Right but I mean, the more classic examples of professions to be made in to doll form tend to more easily liken themselves to simplistic representations that you can convey to children as a toy and have them roughly understand and imagine doing. A doctor, an army guy, maybe a mechanic, a police officer, a scientist they’re all pretty visual, they have uniforms or attire strongly associated with the work itself and plenty of props to package with them for the kid to interact with to emulate doing that job. The therapist kinda wears just whatever and their job primarily involves talking so it just doesn’t seem an obvious choice for a doll for children’s entertainment at all.

So I know the joke with spelling but also, Barbie therapist!? WTF? How does that work as a play toy? The concepts seem like they’d be so confusing and boring for a child. I gather it was to send a “you can be anything when you grow up” message, but it’d be about as exciting as a toy as a Barbie accountant. That’s just weird.

The text is clearly human made, and altogether the whole thing is funny. The tool for creating the images in this context doesn’t really impact upon the quality of the work as a whole given the low standards and the fact that it’s literally a joke, and furthermore is pretty unlikely to have put anyone out of a job. I can’t imagine anyone is making a profit out of this so even the murky topic of copyright for the training data used by the model is at the very least less bad even if not completely abrogated.

If they’d done this with stolen images from the web and Photoshop I don’t think there’d be a lot accusations of ‘Photoshop slop’ because they didn’t create costumes and props and do a shoot on location and went with the ‘lazy’ option instead.

There are many things to be worried about with the popular availability of generative AI tools and the torrent of slop that’s being pushed out of them but this really seems not to be one worth worrying about or even having contempt for.

What turned out to be the problem application?

I was unbothered by it as well, at least intestinally, the physical pain of something hot enough was certainly something I could experience and dislike at the extreme end but my stomach and bowels would have been fine. That it until about the past 5 years or so when my stomach suddenly decided it couldn’t handle all kind of things that were never a problem before and now I totally get what people were talking about. It’s pretty sad, I miss being able to reliably tolerate highly spicy food.

Their question seems to be about buying from outside the US rather than from. They’re asking about risks involved with importing stuff there.

Wait there’s sequels? No way.

That seems like it still counts as a love story then, or at least “romance” given that that’s primarily what it’s plot and themes revolve around. What qualifies something to be a love story if not that?

That’s all well and fine but do you really choose to abbreviate shampoo as “poo”?

Yikes

Or quicksand for that matter, I was really expecting that to be a much bigger problem. Especially after reading all those Tintin comics.

Loved old school paint. I used to try and recreate 3d renders of Nintendo characters that I’d seen printed in magazines and on my Gameboy pocket pouch by doing a kind of primitive dithering technique that 10 year old me thought up drawing 1 pixel blocks of specific colours in alternating patterns to try recreate shading or gradients of colour and I’d draw whole rows of them with the line tool which naturally had a staircase effect to it. Used to save it all on a zipdisk.

I’m more unhappy with messaging apps that notify people if you’ve read a message. It did have a positive side effect in that with Facebook, once they introduced that feature sometime around 09 or something, it caused me to reduce my use of the messaging capabilities significantly but frankly I’m not sure that’s really what Facebook or I really wanted. It’s a common feature in messaging applications and I fucking hate it. I need to read the message to decide if I want people to know if I’ve seen it and I can’t do that without telling them I’ve seen it.

It does look pretty cool

That’s it I’m outta here.

The question is easier to answer with any sympathy and understanding when you ask any given individual if they’re personally planning a jailbreak on behalf of this person. At least that seems to be the calculus for what “tolerate” means here.

There’s little room for parties not directly involved to work within the system and if the independence of the judiciary is under suspicion then “fight and die” is literally the prospect people would have to face to reasonably do anything about this and that’s a pretty high bar, one which I doubt many would-be critics of the “fat, lazy cowards” would be willing clear themselves.

Wasn’t that place at least as famous for successful escapes as it was for being a tough and scary place of punishment? If you’re whole bag is turning back the clock to a time you thought was tougher, more punitive and therefore somehow more effective at deterrence and your decisions are more cultural than rational; shouldn’t you pick somewhere not famous specifically for failing at it’s entire purpose of existence?

You don’t have that? Where are you?

It’s bad that this scam is running of course but, I have to say this particular scam has almost a nostalgic quality to it. It reminds me of the type of trickery that old school malware back in the day used to rely on to get on to people’s computers. It’s kind of quaint how unsophisticated it is and how much active work it requires of the victim to successfully infect them.

The lost IQ points from doing this will probably gradually contribute to improved general mood over time.