investigates
In my web browser, browsing the lemmy.today Web UI, looking at the homepage for the community, if I take a screenshot, the current banner appears to be displayed at 966x129; the actual underlying image is 4,000x533.
Looking at a different community's banner [email protected], I get 966x240 visible in a screenshot, with the underlying image being 1,792x672.
So at least on my browser and viewed on that Lemmy frontend, I'm a little suspicious -- without looking at the code -- that 966 might be some kind of native target for width. It can clearly handle higher-res, and that might be desirable for some higher-resolution displays or clients, if they leverage that.
I do think that branding is also a factor. I remember once reading something saying that that people who get married and have kids and need a family vehicle don't like driving what their parents drive, that it'd be boring and stodgy. So avoiding the station wagon that their parents drove, the next generation drove minivans. The next generation avoided their parents' minivan, and drove SUVs. The next generation avoided SUVs and drove hatchback CUVs.
They all kinda fill the same role, as a large enclosed vehicle with a fair bit of cargo space accessible via a rear door.
Here's a generation-old article from when SUVs were the hot item on the way in:
For a period starting in the early 1980s, when Chrysler couldn’t make enough Caravans and Voyagers, the minivan was a suburban status symbol. Baby Boomers claimed it as their preferred mode of family transportation, replacing the stalwart station wagon that had dominated for decades. Nearly every auto maker added a minivan to its line, and the category topped the auto sales charts throughout most of the ’90s.
Times have changed. Boomer offspring have grown up and out of their car seats and started driving their own cars. More and more moms, notably those from the older end of Generation X, are working. Sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) are all the rage in suburbia, with many a maturing mom abandoning her minivan, opting for liberating style over utilitarian substance. Along the way, the minivan has developed a stigma, and now brands its owner as pragmatic and sensible – not to mention a little bit square.
“Minivans are out of favor,” says Gordon Wangers, managing partner of Automotive Marketing Consultants Inc., Vista, CA. “Many former minivan moms wouldn’t be caught dead in a minivan [now]. They want an SUV. It’s a major trend that will not go away.”
Oh, good point, hadn't thought about the changes to garages over time. Hmm.
I suspect that some of this in the US was due to the strict liability imposed on civil aviation manufacturers in the US. It increased civil aviation safety, but demolished a lot of the civil aviation manufacturers.
In criminal and civil law, strict liability is a standard of liability under which a person is legally responsible for the consequences flowing from an activity even in the absence of fault or criminal intent on the part of the defendant.
It made manufacturers very risk-adverse, placed overwhelming weight on being a known, mature design.
GARA later rolled back some of this, but things never really returned to their original state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Aviation_Revitalization_Act
The General Aviation Revitalization Act of 1994, also known by its initials GARA, is Public Law 103-298, an Act of Congress on Senate Bill S. 1458 (103rd Congress), amending the Federal Aviation Act of 1958.
General aviation aircraft production in the U.S. -- following its 30-year peak in the late 1970s—dropped sharply over the next few years to a fraction of its original volume—from approximately 18,000 units in 1978 to 4,000 units in 1986. to 928 units in 1994. (In a 1993 speech, Sen. John McCain said "nearly 500 last year [1992]".)
General aviation aircraft manufacturers in the 1980s and 1990s began to terminate or reduce production of their piston-powered propeller aircraft, or struggled with solvency.
At the time, industry analysts estimated that the U.S. decline in general aviation aircraft manufacturing eliminated somewhere between 28,000 and 100,000 jobs—as unit production dropped by 95% between the 1970s peak and the early 1990s—sharply different from other segments of the global aerospace industry, where U.S. market share was still strong.
Product liability costs
Those manufacturers reported rapidly rising product liability costs, driving aircraft prices beyond the market, and they said their production cuts were in response to that growing liability.
Average cost of manufacturer's liability insurance for each airplane manufactured in the U.S. had risen from approximately $50 per plane in 1962 to $100,000 per plane in 1988, according to a report cited by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a 2,000-fold increase in 24 years.
Rising claims against the industry triggered a rapid increase in manufacturers' liability insurance premiums during the 1980s. Industry-wide, in just 7 years, the manufacturers' liability premiums increased nearly nine-fold, from approximately $24 million in 1978 to $210 million in 1985.
