Mesa

YouTube's playlist shuffle feature has been broken for at least 11 years. I know this because I remember complaining about it in middle school.

Maybe this is what sowed the first seed in my path to becoming a developer.

And this is how a girl got me to sniff straight ammonia gas in middle school.

I can corroborate your last point because I watched both of these series relatively recently, and I also have little to no nostalgia associated with the subject.

I actually used to despise when ATLA came on. At that age, I could never commit to following plot-heavy shows, because I didn't really watch TV a ton (I thought I watched a lot, but I'm learning now as I talk to peers that it was not lol), and the show felt like it was on forever, eating up time on Nick. I finished it up around this time last year and ATLA is now among my favorite shows ever. I continued with TLOK shortly after, and yeah, those were my feelings.

So from my experience, I'm not gonna say it's the whole "growing out of it" thing. TLOK just is a less interesting story, the way I see it.

I was extremely excited in the beginning because the setting felt very well-constructed. I thought that bending contributing to rapid technological progress made a lot of sense to me, and I really like that there wasn't excessive exposition regarding the state of the world.

So much of what they did from that point just felt so corny.

It was just so disappointing for me. I don't know if they got creatively restricted, or if something happened with the original writers or what. I don't regret watching it, but I just wish they had taken or had been able to take more risks.

How did you feel about The Legend of Korra?

Since I'm already thinking of Spongebob, I'll say that the Sponge Out of Water movie was the first large-scale disappointment that I experienced from a delivery perspective.

All of the advertisement showed almost entirely the scenes where they were, per the title, out of water. Once out of water, per the title, Spongebob and the crew were 3D, superimposed into the real world, and they had superpowers. It should've been great.

In the actual movie, they did not become "out of water," per the title, until approximately the last 20 minutes of the movie, if my memory serves me correctly.

I was also a bit disappointed with Avatar: The Legend of Korra. It's not a bad show—it's just that The Last Airbender set the bar so high, and TLOK did not measure up.

Thanks, I'll try those out.

Functionally, I don't. Just because Mastodon is Fediverse won't make me "Tweet" more. Same thing here. In fact, I use Lemmy less than I used Reddit. Element does not measure up to what Discord does at the moment.

So outside of my beliefs of what the internet should be and the alignment of my choice of platforms with my beliefs, I'd rather be using the thing with the widest userbase and/or the best functionality. However, I no longer believe in Reddit, Discord, nor hardly any other big tech products; and so, here I am.

I do like the idea of federation, and I wish it were the norm for society when it comes to choice of product. But we're at a point where many people my age don't even know you can host your email outside of Google, and it's not really their fault. If I could wave a magic wand and snap every service to a federated nature, making everyone who uses the internet accustomed to using the federated web, I would do so in a heartbeat.

That said, does anyone know of a good chat service that actually has desktop audio on screen share? Preferably federated and similar to Discord, but obviously that's really specific.

I love me some good navel oranges. So, on a good day, yes.

The type of breakfast people in movies would eat one bean sprout from and off they go.

I think this comment in this thread answers your question or, at least, other questions of a similar sentiment.

Arguing that AI art is bad by pointing out its material flaws is largely unproductive (I'd even argue that it's counterproductive) because those flaws are theoretically surmountable. This post is a great example of that, and it highlights the reason I actually hate the presence of AI-generated work amidst the artistic world. It causes humans to hallucinate errors in normal artwork, and it normalizes this wack idea that perfection exists in art. It pollutes our intake of artwork and makes it exhausting to explore unfamiliar artists. As a personal anecdote, I used to love finding tracks on YouTube with less than 300 views and a weird thumbnail. It used to be an instant click. Now, it always feels like there's an 80% chance that it was soullessly generated almost entirely with AI—and so I click those videos less.

It's not because AI generated music sounds bad, or because AI generated images look bad. Sometimes they look great. But I don't really give a shit that it looks great if there's no human context behind it that I can ponder. AI work removes the value of discussion to me. Fuck that.

I've seen discussion about the idea of "the curtain is fucking blue," as it relates to the crisis of thought-terminating cliches; and the scariest thing to me is that, with AI work, the curtains are actually just fucking blue.

This leads me into a whole rant about how "Death of the Author" is so frequently misappropriated, and how it relates to the role of AI in the art world, but this comment is long enough.