The setting is fun. The author is garbage. Also don’t think too hard about the characters or the way different magical races are portrayed.

WTF, the Nazi bar analogy wasn’t supposed to be in support of the creation of Nazi bars. Are you okay? Did you recently hit your head? What the fuck have you been smoking?

Edit: Yep, knew it’d be unpopular. Rather than just downvoting me, though, why not tell me why you disagree?

Because I don’t even know where to start. The biggest part, I suppose, is that if you give them a space like this, it normalizes the movement. People stop feeling like there is something wrong with disliking the LGBT community, the movement grows as it is no longer stigmatized, and LGBT rights backslide.

Furthermore, holding a “hetero pride” festival during pride month is inherently bigoted as well. Pride month exists because straight people wouldn’t let gay people express themselves otherwise. Your idea isn’t totally unlike the idea of letting klansmen openly hold festivals during Black History month so they stop harassing black people.

I mean, iirc Canada already accepts some LGBT refugees from other parts of the world. So unless you’re saying that everyone in the US is queer, it seems like the obvious thing to do would be to apply the same standards to US LGBT refugees as LGBT refugees from other parts of the world.

That’s awesome. Now, when are you gonna remove the law barring US LGBT refugees?

Are we really that far gone yet? No, but we’re headed there.

I have no idea if this is satire or not but I unironically love both the idea of your dinosaur character(?) and that YouTube clip.

It’s half satire. I honestly didn’t get to watch Jurassic Park as a kid because my parents knew I loved dinosaurs, but also that I was also a very timid child. As a result, I didn’t get to watch it because they thought it might scare me away from my love of dinosaurs (other things in my life caused me to lose interest anyway, but I’m slowly rekindling it). Now, I honestly struggle to enjoy dinosaur media that doesn’t portray them with feathers. Beautiful and terrifying is, imo, vastly superior to “I’M HERE TO SCARE”.

The furry flavor was mainly for fun.

Do you have art/bio for your sona? If I ever play D&D again this may well inspire me to update my Dragonborn bard to have feathers. /gen

Also, kinda. I’m working on updating her design, but here’s a fairly old screenshot of my VRC avatar.

If you’d like, I could recommend some e621/e926 tags and artwork. Be warned that you will get lewd stuff on e621 if I just give you tags, but you could use e926 with the same tags if you don’t wanna get blasted by uncensored cloaca (e926 is literally just a front end for e621 that forces the safe filter on).

Bruh. My sona has feathers because that’s what theropods had, and quite frankly, the idea is kinda pretty. The furry element to my comment was supposed to be for humor, not kink. “Us prehistoric birds are just as pretty as our extant brethren and it should be a crime to portray us as anything else uwu” kinda thing.

Here’s the thing though. Feathered dinosaurs can be just as scary, if not more so than their highly scientifically inaccurate counterparts.

One thing to consider is this: there are several modern species of birds which can mimic a broad range of sounds, varying from other bird calls, human speech, car alarms, heavy machinery, and so on. Furthermore, the birds capable of mimicry often also have the ability to associate these sounds with specific contexts, and perform these sounds while anticipating a specific outcome; for an example: a parrot asking for a cracker because it expects to receive a cracker when it asks for one.

Additionally, due to their relation to birds, theropods would have been less likely to roar and more likely to chirp. Sounds silly and cute right? Well, as an animal gets larger, the noises they make typically get slower and lower in pitch. Try slowing and pitching down the sound of a chicken going bwak-ack or the call of a loon and tell me that isn’t really fucking unsettling. Hell, just the unedited call of a loon itself is fucking disturbing if you imagine it’s coming from a voracious carnivore and not a waterbird.

Also, you can’t tell me that making dinosaurs act even more bird-like wouldn’t be even more terrifying: https://youtu.be/yS71VeptuEc

What other family movies would you like updated to indulge your personal kinks?

Since you asked though, Zootopia really should have an unrated cut that includes scenes of Judy getting railed by Nick’s fat, knotted fox cock. c:

I love dinosaurs. One of my main sonas is a feathery fuckwit named Mossy Feathers. I’m strongly considering going back to school for paleontology.

All that to say that I never watched Jurassic Park growing up because my parents thought it would scare me away from dinosaurs. I will continue to never watch it because they refuse to even make a “feathered cut” of the movie.