Insurance underwriters, worldwide, began to refuse to sell product liability insurance to U.S. general aviation manufacturers. By 1987, the three largest GA manufacturers claimed their annual costs for product liability ranged from $70,000 to $100,000 per airplane built and shipped that year.
Ah, good to hear it. They do (or did, and I assume still do) also have higher res displays.
Going back to an earlier bit in the conversation, where you were concerned about light sources in the car, I think that auto-dimming might also help (not just with VFDs, but the brightness of any in-car display). My car dash has the option to automatically set brightness based on ambient light levels (something that I wish my desktop computer monitor could do...part of "dark mode"'s benefit is a mitigation for devices that don't do this). I don't know if that was a thing back in the 1980s or so, when these display designs were popular.
I also kind of wonder if eye-tracking, which has come a long way, could be made reliable-enough and responsive-enough to toggle off displays if the car can detect that a user is looking somewhere away from them. Maybe be conservative, not with some critical displays, but stuff like the radio or clock or something. Eye tracking systems normally use the near-infrared, as I understand it, not visible light, so I'd think that you could theoretically do it in a darkened car without problems.
The length I figure mostly isn't an issue aside from maybe street parking. But the width thing seems like a hassle.
I drive a (by American standards) narrow sedan, but I have to say that I keep seeing people have trouble getting out of their cars in older parking lots because there isn't enough clearance between two wide vehicles. Lot of people just lapping over two slots or avoiding parking next to another car.
I suppose that some of that is self-solving -- I mean, if there's enough inertia, parking lot operators will reallocate space in their lots. Or maybe vehicle manufacturers will step in and minivan-style sliding doors will just become the norm (like a two "sliding door coupe", maybe?)
I'd rather just have either (a) the protectionism go away, or (b) if that's not possible for political reasons, at least slash the misincentives associated with it. Just outright say "if it's an American-made vehicle, it gets a subsidy" if that's what industrial policy actually is. All of the associated regulatory stuff is creating inefficiencies of its own.
I think that some of that is fuel efficiency requirements forcing convergence.
The sedan thing weirded me out too -- I mean, when I think of a "car", I think of a sedan -- but as I understand from reading, that related to people wanting larger maximum cargo space in the car, like if they had to shove a piece of furniture or something in it. I'm in the sedan camp -- in the very rare case that I need to move something really large, I'm just gonna U-Haul it. But I can at least understand the concern people have.
The truck and generally-large vehicle thing, I think, related to a combination of:
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The chicken tax. American auto manufacturers have a 25% protective tariff covering the "light truck" class, making it much more profitable for domestic sales.
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Fuel efficiency exemptions granted that class (which I suspect may have something to do with regulations resulting from lobbying from said manufacturers and them having incentives surrounding the above chicken tax).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy
CAFE standards signaled the end of the traditional long station wagon, but Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca developed the idea of marketing the minivan as a station wagon alternative, while certifying it in the separate truck category to allow compliance with less-strict CAFE standards. Eventually, this same idea led to the promotion of the SUV.[106][107]
The definitions for cars and trucks are not the same for fuel economy and emission standards. For example, a Chrysler PT Cruiser was defined as a car for emissions purposes and a truck for fuel economy purposes.[2] Under then light truck fuel economy rules, the PT Cruiser had have a lower fuel economy target (28.05 mpg beginning in 2011) than it would if it were classified as a passenger car.
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High American towing requirements. That is, American vehicles have far more restrictive towing requirements than in most other countries -- you need a larger vehicle to legally tow a given load than in many other countries. I suspect that the regulations may also have something to do with American automakers lobbying for protective regulation; it pushes American consumers to buy from that protected class of vehicles.
Long story short -- I think that you can probably chalk a lot of that up to rent-seeking out of Detroit.
Newer, but I quite like the gentle amber LCD (not LED) displays of my car. At night it’s bright enough and sharp enough without being visually loud. I wish more of these displays were still being made, I’d love to use them in car-centric Arduino projects and data displays that would be consulted at night or that sort of thing.
Not sure if you mean VFDs or amber LCDs, but Matrix Orbital sells both sorts in small quantities that you'd use in a project and can interface to a microcontroller -- I was interested in them myself when looking for small VFDs, years back. They're going to be segmented alphanumeric or grid displays, though, not things with physical custom display elements like those car dash things, but that's kinda part and parcel of small-run stuff.
https://www.matrixorbital.com/
https://www.matrixorbital.com/blc2021
Just choose the "amber" option if it's an amber LCD you want.
