You nailed it. For me, the human-written stories were interesting because it’s not immediately apparent where they’re going. The prose evokes images and emotion, and I want to put the pieces together to identify the theme.

The AI stories blurt out the theme almost immediately, and then my attention wanes because there’s nothing left in the text except for a base retelling of events.

As the Ramones once sang:

twenty-twenty-twenty-four hours to go

I wanna be sedated

I think the window glow looks pretty good.

My suggestion is on the compositional side: The lighting on the humanoid lacks a physical source, so the highlight looks out of place as if the figure was composited into the scene separately. If you can think of an object that is casting light onto the humanoid and place it into the scene (a neon sign, light spilling from a rooftop access door, etc) everything would fit together just a bit better.

Another thing you could try is looking into 3-point lighting used in photography and film. Different 3-point configurations on the humanoid could help make them stand out from the background while keeping the highlights more subtle.

They have silly outfits because it’s fun to make your friends laugh and be goofy, and also because it protects privacy and creates a cohesive world.

The story I heard behind the costumes is that they used to play at a venue that only let a band perform once per day. They put on the outfits to appear as a different band and get paid for an extra set.

I haven’t found one yet. I think anyone who could offer the same would inevitability end up using the same slimy tactics as Amazon.

When I can, I wait and bundle purchases together in order to save on shipping costs. Almost nowhere can match the 1-2 day shipping on Amazon, but it’s rare that I actually need anything so fast.

Some of my go-to choices:

• If it’s some cheap product that Amazon sells 10,000 different versions of from brands with unpronounceable names, I usually can get it on AliExpress for cheaper. The tradeoff is waiting longer.
• For consumer electronics, I’ll look on B&H, BestBuy, Microcenter
• For PC components, although I dislike newegg, I consider them less bad then Amazon
• Books I order from my local store and pick them up in person
• Electronic components, microcontrollers, etc I look at Mouser, Digikey, SeeedStudio, Adafruit, Sparkfun, and others
• EBay is low on my list, because sometimes the seller is just drop-shipping you a product straight from Amazon and charging you more for it

Not quite. The bullying comes in a few forms:

• Removing the “buy now” button from the product page, making users click through multiple steps to complete a purchase. Per the video, suppliers who had this happen to them saw 80% drop in sales.
• Amazon automatically lowers its price, but then charges the supplier a fee on each item sold to make up for the difference in margin.
• Amazon marks the product page with a big red badge saying “high price”, discouraging users from buying the product.

Since the suppliers often need Amazon more than Amazon needs them, the net result is that they comply.

Why hew so closely to the “immutable paradigm” as if it’s a rule? I have a few packages layered on my system to achieve results that flatpak + toolbox cannot. Never had a problem with updates.

Fucking DHL is double-dipping: They charged me a tariff inspection fee to import my packages, and now they charge a fee* to request tariff refunds of eligible shipments.

*Or I can make an account on some inscrutable government website, write letters to DHL to get paperwork about my shipments, and try to figure it out myself.

TempleOS signed by Terry Davis.

I burned it to a DVD and mailed it to him for an autograph, back when he still had stable housing. I think maybe 2015.

Plenty of people just want an appliance to play games.

I build my own, but that’s because I want to save money. Actually picking the parts and figuring out compatibility, specs, etc is my least favorite exercise. Luckily I have a friend who cares way more about that, so I tell them what I want to achieve and they give me a shopping list.

He sewed offensive Gorn messages into the clothing of three Romulan diplomats who stopped off at DS9. Because the Gorn can see different spectrum from Romulans, nobody noticed the hidden insults until they landed on Gornar.

The difference is small and pedantic:

“Once” means “A single time”

“Nonce” means “Used a single time”

Nonce carries extra information that something is being used.

Wikipedia claims this term dates to middle English:

Nonce is a word dating back to Middle English for something only used once or temporarily (often with the construction “for the nonce”). It descends from the construction “then anes” (“the one [purpose]”).

Nonce is used extensively in the context of cryptography to mean “used exactly one time”. Usually this refers to a random number that a server shares with a client to establish secure communications.

Red Sonja (1985)

I like that it’s a definitely-not-Conan movie with a bit more humor. Maybe people don’t like the kid actor, but I thought that Prince Tarn and Falcon added a lot without being overbearing. It could rate even higher for me if they’d gotten Basil Poledouris to do the soundtrack.

Cool World (1992)

Things really start to fall apart in the third act once Holli transports to the real world and from a technical side, Who Framed Roger Rabbit beats it by miles. However, the idea of Cool World, a mix of childish and sleazy animated characters all living in the same universe, is compelling. Bakshi’s animation style really brings it alive.

“Shake” is scraps of cannabis plants left behind after processing it for consumption (trimming). It’s less pleasant to smoke and contains less THC than the main bud, so it gets sold off in bulk or reprocessed into concentrates.

To be pedantic, the MW in OpenMW doesn’t stand for anything. It’s supposed to make players think of “Open MorroWind”, but only Bethesda has the right to use the name Morrowind.

Skywind: Playing the plot of Morrowind in the Skyrim engine. Game mechanics, spells, skills, models, textures, and bugs are all going to be similar to what you have in Skyrim, give or take some modding.

OpenMW: Playing Morrowind in an open source, crossplatform game engine. You are playing the exact same game as TES III (gameplay mechanics, spells, models, textures, etc are 1:1 identical in a vanilla install) but the code behind it is less buggy, more moddable, and it provides many modern quality-of-life improvements that the original engine couldn’t do.

Can I leave all my drives connected, plug in a seperate SSD through USB, boot into Nobara live and install on that drive without it affecting my mint install?

Yes. Just double-check every part of the install process so you don’t write to the wrong device.

Also, if I do that will it put the EFI file on the seperate SSD?

Probably yes (depends on the options you pick during the install process). The external drive will get its own boot partition with appropriate EFI files. Then to boot from it, you would select the external drive in your UEFI.

I use rEFInd as my EFI bootloader: It lets me chain load other boot options (external drives) without touching my motherboard UEFI settings. I leave it installed to my main boot partition, but it scans for other bootable partitions at startup. Then it auto-populates a selector list of my main install, or whatever other external devices are plugged in. It can chain load GRUB, other EFI bootloaders, Windows, etc from these devices, so you don’t have to worry about compatibility with whatever bootloader the OS expects to use.

Explain how the cartoonist could avoid drawing the crossbow?

/s