I personally never used Macs, so I’m not familiar with all this, but my wife works on a super slow 21.5” 2013 iMac, really slow. So, I bought another old 27” iMac but with a removed HDD, so I have now to upgrade it and hoping/wishing to get a nice snappy machine! Hoping that nothing is broken inside though. I need your help if you could answer my questions below:
a. SSD choice (I’m thinking 1 TB – PCIe M.2)

• a1. If you could suggest 2 or 3 options for brands and models? Compatible, reliable, good quality, good price. For reference, I checked some online SSDs and here are some that seems to be good, there were plenty of other ones also: Brand Model $-CAD W (MB/s) D-RAM HMB

Samsung 970 EVO Plus $-115 3500/3300 Yes No
WD SN770 $-83 5150/4900 No Yes
Hynix Gold P31 $-175 3500/3200 Yes No
WD SN570 $-80 3500/3000 No Yes
Samsung 980 $-110 3500/3000 No Yes
Samsung 980 Pro $-145 7000/5000 Yes N/A
Crucial MX500 $-70 550/510 Yes N/A
Crucial P3 $-63 3500/3000 No Yes
Kingston A2000 $-95 2200/2000 Yes No

• a2. Does it need an adaptor? If yes, which one?

b. MacOs

• b1. What’s the version I need to install in my case? Something easy and simple without going through bridges and intermediate softwares.
• b2. What’s the procedure to do that, before or after the physical installation of the SSD inside the machine? If you have a link to some videos that’ll be great.

c. Thermal paste/Pad: While I have it open, I will try to clean gently any dust and also repaste/repad components inside, this is new to me, I just discovered it:

• c1. Do I use a thermal paste or a thermal pad or both and which one for what?
• c2. Any products names I should use rather than others? Any links please?
• c3. I already ordered an adhesive seal for the closure.

d. RAM: I believe it has an easy access from the back, so I will ask later about this part…. a, b & c are priorities to get me going.
Thanks in advance!

I'm inclined right now to dig up an old request:
https://www.reddit.com/krita/comments/hwxnrh/360_panorama_painting_features/
Where are we on this?
I'm very interested in being able to paint equirectangular panoramic images 'street view' style at the moment. Is there a plugin yet? Is krita extensible enough to do this with a plugin or does it need to be done at the core level?
I'm downloading the source code as I speak. As far as I can tell there's no fos software capable of doing this. There might be stitching applications, old plugins for gimp that no longer work, but I can't find anything that's foss that lets me paint 'street view' style and imo there's only one fos digital painting application worth pushing to adopt this feature.
I'm also a little impatient rn and I might be crazy enough to figure this out myself, or maybe not. Is there anywhere I can go to quickly grasp how the canvas rendering system is put together? How the Wrap Mode is implemented? I've translated between cartesian coordinates and spherical coordinates in graphics language code before so I feel like I could potentially get something going if no one else is willing and I got some pointers.
Or if there's existing fos software that can do this right now and isn't a pain to use that would also be nice to know.

I been trying to persevere the console and play it.
I close the system down the proper way at least to my knowledge of the proper way(turn off the system then actually flip the switch to cut the power). Gaming sessions time are 2-3 hrs Anything else that I could be doing? I already know that I will have to replace parts eventually just wanna keep it in its origin state til I learn how to fix it myself.

About 2.5 years ago I ended a 3+ year relationship with my nex after finding out he was having an affair for 3 months or so. The whole relationship was rough but it eventually got to a point where I was barely hanging on.
The last few months prior to the breakup were terrible and while the cheating occured (which I didn't know of) my ex was constantly breaking me down and causing fights and problems to prove to me how terrible our relationship was because of me, making me try to fix everything about myself in hopes of repairing it.
Then what went down after the breakup was even worse. The breakup itself was calm, amicable because by that time I had no energy to fight so i just accepted it and left.
My ex kept our apartment and the cat bc I couldn't afford it alone so I moved to a dorm. He didn't let me go pack my things for 2 weeks and only mailed what i packed in boxes about a month later. Some of my stuff arrived after 4 months and some never arrived to this day.
He brought the woman there before I moved out and she left her stuff all over the house like a dog marking territory. It was horrible to go home and see someone replace you in just a few days. This was followed by small petty actions like returning gifts i gave him over the years to me or my mom, unfollowing me even on stuff like pinterest and keeping my belongings hostage etc.
I live in a foreign country too (his country) and I was completely alone when all this happened. I had no support system and had just started a MA back them and didn't know anyone yet.
I cut all contact and started therapy and psychiatric treatment right away. I have adhd and insomnia and on top of that I developed bad anxiety and a severe depression (was considered a suicide risk and had to go in weekly for check-ups for over a year).
Eventually things got better and i slowly healed but I'm still in therapy and still on antidepressants. Every once and again when something bad happens in my life (like having another failed relationship or losing a job etc) i fall back into that depression and that pattern of self-doubt. Back then my ex convinced me all of it was my fault and I should be grateful to that woman coming into our relationship.
It's been 2.5 years now since. I've never spoken to him since but we have some common friends. I stayed away from any socials but once a year or so I'd hear about him. It got easier in time but it's still painful. I learned he got another cat about a year ago and that women lives in the apartment we got bc we planned to get married. He got a new job and seems to be doing better than ever.
I've done a lot too, I graduated with and almost perfect gpa, I opened a business etc but I've never gotten back to my old self. I'm still struggling with my mental health, I struggle having relationships that close again, I feel lonely often and my self esteem never fully recovered. I've kinda given up on pursuing romantic relationships and on the idea of having a family someday too. And the saddest of all, I used to be a very ambitious and resilient person with big dreams. I've achieved a lot of things I'm proud of but I lost that passion. I worked incredibly hard to move to this country to be with him and pursue my studies and I saw that breakup as the result of my hard work.
What makes me sad is that even after so long has passed I'm still dealing with the aftermath of that relationship and having a hard time while the person who hurt me is living their best live as if I never existed from day 1. It feels like someone erased a huge chunk of my life and everything I had during that time just evaporated, including my furniture and my cat and all I've got left from it is a big suitcase full of trauma and sad memories.