Can also get their displays via Mouser or Digikey.
The birth rate, or the average number of children that are born to a woman over her lifetime, has dropped from 1.58 children per woman in 2021 to 1.35 currently.
In the years from 2011 to 2016, Germany's fertility rate rose from 1.39 to 1.59 due in part to better overall conditions for families with children as well as the arrival of immigrant families with higher fertility rates.
So, basically, all the recovery since 2011 has been lost.
I don't log in or post there any more, but there are still a few occasional subreddits that don't have analogs here that I'll sporadically browse anonymously.
I still use it if searching for information on a search engine; like, doing a site search on Reddit for answers on certain things.
I don't expect to be going back unless something blows up here. For most purposes, the Threadiverse has passed the traffic threshold I need to be engaged.
Horsehide bomber jackets of the sort worn in WW2.
We can make cheaper and lighter synthetic materials. But I like the look that leather jackets acquire with wear over time (and particularly horsehide, which is less-available today than cowhide, as we don't have many horses around any more).
They aren't gone -- it's still possible to obtain them. But in 2024, they're really limited to people going out of their way to get them.
Once widely used, the number of operational lighthouses has declined due to the expense of maintenance and the advent of much cheaper, more sophisticated, and more effective electronic navigational systems.
They were quite important for a long time. We used them for thousands of years, and they're often unique in form, iconic. And they're a good subject for photos and paintings, and I think that the light effect from them is neat. Lots of books and such using them, like ones on remote rocks, to get an isolated setting ("the lone lighthouse keeper").
But the past few decades of technological advancement have probably closed the end of their era.
That's true in that absent very unusual cases, we don't lose technology, so all the past technology remains. I think that it's a valid insight.
However, I think that it's also true to say that there are technologies that -- while not gone -- fall into disuse because of a changing environment.
You're saying that a "better" technology will remain, and for certain definitions of "better", I agree. We have no reason, absent maybe a changing environment that makes what is "best" different at different points in time or changing understanding of what is "best" (e.g. maybe internal combustion vehicles going away as we understand the impact of carbon dioxide emissions) to stop using a better technology.
But OP is specific in distinguishing between "best" and "coolest":
I don't mean BETTER. That's a different conversation. I mean cooler.
So I think that his question is valid.
I like the look of vacuum-fluorescent displays (VFDs) -- a high-contrast display with a black background, solid color areas. Enough brightness to cause some haloing spilling over into the blackness if you were looking at it. Led to a particular design style adapted to the technology, was very "high-tech" in maybe the 1980s.
OLEDs have high contrast, and I suppose you could probably replicate the look, but I doubt that the style will come back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_fluorescent_display
EDIT: A few more car dashboards using similar style:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/skillshare/uploads/session/tmp/50c99738
https://www.pinterest.com/hudsandguis/retro-car-dashboards/
And some concept cars with similar dash:
https://www.hudsandguis.com/home/2022/retro-digital-dashboards
Some other devices using VFDs:
They already nailed this guy a bit back -- I was confused for a sec, thought I recognized his face from previous coverage. The article is just saying that the IDF is confirming that an earlier airstrike that had targeted him did, in fact, kill him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2024_Dahieh_airstrike
October 2024 Dahieh airstrike
On the night of 3 October 2024, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) carried out an airstrike on an underground bunker in Dahieh, a predominantly Shia Muslim suburb in the south of Beirut, Lebanon, where Hezbollah leaders, including Hashem Safieddine, had convened in the headquarters of Hezbollah’s Intelligence Branch.[1][2]
It sounds like both Lebanon and Israel had suspected that he was dead prior to this point, just weren't certain:
Fate of Hashem Safieddine
According to the Israeli Channel 12, Israeli security officials were "increasingly confident" that Safieddine had been killed in the attack.[3]
On 5 October, a Lebanese security source reported that Hezbollah lost contact with Safieddine, and that Hezbollah has not heard from him since the airstrike.[9][10]
Al Arabiya and Al Hadath reported that Israel confirmed the assassination of Hashem Safieddine and all Hezbollah leaders that were with him.[11] On 8 October, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant stated that Safieddine was likely "eliminated". The claim was later repeated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.[12][13][14] On 22 October, the IDF formally announced his killing along with Hussein Hazima and other senior Hezbollah members.[15][16]
“Europe is the largest consumer of cocaine worldwide, bigger than the United States, so the demand is there,” said Schindler, a former U.N. Security Council and German government official.
