How is it with nVidia?

Weird. I thought I’d downloaded them a while back. I must be wrong.

I’m pretty sure they’ve been on GOG for a while now.

One thing that GIMP was always far superior on was cutting people out from single-colour backgrounds. All kinds of hassle on any other tool, with even the simplest workflow needing a tonne of refining and touching up. With GIMP, you just select the colour & hit “color to alpha”. Done. It even gets all the tricky hair semi-transparencies.

I forget who it was, but a public figure once said that birthdays are horrible because it allows people you thought you were close to to demonstrate how little they really know you

I don’t disagree with your point at all, but I don’t think the divorce thing is separate from feminism. Women became financially independent because of feminism, and felt emboldened and worthwhile enough to leave abusive situations because of feminism.

It’s perhaps fairer to say that we can, at least partially, credit feminism with these things. It didn’t magically do it in the way that misogynists would like to think, but it’s definitely not unrelated.

This is such an interesting read. Thank you for posting it.

Whedon, you mean? Oh, it gets worse.

A few years after the series ended, Tim Minear, IIRC, put up a page where he outlined what the plans which never got fulfilled were. Or maybe it was a transcript of an interview, or something. I forget exactly what.

What I do remember, however, is the resolution to the Mal/Inara will-they-won’t-they.

So. Remember in the pilot when they think they’re going to be boarded by reavers? There’s that shot where Inara opens up a wooden box to reveal a syringe. Now, most people assumed that that meant she was going to kill herself rather than be taken alive.

No no no no no.

Oh no. That was a special Companion syringe full of a special Compaion drug. What does the drug do? It makes her vagina toxic. So anybody who has sex with her will die.

Cut to a future episode. Serenity is overrun by reavers. “Hundreds”, IIRC. Inara is the only person trapped aboard. The episode focuses on the rest of the crew trying to rescue her. They eventually get on board to find her in a bad way, surrounded by corpses. Every single reaver raped her and died as a result.

Mal picks her up and carries her to sickbay, and is then very attentive and loving while she recovers.

Yup, that’s what brings them together in the end.

I love Firefly. But, having read the ideas for the future (and knowing what I now know about Whedon), I’m glad it only had 13 episodes. It can be this beautiful little jewel of a show, before they had the chance to fuck it up.

And this is because 99% of our press is explicitly right-wing and has a somewhat fuzzy relationship with truth.

Thanks, Murdoch!

Hitler sent envoys to the US to study Jim Crow laws. The anti-Jewish laws of the Third Reich were inspired by and heavily based on Jim Crow laws.

Except…the Nazis thought Jim Crow was too severe. Seriously. Under Jim Crow you were considered Black if you had “oone drop” of Black blood. In other words, if any ancestor of yours was Black, no matter how far back that may go, you were Black.

In Nazi Germany, you were considered Jewish if one of your grandparents was Jewish.

How racist do you have to be for the literal Nazis to go “wow! That’s a bit racist!”

Or they mean “okay, so I did something reprehensible. I’m not going to admit it so just shut up”.

If they don’t already, this person really needs to move to the UK…

I once did a remix competition. Not to win, just to have fun playing with samples and the discipline of having a time limit. I knew going in that what I was going to do had 0 chance of getting anywhere near the top.

The winning three entries were judged by the website, the artist, and 3 executives from the record label. And the winning 3 entries were all exactly the same.

They were all the same style of EDM (bear in mind, this was a poppy guitar song being remixed, so there was no particular driving factor towards that direction), they had similar bass lines & synth parts - both in terms of the riffs themselves and in terms of the sounds used. They all sped up and pitched up the vocal and chopped it in a very similar way. And they all had the exact same structure. You could literally play all three simultaneously (after timestretching by a couple of BPM to make them the same tempo) and the intro would be the same number of bars, the beat would come in at the same time, the vocals would come in at the same time, the dropdown would come in at the same time, the build-up would come in at the same time and lasted the same number of bars, they had the same bar of silence after the build-up, and then the drop did very similar things with the bass and all three went into half-time simultaneously.

There were hundreds of entries, and really what you had to do was make something that sounded like everything else. It was depressing, honestly.

Ignoring all the straw-manning which has nothing to do with anything I wrote…

To be clear - your contention is that a spelling in a name can only legitimately be changed if the new spelling is an equivalent alternate spelling of the same syllable from a different context and where the two spellings must have an equivalnet definition in that context, but that definiteion does not need to be relevant to the name itself? I don’t think you’ve said that last part, but I’m kind of assuming that you wouldn’t argue that someone called Ashley or Ashleigh would necessarily have to have been born in a meadow surrounded by ash trees.

So…how do you feel about Kayleigh? Derived from Caoilfhionn. Means fair-haired. The spelling “Kayleigh” is around 40-odd years old. You dislike it for the same reasons and with the same vociferousness as Emmaleigh, correct?

And you are, of course, fully in favour of Oakleigh, since it’s exactly the same as Ashleigh except with oak trees rather than ash trees. The fact that it’s a very new variation has no impact on your feelings towards it, right?

What I mean is I know that a lot of things done online in China are done with WeChat, including it being something that some apps run in. If the same is true for what’s being discussed here, then the Chinese government doesn’t need people to prove their ages first, because they already have that data.

Would you need to in China? i genuinely don’t know if downloading apps is something that’s done through WeChat but, if so, the government’s got direct access anyway.

Adam Baldwin has been pretty far-right/anti-feminism/anti-LGBTQ/anto-“woke” for a long time. He’s MAGA. He was even a GamerGater back in the day.

There’s no reason for them to be digital at all. The UK has secure elections with hand-counting paper ballots.

I wonder what kind of conversations Vance had with his wife about these kinds of things? Or his children…