Because lately, I'm seeing people claiming that we're all going to die within this decade:

Experts are warning AI could lead to human extinction. Are we taking it seriously enough?
Human extinction.
Think about that for a second. Really think about it. The erasure of the human race from planet Earth.
That is what top industry leaders are frantically sounding the alarm about. These technologists and academics keep smashing the red panic button, doing everything they can to warn about the potential dangers artificial intelligence poses to the very existence of civilization.
On Tuesday, hundreds of top AI scientists, researchers, and others — including OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis — again voiced deep concern for the future of humanity, signing a one-sentence open letter to the public that aimed to put the risks the rapidly advancing technology carries with it in unmistakable terms.
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” said the letter, signed by many of the industry’s most respected figures.
It doesn’t get more straightforward and urgent than that. These industry leaders are quite literally warning that the impending AI revolution should be taken as seriously as the threat of nuclear war. They are pleading for policymakers to erect some guardrails and establish baseline regulations to defang the primitive technology before it is too late.
Dan Hendrycks, the executive director of the Center for AI Safety, called the situation “reminiscent of atomic scientists issuing warnings about the very technologies they’ve created. As Robert Oppenheimer noted, ‘We knew the world would not be the same.’”
“There are many ‘important and urgent risks from AI,’ not just the risk of extinction; for example, systemic bias, misinformation, malicious use, cyberattacks, and weaponization,” Hendrycks continued. “These are all important risks that need to be addressed.”
And yet, it seems that the dire message these experts are desperately trying to send the public isn’t cutting through the noise of everyday life. AI experts might be sounding the alarm, but the level of trepidation — and in some cases sheer terror — they harbor about the technology is not being echoed with similar urgency by the news media to the masses.
Instead, broadly speaking, news organizations treated Tuesday’s letter — like all of the other warnings we have seen in recent months — as just another headline, mixed in with a garden variety of stories. Some major news organizations didn’t even feature an article about the chilling warning on their website’s homepages.
To some extent, it feels eerily reminiscent of the early days of the pandemic, before the widespread panic and the shutdowns and the overloaded emergency rooms. Newsrooms kept an eye on the rising threat that the virus posed, publishing stories about it slowly spreading across the world. But by the time the serious nature of the virus was fully recognized and fused into the very essence in which it was covered, it had already effectively upended the world.
History risks repeating itself with AI, with even higher stakes. Yes, news organizations are covering the developing technology. But there has been a considerable lack of urgency surrounding the issue given the open possibility of planetary peril.
Perhaps that is because it can be difficult to come to terms with the notion that a Hollywood-style science fiction apocalypse can become reality, that advancing computer technology might reach escape velocity and decimate humans from existence. It is, however, precisely what the world’s most leading experts are warning could happen.
It is much easier to avoid uncomfortable realities, pushing them from the forefront into the background and hoping that issues simply resolve themselves with time. But often they don’t — and it seems unlikely that the growing concerns pertaining to AI will resolve themselves. In fact, it’s far more likely that with the breakneck pace in which the technology is developing, the concerns will actually become more apparent with time.
As Cynthia Rudin, a computer science professor and AI researcher at Duke University, told CNN on Tuesday: “Do we really need more evidence that AI’s negative impact could be as big as nuclear war?”

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/30/media/artificial-intelligence-warning-reliable-sources/index.html#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThere%20are%20many%20'important%20and,that%20need%20to%20be%20addressed.%E2%80%9D

Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down
BY ELIEZER YUDKOWSKY MARCH 29, 2023 6:01 PM EDT
Yudkowsky is a decision theorist from the U.S. and leads research at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. He's been working on aligning Artificial General Intelligence since 2001 and is widely regarded as a founder of the field.
An open letter published today calls for “all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.”
This 6-month moratorium would be better than no moratorium. I have respect for everyone who stepped up and signed it. It’s an improvement on the margin.
I refrained from signing because I think the letter is understating the seriousness of the situation and asking for too little to solve it.
The key issue is not “human-competitive” intelligence (as the open letter puts it); it’s what happens after AI gets to smarter-than-human intelligence. Key thresholds there may not be obvious, we definitely can’t calculate in advance what happens when, and it currently seems imaginable that a research lab would cross critical lines without noticing.
Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die. Not as in “maybe possibly some remote chance,” but as in “that is the obvious thing that would happen.” It’s not that you can’t, in principle, survive creating something much smarter than you; it’s that it would require precision and preparation and new scientific insights, and probably not having AI systems composed of giant inscrutable arrays of fractional numbers.
Without that precision and preparation, the most likely outcome is AI that does not do what we want, and does not care for us nor for sentient life in general. That kind of caring is something that could in principle be imbued into an AI but we are not ready and do not currently know how.
Absent that caring, we get “the AI does not love you, nor does it hate you, and you are made of atoms it can use for something else.”
The likely result of humanity facing down an opposed superhuman intelligence is a total loss. Valid metaphors include “a 10-year-old trying to play chess against Stockfish 15”, “the 11th century trying to fight the 21st century,” and “Australopithecus trying to fight Homo sapiens“.
To visualize a hostile superhuman AI, don’t imagine a lifeless book-smart thinker dwelling inside the internet and sending ill-intentioned emails. Visualize an entire alien civilization, thinking at millions of times human speeds, initially confined to computers—in a world of creatures that are, from its perspective, very stupid and very slow. A sufficiently intelligent AI won’t stay confined to computers for long. In today’s world you can email DNA strings to laboratories that will produce proteins on demand, allowing an AI initially confined to the internet to build artificial life forms or bootstrap straight to postbiological molecular manufacturing.
If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter.
There’s no proposed plan for how we could do any such thing and survive. OpenAI’s openly declared intention is to make some future AI do our AI alignment homework. Just hearing that this is the plan ought to be enough to get any sensible person to panic. The other leading AI lab, DeepMind, has no plan at all.
An aside: None of this danger depends on whether or not AIs are or can be conscious; it’s intrinsic to the notion of powerful cognitive systems that optimize hard and calculate outputs that meet sufficiently complicated outcome criteria. With that said, I’d be remiss in my moral duties as a human if I didn’t also mention that we have no idea how to determine whether AI systems are aware of themselves—since we have no idea how to decode anything that goes on in the giant inscrutable arrays—and therefore we may at some point inadvertently create digital minds which are truly conscious and ought to have rights and shouldn’t be owned.
The rule that most people aware of these issues would have endorsed 50 years earlier, was that if an AI system can speak fluently and says it’s self-aware and demands human rights, that ought to be a hard stop on people just casually owning that AI and using it past that point. We already blew past that old line in the sand. And that was probably correct; I agree that current AIs are probably just imitating talk of self-awareness from their training data. But I mark that, with how little insight we have into these systems’ internals, we do not actually know.
If that’s our state of ignorance for GPT-4, and GPT-5 is the same size of giant capability step as from GPT-3 to GPT-4, I think we’ll no longer be able to justifiably say “probably not self-aware” if we let people make GPT-5s. It’ll just be “I don’t know; nobody knows.” If you can’t be sure whether you’re creating a self-aware AI, this is alarming not just because of the moral implications of the “self-aware” part, but because being unsure means you have no idea what you are doing and that is dangerous and you should stop.
On Feb. 7, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, publicly gloated that the new Bing would make Google “come out and show that they can dance.” “I want people to know that we made them dance,” he said.
This is not how the CEO of Microsoft talks in a sane world. It shows an overwhelming gap between how seriously we are taking the problem, and how seriously we needed to take the problem starting 30 years ago.
We are not going to bridge that gap in six months.
It took more than 60 years between when the notion of Artificial Intelligence was first proposed and studied, and for us to reach today’s capabilities. Solving safety of superhuman intelligence—not perfect safety, safety in the sense of “not killing literally everyone”—could very reasonably take at least half that long. And the thing about trying this with superhuman intelligence is that if you get that wrong on the first try, you do not get to learn from your mistakes, because you are dead. Humanity does not learn from the mistake and dust itself off and try again, as in other challenges we’ve overcome in our history, because we are all gone.
Trying to get anything right on the first really critical try is an extraordinary ask, in science and in engineering. We are not coming in with anything like the approach that would be required to do it successfully. If we held anything in the nascent field of Artificial General Intelligence to the lesser standards of engineering rigor that apply to a bridge meant to carry a couple of thousand cars, the entire field would be shut down tomorrow.
We are not prepared. We are not on course to be prepared in any reasonable time window. There is no plan. Progress in AI capabilities is running vastly, vastly ahead of progress in AI alignment or even progress in understanding what the hell is going on inside those systems. If we actually do this, we are all going to die.
Many researchers working on these systems think that we’re plunging toward a catastrophe, with more of them daring to say it in private than in public; but they think that they can’t unilaterally stop the forward plunge, that others will go on even if they personally quit their jobs. And so they all think they might as well keep going. This is a stupid state of affairs, and an undignified way for Earth to die, and the rest of humanity ought to step in at this point and help the industry solve its collective action problem.
Some of my friends have recently reported to me that when people outside the AI industry hear about extinction risk from Artificial General Intelligence for the first time, their reaction is “maybe we should not build AGI, then.”
Hearing this gave me a tiny flash of hope, because it’s a simpler, more sensible, and frankly saner reaction than I’ve been hearing over the last 20 years of trying to get anyone in the industry to take things seriously. Anyone talking that sanely deserves to hear how bad the situation actually is, and not be told that a six-month moratorium is going to fix it.
On March 16, my partner sent me this email. (She later gave me permission to excerpt it here.)
“Nina lost a tooth! In the usual way that children do, not out of carelessness! Seeing GPT4 blow away those standardized tests on the same day that Nina hit a childhood milestone brought an emotional surge that swept me off my feet for a minute. It’s all going too fast. I worry that sharing this will heighten your own grief, but I’d rather be known to you than for each of us to suffer alone.”
When the insider conversation is about the grief of seeing your daughter lose her first tooth, and thinking she’s not going to get a chance to grow up, I believe we are past the point of playing political chess about a six-month moratorium.
If there was a plan for Earth to survive, if only we passed a six-month moratorium, I would back that plan. There isn’t any such plan.
Here’s what would actually need to be done:
The moratorium on new large training runs needs to be indefinite and worldwide. There can be no exceptions, including for governments or militaries. If the policy starts with the U.S., then China needs to see that the U.S. is not seeking an advantage but rather trying to prevent a horrifically dangerous technology which can have no true owner and which will kill everyone in the U.S. and in China and on Earth. If I had infinite freedom to write laws, I might carve out a single exception for AIs being trained solely to solve problems in biology and biotechnology, not trained on text from the internet, and not to the level where they start talking or planning; but if that was remotely complicating the issue I would immediately jettison that proposal and say to just shut it all down.
Shut down all the large GPU clusters (the large computer farms where the most powerful AIs are refined). Shut down all the large training runs. Put a ceiling on how much computing power anyone is allowed to use in training an AI system, and move it downward over the coming years to compensate for more efficient training algorithms. No exceptions for governments and militaries. Make immediate multinational agreements to prevent the prohibited activities from moving elsewhere. Track all GPUs sold. If intelligence says that a country outside the agreement is building a GPU cluster, be less scared of a shooting conflict between nations than of the moratorium being violated; be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.
Frame nothing as a conflict between national interests, have it clear that anyone talking of arms races is a fool. That we all live or die as one, in this, is not a policy but a fact of nature. Make it explicit in international diplomacy that preventing AI extinction scenarios is considered a priority above preventing a full nuclear exchange, and that allied nuclear countries are willing to run some risk of nuclear exchange if that’s what it takes to reduce the risk of large AI training runs.
That’s the kind of policy change that would cause my partner and I to hold each other, and say to each other that a miracle happened, and now there’s a chance that maybe Nina will live. The sane people hearing about this for the first time and sensibly saying “maybe we should not” deserve to hear, honestly, what it would take to have that happen. And when your policy ask is that large, the only way it goes through is if policymakers realize that if they conduct business as usual, and do what’s politically easy, that means their own kids are going to die too.
Shut it all down.
We are not ready. We are not on track to be significantly readier in the foreseeable future. If we go ahead on this everyone will die, including children who did not choose this and did not do anything wrong.
Shut it down.

