She isn’t a controlling spouse, she’s a controlling housewife in an exaggerated disappointing version of a post-nuclear American family.

The show states over and over again that Walt believes a man provides for his family… a necessarily and pointedly gendered role that is central to his entire character’s motivations. Skyler’s nagging is framed exactly in relation to his perceived shortcomings with respect to this gendered expectation.

In a gay relationship you don’t tend to just mirror straight relationships but the bottom replaces the women, or something. So you can’t just conjure Skyler as a dude and make it make any sense as a family.

When there are two or more men coming together, usually they all have their own separate careers and plans for life. There is no template gay relationships have to build off of, and having children is way more difficult and complicated. We have to define everything for ourselves.

None of the tropes that are foundations of Breaking Bad work if you swap the genders of the characters. If walt were a woman nothing she does would make sense to the audience and the treatment from her annoyed husband would be absolute nonsense. Why would he expect her to provide for the family? Why would he expect her to man up? Etc?

Don’t touch her, she’ll steal your football powers!

They would be android devices, then.

So no. They wouldn’t be good.

A mild copyright violation based on a system designed around the constant distribution of copies of things is NOT a parable about sexual violence, people.

I feel like this extremely insensitive rape take is the fediverse’s version of the Godwin Law.

Read up on RCS’ history, and current standard.

RCS is a clown college of brokenness that doesn’t include encryption, and not even all of the telcoms in the country put together could make an official client for it. It is no more a standard than iMessage, and it certainly isn’t as good of one.

I’m verbose mode.

OP posted to a movies community about Tom Cruise’s narrative troubles, and how he changed them in the eye of the public.

Your comment recommends two movies that don’t have anything to do with Cruise, and a third, from 1988, with Cruise decades prior to his narrative issues.

You didn’t offer an explanation of why we should watch the movies, or even mention that Cruise was in the third, which is odd since you mentioned stars from the others. It came off as you ordering us to watch unrelated movies that don’t have anything to do with the article.

That just makes it feel very out of place. A recommendation list even with Tom in one of the movies feels like a sort of social non-sequitor in this type of thread.

That gives a similar kind of energy that a dad trying to search for celluloid clitorist couplings has when he mistakenly types into Facebook before confidently hitting Post.

Had you said:

“Tom Cruise was excellent in The Color of Money which was a sequel to the wildly successful and excellent The Hustler staring Paul Newman, and despite Cruise’s personal issues later in his career I recommend everyone see both films! Also watch The Sting if you enjoy Newman’s performance in The Hustler since he’s excellent in both.”

Or something like that, we would have all followed your thought train from the article.

Drats. I give it a go every handful of years because I want it to be great, but that’s my experience every time, too.

I still hold out hopes, since Blender used to be the same way. When I last tried Blender, their keyboard shortcuts and scene navigation were clearly developed by someone who thinks that using emacs is a good idea, and that vi never should have been improved.

But they’re a serious pro tool now that has a foothold in the 3D industry which I would not have predicted back then.

This is a fantastic list! Thank you for sending it my way. Saved for later exploration and I commented with my latest free (though only partially open source) app suggestion.

Fantastic list!

If you’re ok with including AI art generating apps on the list then check out Draw Things.

It’s free, runs the models only locally on your device, and collects no data/has an excellent clear privacy policy. It also does it in a fairly user-friendly way.

I have been extremely blown away by how capable it is. You can import Checkpoints, LoRa, Embeddings, and other Stable Diffusion-based things downloaded from huggingface, and civitai, likely other places. You can mix models and train LoRa. It has recently added API and http server functionality so you can automate image generation or plug it into other apps. It even can generate up to 25-frames of video, and it includes an exporter that does video frame interpolation.

It runs on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and the iPad version runs on VisionOS. I take a photo with my phone and make crazy variations of art with it without having internet access or paying a dime more than my expensive device already cost me.

With a separate app I can turn things I generate into stereo photos or video and see them in 3D on my headset.

I can also zoom in and enhance parts of photos, or upscale them in ways that hallucinate reasonable details.

I feel like I’m one hoverboard away from the future I was promised as a kid!

I’ve been so enamored with this app recently that it’s making me consider a career change, so I apologize if I’m coming off like an advertisement.

I’ll have to check it out. Thank you for the recommendation!

I love movie suggestions and I am pretty sure those movies you recommended are great classics, but your comment was giving big “google for lesbian porn” Facebook post energy…

In many specific applications current AI algorithms already exceed human capabilities. That’s been the case for much longer than the LLM craze. And as new AI algorithms are developed it becomes more and more likely that even without Artificial General Intelligence, the category of computing known as AI could reach a point that it exceeds human capabilities in all possible applications.