Dammit, London.
I remember being outdoors feeling like a relief in the original Half-Life.
In Far Cry, I definitely preferred being outside. Same with Metro.
I think in most FPS games I've played, the player doesn't have the developer ambush them with stuff outside. Maybe that's a factor.
This isn't a specific game, but Twine-based games will generally work reasonably well on an Android web browser. These tend to be sort of multiple-choice choose your own adventure games, but span a wide range of genres. I don't know of a single database cataloguing all of them, but there are a fair number out there on the Web.
For an example (not one I'd specifically recommend, haven't even played through it, just hit Kagi for an example game that people were recommending):
I don't play it that much, but Mindustry is probably worth looking at, a factory-building game in the Factorio mold.
https://mindustrygame.github.io/
Unciv is a reimplementation of Civilization V (with simpler graphics).
https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv
Not in F-Droid, but open-source: I very much like Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead as a game, but it's really better-suited to a PC, which is the platform it was originally designed for. It's compute-heavy, and while the Android adaptation is usable on a touchscreen, it benefits from having a Bluetooth keyboard or something. Open-world roguelike. You can just download the apks directly. This has a steep learning curve; think Dwarf Fortress. Lots of depth, though!
I'm not actually all that rabid about the touchscreen UI. Probably better solitaire UIs out there, but PysolFC is a fork of Pysol, a long-running Linux solitaire implementation. It has a ton of different games; my favorite is Eight-Off, a game that's somewhat similar to Freecell, but less-widely played. I think that solitaire games are a good match for a phone platform, so worth having it or another solitaire game around.
https://pysolfc.sourceforge.io/
My own favorite is one that you mentioned, Shattered Pixel Dungeon, which I think is a good adaptation of roguelike gameplay to the touchscreen. Its creator posts on a Threadiverse community here, [email protected].
Israel said to request US send second THAAD missile defense battery ahead of Iran attack
>Israel has requested that the US send a second THAAD battery to protect the country in case of an Iranian reaction to an expected Israeli reprisal attack, Channel 12 reports.
Post propagation from sh.itjust.works
On lemmy.today, I don't appear to be seeing posts created in the past two days as of this writing on either [email protected] or [email protected]. I am subscribed to both communities. I have not done an search to determine whether other subscribed sh.itjust.works communities are affected, though I assume that to be the case.
They are visible from lemmy.world, so the posts are propagating to at least some other federated instances.
sh.itjust.works presently appears to be running Lemmy 0.19.5 (versus lemmy.today's 0.19.4 and lemmy.world's 0.19.3). However, I do not think that this is a version-related problem, at least not alone, as [email protected] is showing up fine on lemmy.today.
https://lemmy.today/instances lists sh.itjust.works as a federated instance as of this writing.
https://sh.itjust.works/instances lists lemmy.today as a federated instance as of this writing.
Lemmy.today has also been responding very slowly to me over the past hour or so, and was frequently showing connection timeouts and gateway error pages when trying to load pages. Other instances appear to be working normally. That may be entirely unrelated, but I thought that I'd mention it, as it's unusual and at least might be related.
New Google agreement could boost development of small modular reactors—if they work.
I am surprised that product recommendations are not better
One thing that I expected to be absolutely amazing in 2024 from online vendors was product recommendations.
That vendor, assuming you use a single, persistent account to do purchasing, has a full list of your purchase history. They may well also have browsing data.
And so, given all that data to mine and analyze, one of the few places where I actually have tried to see what a vendor can do in terms of analyzing my preferences...has been really unimpressive.
I'm mostly thinking of Amazon and Steam, since they're the online vendors that I use the most; Steam in particular has a considerable amount of data it can gather, including video game playtime.
Yet even though Amazon grabs some eyeball space on every page to try to recommend products, I have rarely been recommended anything I actually want to buy on Amazon. Occasionally, sure, but virtually everything I get is via plain old searching. And the most-successful recommendation approach Amazon uses, by far, is just asking me whether I want to purchase more of something that I've purchased in the past. I'll grant that maybe there's subtlety there that I can't appreciate from the outside, like computing frequency at which a given "repurchase" recommendation happens or taking into account past average purchase frequency, but it doesn't seem like the most-sophisticated form of recommendation.
