Alice Bell 🔜 Gamescom

The DoD Rapid Response team on Twitter writes: "The Secretary of Defense has great jeans." The attached photo shows Sec. Pete Hegseth wearing a blue sport coat, white button-up shirt, blue jeans, and a big buckle Western belt.

I disagree. I will tell you what's wrong with his jeans. 🧵

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I've updated my ko-fi goal with August's expenses. As always, any work I get I will also add to the total for transparency. The truth is that we need more than this to break even, but this is the max I want to ask for.

ko-fi.com/foxtrotluna/...

Reading WH40k lore like:

The founder of the Imperium is the Emperor of Mankind, the most powerful psyker— PAUSE. What is that?

Psykers are also called "witches" among the Aeldari— PAUSE. What is that?

The Aeldari Empire was without equal across both realspace and the Webway— PAUSE. What is that?

Generative AI is actively anti Labour and is an investment bubble, this is a joke

"with a m—b—r of p—m—t"

Adding "member of parliament" to the list of slurs

i've started, and it's important to my politics, to just say, well if this part wasn't true, how would i feel, really dig into my complaint. what actually about it don't i like. is it that it's shit? or is it that it's wasteful? what if it wasn't wasteful? well, it's trained on stolen data. what if

this is very good practise

I've started doing a thing where I see an amazing bit of art e.g. Miyazaki animation storyboard and think 'see this is way better than what AI could do' and that is also putting the robot cop inside my head, must stop!

My condolences to the Pride & Prejudice (2005) girlies (gender-neutral) on the death of their Darcy.

you are a modern miracle!!

You know, not 'this is the best I can do' but 'I can see that I, too, can learn to become an expert! it is worth putting more time in!'

I will try! I think I am exactly the person Andy is talking about here, fwiw - with craft hobbies I can now make complicated little dolls and things and even some clothes, but I need to start with a crochet-a-Yoda box kit equivalent to feel like I can *do* something.

being on morphine for the first day was helpful. it's very interesting because you can see where he was working from cutscenes and things than then vanished from the game, extremely incoherent way to make a book

I mean that has always been true, and I say it as a huge AC fan. I think it worked really well with Desmond and then they lost it a bit. I reckon with some solid effort and judicious pruning of cannon you could do something cool with it again though.

thank yoooou I am excited to buy expensive plastic!!

Amazing advice, thank you both

That gesture can almost serve as a source of comfort. The old systems of prestige—the literary inner circles, the top-ranking daily newspapers, the party leadership—are rickety and insecure. Everyone has a publishing platform and no one has a career. Smarm offers a quick schema of superiority. The authority that smarm invokes is an ersatz one, but the appearance of authority is usually enough to get by with. Without that protection, to hold an opinion is to feel bare and alone, one voice among a cacophony of millions. In another meditation on the problem of negativity, published on the New Yorker's website in September, the critic Lee Siegel wrote that he had abandoned hostility in his own work, because it is unsuited to these times: [U]nlike a positive review, a negative one implies authority, and authority has become something ambiguous in our age of quick, teeming Internet response, where all the old critical standards and parameters are in the process of vanishing and being reinvented. Fifty years ago, Dwight Macdonald's excoriations were sanctioned by a tight-knit community of readers and thinkers. In our time of dizzying reconfiguring, a Macdonald takedown, so assured in its acerbic judgments, would not have the resonance it once did. The source of its vituperative authority would not just be opaque. It would be non-existent. In theory, this might produce a more humane and rounded criticism. In practice, though, Siegel is describing a ratchet, one which has already been tightening for a while. Sympathy begets sympathy, to the benefit of things that don't deserve to be sympathized with. The ascendent forms of cultural power depend on the esteem of others, on the traffic driven by Facebook, on the nihilistic embrace of being liked and shared.

this bit in particular, tho

Out of interest, what method would you recommend for a new starter? 👀

So apparently, it may turn out that The Wizard of Oz at the Las Vegas Sphere wasn’t entirely made in AI and Google threw the VFX crew under the bus by claiming it was all done by artificial intelligence.

If true, then fucking yikes.

Me either. It’s in single digits

I have not engaged with broader AC transmedia enough to comment I’m afraid.

(Fwiw I went with middle class cisgender woman who loves cheese biscuits upset that M&S is abandoning long standing brand values of fairness and respect and not supporting their staff, will not shop there again until this is addressed)

A paperback copy of the Assassins Creed Brotherhood game tie-in novel

I finished this (largely read last night at about 2am) and it’s fascinating. May have retroactively made me like the game less, surely the goal of transmedia. We’ll be talking about it on the podcast in a few weeks, with an old briney friend.

Can't fault the clarity of Labour's message on protest. There are BAD protesters who must be punished (Irish musicians, anti-genocide vicars) and there are GOOD protesters whose views deserve respect (masked thugs with petrol bombs trying to start a pogrom)

That's me off Percy Pigs and those really nice little cheese biscuits they do, lads.

M&S make it hard to find a good email for complaining to them about the way they've treated their staff member - I'm going for ceo@customer-support.marksandspencer.com

Well I’m going to be complaining to M&S

Nah that’s a fair cop

I feel like a 2/9 sharing combo

I think failure undersells what has been a conscious and malicious effort to demonise and scapegoat immigrants of all kinds.