But even with that fact it’s true that we shouldn’t treat the current implementations of AI as if it were human.

If we ever develop an actual AGI and it is ad capable as a human, then we should reconsider, but nothing we have now seems to imply we are close to that.

You’re not my real dad!

Has GIMP improved much in the last five years?

My partner uses Adobe products for one of his jobs, and he had installed their cloud software on one of my laptops on his user account. Which forced it on all other user accounts, too.

I found that it installed horribly challenging to kill or remove daemons that would relaunch and reinstall their spyware bullshit if you didn’t kill all of them in the right way, and it was spamming me a pop-up asking for my password to install other things, which I couldn’t prevent.

I was able to stop it after many attempts and then got my partner to uninstall that junk from my laptop.

That was all still more user-friendly than the last time I tried to use GIMP.

Are there viable alternatives for their products?

If I haven’t seen the first 9, will I understand the plot of ROG Ally X?

I have used and worked on/with/owned quite a few VR headsets, yeah. Not a comprehensive reviewer-worthy amount, but I’ve been working on, or playing with, a VR headset since 2015, and I do consider myself to be an enthusiast.

Currently I own a Valve Index and a PSVR 2 along with my Vision Pro. Those two haven’t gotten use in a long while, whereas I use my Vision Pro a lot every day.

I don’t have a lot of experience with Quest 2, 3, or Pro, because Meta’s whole account debacle caused me to give my original quest away to a homeless friend of mine, which he sold for child support money, I think. Not a fan or Meta as a company in general.

I am a slight fan of Apple as a company, and by lemmy standards, I qualify as a rabid lunatic fanboy of Apple, so take it with a grain of salt, but…

The Vision Pro is a lot more of a comprehensive product than any of the other devices I’ve used, in ways that probably don’t matter to most VR enthusiasts. The surprisingly gripping features of it have nothing to do with gaming whatsoever, and everything to do with art, content, media, and productivity.

The main hobby I’ve been using it for daily is learning how to create 3D videos using Stable Diffusion. The huge bonus for this is all of the iPad apps that mostly just work without issue out of the box sprinkled with some Vision Pro specific apps.

Without leaving the headset or relying on an external device, I can use Draw Things to generate a high resolution image, generate up to 25 frames of video with that image as a starting point, save the image sequence out to a directory, where I can use LumaFusion to combine sequences into a video. If I need to I can use waifu2x to uprez, but that takes forever, so I usually don’t.

I can export the video and drag and drop it into Spatial Media Toolkit, futz with the depth setting, and output an AI generated spatial video. I can use Spatialify to output a SBS video if I want to at that point, but usually just keep them as spatial videos.

Aside from that specific workflow, It’s also the best 2D and 3D video watching headset experience. Being able to dial my environment in to drown out a the rest of a cross-country flight and watch Mad Max: Fury Road in 3D while it reflects on a lake in front of me, the size of a cinema screen, is both magical, and something that I hope even Quest users get to experience in some capacity on their platform.

It comes in handy, too, when I want to watch or do something different than the bf is watching on the tv.

I also am benefiting from the Apple ecosystem, since I own an m1 macbook and an iPhone 15 pro.

I love being able to capture spatial videos and panoramas and then experience them in headset later. Airdropping files between devices also lets me offload longer video processing to them, since waifu2x and handbrake on the mac work better for uprezzing and Spatial Media Toolkit has a native-ish Mac release.

For generative AI Draw Things is also on the mac and iPhone, but I’m learning ComfyUI since it seems way more powerful. And I use Screens 5 to vnc from my headset or phone, or I use the native virtual display if I’m by the mac itself.

My only experience using a Quest 2 was recently when a friend came over and we spent an hour trying to get it to work, resetting and rebooting over and over, before finally just giving up on pairing one of the two controllers, and we used the ios app to launch the browser to watch some 180 stereo videos. It wasn’t a good experience, but I’m sure it would be once it’s setup.

But I can’t really knock it too much, since trying to share the Vision Pro is the worst part of the device. The best option is to SharePlay to a mac or Apple TV, since the whole guest mode thing takes too long. And while I won’t fly without my Vision Pro again, I wouldn’t feel comfortable bringing it to a friend’s place. That thing’s expensive as hell, and I don’t want someone to drop it or for it to get stolen.

I do, yeah.

I canceled my Disney+ sub due to the price increase during the great enshitification race to the bottom, but their support for VisionOS and immersive content is making me rethink that.