I mean, thats good, but unfortunately a huge (over-representative?) amount of online leftist discourse is so subsumed by extremely emotionally driven short sighted glomming onto bullying a particular person that they often say things that are basically obviously ludicrous if you either take a few deep breathes and think about what you’re saying, or if you’re not really involved in the often extremely petty nature of discourse around/perpetuated by many popular online leftists.

But hey, Not All Leftists, I guess?

Its frankly deeply embarrassing to accurately describe myself as a leftist and then have less politically engaged people often think I’m like one of these over the top internet personalities, and also infuriating when I describe myself as a leftist to other leftists online, who then usually woke scold and purity shame me for having non ludicrous positions.

Hell I’m still banned from like half the hexbear and lemmy.ml communities for pointing out that maybe Taiwan has expressed a desire for governmental sovereignty, you know kind of like Ukraine, even though its obviously not a perfect society, it doesnt deserve to be invaded or subverted by a neighboring state?

Nah. Verbotten opinions.

I think the latest hexbear community to ban me did so because I posted a response to an ‘enigmatic, therefore funny and awesome’ meme on weibo.

The meme, a kind of wojack meme, boils down to ‘Dengist reforms allowed western influence into China, which has resulted in nowadays Chinese incels pretend to be black men online to pick up chicks because many Chinese basically racistly view black men as all having giant cocks.’

But you can’t even hint that parts of Chinese society might be gasp racist, or even have segments that view women as only interested in big dicked men because this breaks the brains of many online Western leftists that Chinese society is not actually perfect.

Its even more baffling to me that many online Leftists barely ever mention, or tie themselves up in absurd logical/rhetorical pretzels about how just in general many East Asian societies and ethnicities have large chunks that are extremely racist towards other East Asian and other ethnicities, basically because a good number of East Asian societies are nominally communist or socialist, so that must mean they’ve solved racism.

When your highly nuanced and extremely educated political stance is obliterated by an extremely obvious fact that you forgot to consider because you got lost in the sauce of [current hot conversation topic] for [I’m a Leftist!™] identifying individuals.

Well uh when you have the US Navy under your command, and already in the area dealing with Houthis, you know, by shooting down their missiles and bombing them and such, you actually /can/ stop trains and tankers.

You could airlift aid! You could, hilariously, stop ships heading to Israel with a Naval Blockade!

Obviously that last one isnt going to happen, but theres a whole lot more than basically nothing that you could do.

For starters: Cut off a bunch of joint projects between US and Israeli firms, stop sending them large amounts of money for other things, stop fucking shit canning every attempt by the UN to sanction Israel, or maybe even use these aforementioned things as threats and leverage to force a fucking ceasefire.

And now because this is the internet: Am I saying that Trump is somehow not bad, not far, far, far fucking worse by pointing out the rest?

Nooooo!

No, fucking obviously Trump would be a thousand times worse!

But pretending that there’s nothing Biden could do is a joke.

He doesn’t because he is a long time Zionist, and the American public, and particularly political and media figures, have been bathed in Zionist propaganda for so long that it takes an overt genocide for us to figure out that maybe Israel actually isn’t a perfect unconditional ally.

Yeah thats the main problem, significant development is likely to be crushed.

I realized after writing this all out that it was closer to a sequel than a remake but… oh well, I thought it was a neat idea nonetheless.

And yes now that you mention it this is actually similar to the Golden Sun series irt the dueling groups of protagonists (antagonists?), but I swear I did not realize this and was going more from the DB Xenoverse time demon angle.

I do not actually know as this is the first time I am even hearing of Chrono Cross.

Youre telling me theres a sequel?!?!?

I only ever managed to play Chrono Trigger on ZNES something like 20 years ago and remember being blown away by how different and more interesting it was from basically every other JRPG up to that point.

Now I must find this sequel.

Ah right! Its been a while haha.

It has apparently been rehosted as ‘Nuzu’ on github… but I wouldn’t be surprised if that or any similar instance just gets taken down once it gets reasonably popular.

MSFT sure as shit doesnt want to get sued by Nintendo.

Well I am surprised no one has mentioned this but:

This is the best possible JRPG to do a retcon/reimagining of as is going on with FF7, but a bit differently.

Time travel!

So, start a new story with new characters, but intermix this with the old cast and story beats resulting in a completely new story that brings back old favorite settings and characters, introduces new ones.

Maybe you change significant plot points of the old story, maybe you don’t, maybe you doom the world to some entirely new kind of catastrophe, maybe you get stuck in what would otherwise be called a soft lock but is actually in this world an intentional plot device that just looks like a soft lock but isnt.

Hell, if you /really/ want to go hog wild with this:

Make the new set of characters generally opposed to the original set of characters, have their own method of time travelling, and make it so much of the game is actually about attempting to out-time-travel-wit the others, basically with certain characters attempting to be time demons ala DB Xenoverse and others trying to stop them… all mixed with the narrative possibilities at many points for many characters to switch allegiances, go rogue, or mostly team up.

even moooore possible endings

No I have no clue how you could actually write something this complicated, but the entirety of Kingdom Hearts exists and people tell me somehow that all makes sense, so I am confident a team of competent writers can pull off an absurdly complex multivariate story line.

