Person who took this video is an actual hero. I don't want to imagine what could have happened to that woman without them.

Also: don't make the mistake of looking at the replies to this on Twitter. I forgot just how bad it was, but nearly every top reply is by verified accounts trying to justify this somehow. It's actually insane to me the complete lack of empathy these people show - past party lines and political differences, isn't this obviously a bad thing that shouldn't have happened?

i think a lot of it comes down to how much easier it is to drop Harry Potter than entire social platforms and such.

for example, it'll take time and energy for me to move from Windows to Linux, which i simply don't have right now. but all i need to do to stick it to Rowling is not care about Harry Potter.

now, that doesn't mean i would go out of my way to harass people who still support the franchise, but i could see how that would embolden other people to do so, and i still think it's important to let people know that J.K. Rowling actively advocates against trans people existing.

additional context; Katie Scott, a former exec at ubisoft, will be the "Head of Vanilla Minecraft" in 2026. this source writes:

Scott left Ubisoft in November, but her role as vice president of the company's global creative game office saw her specialize in "competitive, live service, and free to play experiences to create games with lasting impact, high retention, and monetization results." She also writes that she focused on "live service strategies and ambitious retention and monetization" in Assassin's Creed and Rainbow Six games

now that sounds bad on paper, but it's unclear to me what exactly she'll be doing in this position. best i could find was this linkedin post advertising the position 7 months ago, which reads:

Join us in shaping the future. Minecraft isn't just a game. It's a platform for creativity, learning, and building community. We're seeking a senior leader, based in Stockholm, to guide our talented teams toward Minecraft's evolution. Help us build a better world through the power of play.

my interpretation of this is that she'll still be under other managers, and wouldn't be making any big decisions alone. regardless, this is not a good look for Mojang, especially at a time where the community are getting impatient with Bedrock's issues.

I agree with your point in general - there's no use in being skeptical if you call stuff fake at the first sign. Innocent until proven guilty or whatever.

You're right that the image could be clipart, and a human could have made those typos, but there are some non-human tells in here other than that.

The P in protection is a lowercase capital, and one of the r's in irŕritation is accented. The latter could've been mistyped on a phone keyboard, but in that case it would've been autocorrected, and that still doesn't explain the P.

There's also some weird GPT-like descriptions that are thrown in for no reason. Why does the bandana being "fashionable" matter? How are arm warmers "subtle", exactly?

As another commentor pointed out, a T-shirt with a graphic is more likely to make you recognisable, so that part's just wrong. I also don't get why "tactical/military bags" should be "avoided"? Seems like the kinda misinformation AI would spout.

What I really don't get here is why someone would use AI to generate the entire thing, rather than only using it for the graphic (still morally questionable but excusable) and adding the text in manually (something you can do in MS paint).

new response just dropped

idk where you get that impression from, you can definitely find nice streamers if you look for them.

take RTGame. no controversy whatsoever. swears a bunch, but only as a result of being irish. fantastic community. but he streams on twitch, so i guess he's trash?

is it because streamers ask for donations? because they play games as a job? i'm genuinely curious.

one guacamole is 6.02214076×10^23^ guacas

source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=lLlwvmu1ZeA&lc=UgzxUpp15TXNo4txA_14AaABAg

kinda crazy that they made it impossible to follow the only rule

i wonder if there's a limit to adding "slop" to things

live service games are liveslop, fast food is foodslop, making smalltalk is conversationslop, charities are kindnessslop, being awake is wokeslop, dreams are sleepslop, everything is thingslop

and this post, too, is just contentslop

He is somewhat right about the ethics of true crime content, but that has nothing to do with him reporting lies as fact.

The better play would've been to be upfront with everything being fictional, then go all in - make stories about prisoners using wormholes to smuggle in contraband, or a vampire hunter accidentally killing an innocent human.

If Paul did something like that, he could have kept the channel and made his argument on there to a much wider audience. But maybe this idea would be too much effort for someone who makes AI slop...

if you only play one card, you can hold more steel/gold/blue seal cards in your hand

this doesn't matter much for winning normal runs, but if you happen to get jokers that buff steel cards (i.e. Mime and Baron), copy said jokers, find ways to increase your hand size, and make every card in your deck the same card, you can get absurdly high scores and get really far into endless mode

my current high score is 6.817x10^98, which I got with a really good high card plasma deck run

again though, you do need to find exactly the right jokers for this, so building around any other hand type is almost always more reliable for winning ante 8

i tend to only comment when i feel like i have something to add, and i only post after putting in far too much effort into perfecting what i made.

i have ideas for shitposts down in writing. the first thing i posted was sort of shitposty, even. with the time it takes for me specifically to make a shitpost though, i figure i might as well create something more meaningful.

and i hope that adds more value to the fediverse than if i posted as often as i could. some folks are better at that than i'll ever be, anyways.

carter vail's stuff is great! some required watching for those not familiar:

dirt man (self explanatory)

song about his taste in women

a cowboy song

and one of his more serious music videos, for good measure

I agree the econ jokers are in an odd spot (I usually store them all the way on the left), but the Ceremonial Dagger has to eat the Egg.

