Wow, today I learned! Thanks for the info. It turns out a half remembered episode of Schoolhouse Rock seen 30 years ago is not the authoritative source on the legislative info.

Unfortunately, that is not stopping me for hearing, "I'm just a bill, sitting on Capitol Hill" ad nauseum in my head lol

Bills start in the House before they are passed to the Senate. My guess would be that she championed it through the House, and then passed it off to the Senators mentioned to continue shepherding the legislation to the President's desk.

Whatchu mean your Bible ain't got the Gospel accordin' to Charlie? You one of them freaky-deaky Catlicks? Come on down to the First United International Church of the Resurrection of the Lost Cause and we'uns gonna show you how to praise the Lord CORRECTLY!

Check it out for yourself, if you like. 22 minute gameplay demo. I think it looks neat, but I am not involved enough with the game to samee how these things interact with one another.

Correct, I really was.

I did not fail to see that you had listed many different options. I selected Craiyon because you and your partner had listed it as the first beginner friendly option. I am, as I stated, a total novice. I listed my process for trying to generate an image. I listed the issues I was running into. Instead of providing suggestions for how I could have done things better (beyond "why didn't you try one of the other tools we've listed") you have A) referred me to a welcome post which contains no pointers for the issues I've told you I had and B) created an image trying to show me how easy it all is with no description of what you did to get the results you posted here.

As I said in my initial post, you are completely undervaluing what it takes to get the results you got, because you appear to be experienced with these tools. That's great, but you've posted something that is asking why people are not following your lead and creating content in your absence. I have no desire to jump through a half dozen different image generation services to make something I feel like is a guessable, but interesting post.

Now, you may say, "fuck you rando, it's not my job to teach you how to make these tools do what you want, Google it". However, within the context of this post, you could really stand to take a less superior, snarky stance towards the people you're asking for help in supporting this community and instead actually listen when someone describes the problems they're having. Even if you think I'm being a big dumb idiot.

Regarding the image you generated, I'll reiterate what I said initially, I got like 8 pictures of horses in various impossible poses when I put the lyrics from one of the verses in. I recalibrated by writing a prompt which evoked the lyrics of the song without necessarily directly quoting them. That did get me in the ballpark, but, like I said initially, most of the actual lyrical references were lost and I was left with a generic image of 19th century combat. Much like the image you just posted. And you might think that that image is perfectly acceptable as a post. I disagree. Sure, in this instance it would probably work (there can't be THAT many metal songs referencing the charge of the light brigade), but if it was a more generic song, it would be unnecessarily difficult to guess. Which, as others in this thread have said, is an impediment to people interacting in this space.

What exactly from the welcome sticky do you believe I failed to understand?

I think perhaps you should reevaluate your communication style. I just provided a lot of honest feedback to your query in a manner that I hoped was constructive. If you feel like I misunderstood something, or that you've covered one of my points above in the welcome text, then you could respond to me in the same manner I responded to you. Because I did read the welcome post while I was composing that post. I even reference it directly in my post, which I'm not entirely sure you bothered to read, since you've not responded to any of the points I brought up. So I'm sort of sitting here wondering "What's The Point Of A Feedback Post If OP Is Unwilling To Receive Feedback?"

Is that really all that surprising though? Novelty is a powerful incentive. The folks that were bolstering your early numbers are probably those who are specifically hunting for brand new or small communities. I'd wager that these users typically post more frequently than the average. However, much like you are experiencing right now, once the novelty of a new community concept fades, if those posters don't get the engagement they wanted on their test balloon posts, they will write the community off as dead and move on.

As the person with the most skin in the game for this community, your steadfastness is what will provide the base upon which others will build, but you should be prepared to either suffer the grind until the community has built a self-sustaining ecosystem of posters, commenters, and lurkers who upvote. Alternatively, if you're getting burnt out from feeling like you're screaming into the void, you can walk away (intentionally this time, not because of a hospital visit). Return later if you feel reenergized, but you don't have to. It's just an internet forum.

Also, I do think you are underselling the difficulty of posting in this community a little bit. I've been toying around with Craiyon, based on the recommendation of your sticky post, trying to generate an image for Iron Maiden's "The Trooper". It's a fairly cinematic song, should be easy to generate an image that fits, right? Plug in a couple of the most evocative lines and you're off to the races. Not so much, I'm finding. Dumping the lyrics in raw gets me various depictions of horses and not much else. Okay, back to the drawing board. In my own words, I describe a 19th century cavalry charge. Closer, but it lacks any of the touchstones from the lyrics themselves. Also, the resulting images themselves are various degrees of janky in the way that the free image generators typically are. Sure, I could just throw it out there in the spirit of providing content for people to chew through, but I might argue that a tidal wave of low effort posts is more damaging to the health of most new community than few posts of relative high quality. And, again, this is all for a song that is very specific in the imagery it evokes. I'd imagine trying something more esoteric would need even more revisions and iterations to get dialed in to a point where someone has a shot at guessing.

