If they’re established, yeah. But you have to wait until you’re contacted because it isn’t something that you’ll have an easy time finding a buyer for.

I have, however, been offered a few grand for my oldest account there, as well as one of my niche subs that was private long before they decided to be assholes.

That, apparently, is valuable. It’s not as easy to make a sub private now, so one of the older ones is attractive for some reason. The person that contacted me wouldn’t explain what/why, which is part of the reason I told them to fuck off, but they had offered two grand for it.

Oh yeah.

It isn’t a dealbreaker for me, but it really is nice. It takes getting used to, but it cuts down on the need to move to the touchpad or mouse. If you’re working in tight quarters, or have mobility issues, or hand issues, it can end up being a major improvement. It’s a ymmv thing of course, but I end up using it more than I thought I would when writing.

Ummmm, who’s going to tell them?

Slowly. With loose clothing. And we ain’t even tropical.

Neither.

IDGAF if anyone remembers, and I ain’t reminding anyone.

About the only thing I care about regarding my birthday is being allowed to nap without interruption lol.

It’s inevitable.

It also serves to give new users a stable instance that they can learn on. Then they’ll either switch instances, stay with the biggest, start their own, or abandon federated social media entirely.

But that initial stability gives the best chances of people staying. I started on the big, obvious ones for lemmy and Mastodon. On lemmy, I abandoned my .world account pretty quick for this one because it offered what I need. It ended up being one of the bigger ones, but I don’t plan on switching. But when someone in my life wants to try lemmy, I tend to recommend one of the less annoying instances lol.

Mastodon, it was similar; .social didn’t fill my needs, so I migrated. Twice so far.

There’s always going to be a “biggest” instance. It’s going to be the one that’s easiest to find. You could plug in the smallest instance for Mastodon, and it would decentralize more. But it might also overwhelm that instance. Mastodon in particular has an organization that can maintain a solid instance with massive numbers. Letting it serve as a gateway just makes sense.

My baphomet guards our salt & pepper

I think you misunderstand what’s happening.

It isn’t that, as an example to represent the idea, openai is training their models on kiddie porn.

It’s that people are taking ai software, and then training it on their existing material. The wired article even specifically says they’re issuing older versions of the software to bypass safeguards that are in place to prevent it now.

This isn’t to say that any of the companies involved in offering generative software don’t have such imagery in the data used to train their models. But they wouldn’t have to possess it for it to be in there. Most of those assholes just grabbed giant datasets and plugged them in. They even used scrapers for some of it. So all it would take is them accessing some of it unintentionally for their software to end up able to generate new material. They don’t need to store anything once the software is trained.

Currently, none of them lack some degree of prevention in their products to prevent it being used for that. How good those protections are, I have zero clue. But they’ve all made noises about it.

But don’t forget, one of the earlier iterations of software designed to identify kiddie porn was trained on seized materials. The point of that is that there are exceptions to possession. The various agencies that investigate sexual abuse of minors tend to keep materials because they need it to track down victims, have as evidence, etc. It’s that body of data that made detection something that can be automated. While I have no idea if it happened, it wouldn’t be surprising if some company or another did scrape that data at some point. That’s just a tangent rather than part of your question.

So, the reason that they haven’t been “sued” is that they likely don’t have any materials to be “sued” for in the first place.

Besides, not all generated materials are made based on existing supplies. Some of it is made akin to a deepfake, where someone’s face is pasted onto a different body. So, they can take materials of perfectly legal adults that look young, slap real or fictional children’s faces onto them, and have new stuff to spread around. That doesn’t require any original material at all. You could, as I understand it, train an generative model on that and it would turn out realistic fully generative materials. All of that is still illegal, but it’s created differently.

Okay, let’s be fucking real here. This is not a first amendment issue at all. Never has been, never will be.

There’s no constitutional lawyers making that claim that don’t work for someone paying them to.

Nobody’s speech is being limited. One specific platform is being removed. One of many. That’s it.

Dude, how many times are you going to ask this?