James Double-Bonded-Latinum

Goddamnit this is so fucking good.

Levar absolutely killing it, fuck.

And Patrick Stewart just looks uncannily similar to my own grandfather as he was in the late 50s.

Please, please I need to see what O Brien and Keiko look like ahahah!

To be frank:

If you tell a person named Josh that you are just joshing them after telling them something incredible, they want to kill you, but usually don’t.

There.

I was frank, but I’m not Frank.

Fucking English I hate this language sometimes.

I appreciate the straightforward answer, thanks!

But uh… fuck. This fucking sucks, Yuzu is basically dead now, they have to disband and take down their code.

If Yuzu lives it will only be pirate copies floating around, further development will… basically have to go underground more like game crackers, as this very settlement establishes that Nintendo will sue you into oblivion if you publicly work on this.

I think the Wickerman remake is just actually a good movie. Yes, its so over the top at times that you are laughing at how absurd some scenes are, but its also still horrifying. Its an actual enjoyable experience that is not as formulaic as many other ‘horror movies that are so bad theyre funny’.

Same with Face Off, but its so absurd its funny and also still a good action movie.

Mandy? I honestly think its also a great movie.

I have not seen /everything/ Cage has been in… but everything I have seen that stars him basically either is a good movie, or is a stupid movie that is made hilarious by Cage’s acting.

Everything (that I’ve seen) that doesnt star Cage but just features him as a more minor character? His bit or bits are incredible.

The dude is apparently quite the spender but goddamnit he’s one of the most talented and versatile actors ever.

Are there any movies where he just phones it in?

Not that I’m aware of.

Keep going strong you magnificent maniac hahah.

Honest question: Where the hell are they gonna come up with 2.4 mil?

I have no clue how Yuzu as an organization is funded.

As a person who used to work at MSFT:

I can almost guarantee you there are a whoooole lot of people who have made their careers basically championing the very old chat bot model, and they are probably now either directly in charge of the OpenAI stuff, or at the very least ‘stakeholders’.

They will do nonsense corporate bullshit to make them selves seem very important, never really wrong about anything, and this will result in extremely slow and gradual actual adoption of the GPT stuff, all the while stressing all the reasons their old stupid bullshit can’t be seriously modified because of reasons that have to do with synergizing with other MSFT products.

The process of the company gradually figuring out that none of that matters when it comes to producing something that is actually better will be slow, painful and incremental.

Itll probably take half a decade.

…

For reference, as an aside, I was doing a contract of DBA kinda stuff when they unveiled Windows 8. We had to dogfood it, ie, the MSFT process of everyone working at MSFT has to beta test everything else MSFT is making.

Well… Windows 8 initially broke basically everything we were using to actually do DBA.

I got angry and pointed out that Windows 8 had removed the ‘windows’ from Windows. The initial version was soley the tablet based design, only allowing a maximum of two ‘panes’ open at a time.

We had to wait about a month for the various problems with SQL Manager Studio to be ironed out, and for them to basically allow the option to just use the more or less Windows 7 desktop for you know actually working on our PCs.

Point of me mentioning this is: I saw how ludicrous this all was, and was frequently verbally abused by our team lead for pointing it out.

Youre not allowed to go against the grain at MSFT unless youre a big dog. And… you become a big dog by bullying people and vastly overstating the necessity of what your team is doing.

The culture there is downright psycho and sociopathic.

Because rural voters are stupid, because Republicans have spent the last 30+ years destroying public education, especially in rural and minority heavy areas.

This isn’t an insult, its a fact.

When you’re uneducated and have little experience of the outside world… well, youre extremely easy to convince with rhetoric over actual policy results.

Then combine that with the massively super effective Republican media machine (Rush Limbaugh, Bill O Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ben Shapiro, Steve Bannon, Alex Jones) which reinforces the religion + culture + politics of the rural Republican areas, and there ya go.

I dunno, it seems obvious to me, but thats probably because I was raised by a ditto-head (Rush Limbaugh’s term for his followers) who later became a Q Anon, illegal-firearm-manufacturing-in-his-garage wacko, in a poor, technically suburban but realistically rural area.

Why latch on to Trump in particular?

Because he made it ok for them to mask off and hate all the things they hate but have been lying about hating for decades.

Its a kind of catharsis for them, that manifests in collective hatred of inferior enemy groups.

You know, standard fascist shit?

It doesnt matter that Trump himself is the antithesis of what an idealized Republican person would be. What matters is he lets them feel comfortable expressing themselves.

MSFT appears to still be using a fundamentally old chatbot model that they’ve just slapped a bunch of extra ‘features’ (namely, Wooow! It has APIs and works on other MSFT stuff!) to, much like Bethesda’s game engine.

Probably barely different from Tay in terms of broad conceptual design, just patched and upgraded to do what it does faster.

The core design is garbage, and just like Windows itself, its nearly certainly a giant fucking mess of layers upon layers of different versions of itself hiding under a trench coat, all standing on top of something 10 to 20 years old.

Absolutely amazing.

My guess is that at this point there are so many user prompts its received so far in its training set that bring up both Copilot and privacy concerns that it first interpreted the question, then searched for the most common topic associated with itself (privacy), then spit out a hardcoded MSFT override response for ‘inquiry’ + ‘privacy’.