Most of the other weird joker order shenanigans are caused by Baseball Card, so blame Jim Joker, not me.

Also, Jimbo needs to be in position 149. For optimal reasons.

thanks a bunch for your feedback, and glad you're looking forward to more! should be done with the next one soon(tm).

As others have said, Balatro does not lie to you - the listed odds are always right. But there are some ways to stack the odds in your favor outside of the obvious deckbuilding.

Namely, if you are holding a certain Joker, Planet, Tarot, or Spectral card, you will never see another copy of that card anywhere else through normal means. I'm also fairly certain Jokers, Planets, Tarots, and Spectrals that are currently in the shop offerings will not appear in their respective packs in the shop.

What this means is that you can slightly influence what you get by holding cards you don't want. This is less useful for Jokers and Spectrals, but if you're holding 2 Tarot cards and there are 2 in the shop, opening an Arcana pack gives you a 1/18 chance for each Tarot to be the one you're looking for instead of a 1/22. Same goes for Celestial Packs, but there aren't that many Planets, which makes the odds that much better.

This also means if you win with the hand you want to level up and have a Blue Seal card in hand, you should use the Planet before you cash out and go to the shop so that it can appear again.

The only exceptions to this that I can think of are having the Telescope voucher, which 100% guarantees that a Celestial Pack will have your most played hand's Planet, having a Showman, which can even make the same card appear twice in one pack, or the Invisible Joker, which can show up again after you've sold it even if you keep the duped joker around.

On getting PhotoChad set up, my only advice is to pick up Riff-Raff (or skip for 2 common Jokers if you're feeling real desperate) if you already have one of the two, and try to use Tarots to make your deck lean towards face cards. Similar advice for Lucky Cards - either get lucky and pick up Oops! All 6s or anything that retriggers cards, or don't rely on them hitting to survive the next two seconds.

Finally, the Wheel never hits, except when you have a food joker that dies next round. Then it guaranteed hits on the food joker. /s

p.s. You say you'll be "starved for either chips or mult" on Plasma? Unless I'm reading you wrong, the whole thing with Plasma is you don't need to worry about getting both numbers up; you've gotta go all in on Chips early, since it's easy to get a lot added with a few Jokers, then pivot to Mult late game if you can.

can't wait to sink my teeth into that game... right after I finally get around to getting better PC parts

tried the demo and the framerate was noticeably bad even after messing about with the settings

I mainly blame myself for putting up with Intel integrated graphics until now, but then again, putting "texture quality" below "very high" removes the characters' pupils, so maybe the game's just poorly optimised 🤷

This was, apparently, the wrong move

Well, not exactly. Keep in mind that Undertale was never supposed to get as popular as it did. The player isn't really supposed to know about how to get the ""true"" endings from the get go, or that they exist.

another reason to not just use the elytra is always a plus, and another bit of regular, tiered gear is great - hoping they do that for armour next, which tends to be really samey compared to the tool/weapon variety the game has.

it's unfortunate that both the Nautilus and spears were both leaked beforehand, since it got people speculating about a much larger ocean update which was never gonna be the case. Mojang's official teasers also basically confirmed the Nautilus leak, which didn't help.

while i'm fine with them doing smaller updates and touching up old areas of the game, i did find myself saying "cool, but that was it?", like i did when the happy ghast was announced. really hoping they have something good planned for 1.22 - i would be satisfied with something similar in size to 1.21, but it feels like the community will implode if they don't do an end update at some point soon.

edited to add: there will probably be more stuff added in snapshots than what they've announced here, like there has been for every other "game drop", so that's probably not it. still, wish they at least said that... unless they did, and i missed it...

friend, you have won the internet argument. i say that with no sarcasm whatsoever. the other person misunderstood you, then politely conceded after you made a more detailed comment, adding that this being a crosspost might have caused the bug.

they didn't say "oh huh, must be my app", they said "ohh yeah, it probably is my app, thank you."

what more could you have asked for? what response would you rather have gotten?