toasthaste

toasthaste wrote (edited )

I'm not allowed to get the shingles vaccine because they limit it to older folks but man I'd really love to not get shingles (I was of the last generation to get "chicken pox parties" as kids)

I did finally get my TDaP booster last year. I should really catch up on the others.

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toasthaste OP wrote

Reply to comment by nomorepie in hi jstpst by toasthaste

i been reading books again lately! i saw someone recommend a trick of, you keep a book you want to read in your bathroom, and then don't take your phone into the bathroom with you. it worked shockingly well basically immediately.

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toasthaste OP wrote

Reply to comment by emma in hi jstpst by toasthaste

my roommate has been watching stream VODs of the first bunch of ace attorney games and she's been loving it. is 6 the one with the orca?

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toasthaste wrote

ohhhh i didn't realize they were redubbing them! I was very very fond of the digimon movie english dub back in the day but I've always kind of wanted to see the actual story (but with the voice actors I know)

if only they would release a version with the corrected dub but keeping the ska-ass soundtrack.....

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toasthaste wrote

I laughed at the TLDR :P Doing the good work

I'm glad you tried a thing and are learning more about yourself. I feel the thing of, like-- my relationship to gender doesn't align super well with most of the currently accepted mainstream-within-this-bubble gender theory stuff. I sometimes like to describe myself as "queering the cis-trans binary."

The framing that radfems should be high fiving over Biological Males taking feminizing hormones, victory over maleness.... god I'd never thought of that. That's extremely funny.

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toasthaste wrote

I wished good things for cohost, it was doing a lot of neat stuff. I made an account and poked around but I've been down this road before so I was waiting to see if it stood the test of time (and also I'm still on tumblr lol). I always want these kinds of projects to succeed even when they're not quite for me, more places for people to choose between is better than fewer. It's sad. I really hope someone figures out how to sustain a non-tiny modern social media site that isn't owned by a huge megacorp someday. Or that the culture shifts enough that "pay $/month to be allowed to upload images" becomes a normal thing people don't balk at (can't imagine this happening but who knows)

When tumblr finally dies someday I'll be so fucking sad. In that event I really want there to be somewhere to go to that isn't another twitter clone. F

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toasthaste wrote

Reply to comment by twovests in two years and no great AI art by twovests

I was anxious about the reception my post might get so I didn't check jstpst for like the past month (not-uncommon thing I do lol). Was nice to come back and, for it to be kind and thoughtful and willing to listen in good faith. Thanks <3

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toasthaste wrote

I wouldn't expect a search for "great AI art" to give you very useful results, for the same reasons I wouldn't expect a search on the Target website to give you very useful results for "great art."

I think a decent number of artists are figuring out ways to incorporate ai into their workflow, much like they did with previous digital tools. "AI-assisted Art", rather than "AI art". Rapid concept iteration, or just filling in textures instead of doing it agonizingly slowly by hand, or whatever; it makes sense to me that this would be one of the more common real-world uses for it and I just am not convinced there's some spiritual wrong being done there.

Very few self respecting artists would use AI tools

And that's the thing, like, if this is the attitude they are likely to be met with, it makes sense that they would not advertise when they're using it! There's collective of artists who I'm socially adjacent to online that's very earnest about ethically exploring the potential in this new medium, and all their spaces are extremely private and locked down, out of necessity, due to constant really vicious harassment. Are they making Great AI Art in there? How would either of us know?

It's just. Digital artists have been using algorithmic and generative tools to speed up the repetitive drudgework parts of art for decades now. There was a time when people spoke with scorn about artists using any of the labor-saving tools you can use in Photoshop and called anything people made with the help of those tools "not real art". So often, this feels like the sequel to that.

idk. AI art and its cousins make me extremely uneasy, and occasionally fill me with horrible existential dread if I think about it too much (even if my wrists ever got better, would I ever draw again? What would be the point? Why even try to improve? etc); but the way people talk about it still bums me out. I dunno, it's an extremely brand new medium just starting to be explored, with so much hostility directed toward it (which as ever is mostly going to actually land on the people who are earnestly putting their hearts and souls into it and not the people making airbrushed anime porn image #5776889). Some of the things I do see are really promising and exciting (in between the feeling that I am being swallowed up by quicksand). It feels like if you looked at Tennis for Two and decided that its undercookedness meant that these "video game" things are going nowhere.

(Also like. I dunno. Some of the only pictures I've been able to bring into existence in the past 2 years have been ai generated. It was a lot of fun learning a little bit about how to maneuver the tools to try to coax them into producing something anywhere near the picture I had in my head; the process gave me a nutrient that my soul has been corroding from lacking, with unsolvable chronic pain preventing me from being able to draw any more. The big reason I don't play with generation more is because it's actually pretty difficult to learn to use these tools effectively, they are very complex. All that to say I guess I have more personal investment in this as it looks more and more like I'll never be able to make art with my hands again.)

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toasthaste wrote

I recently saw someone swearing by men's gynecomastia compression shirts as opposed to binders, this was what they linked to me though I haven't gotten one to try out myself yet

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B076B5R4Q1

i think sizing might be weird though, iirc they said for this kind of binding you probably want to go a size larger than the sizing chart would indicate? but I'm really not sure, I bet it varies a ton

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toasthaste wrote

I've had similar issues with earplugs, including waking up in the middle of the night because they were so painful-- I've definitely found some that were a lot less painful than others (maybe smaller? fancier? unsure) and if you make sure to put them in correctly (lift your ear upwards? i think the plugs usually have instructions) I think it can help. there's also silicone earplugs, which aren't nearly as good at blocking out sound but are different enough that they might not have the pain problem

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toasthaste wrote

yeah! I just got one of these like 2 weeks ago so i can sleep with ANC earbuds when the upstairs neighbors are stomping around in the wee hours of the got dang morning and it's been helpful.

for her new piercings, my roommate likes the cheaper one she got that looks like a donut with a bite taken out of it (I tried it but I'm so bad at sleeping and needed something more plush). it appears to have vanished from the face of the internet though so idk maybe it was full of poison or something

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toasthaste wrote

Yeah, I just finished Tunic recently and I absolutely never would have without the ability to customize the combat difficulty. I probably could have but I just flat out do not like the combat, so I would not have.

(the first time I tried the game it only had "no fail mode" and didn't have the "reduce combat difficulty" option, and having to choose between "this boss fight is miserably hard and unfun" and "this boss fight is completely trivial because you cannot die" was insufficient for me. Having medium options counts for a lot!

...huh I wonder how hard it would be to have an option that like... just slows bosses down? If you enjoy the idea of the combat but your reaction time is Just Too Slow to engage with it on its own terms, that seems like it could go a long way. tunic has something like this but it's an item. but I mean more generally for games that decide to have accessibility options. it seems like it might be easier to implement than some other things.

so many more people could have fun with dark soulsian games if this was an option, without it otherwise throwing off the game balance...

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