construction projects to fix the very things they were complaining about.

So I don't necessarily fully agree that America is more fascist than we like to admit, but I think it's largely a distinction without a difference--most Americans are perfectly happy to stand by and let fascism take the reigns, to do nothing and complain about anybody who does try to fight against it, right up until it's too late and THEY'RE the ones up against the wall.

I think the horrible truth of the matter is that the cycle won't stop until one side is dead, no matter how much we wish otherwise. There's just too much bad blood for either side to trust the other, too many old grudges spawning new grudges that in turn result in more bloodshed. I legitimately, honestly, seriously don't see a peaceful solution--the Israelis won't give anything up because they (rightly) fear any concessions will simply be used to fuel further attacks by militants until they're driven out or eradicated, and the Palestinians won't give anything up because they don't have anything left to give up, nor do they have anyone who will take them in, so they can't even leave (which they don't want to do anyway since they'd been living there for centuries).

The worst part is that deep down, pretty much everyone knows this, and they know that supporting one side means tacitly supporting the genocide and eradication of the other. But nobody in power wants to come out and say it, because admitting you're supporting genocide is a surefire way to piss off literally everyone. So we get platitudes and high-minded speeches about preventing civilian casualties, and everyone hems and haws while we create our own little Hell on earth.

And yet that effort to make something from AI is trivial compared to the effort required to become a professional artist or photographer. If I commission art from a human, I'm curating and fine-tuning the output by browsing the artist's gallery, deciding which artist to commission based on their art style, deciding on a prompt to give the artist, and revising the output by adjusting my prompt based on the artist's preliminary sketch. Yet despite all that effort, I don't get the copyright for the completed artwork, because I didn't make it.

I wholeheartedly and completely reject the notion that human creativity has any more than de minimis influence on AI art. It's no more a tool than an actual live artist is a tool.

And we're saying that if peeling out knowledge that someone has a right to have forgotten is difficult or impossible, that knowledge should not have been used to begin with. If enforcement means big tech companies have to throw out models because they used personal information without knowledge or consent, boo fucking hoo, let me find a Lilliputian to build a violin for me to play.

Maybe consider digitizing that cassette, or at least listening to it to make sure it's still usable (assuming you can stomach it). Cassette mediums degrade over time and it's quite possible that microcassete could be reaching the end of its usable life: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preservation_of_magnetic_audiotape