As you may imagine, this is inexcusable for a company the size of Disney. I am personally offended for both for myself and dino-kind. To add insult to injury, to the best of my memory, they have publically stated that they have no interest in updating the dinosaur visuals and instead will proceed to portray dinosaurs unrealistically. Imagine if humans were regularly portrayed as simple-minded cavemen who shout “unga bunga” and bang sticks together. Then research discovered that, in spite of current world events, this is not in fact an accurate portrayal of humanity; yet the media continued to portray humans in this way because “it’s scarier and more entertaining”.

This is speciesist and it is not okay. You can do better. We all deserve better.

shrug Idk if it’s really that insane. Tbh I’m not convinced the hype isn’t being manufactured. I have a cousin who’s a pretty bog standard, flavor-of-the-month gamer, and he’s said nothing about GTA VI.

Not saying you’re necessarily wrong, I guess, just that something seems off.

No, I’m honestly surprised. I’ve barely heard anything about GTA VI. Seriously. I don’t care about it, none of my friends have talked about it despite being the kinda game that they’d be into, and I’ve only seen one or two articles on it.

You sure it’s that highly anticipated? My observation is that people have gotten really sick and tired of AAA games, and this is a shift that’s occurred since RDR2 came out. Very few of the people I know still regularly play AAA games, and those who do almost never buy them on launch. I haven’t seen anywhere near the same amount of hype for GTA VI as I saw for GTA IV or GTA V.

You’re accusing me of being disingenuous? Maybe you’re the one who’s buying into the hype and overestimating public interest. Or perhaps the true answer is somewhere in the middle. Who knows. I was not intentionally downplaying your favorite series though.

Wait, do people still get excited for GTA? I thought GTA V online killed a lot of goodwill for the series.

I mean, they could introduce a new character who takes shelter in a mysterious, dilapidated research facility during the 7 hour war and finds themselves in a hellish labyrinth of puzzles. Maybe said character finds Chell in the field and helps release her (there’s some speculation Chell never made it out, but was actually in some kind of biosphere based on some in-game hints).

Damn, you must be a pretty shallow-minded person to miss the fact that the culture war is perpetuated by the rich to keep us from working together. Racism, religious institutions, sexism, queerphobia, these are tools that the rich and powerful use to keep us divided. When you allow them to wage a culture war unopposed, you are letting them use their ideological “weapons of war” without retaliation.

And no, this isn’t just about wanting to be called a woman. This is about being made illegal for who I am. I can’t fight against the wealth gap if I’m in prison for having tits and a dick, now can I? I can’t fight against the wealth gap if I’m struggling from derealization, depersonalization, dissociation, and suicidal depression brought about by crippling dysphoria as a result of being unable to access estrogen, now can I?

If I dared to suggest we prioritize reducing the disparity in wealth over fighting a culture war, you people immediately assume I’m an enemy.

No, because doing one means doing the other. Who do you think is waging the culture war in the first place?

Personally, as a trans person, I don’t want your loyalty. I don’t care about your loyalty. We don’t know one another at all so I don’t even know if you’re someone I’d actually want to hang around; and I’m not gonna ask for loyalty from a total stranger.

What I want is for you to act like a decent human being and understand that the culture war is part of a much larger war about wealth inequality; and that you’re going to struggle if you allow your allies to slowly get picked off by the ones waging the war in the first place. If that occurred then the best you could hope for would be a pyrrhic victory that leaves you asking, “we won, but at what cost?”

Here’s an article on the two bills that got voted out in Montana: https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/powerful-speeches-from-trans-dems

Most of the anti-trans legislation is as bad or worse; Texas has a couple nutjobs trying to make being trans illegal as a whole.

They can’t see that attacks on trans rights are also attacks on cis rights. I think that’s part of the reason why Rep. Zoey Zephyr and Rep. SJ Howell were so effective at stopping a couple pieces of anti-trans legislation in Montana yesterday. They talked about the fact that the legislation would potentially effect cis people as well as the fact that it’d take “parental rights” away from parents. They also did it in a way that created a narrative which both cis and trans people can identify with, creating a common ground to further convince people that the legislation was wrong. And it was successful. They got a number of Republican lawmakers to switch sides, despite the fact that the GOP prides itself on being in lockstep. They even had a Republican lawmaker make a stand too, saying that the people introducing this legislation were basically just wasting everyone’s time.

People say, “trans rights are human rights” and they’re serious. We embody the extreme of gender non-conformity that cis people occasionally dabble in, and when you start taking away our rights, you start taking away cis rights too.

It makes me sad that I was born in a country that doesn’t give a fuck about the environment when I read things like this. I’d love to do projects like this for a living, but… no, wrong country lmao.

Edit: lemme know when a place like Norway takes trans refugees from the US. I’d love to spend my time walking in forests and building birdhouses.

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.

I did.