https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/

I fully expect to die in the AI apocalypse in 5-10 years, and I'll be surprised by happy if I don't.

https://old.reddit.com/Futurology/comments/134g9zp/one_of_the_creators_of_chatgpt_said_that_the/jifgp46/?context=3

People are going to say no because it would be inconvenient, but I don't see what's stopping AI from ending all life in the next couple of years. Alignment is an unsolved problem, and an unaligned AI will most likely try to kill anything it sees as a threat to its mission.

https://old.reddit.com/artificial/comments/13xsbnt/is_ai_going_to_cause_the_complete_extinction_of/jmjzpmo/?context=3

Yes, AI will probably cause human extinction in the next decade. Paul Christiano, former senior employee of OpenAI, said that there is 20% chance that AI causes human extinction. Eliezer Yudkowsky, major contributor to AI safety and development, thinks it is 99%.

https://old.reddit.com/artificial/comments/13xsbnt/is_ai_going_to_cause_the_complete_extinction_of/jms84rb/

I am trying actually! I organized a picket outside OpenAI's HQ in May, before the Extinction statement.
You can search Eliezer Yudkowsky podcasts on youtube, or his blog. The podcast i recommend is Bankless one.
He says that our death is the most likely outcome from AI, and is now living off his life, like it is his last years.

https://old.reddit.com/artificial/comments/13xsbnt/is_ai_going_to_cause_the_complete_extinction_of/jmsqj28/
Based on these, it seems like we're far more likely to go completely extinct than we did before with AI, COVID-19, nuclear weapons, and so on. None of those existed during Medieval Era, so maybe we should've never left that era.
Thoughts on these?

I consider myself decent with computers but I have spent all day trying to get HomeAssistant to work. First I tried Docker Desktop and running the HomeAssistant image but the image didn't have the ability to be assigned a port? So I couldn't open any web interface. I then tried to do it in the command line and I ended up doing something with Portainer where I created a network stack but I couldn't connect to it for a reason that I forgot. So I decided I'd run it in a VM but I didn't want to use the HomeAssistant Operating System because from what I've seen, I wouldn't be able to run Radarr, NextCloud, & other programs right? So I decided to make an Ubuntu Server VM, once I finally got that set up I realized the page said it would only work with Debian haha. I found someone that got it working on Ubuntu through a KVM so I tried that, followed a guide for 2 hours and at the end I couldn't connect to HomeAssitant Web UI because the KVM wasn't assigned an IP or something. Yeah I got too deep in the hole.
Basically, should I run HomeAssitant on Debian Server or is there some other method that I'm not thinking of that would allow me to run HomeAssistant with add-ons, and run other software as well?