Dammit. Now I gotta do this to fuck with my kid

You know, there’s some good eatin on one of them things.

But, probably not.

Reptiles don’t pile on mass the way mammals do. The greatest limitation to tortoise speed isn’t muscle anyway. It’s bone structure and metabolism.

Strapping weight ain’t gonna get mr tarpin swole, he just gonna be tired.

Yeah, the infrastructure just isn’t there yet, and with the difficulty being reported on models I haven’t tried, I’m not willing to jump into any of the current options.

Even the pine phone I got to play around with for a few days was prone to connection issues, and that’s a bit of a dealbreaker

Well, Anne Rice’s vamps were not viral at all. They were inhabited by a spirit.

My symbiotic vampires were built to allow for a wide range of vampire powers. Anything from old school Dracula to Lestat, to things like the red and white court of the Dresden files. The symbiote was a way (originally) to let my players have any kind of vampire they wanted without having to find a new explanation each time.

It turned into more than that over time though.

I’m with you on remembering some other mentions if it though. Can’t really pin down where, but there’s that niggling little itch in memory that says I’ve read it.

Shit, though. Write! Doesn’t have to be for anything but the fun of it.

Yup.

I talk to other writers. We discuss this kind of thing sometimes. Even the bigger names sometimes cross into amateur spaces.

Paranormal romance, as a genre, is driven by the same markets as traditional romance. The stuff that sells is marketed to straight women because they’re the ones that spend on it reliably.

Hell, good luck finding men that write paranormal romance at all, much less in traditional publishing. They exist, but it’s not the norm.

Now, you get into some of the dedicated fan fiction, the blog level publishing, and the non commercial self publishing, you find more that’s geared to other audiences. But those spaces exist because you aren’t going to reliably sell things that don’t interest straight women. You’ll run into what is written with gay or bi characters in the mainstream, but it’s still being written for the straight women to buy. It’s a woefully underrepresented segment, but the truth is that the markets are marginal to begin with, and writing for them simply isn’t going to make enough money to be something traditional publishing invests in.

Yeah, you can argue whether or not fan fiction, and non commercial self publishing is or isn’t part of the overall “writing” population. But even if you include that, you’re looking at a tiny fragment of any given genre. It’s also a tiny fragment of readership.

I have a novella based around magical transition that’s out there, under a pen name. Decent story, and I get the occasional email about it. But compare that to the volume I get from anything else, and it’s barely a trickle (mind you, the total volume of everything is a trickle to begin with, we’re talking maybe a dozen a month at most).

Go look up some of the bigger names in paranormal romance. There’s usually going to be footage of them doing talks at cons, that kind of thing. The audiences are going to be damn near all women. The writers are almost all women. It’s not a closed market, all sides of it except publishers are more than welcoming of men and non hetero fans for sure. There’s all kinds of LGBTQ folks scattered through the crowds. But they are scattered.

If you aren’t a writer, and one that has some degree of presence that’s vettable, you aren’t getting into the private groups where things get discussed about the inside aspects of trying to write. But inside them, anyone that’s actively seeking readers, free or paid, is going to have their intended audience because it’s just a fact that genres exist, and that they tend to have demographics. So you have to keep that in mind, or not get read.

Which brings us back to the beginning. Yes, I’m sure of what I said. It wasn’t an offhand comment.

Grass? Isn’t that what you people on the outside smoke?

Well, like others have said, Anne Rice specifically describes the process, which includes purging the digestive and excretory tracts entirely. Vomiting, urinating, and defecating.

Most authors don’t cover that stuff at all because it’s not really what most readers want. They want the stuff that’s fantastic, not gritty. Or, that’s what authors assume their readers want. Since Anne Rice’s success, vampires tend to be written less as horror, and I’d argue that the majority of vampire fiction is now in the paranormal romance category. Chances are that they’re right in that assumption.