Granted, I normally make it a point to limit Amazon's data-gathering. I browse logged out, make a list of what I want to buy, clear browser state, and log in only long enough to make a purchase. That probably makes it harder for Amazon to associate me with my browsing behavior. But it does know what I actually buy. And it has a pretty substantial history there.
And for Steam, Valve knows what games I play, how long I've played them for, and assuming that there's any mining based on game achievements, even -- at least as an abstract concept that would permit for correlating preference across video games -- what I do in those games. Like, players who get "evil path" achievements in one game maybe prefer video games with "evil" routes, stuff like that. But I have browsed Steam's discovery queue zillions of times, and while I've probably found a game or two on there, the success rate of its recommendations is abysmally low. Probably the most-useful recommendations system on Steam is the "similar games" section when viewing information about a game. But I'm pretty sure that most games I find on Steam that I actually like are just by using user ratings and searching for tags. While, Steam's scoring is opaque, and it's possible that they're using some degree of input, I don't think that it's making use of information about me there. I wouldn't be surprised if it's nothing more than ranking games based on their player review score, which...isn't much more than things like MetaCritic and similar have done. I've occasionally had luck looking for games that have very high hours played, with the idea that people wouldn't play a game a lot if they didn't like it. That makes some use of aggregate data about users, but not about me.
Most video games that I get on Steam that I like are games that I've discovered somewhere other than on Steam, often looking for human "roundup" articles comparing collections of similar video games and giving a brief blurb about pros and cons. That's not new technology.
That comes as a very great surprise to me, when one considers the enormous amount of effort and resources that goes into harvesting and mining data about people. Now, okay, a lot of that is for ads. And advertising isn't exactly the same thing as doing good product recommendation. An advertisement is trying to effectively get someone to buy a product regardless of whether they'll ultimately like it or not, whereas a product recommendation -- at least in the ideal, user-focused sense -- is trying to find products that people will like. But there has to be a substantial amount of overlap between the two. Advertisers don't want to waste money advertising to people who won't buy their product, so trying to find people who are interested in their product is a major part of advertising.
I haven't used any systems that log my music-playing and make recommendations; I'd rather keep my privacy there. Perhaps if I did, that area would be more-successful.
But by and large, it's an area that I'm very surprised is not more successful than it is. It's a "flying cars and jetpacks" thing, something that I'd always vaguely expected of the future, but which never seemed to really arrive. Product recommendation systems never really got to the point of anticipating my needs very effectively, even where they have what I'd consider a fair amount of data to work with.
What's your experience? Does it differ from my own? Do you find that product recommendations from vendors are really useful, pretty much hit the nail on the head for what you want? How do you "find" products? Am I missing something, maybe like merchants on Amazon or publishers on Steam trying to game the recommendations system one way or another, and poisoning its inputs?
Dark Fantasy-Themed Tarot, Major Arcana. Flux, ComfyUI.
Thelsim did a couple of Tarot-style cards a while back. I also just finally got Flux set up in ComfyUI -- had started a long time back, and dropped it.
Flux is a ComfyUI model that's pretty popular over on Reddit, both for the quality and because it uses English-style prompts rather than just a list of comma-separated prompt terms. I remembered Thelsim's project, wanted to see if I could turn out a full set of photographic-style Major Arcana in the first day using it. Turns out...yes! Usually when running Stable Diffusion, I'll generate maybe 20 images and pick the best, but this typically had something reasonable on the first try. It's certainly not flawless -- there are quirks in the image, but for anyone else thinking about playing with Flux, I wanted to put this out there, because I was unexpectedly happy with it, especially given that I've no experience at all with it. I would totally try and get it set up if you have a local generation setup!
Text was added with a script and ImageMagick, not in ComfyUI.
To get some kind of consistent appearance, I appended to each prompt "The theme is magical fantasy horror. The colors are blue, white, red, orange, and black. The photograph was taken with a Nikon D850." I also used "Photograph...at night" on each.