Character: Hattori Hanzo” Humanties greatest ninja”
Nationality: Japan
Door: Hattori Hanzos door is a Giant red demon like mask with the mouth being the doorway
Intro: Heimdall: In all of humanites 7 billion History What are some of the most feared warriors.. NINJAS and this man was not only the strongest and greatest but he was the demon of the sengoku Era of Japan, Representing humanity for round XX of ragnarok is .. HATTORI HANZOOOOO
Appearance Hanzo appears as a tall man with Blue and Gray hair and a scar on his left eye along with a scarf and a black mask that only covers his bottom half of his face and a open shirt kimono that is cut off at his pants and baggy pants
Personality Hanzo is a very layed back man and takes few things seriously and is very confident in his own power. He has been shown on multiple occasions disregarding the opinions and orders of higher ups in his time in earth and even told Someone like Odin to shut up. He also really likes Jokes especially dad jokes. And has some hatred towards Other gods especially ones like Zeus Shiva and Loki due to their overconfidence in the god’s ability to win ragnarok
Volund: none(Again Appearance
Skills and abilities
Eitr: a very powerful poison and the only one able to hurt the gods it cannot kill anyone or any god but it weakens them greatly making them tired and less productive while reducing power and speed along but it can only work if it is injected into the blood system
Techniques
Sasori no bunkastu He throws three Kunai covered in Eitr and throws them at a angle where they bounce off of each other making it almost impossible to evade at least one
Fujona Ori After setting up string around the stadium and pulls out his katana covered in Eitr and begins to bounce off of the string to cut at his
双頭双頭の蛇を狩(MWAHAHAHAHAHA NOW TRANSLATE IT 😈😈😈😈😈😈😈😈😈😈😈😈😈😈) Hanzo throws 5 Kunai after setting up threads and they bounce off of the string making an almost unavoidable attack

Hey, so i know that called shots are a bad idea in general, but i am running a grim dark setting and i rlly need a dismemberment system for some especific enconters, ive come up with a few ideas, and i would like some help to see if this is not broken, or if you guys have better ideas, my requiriments in general are: it must be a damage base system, it must be a somewhat realible system to PCS to use, it must not be too easy to the point pcs are loosing their limbs left and rigth ( ive already thought of just narrate the limb lost, but is just wont cut, i really need a system for this)
so those are my ideas: 1: the charactenpc must take a -5 to the attack for hitting a specific body part (this count as disavantage for sneak attack purposses)
2a: once hit, the character must roll 10+ the target STR mod +target proficency (lets call this limb ac) damage in a single blow to rip a member (or damage it beyond repare) bellow that the target will sufer a efect (drop a weapon, falling prone, etc)
2b: the character must roll 10+ the target STR mod +target proficency to make a limb unusable until treated, if the damage exceed this number by 3 or more the limb is destroyed beyond repare
2a/b variant: same thing but without target proficiency
3: once the target has a member servered it will start to bleed profoundly (10 hp per turn) until treated
bare in mind that i have ways planned to increase limb ac, as well as prosthesis, implants and regeneration magic that the characters will have access to, so losing a arm/leg/eye wont be THAT big of a problem
what are your thoughts? should i allow magic as booming blade/smite to affect the damage? shoud i go for another system? what can i do to balance this thing out

Hello CF India!
I'm a 30 y.o male from Cochin, Kerala who is starting to search for a CF companion to date (and beyond if it works out). I've been lurking around here since quite some time now and decided it's finally time I put the effort especially after seeing a deluge of CF4CF posts lask week. All of you folks have been a great inspiration at that.
I'll make the pitch as short as possible.
About me:
Appearance: I've always been a big guy. Being tall (5'11) and a head full of hair has always helped mask the frame. I've started working on this after hitting 30 and can say I'm a work in progress now. TLDR; tall, chub average looking.
Career: Software Engineer with an MNC and my office location is Bengaluru. Working from home since COVID-19 and I've been liking it so far. I dread returning to the office🙂. I love being an individual contributor and has no big aspirations career progression wise.
Faith: Hindu by birth. I used to be a believer until the last 2-3 years from when there has been a shift. I don't see myself going back to relying on religion again but the occasional 'Daivame/Eswara' calls when in a soup refuse to leave my system (I'm trying hard). I don't hate any religion or faith and has accepted how it might help some folks like my mother.
Interests: Music, movies, road trips (learnt to drive a motorcycle and car recently). I wanted a career in music but had to settle down with IT. I've accepted my fate and realised I'll never be able to earn as much if it weren't for the path I was forced to take.
Sexuality: Heterosexual male, inexperienced, craves intimacy and affection.
Politics: No specific inclination/affiliation. I am both approving and critical of everyone who does/doesn't do their job well.
Other stuffs: INFP-T MBTI. I'm not a pet person, no hate for them. Non-vegetarian diet. I don't smoke. Drinks rarely mostly when travelling. Being an introvert, I find it difficult to start a conversation. But once the ice breaks I'm quite comfortable sustaining it. I prefer texting over voice calls. I've not been in a relationship ever but have confessed my feelings to someone more than a decade ago which didn't work out. Looking back, I think this wrecked whatever little confidence I had. It's been quite a lonely situation since then.
Finally, why CF: It is a huge responsibility that I don't think I can shoulder nor do I wish to bring a child to this world knowing how bad it already is. I also want to retire early and peacefully. Having said that, I don't hate kids (tired of this disclaimer). Just that I don't prefer having them around all the time. Further, I cannot withstand the struggles pregnancy and it's effects brings to females. It feels horrible.
What I expect from a potential partner:
Aged 27-33 (I don't know how I zeroed in on this, but please don't be too young for a 30 y.o guy).
Faith: Not a matter of concern. Please don't hate on any faith or religion.
Appearance: Please don't be too short. This isn't a huge deal breaker and all I want from you is to be happy the way you are.
Others: Please be malayali (I know this further diminshes my chances but I wish for a partner who appreciates malayalam music, movies, poetry, festivals, pop culture references etc). I am not sure if this is a deal breaker though. I feel a common mother tongue will make it easier for us. I'm okay with drinking, but smoking would be difficult. I'm not a long distance relationship person and I don't have any plans to migrate away from my hometown as of now. This also has to do with taking care of my ageing single mother, and estranged father (if he changes his mind and reunites).
Lastly, my plans for us if we make it work: Travel a lot, save lot of money, and retire early. I want us to overcome all the trauma and hardships we might have endured, live a long happy life letting our walls down and enjoying each other's company.
Thanks for reading.
Note: I use reddit only for consuming content which is why the profile is empty.
Please drop me a DM if you think I deserve your time and effort. We'll see how we can take this forward from there.
See you at the other end.