Take what it is likely the most successful paranormal romance series, the Sookie Stackhouse series by Charlaine Harris. She does a little of the gritty with it, but avoids the “nasty” parts. I would say that pretty much every fan of the series from before the show (true blood, for anyone not aware of the books and show) wouldn’t have been a fan if she’d written in any scenes with even the humans pooping “on screen”. Some of the fans from after the show might not have been bothered.

But, that kind of vampire story isn’t really a vampire story. They’re romance stories truth vampire characters. And, usually, they’re written with female protagonists for a cis-hetero adult woman audience in mind. Even when written with a vampire protagonist, it’s almost always going to be a female vampire, or if it’s a male vampire, they’ll be into men. I’m sure there’s exceptions, but that’s what the genre was built on.

If you get into urban fantasy, you’ll find grittier vampire stories and characters, but even there, you only find passing mentions of human digestive products because most people don’t want to read about something they experience regularly.

Now! Having written fantasy and urban fantasy books myself, as well as having done world building for my home brew ttrpg, I have addressed this in passing.

There’s multiple types of vampires between my various settings. But the most common one is formed by a magic based symbiotic virus. That kind of vampire doesn’t excrete anything during their rebirth because the virus is going to reshape the organs involved, and converts what would normally be waste into usable materials and/or energy.

Those vampires only defecate when they eat normal food. This is not something they do often because the virus rewires their brain and sensory organs in a way that vegetables are unpleasant, and cooked meat is as well. Even raw meat doesn’t smell like food to them, though when they choose or have to eat things other than blood, raw meat is the only thing that tastes like food to them. It just tastes very weak and unsatisfying. They’ll still be hungry if they shovel down as much meat as their reformed stomachs can hold.

But, when they do eat normal food, they excrete it eventually. The symbiote after transforming the body no longer inhabits the digestive tract, and it has killed off the gut biome. So, what comes out is what went in; chewed up food. The only time that changes is when there are living microbes on the food. The symbiote will attack those to kill them off, and that does result in some of the food being broken down as well, but it isn’t digested, it’s more that the cells in the food are damaged and leaking.

In other words, you don’t want to be around vampire poop in my universe lol.

You also don’t want to be around a vampire that needs to poop they get grumpy because you only are the remnants of their intestines now moving, they’re uncomfortable. There’s also the reaction of the symbiote when it needs to cleanse any food. It sends signals across the body that there’s something unwanted present, so the vampire feels slightly angry, and possibly nervous.

The only things a vampire can take in and use would be liquids, but except for plain water, and made up beverages created by the vampires, the process is the same. Water will get absorbed, and whatever is left over gets pooped out rather than being absorbed and filtered out into urine. The beverages they’ve made themselves, like blood wine, are grown specifically to make sure the symbiote will treat the non water components like blood. Which, there’s this whole thing about fields of grapes being grown in symbiote rich soil, etc that makes that possible, but I doubt anyone cares lol.

Back to the lore related to digestion. The point of all that is that I’m a tad strange regarding imaginary creatures. When, why, and how they poop is, to me, essential lore. Same with reproduction. So every fictional species/race in my stuff, I’ve thought it out for them. I’ve even got answers for creatures I didn’t build myself (and I say build because stuff like vampires can’t be claimed as a creation, but you can put them together. It’s like fictional legos).

Well, you run into a lot of trouble.

Part of the abortion debate is centred on when, exactly, a bunch of cells can be called a person.

There’s no significant group arguing that it happens after the baby is out of the womb and surviving.

There’s rules in place for what happens when that new person can’t survive on its own, particularly when that’s combined with an inability to ever function as more than a lump.

So, the problem becomes one of deciding when, after that period, that child needs to be given the right to choose for themselves if they want to live or not. There’s already the ability to just not sustain life, but if you’re gong to be making the choice to end that life, you gotta get consensus on whether or not someone gets to decide it for them.

Now, I’m a long term right to death advocate. I consider the ability to choose the manner and time of our own deaths a right, one that is typically repressed, unjustly so

But when you’re taking someone else’s, there’s a much higher standard involved. In order to take someone’s life legally, you have to jump through some serious hoops under normal circumstances. It’s usually only allowed after they do something very bad (by the standards of the legal system making the decision).