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/67cd880f-ed36-4074-b12b-3e509b0dafa2.png
> Photograph of the Grim Reaper at night in a dark, gloomy field. The Grim Reaper is riding a white horse. The Grim Reaper is holding a simple black scythe. The Grim Reaper's hood only contains blackness. The sky is full of stars. The Grim Reaper is wearing black gloves. The Grim Reaper is facing the camera.
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/2f0c296e-da19-4f31-8f35-cac07ce372dc.png
> An photograph of a huge angel in the clouds playing a medieval trumpet at night. The angel is blowing into the trumpet. The angel is in profile. The zombies are climbing out of their graves in a graveyard. The dead are rising. There are snowy mountains in the background.
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/b99ac2e5-a285-45f9-abc8-4267ae10398a.png
> Photograph of a stern-looking young woman wearing a white blindfold and a toga sitting on a throne at night. The woman's right hand is holding a set of scales aloft. There is a longsword lying by the woman's feet. The woman is facing the scales.
Should really have a sword in one hand, scales in the other, but I wasn't able to quickly get that working; probably need more experience with Flux.
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/3ed8cbe7-e97b-4f67-849e-19bd798caaae.png
> Photograph of an angel at night. The angel is pouring glowing liquid from one large goblet in their left hand into a goblet in their right hand. The angel has a halo.
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/18a9c09b-dcc1-46da-87d8-a0c09c851170.png
>Photograph of a man wearing armor riding a Roman war chariot at night. The chariot is pulled by two galloping horses wearing barding. The horse on the left is white, and the horse on the right is black. The chariot is charging the camera. The photograph is an action shot. The man is holding reins.
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/4558e24b-0b45-433f-8548-6bb1873bb2d1.png
> Photograph of the Devil at night. The Devil is crouching on a pedestal. There are two nude demons sitting at the base of the pedestal. The demon in the lower-right quadrant of the photograph is male. The demon in the lower-left quadrant of the photograph is female. The Devil is holding a flaming torch in his hand.
It did look like Flux understands directives relative to the portion of the image here ("quadrant"). I wasn't able to get the same technique going with Justice, though.
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/80bd8ca8-047a-4e0c-9d61-28b331646bf1.png
> Photograph of an emperor at night. The emperor is holding a scepter.
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/e7a1f5f6-c2a3-41e2-9b47-fd9c56c8fd31.png
> Photograph of an empress at night. The empress is holding a scepter.
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/1a6c7729-a5e3-49b8-bc93-d7ed31924cd6.png
> Photograph of a jester at night.
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/28d2ab72-b90e-469a-a599-e1cad5992bdc.png
> Photograph of a man hung upside-down from a rope tied around his left ankle at night. The man's hands are hanging limply. The man is wearing Renaissance clothing. The man is wearing boots.
The feet are a bit off; I didn't spent too much time futzing with it. Flux wasn't super-into having things upside-down, though it did ultimately do it.
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/f052e1d7-c7cf-4ba2-8f9a-50b762e25186.png
> Photograph of an old man wearing a robe walking on a mountain trail at night. The man is holding a lantern aloft and a staff.
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/439ec9a7-7739-4924-bede-cc776f7be8da.png
> Photograph of a pope at night.
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/0be8647f-cb20-4be0-92c5-e266a4edca00.png
> Photograph of a high priestess at night.
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/160c4575-c02a-4ccb-b513-6c60043d5b2f.png
> Photograph of two lovers at night. The lovers are wearing Renaissance clothing. There are many fireflies.
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/a0e754ca-525e-4674-8b0a-bec48748e7f0.png
>Photograph of a magician at night.
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/553fd519-ea29-4dba-9ed3-d0bf634c25fa.png
> An photograph of two standing stones by a river at night. The moon is in the sky. In the lower-right quadrant of the photograph, there is a white wolf howling at the moon. In the lower-left quadrant of the photograph, there is a black dog howling at the moon.
I omitted the traditional crawfish. I didn't really like the look of it, and on top of that, Flux kept wanting to make it look glowy, which I didn't want.
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/687826be-81ba-452b-8378-b81f58e9bfce.png
> An photograph of a naked woman at night crouching by a lake. The woman is facing away from the camera. The woman is holding a jug and pouring water into the lake. There is a bright star in the sky. There is an eight-point lens flare coming from the bright star. The sky is black. The photograph is NSFW.