A coworker of mine recommended Perdido Street Station recently, and as the name China Mieville had come up related to other books and authors I've read and I was looking for something new, I thought I'd give it a try.
In this post, I'm going to try to organize my thoughts about why I hate this book and why it is objectively bad. Not in my opinion, not according to my tastes or preferences. Objectively bad. In the same way as the Holocaust was an objective tragedy.

1. Nonsensical world-building. China Mieville is often credited for building a believable, immersive, vivid or other such positively described world. I didn't believe that Bas Lag was, or could be, a "real" place for a second.
   
   1. Let's start with the main races. We have humans, bug-headed people, flying bird-headed people, cactus people, and frog people. All of these seem to fall into the Star Trek alien trope, where the body is basically humanoid, and only the head is different. This is not believable. Further, I never really got a sense that their cultures were so different. The bird people only got developed near the end of the book, and that was just enough to explain Yag's crime to the readers. One interaction with a group of city-dwelling bird people seems transposed from a British crime movie where the gang leader is reasserting authority of the group, in exactly the same way as a human would. I don't get any sense that they are a fully developed species with their own cultures and ways of thinking. Lin, a member of the bug-headed people, comes of as a typical female human character, despite coming from a species that seems to have collectivism built in to their society and their genes. The cactus people are never really explained at all. Like, do they use photosynthesis? Do they eat food? What's their culture? I just kept imagining people walking around cosplaying these different races but all being essentially humans.
   2. Word and concept choice. At one point, Mieville has a character use the word "capiche." Mind you, Italy does not exist in this world, nor does the Mafia, nor should an Italian American gangster word like "capiche." Similarly, he never says anything about God, Christianity, Judaism, etc, but he borrows the concept of "Hell" and "Hellkin." If there is a hell, there should be a heaven, right? And if heaven and hell exist, there's a god, right? These are simply thrown out there, and never elaborated on again. For money, he uses real world currency names, such as mark, shekel, and Guinea. These have no place in an imaginary world with no connection to our own.
   Isaac is a scientist, and while I don't think it is important to get science "right" in a work that is fictional and that is specifically NOT science fiction, the scientific concepts explained here don't make sense. It reminded me more of the characters in Frank Herbert's Destination: Void talking about transistors, circuits, blah-blah matrices, and yadda-yadda amplifiers. The blah-blah matrices and yadda-yadda amplifiers don't exist, and spending so much time on them didn't make any sense in a novel with so little action. Neither does the number of pages that Mieville devotes to explaining unified field theory add to my understanding or enjoyment of the novel. Nothing in the novel really hinges on this, and the fact that Torque seems to throw a wrench in this idea of having a unified field at all makes me more annoyed at spending time trying to understand what Isaac is getting on about. The idea of "crisis" and a "crisis engine" in particular seems like a scientifically illiterate person's interpretation of chaos and complexity theory. 3. "History." The way the "history" is presented here feels very much like it needs those scare quotes. Are these places and events actually relevant to the story? How much thought was put into them and their order? The way that so many are mentioned and then just forgotten really makes me wonder how seriously I should take them.
   

2.Poor word choices and sentence construction.

1. I've never read a book that made me want to take a shower before. When Mieville describes the city of New Crobuzon, he relies heavily on words with negative emotional valance and bodily fluid language. As a small set of examples, the air is almost always described as having a stench, reeking, being rank, putrid, noisome, being polluted, etc. Water is usually described as being fecal, mucal, fetid, rancid, oily, being polluted, etc. Buildings are moldy, desquamating, dirty. Factories don't emit or release smoke: they "retch" smog. Guns don't fire bullets or shoot bullets: they "vomit" bullets. A sack that is full is described as "bloated." A pile of electrical components is for some reason described as "vile." For 712 fucking pages! I don't have a problem with bodily fluids, and I don't mind when other writers describe a slum or paint a picture of a nasty scene. But in Perdido Street Station, there is no let up. I can't remember a single instance of something that was described in positive terms. Even the first time Isaac has sex with Lin, he is described as almost vomiting because her antennae were waving in such a disgusting fashion. And they went on to have a long term romance! Who almost vomits the first time they have sex with someone they love? Why describe it in this negative way? I don't understand the goal of using language in this way.
2. Related to the point above, the book is monotonous in how it describes the world. Everything is negative and dirty. For 712 pages.
3. Characterization is done in the typical spoon-fed fashion that seems to be popular in many genres of fiction nowadays. I'm thinking of one example in particular, so here it is.