So, how and why are the parents making that decision? Why are they making it alone? Why not wait until the child is older and can decide for themselves? When is someone old enough?

There’s more things that need to be addressed before you could even remotely hope to build consensus and make it legal.

And, from my perspective the answer is a hell no. You, me, everyone, has the right to decide the manner and time of our death (within reason). But we do not have the right to decide it for someone else.

With that in mind, it is a decision that should only be made before adulthood in the most extreme cases, where suffering is assured, and early death inevitable.

Beyond that, there are just too many problems, the same as there are with capital punishment.

Euthanasia is a difficult topic, period. Even with the right to death, are we going to obligate someone else to assist? A lot of people seeking a medical end of life can’t take their own. So they need assistance. When you’re involving someone that can’t decide for themselves (and if someone isn’t deemed capable of voting then they’re not capable of choosing in this), you can’t obligate a doctor to do the job. Nobody should be obligated to take someone else’s life.

So, nah. If you’re an adult, you should have the right, but until then, nobody else should. It still has problems, and you listed the worst of them already. But those problems are not as bad as ending someone’s life without their informed consent. Kids can’t form that for much of anything.

It already is.

I mean, it’s a thing. You can look it up and find documentation on it. It’s in the DSM-5, the main diagnostic tome for mental health. Here’s an overview in a reputable source. It’s listed as cannabis induced psychosis though.

It isn’t exactly a super common thing relative to total population, and there’s a good bit of debate about exactly how much of it is purely an affect in people already prone to psychosis or schizophrenia, and how much is causative. However, I’ve never seen any research into whether it’s 100% about the weed, or if it’s related to other things that are in the weed, and/or if it would be set off by anything that tweaked dopamine in a similar way.

There are other drugs known to trigger psychosis and schizophrenia, and they don’t necessarily work the exact same way. So there’s a good chance that if you don’t have an unusually high chance to end up there, that you won’t, no matter how much you smoke. But there’s just not enough data to be certain.

What is certain is that it isn’t just scaremongering. It may be used to try and scaremonger, but that’s a different thing.

The numbers I’ve seen are low enough that you might go decades in ER work and never see it because it isn’t instant. You won’t really know if it’s CIP until a patient history has been taken, other tests run, etc. So the comments talking about ER veterans not having seen it are irrelevant. They wouldn’t be in on the diagnosis. Now, someone in a psych unit might have a useful anecdote about never having seen it during their career. But it’s also not an all day every day thing.

It’s a relatively infrequent event. Even in a big city, you might see a hundred cases a year that can be definitely diagnosed, and it won’t all be at the same hospital.

However, if anyone working in an ER says they’ve never seen anyone in for any cannabis related issues, they’re either lying, or didn’t work there long. People get greened out, or get a bad trip, or get stuff that’s laced often enough that you’ll see it if you even do part time in an ER. It won’t be every day, or even every week (or it didn’t used to), but the rate of such occurrence is increasing as legalization spreads access and the willingness to both seek help and be honest. That’s a fact you can look up, you don’t have to trust anyone.

Cannabis is a plant with around a dozen potent psychoactive components. That’s why people use it. To assume that everyone is going to react the same to them, in varying proportions, at betting varying levels is just stupid. You can have something as mild as aspirin, perfectly controlled during manufacture for potency, and still have the occasional weird response.

Doesn’t matter how you take it in, you can’t accurately predict your response until you’ve taken it in the first time, and even then you’d need more use to really call it accurate. Then you can still run into weird shit, or laced shit, or shit that’s just way stronger than you’re used to.

Me? I have unpleasant reactions to the stuff, so I don’t use it. I wish I could because it can do great things for people. If I had a history psychosis or schizophrenia in my family, I wouldn’t even stay around where it’s being smoked or used in a way it could get into my system. Just not worth it, because it can happen, and it is most definitely a real thing, no matter how poorly researched it is currently.