A thread for the stories that might not be suitable for the rest of the forum.

Voice actress Bev Standing is suing TikTok for unauthorized use of her voice in their text-to-voice tool.

Apparently, that isn't a synthetic voice.

What it says on the tin.

This is kinda crazy, but I got to thinking about how often managers will tell us not to discuss how much we're paid among our fellow coworkers.  This is supposedly to keep workplace conflicts to a minimum, but as some have pointed out, it's really to keep people from having an excuse to demand raises.

So.

What if we just put it out in the open?

For everyone to see.

Literally.

Not just your coworkers, but your customers as well.

Hang a sign around your neck that shows what your company pays you.  Not a weekly or monthly sum, because that doesn't indicate how much overtime you wind up working in order to make ends meet.

Your actual hourly wage.

The thing is, I don't believe people out there understand just how prevalent wage slavery is.  Yes, it's known that there is general discontent... but I don't think people are getting how bad it is out there.

Imagine how someone who makes six figures a year would respond if they went around, doing their errands, and they saw all these signs with figures like  $8.50/hr, $9.75/hr or even waitstaff wages like $4.50/hr.  And these people aren't stupid.  They know what the cost of living is like in their cities.  They will be forced to stop and consider: "How is it possible that someone can make ends meet with so little?"  And, "How can these people be making so little when I'm paying such a premium for these goods/services?"  Yes, where *is* your money going?

A meal or two at a McDonald's easily covers one person's wages for an hour.  A single lunch or dinner rush is enough to cover the entire crew's wages for the day.  So where is the rest of the money going?  It sure as hell ain't the cost of the food - that's pennies on the dollar.

So why don't we force people to confront the question: where *is* their money going?

Republicans demote Liz Cheney, critic of Trump's 'Big Lie,' from leadership role

Analysis: Why we just witnessed a pro-Trump purge in the Republican Party


The party that claims to be conservative just demoted one of their most conservative headliners because she told the truth about Trump.


So, when's the renaming of the Republican Party to the Trump Party taking place? He does like having his name on everything he owns, so it's only a matter of time, right?

This will let the text be styled with whatever the user has set for a monospace font in their browser, whether it's Courier New or not. Ideally I'd say that Sans Serif, Serif, and Monospace should be at the top of the list, but if it auto-sorts that may not be possible.

It's hardly a major issue, but since I'm picky about fonts and don't allow pages to specify their own it matters at least a little, to me, and if there's one thing I know about the internet it's that you're never the only one.

"Bloody knockback mechanics!"

For a long time now I've been struggling on how to format this as I'm fairly scatterbrained at times and not very good at telling stories like other folk are, something I will be forever envious of *grin*. That aside I've been wanting to info dump some history about Terr from CoH since doing it through story isn't really viable for me. So instead I'll toss up information here akin to a character sheet because when it comes down to it he started off as a homebrew P&P character dating back to mid 90's.

Current plan is this first post will be dedicated to how the character first came to be and a bit of relevant information bout how the system/world worked to explain why some of his abilities work as they do, up to this point everything that he can do and has access to all leads back to this system, in my mind he had an upgrade path so to speak that I've worked with making mental notes during my years of CoH how i can integrate what I feel he would have learned over the years of being there and the timeline reset.

With that out of the way lets start with the name, unsurprisingly it uses my first name as he was a self insert of sorts as me and my old friend did that sort of gaming alot with his homebrew systems. I was real fortunate back then that I had such a creative friend when it came to game system generation. The last name came from my love of the 80's series Knight Rider. I adored the series in the 90's when it would be on the air fairly frequently and I thought Terrence Knight sounded cool so ran with it. Since he was my avatar at the time he was also my age of 15-16 when he was isekai'd by Gate.

Gate, think of him the main MacGuffin behind Terr's life being dumped upside down. An eccentric character with Reality based powers whom achieved godhood and a high rank of divinity at that so once ascended he could affect things on a universal scale. Main spheres of influence he had was Teleportation, Reality and lightening. Not evil by any extent of the imagination he wasn't entirely sane either and when you have that much power and influence and suddenly far more than a human lifespan on your hands..you tend to get bored. Closest equivalent might be somethin like 'Q' from Star Trek. He is the entity Terrence refers to when talking about 'something or someone deciding I'd be a pawn for amusement'. At this point he doesn't know the entity's identity and its keeping all information well masked, but its the source of him being dumped off on CoH universe and plucking him out of the doomed Batillion timeline and sending him back, its also a source of his directional issues and certain other skills.

The game system: Perks and Flaw based point system for character creation similar to some other pen and paper games. Used for initial stat distribution and buying character/class abilities as the game wasn't entirely freeform using classes with their own skills which could evolve and branch off to get sub abilities depending on the situations TK went through. I could purchase things that were not initially part of a class at extra cost but only if my friend decided it made sense at the time or was cool enough. Because of the setting and the fact it was just me and him Terr ended up fairly monstrous because he wasn't part of a party of characters so as a solo character he evolved to be fairly overpowered by the world's standards by the time he finally moved on. I've joked that he's akin to a shounen character and every shounen protagonist has -something- as a claim to fame, for Terrence its probably his Instinct skill. I'll go into further detail bout that when i get around to that particular section. (Cue Ultra instinct jokes here)

The world he was dropped off in first and where he lived before being transported to Primal Earth was a high fantasy world, fairly high powered at that where gods were a very real thing along with religious factions and all that jazz. First important note here is anything involving souls was heavily taboo and any being caught meddling or harming a soul was marked for execution as all the deities took souls seriously. Not to say it didn't happen but it very rare and secretive, and due to such restrictions countermeasures against such was very rare to the point of near nonexistent. This played an important part in Knights story due to what class was forced upon him.

Second part and a more 'gamey' aspect is how the very world itself enforced the rule of ownership. As it sounds owning an object, land, or even people in the case of slavery and such was enforced, thievery as punished through various means be it bad Karma, pain, curses or instant death depending on whats was being taken. A repetitively minor object that a person may not have owned long or didn't have much value to the person would only cause a minor repercussion. Attempting to steal something like a family heirloom that's been there for generations would have very brutal consequences. Of course that is entirely circumvented by just killing the owner and effectively inheriting the possessions, older magical or supernatural beings have a stronger link to the natural world and in turn the rule of possession was further enforced. Stealing from a dragon? Doesn't happen unless you wanna be a corpse by its hoard. Kill it and inherit the hoard and of course all the dragon parts that could be butchered and sold or used for magical objects.

Probably enough for now, I just needed to kick my ass into finally putting -something- up since its been bothering me for months now to do something like this heh.

Edit:didn't realize I had accidentally made a emoji in the system segment. fixed.

My father's ASUS laptop just got updated-and-bricked by Windows. Again. He's getting fed up.

What's the best Linux for end-users who are used to Windows nowadays?

Old thread is here.

(05-07-2021, 11:09 AM)robkelk Wrote:

(05-07-2021, 08:04 AM)Bob Schroeck Wrote: By the way, has anyone alerted Miraheze staff just in case they're targeting other wikis?

Not I... and I know there's at least one other Miraheze wiki that uses a lot of Commons images, so they might be a target as well.

Not in North America, mind you... but it is possible.

CBC Analysis: A bipartisan consensus on climate change? The U.K. suggests it's not a pipe dream