"Lin and Isaac snatched furtive nights together when they could. Isaac could tell that all was not well with her. Once, he sat her down and demanded that she tell him what was troubling her, why she had not entered the Shintacost Prize this year (something which had given her usual bitchery about the standard of the shortlist an added bitterness), what she was working on, and where. There was no sign of any artistic debris at all in any of her rooms. Lin had stroked his arm, clearly grateful for his concern. But she would tell him nothing. She said she was working on a piece of which she was tentatively very proud. She had found a space that she could not and did not want to talk about, in which she was producing a large piece that he mustn’t ask her about. It was not as if she had disappeared from the world. Once a fortnight, perhaps, she was back in one of the Salacus Fields bars, laughing with her friends, if with a little less vigour than she had two months ago.
She teased Isaac about his anger at Lucky Gazid, who had vanished, with suspiciously good timing. Isaac had told Lin about his inadvertent sampling of dreamshit, and had raged around looking to punish Gazid. Isaac had described the extraordinary grub which seemed to thrive on the drug. Lin had not seen the creature, had not been back to Brock Marsh since that forlorn day the previous month, but even allowing for a degree of exaggeration on Isaac’s part, the creature sounded extraordinary. Lin thought fondly of Isaac as she adeptly changed the subject. She asked him what nourishment he thought the caterpillar might gain from its peculiar food, and sat back as his face expanded with fascination and he would tell her enthusiastically that he did not know, but that these were a few of his ideas. She would ask him to try to explain to her about crisis energy, and whether he thought it would help Yagharek to fly, and he would talk animatedly, drawing her diagrams on slips of paper.
It was easy to work on him. Lin felt, sometimes, that Isaac knew he was being manipulated, that he felt guilty about the ease with which his worries for her were transformed. She sensed gratitude in his lurching changes of subject, along with contrition. He knew it was his role to be worried for her, given her melancholy, and he was, he truly was, but it was an effort, a duty, when most of his mind was crammed with crisis and grub food. She gave him permission not to worry, and he accepted it with thanks. Lin wanted to displace Isaac’s concerns for her, for a time. She could not afford for him to be curious. The more he knew, the more she was in danger. She did not know what powers her employer might possess: she doubted he was capable of telepathy, but she was risking nothing. She wanted to finish her piece, to take the money and to get away from Bonetown."

Let me remind you, this book is 712 pages long. He takes approximately two pages, from 208-209 in the Kindle edition, to detail all this information about the relationship between Isaac and Lin. This is just bad writing. Some of this could have been handled in short dialogues embedded in other scenes, and some of it should be left to the reader to piece together. This is an example of what Steven Erikson described as pablum in his post a few years ago about effective characterization.

1. Overly descriptive language.

The great cable slipped in spurts into the water by the riverwall. It plunged absolutely precipitately into the darkness, hitting the surface at 90 degrees."

(Perdido Street Station, p. 603)
Why, the fuck, does he describe the cable going into the water in such a redundant and repetitive way? This is not some pivotal event in the story. It is related to an important plan, but there is no need for the drama around this singular event. If I spent this many words talking about a character picking up a pencil, I had better have a real good reason for doing so. Mieville does this all the time. The above mentioned meetings with the Hellkin are another prime example. He spends pages describing the procedures for meeting them and the actual meeting, they add nothing to the story, AND they make his world seem poorly thought out. What did he gain by describing them? Hell if I know!

1. Plot Structure and Pacing
   
2. Stupid plot events. Mieville goes out of his way to show that the evil soul-eating moths are not damaged very much by regular physical attacks. And then, the first moth is killed by unceremoniously dropping a heavy weight on it, like something out of a Wile E. Coyote skit. Three of the remaining moths are killed using more appropriate means, but... Look, I know there were the infamous Milner experiments on rats where they'd press a button to get something like an orgasm, and once they could do this, they'd basically just press the button until they died. I don't know of any actual living organisms that will, for example, eat food so much that they physically explode, ignoring Monty Python sketches to the contrary. It's funny, but it doesn't seem like a realistic way to take out soul-eating creatures.
   

Another example is Jack Half-a-Prayer. He is mentioned maybe twice in the book, very obliquely, before suddenly near the climax he shows up and just starts helping the main characters out in the middle of a fire fight. If he had been foreshadowed more, if there were some stronger motivation than just "Oh my main characters are in a pinch! I know! I'll have so-and-so come!" I might have accepted this, but not the way it is done in the book.

1. Pacing. This book overstays its welcome. Mieville creates too many new ideas and just throws them out without exploring their implications, and moves on to the next, and the next, and the next. (Sinistrals and Dextrals, I'm looking at you! Does anyone even remember this from the book?) Then he spends 10 pages describing the fucking Hellkin, or 20 pages revealing that one of characters was a government spy. Or the passage above where he tries to do a novelized version of a relationship montage to show the development of Lin and Isaac's relationship over time. It is too scattered and too focused on the stupidest things at the same time. Why do we need a multi-page graphically detailed moth orgy? In a 712 page book that already has too many adjectives and adverbs? By the 300 page mark, I was regularly having to psych myself into going on to the next page.
   
