It’s honestly pretty hard for me to find media I can swallow because of having an anxiety trigger that is so common.
Most media has depictions of death or loss in it, and I’ve come across first person descriptions that were so immersive that my heart was actually pounding and I had to take a few days to stop feeling down, and it’s not something the authors usually mention explicitly. So in the end I don’t really watch or read anything serious these days.
That’s really the thing with Steam in general, from a consumer perspective it’s a very good and honest service, it actually adds to the experience of playing games instead of being an annoyance.
A lot of other stores feel like only shells made around popular titles to promote more stuff and lock people into using them. More launchers won’t solve the monopoly of Steam, you’ll just end up with as many as there are streaming services.
That’s not the case for GOG and Itch, but there you don’t get the same level of experience.
Not sure myself, I’m trying to get into some IT jobs (not necessarily programming) that aren’t anywhere near social media and are more focused on internet infrastructure, but getting any job is hard when you’re starting out and I would like to avoid the evil ones at all cost.
But just as there is no ethical consumption in capitalism, there’s no consensual work, so the values of wherever you end up working won’t align with yourself or the other workers fully, it’s just a question of degree.
It’s definitely useful for exploring ideas, I recently used AI-generated images as reference for an artist and it helped me get my thoughts across. I can’t wait to see the final result of it!
It’s probably also good for adding illustration to text where someone otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford it or spend the time, adding detail to your own art and so on.
The worrying thing to me is how fast it can create all sorts of images, and combined with LLMs and other tools even be automated. I could totally see entire feeds being populated by personalized AI art, stories, and music, let’s not forget that’s largely dictated by algorithms already if someone uses things like Spotify.
So one day it might get extremely difficult to tell if what you’re looking at was even created by someone on their own, or if AI had any significant role in it. This would make it impossible for regular artists to compete under the current economic model, which to be fair needs to go, but it will still cause suffering in the meantime. Even beyond capitalism, people want share their work for others to appreciate, and if every channel of communication is flooded it’s going to be pretty difficult to get noticed among the noise. If AI can create stunning images it might also depreciate art in the eyes of others, because to get to a very similar result using AI could take a lot less effort if the technology further improves, so they might see it as just a commodity or “pretty picture” and not think about artists at all.
It is a derogatory term, so it's bound to get overused a bit, but it generally refers to "leftists" who like the USSR and simp for existing authoritarian states with "communist" parties, like the PRC, Cuba, Vietnam, NK, and even Russia despite it having nothing to do with any kind of socialism anymore. Some of them are indeed war crime enjoyers, while others try to dress it in denial and propaganda.
As a counter example, socdems, democratic socialists, anarchists are not tankies, it's not just anyone on the left spectrum.
For a sci-fi story I'm slowly chipping away at I'm sort of trying to answer the question of how anthros could arise from humans, so that kinda sidesteps the issue of jealousy, since there would be choice, but it still leaves the other questions.
Maybe tail accessories would be made in multiple sizes and shapes, just like clothes for people are, though if tails and species are custom that could make it even more difficult, and there are so many real animals regardless. I guess in such a technologically advanced world accessories would all be custom made and arbitrary designs could be applied to them.
Something I haven't seen too many people think about is the health implications of having a tail. Walking on two legs while having a tail would probably cause tail injuries to be common from falls etc., and how do you account for it in infrastructure so it's safe for all kinds of them? It's similar to how things in our world aren't always designed for left-handed users, women or different body types, like cars for example. How would you keep lots of different species with slightly different anatomies, including tails, safe?
Furgonomics aside, I love tails and ears as a form of emotional expression, maybe in part because I'm autistic and would find it easier to express myself this way without the baggage that human body language brings!
I guess you could make a lemmy community where only you can post and it would act as a kind of blog, but you still can't follow mastodon users. That's actually something I want to do with my own instance and a custom frontend, because it seems perfect for what I want!
Not sure if merging different accounts would really be possible like that, you could do authentication using mastodon accounts similar to how you can log in with google, but there's really no universal way of doing it over activitypub itself unless you want to send confirmation codes over it like we do over email heh.
It's possible to point a custom domain to your existing fedi account with webfinger (you actually only need to make a file in .well-known on a web server), but I don't think it's possible to do it with multiple accounts. It would actually be cool if you could point people to your domain and have different fedi software figure out which one is the most appropriate, or present a list.
Also that custom domain won't show up on the account itself, that's another opportunity to maybe make identify separable from instances, so someone could be less dependent on it sticking around, I think bsky attempts to do something like that, but it also has quite a lot of holes in it and I feel like activitypub is a better foundation overall.
I'm very afraid another alternative is being conisidered here, and it's worse than any of these.
It's fascism.
And there's sadly precedent for it, economic crisis leads to political and social instability that can be cleverly exploited by appealing to peoples' emotions and putting them against an imagined enemy in other people, when the real enemy is hovering above us and cheering it on.