Some kind of ancient forest spirit emerges from the woods, consumes my soul and leaves my body in a coma before fading back into the trees without a trace.

What?

You need more furfriends in your life then. Then you’d get a laugh and “The Cone of Shame” instead.

Who the fuck are you talking to that is saying, “oh, well, both sides, you know?” The only people I know who are still saying that are people who are wealthy enough to not feel the immediate effects of Trump, or are conservative, white, christian assclowns who voted for Trump. Why are you talking to those kinds of people for an honest read on the US? Those people are part of the reason we’re here now.

Note: unfortunately these are all on PC and don’t have couch coop unless specified otherwise. I also don’t think they have DRM aside from normal steam stuff (or require an internet connection for actual gameplay purposes), but any steam DRM should be easy to remove.

Warframe: space ninjas: the game (though it does require an online connection since it’s basically a coop mmo, and it is third-person as opposed to first-person)

Payday: basically cops vs robbers. You’re the robbers.

Killing Floor: Lodesemone! Dosh! Grab it while you can, lads! Money, money, money! Coop zombie survival. I hope you love blood and gore.

Abiotic Factor: what if you were a scientist in the Black Mesa GATE Cascade Research Facility and you had to survive? Can be played single player or multiplayer.

Halo: MCC: Halo already has a reputation for being the ultimate coop shooter. The MCC adds and expands coop for the games; however the PC version lacks split-screen. This can supposedly be added back with a mod, but I haven’t tried it so I can’t attest to how functional it is.

I’ve heard Sven Coop is really good if you like Half-Life stuff. It’s a coop Half-Life mod.

Risk of Rain 2: technically third-person, but a very good coop shooter.

There’s a mod for that now, so you don’t have to do the Nucleus Coop bullshit. I haven’t tried it, so I dunno how well it works, but ye.

Fyi, afaik Halo MCC supports 2 player coop on Halo: CE, and 4 player coop on the other games. That said, they removed split-screen on the PC version. Supposedly they keep saying they’ll add it back eventually but, well, “eventually” has yet to happen.

That said, I’ve read there’s a mod for native split screen now so you don’t have to do the awkward Nucleus Coop stuff. I haven’t tried it though, so ymmv.

What is the image equivalent of analog horror? 'cause this is giving me those kinda vibes.

Yeah, uh, last I checked American territories don’t have the ability to vote in federal elections. Someone from Puerto Rico can’t vote for the US president despite being governed by the US. It’s one of many bullshit systems designed to keep the GOP-Democrat right-wing ratchet going.

Contrary to that Europe doesn’t have one cohesive identity, your example of Orban is multiple country borders removed from me personally.

Orban would probably be best compared to a state governor. Just a reminder that Texas is literally larger than the largest EU country with some space leftover for a city-state or two.

The idea that the US has a cohesive identity is just… unbelievably ignorant. I’m actually amazed that you believe that considering that no one in their right mind would say the same thing about places like Africa, Europe, or South America.

I didn’t have a choice to be born here, and, had I had the option, I wouldn’t have defaced a Native American monument in the first place. This is on top of the fact that the US is currently trying to find ways of disowning/executing me (trans).

Quite honestly, maybe I shouldn’t be offended by being lumped in with other Americans, because maybe I’m not actually being included in these kinds of sweeping statements. However, it rubs me the wrong way when people imply that Americans as a whole are responsible for the things our government has and is doing.

Again, I didn’t ask to be born in the US. I don’t like that I’m “American”. No one asked me, please don’t lump people like me in with the others.

Well yes! You stupid leftists don’t have the right to live a comfortable life, free from criticism and accountability like us right-wingers. We’re the ones who are right, it’s right there in the name, “right-wing”. As such, anyone that might cause us discomfort, such as breaking ties or criticizing the ones who we support, is espousing a disgusting, ignorant, liberal ideology.

(I hope it’s obvious that I’m being sarcastic)

I mean, they have closed caption devices you can borrow. They fit into the cupholder and display captions for you.

Eh, I personally think it is, but you have to temper your expectations. It’s absolutely not Artificial General Intelligence, nor is it as flexible or capable of rapid learning as human intelligence (or likely most forms of living intelligence in general). However, I’d challenge the notion that it lacks intelligence entirely.

AI still “learns” from what you shove into it; it’s still creating algorithms to adapt to the information stream(s) it’s being exposed to which is not unlike how the human brain is believed to function. As such, I personally view it to be intelligent, but not anywhere near as intelligent as people think it is, and absolutely not in the way people want it to be.

One of the big differences that I see is that, afaik, AI is unable to learn while it’s running. You have to train it, run it, train it again based on user input, run it, train it again on more user input, and so on. Humans are more efficient at learning when they sleep and take breaks, but are still capable of learning things without “shutting down”, so-to-speak (not that we ever truly shut down outside of death, but that’s tangential).

