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[Flying Dice]

Drive your quad bike into a bush at 20km/h? Dead. Drive off an embankment at 60km/h, front-flip, bounce twice on the way down? Barely scratched.

Arma is silly.

[Shadowlord]

Itlian police on Sunday were investigating the death of an American woman whose naked body was discovered in her home in Florence.

Ashley Olsen, 35, from Summer Haven, Fla., who moved to Florence from the United States three years ago, was found strangled on Saturday in her one-bedroom apartment in the arty Santo Spirito district of the Tuscan city, authorities said.

I don't know where the famous Ashley Olsen is from, but I know she's younger than that. And yet there's the link on the name.

[i2amroy]

Itlian police on Sunday were investigating the death of an American woman whose naked body was discovered in her home in Florence.
Ashley Olsen, 35, from Summer Haven, Fla., who moved to Florence from the United States three years ago, was found strangled on Saturday in her one-bedroom apartment in the arty Santo Spirito district of the Tuscan city, authorities said.

I don't know where the famous Ashley Olsen is from, but I know she's younger than that. And yet there's the link on the name.

Different Ashley Olsen's. The murdered one was Ashley Ann Olsen (age 35, an artist), while the famous one is Ashley Fuller Olsen (age 29 an actress/fashion designer/misc).

[ComatosePhoenix]

Browsing an old forum discussion when through some coincidence all parties involved decided it was a good time to change their avatar.

I completely lost track of the conversation.

[Kot]

Is this a good time to change our avatars?
I mean, mine changes all the damn time.

[Bauglir]

So I'm trying to do some work with neural networks for the creative component of my degree. I decided to give Torch a try as the library I'd use for implementing the damn things, because it's apparently great and I figure that if my choices are wracking my brain trying to learn something like it or Theano, I might as well go for top tier performance.

So, I installed it on my Ubuntu installation that I have on my desktop. Attempting to use CUDA (which does a hell of a job at improving performance by doing lots of calculations on the GPU), however, generates an extremely cryptic error message. The only thing I can find on the internet that looks relevant is a Google Groups post from a couple of weeks ago with no replies.

On a desperate whim, I decided to try installing it on my shiny new laptop. It works. So it appears that I'm going to do development on a computation-intensive project on a laptop, running an unsupported Linux distro, because my desktop, running a supported Linux distro, is useless by comparison. I'm gonna have to buy some cold packs or something to keep the thing from overheating, I swear.

[Flying Dice]

Fenspace. It's just... ugh. The premise in abstract is amusing if overly self-indulgent, and the initial divergence could be taken down interesting paths, but the thing itself is just the epitome of sperglord circlejerking about fandom and superiority over normies with an added dose of blatant strawmanning and illogical behavior to allow things to develop in the way they did.

[Frumple]

... y'know, I remember seeing that name in passing a few times. What is it?

[Flying Dice]

Okay, um. There are a couple of ways to skin this, I'll tackle several of them:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

1. It's a shared, community-created and -driven setting with media fandom and dirt-cheap intrasystem and interstellar travel as the core components.

2. The prime mover of the setting, the lynchpin to the whole thing, is handwavium. Stereotypical magic unknown substance. The premise is that it started appearing on Earth in the early 2000s. It slowly self-replicates and causes unusual developments when used to treat... pretty much anything that isn't a weapon. It turns weapons into toys. Commonplace examples from the setting include turning cars into functional spacecraft, painless biomodding (when applied to people), creation of true AI (when applied to computers), extremely high-output clean power, drives that turn interplanetary travel into a matter of minutes and hours, cheap FTL (in the "outside arbitrary system limits" model, hard-capped at 500c), so on and so forth.

And it works basically by magic, such that anyone with an old car, some spare parts, and some handwavium can make themselves a spacecraft that can get into orbit and fly to Mars in a couple hours. Or create an AI in their laptop and make the battery for it capable of running six months without recharging. Turning scrap metal into something nearly as good as high-end military armor. Shit like that.

The only real requirement is that there has to be some creative or imaginative component to the treatment process; one notable example was the conversion of scrapped F14s into functional VF-1 Valkyries by treating them for hours in a garage while marathoning Macross series near them.

3. So all these random grognards, nerds, fans, and assorted dreamers hare off in as many directions. This is where it becomes painfully self-referential; the major factions are all fandoms, the loose political body is called the Convention, so on and so forth. But whatever.

4. This, sadly, is where it breaks down into the creepy internet circlejerk as opposed to the vaguely pathetic internet circlejerk. The biggest logical flaw in the whole premise? The only people on Earth who were interested in true AI, ground-to-orbit capability, rapid interplanetary and interstellar travel, high-output clean power, &c. ad nausem, all so dirt-cheap that anyone could do it? Nerds. Fandom nerds and nobody else. Not a single national government, corporation, NGO, fuckin' anything was interested in a solution to the power crisis, spaceflight for an indescribably tiny fraction of the cost, &c. in this setting apparently.

Then it got into the victimhood complex and the derision of normies. All these nerds started fucking off into space. Cool, whatever. Except apparently not. Relationships between Fenspace and national governments range from a handful willing to cooperate on matters of mutual interest to a much larger portion of Earth's nations and peoples willing to condone everything from blanket bans on the use of handwavium to executing would-be Fenspacers, with an ample dose of lifetime imprisonment without trial along the way.

Worse, I've seen fans of this thing rant and rave about "Danes" (munDANES huhuh get it) being horrible people &c. &c.--they created something which had the potential to be interesting and then threw it all away for the sake of making dank references and creating the perfect strawman of normies shaped from almost the entire human race.

It's the fucking epitome of why I'm sort of weirded out by the fringes of a lot of internet culture, that there's potentially this sort of crazy delusion of persecution poisoning something which would otherwise bring people together.

the tl;dr: some people on the internet have a moderately interesting idea, ruin it by being weird

Like, the actual concept of a divergence in which anyone can turn a car or shipping container into a working spaceship? That's fucking cool. I'd steal it for a book but I'm too lazy and also I don't want crazy people to stalk me. :^)

[Rolan7]

The only real requirement is that there has to be some creative or imaginative component to the treatment process; one notable example was the conversion of scrapped F14s into functional VF-1 Valkyries by treating them for hours in a garage while marathoning Macross series near them.

My sides

Sounds like a fun exercise in escapism.  I don't blame people for resenting "normies", personally, though it's important to stay functional in society.  *Because* of that, in fact.

Calling them "danes" is super cringeworthy though

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, it's like... why do you have to be so fucking extreme about it that you completely wreck the setting in your efforts to shit on people who don't "get" your interests? o.0

[TheBiggerFish]

So cool, and yet I want to slap the people responsible for most of the plot in the face.

[Amperzand]

It is a pretty neat idea, though I personally prefer different sorts of setting for my own projects. Too bad it got ruined by internet stupidity osmosis.

[flabort]

So cool, and yet I want to slap the people responsible for most of the plot in the face.

+1

[Execute/Dumbo.exe]

Oh my god It's literally called handwavium I thought FD was being sarcastic there.