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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I’ve noticed a ton of these too: it seemed to have started right around New Year’s.

    As someone who typically scrolls All, I’m not even sure if it’s specific to this community. There are a lot of Comic and Meme communities where these things are getting posted across various instances. I’m still not sure whether this is nefarious or someone trying to grow Lemmy. Could just be some college student trying to test out making bots, posting things they genuinely like. Though I have noticed most of the comics tend to em have divisive elements or say things that are obviously wrong. It seems like their goal might be to drive comment engagement.

    So I’ve been marking them with UserNotes as “Comic Bot” and usually just do voting and moving on. Occasionally commenting to draw attention to the user history for others.


  • And OP is yet another account that was created incredibly recently just to post a handful of comics.

    It started happening with the new year. Tons of account getting created, in various instances, and posting comics to a variety of different communities.

    Idk maybe it’s someone trying to boost Lemmy’s rate for content and just drive the growth of the platform, but something about it just doesn’t smell right.


  • Started with guitar 21 years ago. Don’t remember the exact timelines, but I picked up bass and piano within a couple years. Then drums and singing. Dabbled in mandolin, banjo, cello. Most stringed instruments, especially those in western music, are pretty similar so they’re pretty easy to switch between. I even dabbled in clarinet because my older sister left it with my parents when she moved out, but I never put that much time into it.

    My talents in each have waxed and wanted over the years. Guitar was always my primary preference.

    The problem is that everyone and their mother can play guitar. It makes sense- tons of households have guitars lying around. Acoustics are a really cheap and easy entry point- any college student can pick one up and learn a few chords and start trying get attention. It fits in your dorm or in the car you’re halfway living out of. There’s also plenty of cheap box kits of really low-quality electric guitars + small practice amps that are affordable for parents, with the added benefit of making kids use headphones so you don’t disturb the neighbors. Drum kits, by contrast, are expensive, big, difficult to move around (band practice pretty much always has to be at the drummer’s place), and loud. So drummers are usually hard to find.

    So I spent time in bands as a bassist and keyboardist. Two separate times I had wealthier friends who played guitar and had younger brothers whose parents purchased a drum kit, but those brothers never learned to play, so I ended up behind the kit even though I couldn’t really practice on my own time. For a while I was the basisst in a band where the left-handed drummer didn’t have room in his house, but there was room in my basement so I ended up messing around and learning to drum left-handed a bit too. I’ve been the lead guitarist, but only rarely outside of my solo stuff.

    Bass is very similar to guitar. Different style, and I do think it’s important to change your approach and technique (I don’t use picks on bass), but a lot still translates. With keyboard I was never classically trained or anything- I mostly just learned guitar, bass, and vocals parts on keyboard. I put a lot of time into programming software synths. Often I would just match what those instruments were playing with a different texture, or just play chords underneath. As a keyboardist I would also be in charge of like, punctuation and sound effects. The kind of little extra things you don’t notice on an album and often gets cut out of live shows.

    I think I’ve been a decent singer. I initially took lessons with the intention of just being a background vocalist and maybe doing some acoustic open mic nights. I joined the choir in college and got selected as the best Bass to represent the school at an event one year. I kind of accidentally ended up as the lead singer of a few bands just by being the best singer in the band. Never just the lead singer though - always play drums or bass or guitar too. Singing is a lot of work- I needed to stay in shape, watch what I ate and drank (especially on the nights of practice or performance). It’s easy to identify mistakes as you’re playing an instrument, but for singing I would have to record myself and listen back to it a ton. I learned from my choir director all the little details to listen for- pitch drift, sloppy pronunciation, breathing issues, etc. And Satan forbid I catch a cold before a show. Right now I’m out of practice, so while I could totally rock out a karaoke night at a bar I would need a couple of months notice before playing a real show.


  • Most bad games aren’t really a terrible experience. Usually, it takes a few minutes, maybe an hour max, to realize “wow this game is bad and not worth putting any more time into”.

    I think the worst games are the ones that can suck you in with the promise of being good. For me, that was Catherine.

    The game has 3 main phases. The main “gameplay” is 3D block pushing puzzles that are presented as dream sequences for the main character. They start off simple, but add mechanics and complexity as you would expect from any good puzzle game. Then there is the time you spend with the main character awake hanging out at a bar, talking to other characters as a social sim game. The characters seem varies and like they could be interesting. Finally, there are animated cutscenes that are pretty good looking that show what your main character does throughout the day, between waking up and ending up at the bar every evening.

    The biggest problem is the writing. The main character starts off as a pretty shitty, selfish asshole. At first I played hoping to see him learn and grow as a character. When it became clear that wasn’t going to happen I instead started to hope that he at least suffered some consequences for his actions. But… No, he doesn’t. He just stays an asshole the whole time. None of the other characters really go anywhere either. And while the gameplay started off good, it quickly burns through all of the block pushing mechanics they thought of and turns into a repetitive slog. It really felt like they only made the first 1/3rd of a complete game and decided to just copy and paste that to pad out time instead of actually finishing the game.





  • IUD’s can be great too. My wife has used them for years. Reduced period frequency and severity, higher effective rate of contraception, no need to worry about taking a pill late or missing one. Her gynecologist said it will probably reduce pre-menopausal symptoms too when she gets older. And it’s pretty easily removable.

    There was a couple of weeks when she was sore from the initial placement, and the same whenever it gets changed. They keep on getting approved to last longer and longer- the most recent one was good for 8 years, but there’s a good chance it will get extended before it needs to be replaced as more research is done.

    Not for everyone, but great for a lot of people.


  • It’s a shame how many people here are willing to just pretend those statements don’t exist and handwave then away because they like the game.

    Also, the game has never gone on sale, and in fact saw a price INCREASE years after launch. $30 was already a bit steep for a game like this when there are tons of similar indie RTS’s for $10-$20 that go on sale, and they increased it to $35. And then added a $30 DLC on top of that. If you’re looking for a good value RTS- Dwarf Fortress is free, and if you want you can pay $30 for the nicer version and support devs who, afaik, do not have such controversy attached.



  • Just because she’s a YouTuber doesn’t mean that she even received these comments, but let’s just say she did.

    It’s a much further stretch to assume that the same people saying “your husband wrote that for you” are re now saying “AI wrote that for you”. Both men and women are equally subject to being accused of using AI maliciously, and both men and women have an equal capacity to maliciously use AI in the first place. This is an issue about society and technokogy, and bringing alt-right gender identity politics into this only serves to muddy the waters and undermine the legitimate criticisms of AI.