Another difference is that, unlike “natural intelligence”, AI ends up being hyper focused on a specific task. It’s a bit like grabbing an ice cream scoop and removing a very specific part of the brain, let’s say the part responsible for imagining images, and then letting people interface with that alone. Yeah, it’s not gonna be good at parsing text because that’s not what it was designed to do. That’s a different part of the brain. The one you’re playing with right now is only good at visualizating images, so you’re gonna get pretty images, but good luck with getting it to do proper text, understanding proper body language, etc.

Finally, AI hallucinates like crazy. This is one where I’m not sure if we’re really that different from AI (I’ll explain in a moment); but it is a big issue when it comes to try to get AI to factually report information or perform logic tasks. You can ask an AI what 2+2 is and get 4 one day, 5 the next, 3 on Saturdays and then -2027346 on Christmas.

But wait! Doesn’t that make it unintelligent?

No.

Going back to the previous statement about AI being hyper-focused, it just means you’re not interacting with a part of the brain capable of logic; you’re interacting with something else. Maybe the speech center, idk.

However, there’s another element to this where AI doesn’t have a persistent “reality anchor” like we do. To an AI, fact and fiction are purely conceptual because it doesn’t truly exist in our world, it’s off in its own little digital world. Furthermore, the experiences it can gain from the training set are heavily limited compared to what living creatures experience. We have a constant stream of information that reminds us about what is real, who we are, what things look like, how things move and so on; and we get that data stream in 3 dimensions (arguably 2.5, but I digress) instead of 2. It’s like expecting a plant to thrive when given a trickle of water when it normally grows exclusively in a swamp. We ourselves tend to begin hallucinating when our senses become cut off from the outside world because our brains make up stimuli when the expected stimuli is missing. So… I’m not sure if the hallucinations are totally unreasonable, unrealistic or all that different from how we’d behave if subjected to the same environment; but at the very least it’s something that makes AI appear unintelligent.

That’s not to say that AI is a good thing or that it lives up to the hype. Fuck AI for being wildly overhyped, overused, and destroying people’s livelihoods in a world where “earning for a living” is still required for some god-forsaken reason (just a reminder that the phrase, “earn a living” implies you don’t deserve to live if you aren’t able to make money or have someone doing it for you). At the same time, however, it kinda is intelligent. I think people are just expecting way more from it that it’s capable of doing. It’s like people expect intelligence to manifest in grayscale when it’s more like RGBA or something.

Edit: sorry about the massive wall of text; I was fascinated with AI and its potential for a while, which meant it lived rent-free in my head at a series of philosophical questions about things like intelligence and what it means for humans that something designed to function as a series of virtual neurons would behave so similarly yet differently to humans. These were the kinds of conclusions I came to.

Dude, it’s a school/work laptop. If someone gets pissy about it, tell them to get over it. Alternatively, ask the administration to let you plastidip the lids so they get even wear. Plus it’ll be easier to remove the stickers when it comes time to reprovision the computers because you can just peel the plastidip off if it’s sticker-covered. Furthermore, it’d help reduce the number of scuffs and scratches to the laptop’s exterior.

Needs more stickers. If you haven’t sticker bombed your PC, can you really say it’s your PC?

I’m so exciteeeddd, let’s fucking gooooo. Let’s hope his spine doesn’t become flaccid.

I didn’t even need the translation, I understood enough words that I got the gist of it and it made me laugh. How dare they be so correct.

Girl, I can’t believe no one here is telling you that the behavior you’ve described is absolutely not “having a man that treats you right”. Guilt tripping, trashing his own girlfriend while being with her, telling you to be unfaithful, ignoring your homosexuality…

Hell, the way you’ve described him makes me wonder if his girlfriend was actually schizophrenic or if he just gaslit the fuck out of her and ditched her when it started to catch up to him. Did you know her personally? Did she show signs of schizophrenia that couldn’t be explained by gaslighting? Did he try to work with her through her potential schizophrenia? That’d be another huge red flag: if she showed signs of disability and instead of trying to work with her, he dumped her.

Don’t do it.

You’re just sad, hurt, and about to get yourself into a hell of a lot more hurt if you listen to this strange compulsion of yours. Chill. Take a deep breath. Find some lesbian chicks. There’ve gotta be dommy lesbians around you if you’re in a somewhat populated area in the US. Make friends, fuck your friends, have fun, and maybe you’ll eventually end up with a girlfriend or two (and maybe a trans puppygirl too).

I don’t actually use these much, but I love using them whenever I get a chance:

CRT monitors

iPod Classic

OG GameBoy

DSi XL

I actually had rockbox on the iPod but had to take it off because I’m more concerned with how it feels to use than the actual functionality; and rockbox kinda fucked it up.

Edit: I kinda unironically wish dial-up would come back, but as a novelty that ends up blowing up into an actual, community-driven internet. A) gives me fuzzy feelings for when I was a kid at my grandparents house before they ate the MAGA brainrot, and B) might force people to learn how to optimize their shitty websites or get left behind on the corpo-web.