ICastFist

I mean, you take one look at Greek statues and Roman busts and you realize that people figured how to aim for realism, at least when it came to the human body and faces, over 2000 years ago.

Yet, unlike sculpture, paintings and drawings remained, uh, "immature" for centuries afterwards (to my limited knowledge, it was the Italian Renaissance that started making realistic paintings). Why?

Given how harder it's becoming to tell apart AI slop from something made by a human (videos, photos, text), and how much scammers and other criminals are piling up on the tech, I'm thinking this will be the silver lining, making some people pay more attention to real life and finally accept the maxim "Don't believe everything you see on the internet"

Other points:

• it's not mutually exclusive with any other neurodivergence, in which case they're "twice exceptional";
• In an environment with unprepared people and professionals, they may be wrongly diagnosed as having some other neurodivergence.
• It's not just a high IQ score;
• Gifted kids can be problem students and have low grades;
• Homework feels like torture (this is true to any child, tho);
• They're very likely to question authorities and point out perceived hypocrisy (emphasis here on perceived, because pointing something and being right are different things);
• As kids, they may have weird quirks for executing tasks, such as wanting to hold pencils the "wrong" way, or wanting to press against a wall to do homework;

If you're Brazilian or can understand Brazilian Portuguese, this is the podcast I listened to - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apnuIIePeeA

Aos brasileiros que acabarem encontrando esse post, o podcast que assisti é o que linkei acima

I've been interested in checking out some "DIY" boardgames, ones that you could just print the pieces/sheets/cards/tokens/etc and play.

I'm mostly interested in boardgames that can be played with 4+ people and require little setup or rules introduction, as I'm pretty much being the "gateway drug" for the group (everyone I've shown Blokus so far has loved the game).

I'm ok with knowing about heavy games (stuff that takes an afternoon to finish) to keep an eye on for future reference

I've been reading a book on the Paraguay War, Maldita Guerra, and it mentioned how Solano Lopez (then Paraguay's dictator) planned to invade Mato Grosso and possibly take Cuiabá. Trips upstream from Assuncion to Cuiabá at that time would usually take 12+ days on steam ships.

What really surprised me is that this kind of information was supposed to be taught back when I was in school.

Some weeks ago, I've come across Delta Chat, whose main thing is "(near) instant messaging using your email"

That left me thinking, has this been attempted before? If not, why? Also, why (besides servers' limitations as means to fight spam) isn't this solution used more often, given that e-mail has been a decentralized solution for well over 40 years now?

I'm thinking about making a character entirely out of Polygon2D nodes without textures. One thing I haven't figured out how to do is make each polygon cast a "permanent" shadow on top of the ones that are Z levels below it.

Below is an image of what I want to do, but using shaders/lights. I've only managed to do this by making extra polygons to fill in as the shadows.

How exactly do I have to set up a light source to achieve this effect? Using a DirectionalLight2D or a PointLight2D just brightens the polygons and I can't figure how to use a LightOccluder2D, or even if this is the correct way to get this result

(The polygons are green due to the DirectionalLight being green) - The occlusion simply applies the shadow on anything that is Z levels below it.

Asking mostly because I have fuckloads of video courses, plus a number of movies, that I have yet to even check if the content is as good as their titles imply and I really feel like I'm mostly hoarding this stuff because I have no fucking clue.

It's been ages since I last saw ep 1 and, while looking for the despecialized original trilogy, I came across the prequel fan edits. "Eh, why not?"

Gotta say, I was expecting the pacing or the story to kinda fall flat, but this was a very enjoyable watch. There's a lot that was cut, nearly all the "whimsy" was removed, also the whole underwater trip when the jedis first land on Naboo. This leads to the Gungan alliance being a "jar jar ex machina", but it worked well enough in my opinion. Other than that, I think the movie works really well in every aspect.

The torrent I got also comes with a .docx that lists the whole movie script with all the stuff that was cut in red, and new additions (very few) in blue. A smaller list of changes can be read here - Besides removing a lot of jar jar's antics and any references to midichlorians (I personally never cared about that), one notable change near the end was making Anakin blow up the command ship before Padme and her group capture the Viceroy, so it makes it seem that the droids being deactivated is what allowed them to complete their objective.

One thing that I noticed during the final battle was that the Trade Federation pretty much dropped the blockade, as they only left one command ship in orbit, compared to the dozens at the beginning of the movie. I guess that was because the land invasion worked, so there was no further need to keep the orbital blockade.

PS: I couldn't stop laughing when Obi Wan fell because of that fucking meme

PPS: I always liked how Naboo looks, but this time I really paused to look a bit better at the architecture, and it has such a nice mix of mediterranean marble of yellowish tones and cyan roofs. With the current image quality and all, it was much easier to pick out "ancient CG" and in many places it looked like a "old last gen game", but it had that late 90s charm that warms my hearth with nostalgia.

PPPS: The worst part about watching SW as an older person is seeing all those damn walkways without a single guardrail anywhere. Coruscant is even worse, that transport vehicle full of VIP heading to the senate is fully open without so much as seatbelts.

I make the specification of non-linux because otherwise this would just become a thread full of obscure distros that do the same thing as a million other distros.

Some lesser known OSs:

• AROS - based on Amiga OS, has some derivatives like IcarOS and MorphOS
• Haiku - based on BeOS
• Redox - Unix-like, made in Rust (might technically count as linux?)
• Serenity - Unix-like, very late 90s look and feel
• Kolibri - Tiny OS, the image is ~44MB. It also has a smaller version that fits in a single floppy.
• PhantomOS - When 3 Russians decide to turn everything about a typical OS upside down.

With efforts to resuscitate Neopets ramping up, monthly users have nearly tripled to 300,000 in the past six months, and the company is on track to be profitable by the end of 2024, [current Neopets Team CEO] Law said.

Also notable:

Law said that rather than cracking down on fan-created components, the company is embracing them. It launched a “Neopass” login system that allows users to access games across the Neopets system, including third-party and fan-made games.

For anyone that missed the initial news back in March -> https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/03/playtron-wants-to-go-way-wider-than-steam-with-a-gaming-os-for-core-casuals/

So, to everyone that was already kinda skeptical back then, congratulations, you were right.