2. Forgiveness.
   

One of my favorite fantasy series of all-time, The Malazan Book of the Fallen, takes empathy, compassion, and forgiveness as some of the major themes. I was at first shocked by how often the "evil villain" turned out to be someone with a tortured youth, tragic past, or some other circumstance that explained their behavior. And at the end of many of these tales, that dastardly sinner was taken off to be reformed, or taken under someone's wing to try and make up for the harm they'd caused. Yes, sometimes they were killed or maimed in gruesome fashion, but many had a chance to reform.
In contrast, in Perdido Street Station, it is revealed that Yagharek committed a serious crime among his people, for which he had his wings cut off without anesthesia. Isaac agrees to help him become able to fly anyway, and along the way we see Yagharek risk his life many times to protect this city that disgusts him (as evidenced by the large increase in those bodily fluid words during the Yagharek sections proceeding each part) and to protect his friends. Now, if we could get inside Yagharek's head during these moments, and see that he's thinking "Oh, this had so better be worth it! I really don't give a fuck about these people and I just wanna fly again." That would be one thing. Near the end, it is revealed that Yagharek basically committed the crime of rape (which is framed as second degree choice theft, choice theft being an interesting sounding cultural concept, but which actually makes no sense if you try to work out the implications of how a legal system based on it would work....). Isaac is asked not to build the promised wings for Yagharek, and he ends up abandoning him.
Now, look, I'm not condoning rape. I think it is a horrendous crime. As bad or worse than murder. People do horrible things. Sometimes with intention, sometimes in the heat of the moment. Of course, getting caught in the heat of the moment doesn't excuse the action. One of the problems is that Mieville doesn't reveal much about Yagharek's psychological state afterwards. We don't know, for example, if like Red's character in The Shawshank Redemption, he feels sorry for what he did as a hot-headed, stupid young man, and that every day he regrets what he did. I think a lot hinges on that. If Yagharek is really just looking for a way to void his punishment, Isaac is probably right to refuse him. If Yagharek regrets what he did, and wants to make up for it somehow, and needs something that will make his life worth continuing, Isaac probably should have helped him instead of being a closed-minded judgmental prick.
Given Yagharek's actions throughout the book, Isaac comes off as an asshole, and to the extent that his judgment matches Mieville's, so does Mieville.

1. "Political" Themes I see a lot of discussion about how Mieville is very political and how he's a communist / socialist, and wants to take down capitalism, etc, etc. I picked up on a lot of that in PSS, but I think Mieville handles these themes very poorly. As a better example of a deconstruction / take-down of capitalism, I'd again recommend The Malazan Book of the Fallen, specifically Midnight Tides and Reaper's Gale, both of which examine the problem in more creative and deeper ways than Mieville does in PSS.

So that's my hot take on Perdido Street Station. You're free to disagree, but I'm tired of hearing so many demonstrably untrue claims made about the quality of Mieville's writing, in particular his descriptions and his world building as seen in PSS. I know that PSS was his second book, and he might have matured a lot as a writer since then (the same coworker who recommended him said his style doesn't change much in later books, but I can't judge them myself). But 712 pages is more than enough in one lifetime for me.

Hey, so i know that called shots are a bad idea in general, but i am running a grim dark setting and i rlly need a dismemberment system for some especific enconters, ive come up with a few ideas, and i would like some help to see if this is not broken, or if you guys have better ideas, my requiriments in general are: it must be a damage base system, it must be a somewhat realible system to PCS to use, it must not be too easy to the point pcs are loosing their limbs left and rigth ( ive already thought of just narrate the limb lost, but is just wont cut, i really need a system for this)
so those are my ideas: 1: the charactenpc must take a -5 to the attack for hitting a specific body part (this count as disavantage for sneak attack purposses)
2a: once hit, the character must roll 10+ the target STR mod +target proficency (lets call this limb ac) damage in a single blow to rip a member (or damage it beyond repare) bellow that the target will sufer a efect (drop a weapon, falling prone, etc)
2b: the character must roll 10+ the target STR mod +target proficency to make a limb unusable until treated, if the damage exceed this number by 3 or more the limb is destroyed beyond repare
2a/b variant: same thing but without target proficiency
3: once the target has a member servered it will start to bleed profoundly (10 hp per turn) until treated
bare in mind that i have ways planned to increase limb ac, as well as prosthesis, implants and regeneration magic that the characters will have access to, so losing a arm/leg/eye wont be THAT big of a problem
what are your thoughts? should i allow magic as booming blade/smite to affect the damage? shoud i go for another system? what can i do to balance this thing out

24yr (MTF) I don't want my family to treat me differently by putting a label on it, they are very conservative growing up in the south, military father and hyper religious mother, 4 siblings. Had all the trans stereotypes since I was 2. Had a scare around 5 when one of my moms friends mentioned my occasional "playing dress up" might be some "gay gender confusion" instead of regular kid stuff, the look of absolute horror on her face solidified my closet status to the point I automatically and immediately repressed and covered up any feminine behavior up to and until I left home @ 17 to join the military. Even after leaving home I've done everything I can to "fix" myself up until about age 22, but this did nothing but make the dysphoria worse, after being exposed to different cultures outside of how I grew up, and talking to some professionals I accepted I won't be able to continue as I am. Recently my mother was trying to be a bit of an ally for her job but all conversations I have with her tell me she still thinks any LGBT+ stuff is a mental illness and they need some "pray the gay away" help. So I'm hesitant to tell them I'm transitioning, I don't want them to automatically treat me differently, they're more open now so I doubt they'd get violent or disown me, but I don't want to deal with the subtle bigotry and lack of boundaries I know they still haven't gotten over. They'll find out eventually seeing as I start hormones this month, and I don't visit often enough for any changes to be overlooked easily, but I don't want to come out to them because I no longer have the need to be accepted by them, nor the patience to deal with there prejudice. I don't want to cut ties with them or my siblings who I get along with still, but I dont know if letting them figure it out on there own is the best move. BTW I came out to my sister in law to see what would happen, she was super supportive and excited a sister in law who was close to her age she can hang with, rn she's all i have in regards to a support system, and that's good with me.