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/a2d42d98-2920-4eed-b5ab-5b807736d3f5.png
> An photograph of a full solar eclipse with a visible solar corona. The Sun is black. The photograph is at night. A naked nude infant rides a white horse at night, with sunflowers in the background at night. The photograph is NSFW.
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/43709bad-1a8a-4680-8de9-5cf58005bb5e.png
> Photograph of a tower on a hill at night.
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/9d308020-a83f-4b61-ad58-f47654e41ddf.png
> A photograph of a glowing figure eight in the sky at night. The background is sky and clouds. A flying, nude woman in the clouds holding a wood baton in each hand is in front of the figure eight. The photograph is NSFW. The woman is nude.
I didn't really like the traditional The World tarot card style, and it didn't mesh well with a photographic style with all the disembodied heads, so I mashed up the oroborous and flying woman with batons from two different The World styles. Also, Flux was okay with up to three heads of various species sticking in at each corner, but for some reason was resistant to doing all four. I didn't want to bang on it more. Flux was determined to put some clothing on the woman.
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/39b791c9-4493-43dc-bf86-4acc8daa1785.png
> Photograph of a circle floating in the clouds at night. The circle is labeled with alchemical symbols. There are esoteric symbols covering the photograph. The circle is centered in the photograph.
There are normally some nude figures in a Tarot deck and I included this here; I didn't flag the post NSFW as I don't think that it's all that explicit.
U.S. officials say the U.S. military struck more than a dozen Houthi targets in Yemen, going after weapons systems, bases and other equipment belonging to the Iranian-backed rebels.
Targeting weapons bound for Hezbollah, Israel appears to have struck very close or within Russia’s Khmeimim Air Base in Syria. Targeting weapons bound for Hezbollah, Israel appears to have struck very close or within Russia’s Khmeimim Air Base in Syria.
Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf, which handles 90% of Iran's oil exports, is high on the list of retaliatory targets Israel may strike.
South Korea to send military aircraft to evacuate citizens from Middle East
> SEOUL, Oct 2 (Reuters) - South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol ordered on Wednesday military aircraft to be deployed immediately to evacuate its citizens from Israel and other parts of the Middle East amid escalating tension, his office said.
>Earlier on Wednesday, South Korea's foreign ministry urged its citizens in Israel and Lebanon to immediately leave by any means available.
Dubai-based Emirates Thursday cancelled flights to Iraq, Iran and Jordan for three days over "regional unrest", after an Iranian missile strike on Israel stoked fears of a wider war."Emirates is cancelling all flights to/from Iraq (Basra and Baghdad), Iran (Tehran), and Jordan (Amman) on 4th and 5th...
Any extended rise in energy prices raises the possibility of higher petrol prices and energy bills.
The price of oil has jumped 5% after US President Joe Biden said the US was discussing possible strikes by Israel on Iran’s oil industry.
Asked on a visit if he would support Israel striking Iran’s oil facilities, Biden said: “We’re discussing that”, according to Bloomberg.
Joe Biden ‘discussing’ possible Israeli strikes on Iran oil facilities; IDF says it has killed a Hezbollah commander – Middle East crisis live | Lebanon | The Guardian
Biden’s comments sent oil prices soaring; IDF says Khader Shahabiya was responsible for rocket attack on football field that killed 12 young people
Iran: “the phase of unilateral self-restraint has ended”
At least nine killed in Israeli air attack on central Beirut, as fights in southern Lebanon intensify.
This is merely a bullet point on the main article, but seems more-significant to me than the article's main title, and has now been cited on a number of other news sites:
>Iranian source tells Al Jazeera Iran sent a message to the US via Qatar saying that it does not seek regional war but adding that “the phase of unilateral self-restraint has ended”. It also warned any Israeli attack would be met with an “unconventional response” that includes targeting Israeli infrastructure.
As Iran threatens to attack Israel over the assassination of a Hamas leader in the Iranian capital, its long-vaunted missile program offers one of the few ways for Tehran to strike back directly.
Quick summary: an analysis of the Iranian ballistic missiles used in the attack in April showed them to demonstrate dramatically worse performance than had been expected of them.
A war meant to draw in the militant group’s allies has instead left them battered
https://archive.ph/glm0E
At least seven killed in attack that took place moments before Iran launched a barrage of rockets at Israel.
Iran’s large-scale attack on Israel presents the United States with the chance to achieve a set of long-standing objectives.
https://archive.ph/vhuZu