Other than a very brief period of time when these sort of generators were first making waves in TTRPG DM communities, this is the only time I've messed around with these types of programs, so I don't really know how to best revise or write these prompts. It ends up being a lot of trial and error. Which, yeah, if I'm just throwing out a test post to gauge the response, no big deal. But I don't think it should shock you that someone may not be interested in doing that on a regular basis. It seems like you possibly have some degree of experience with these programs (at least looking at the quality of the outputs you've been posting), and I think you may be letting that cloud your perception of the time investment.

As a final point regarding engagement in this community, I'm not sure this is the sort of game that breeds huge amounts of comments and whatnot. Using your Journey post as an example, I posted a guess, you responded with an emoji, and now that post is now effectively dead unless things go wildly off topic in the comments. Not that that's a bad thing if you're okay with it as the community manager, but I'd guess it is probably the exception to the rule. In the reverse situation, if I come across a post which has stumped me, I'm more likely to just keep scrolling on to the next thing because I wouldn't want to ruin the chance someone else might have at guessing it "honestly" (so to speak) by asking for clues. That's admittedly silly, but I don't think the sentiment is unique to me.

I don't mean to bust your chops, I do really like this concept and hope it finds its footing. I just think you may have been overly optimistic with your expectations.

"Don't Stop Believing" - Journey?

Strangers, waiting Up and down the boulevard Their shadows searchin' in the night

For what it's worth, my typical Lemmy habit is to pull up the "subscribed" feed in the morning, sort by "Top Day", and then scroll until I hit all of the posted content from my communities. After that point, I might transition over to "All" and sort by "active" to see if there is anything out there getting traction that I've missed. This is the first post I've seen from this community. It's an interesting concept, so I've subscribed today. As others have said, this community is still establishing itself. Keep generating content, and if what you publish is enticing (as it was for me today), and you'll attract others. Some subset of that population might also have the the drive to create content as well, but it wouldn't shock me if the proportions of lurkers to posters was 99:1.

I dispute the premise that SBMM is a fundamental requirement for PVP to work, though obviously it's become intertwibed with the genre that a game choosing not to use it is going to have a more difficult go of it to onboard folks.

There was a time before SBMM after all. A time of server browsers, admins with chips on their shoulders, GameSpy, and "unofficial" map rotations and rules.

Now, for about a billion different reasons, this model is not going to make a comeback and become king again. But, I just wanted to mention that MM is not as "fundamental" as your comment indicated.

Austin, the character, also has the advantage of being written as fully committing to the free love swinger movement of the 60s. It would not stretch credulity if his 90s era handlers were paranoid about Austin finding out his partner is a gay man, but Austin himself is completely nonplussed by the news. Hell, he could even allude to having same-sex experiences of his own ("You know, when you are at the bottom of an orgy pile, you don't always know where your bits and bobs are going, and you certainly don't care. Yeah, baby!")

Depends on how it's handled. While I think your version is the most likely outcome, especially considering the creative team are a bunch of aging Gen Xrs, the reason the original escaped the pitfalls we are talking about here is that Austin's 60s sensibilities are the butt of the joke, not the advancement of societal norms so often decoratively labeled as "political correctness". The movie is about the character learning to adapt to the times, and not the character demanding the times return to the 60s status quo.

Really though, I think they already sort of made the movie we are talking about here, and it turned out fantastic. The 21 Jump Street movies were basically what we are describing, just without time travel shenanigans. Channing Tatum's character, who was hot shit at his high school in the 90s, returns to high school 20 years later and finds that the things that made him popular are no longer cool and he has to learn to adapt to changed circumstances. Obviously that one is specifically satirizing the change in school culture post-90s, but it works on a general level too I think.

OP described something which conflicted with my direct, personal experience with that thing. I offered up my perspective. You responded with your perspective, based on your own anecdotal evidence. Yes, I could have run off to Google to fact check you and learn of all of the types of BFA that are out there. I chose not to. Why? Because we're in the comment section of an article that has NOTHING to do with blank firing adapters. I assumed, and I guess you're just going to have to forgive me for not researching in advance enough to not make this assumption, that, in responding to my post, you might be interested in further expounding upon the statements you made and answering questions I had about how your devices worked since they were clearly of a different design than what I had experienced. On the topic of assumptions, I was very clear that I was making an assumption so as to make it painstakingly obvious that I wasn't trying to say you were WRONG ON THE INTERNET, but just that I wasn't clear on how the device you were describing could be functional, given my previously stated understanding. I even attempted to reinforce that I wasn't trying to invalidate your assertions by stating I was certain that wood tipped blanks were a real thing, I just had no personal experience with them.

So, I dunno what to tell you man. I tried really hard to be as non-confrontational as possible in my comments. I'm tempted to say that I clearly failed in my ambition there, but no, I don't think I will. You responded like a dick, and I think you ought to ask yourself what you're doing in a discussion forum if your first response to a comment asking for you to clarify some of your statements is "fuck you, Google it."

I'm a little confused by your response. Everything in my post was written from the perspective of firing the type of blank I described (no bullet, balsa wood or real) with the BFA attached. While I have had that type of blank cycle the weapon without a BFA attached, it's the exception to the rule.

Furthermore, would you clarify the use of these balsa wood bullets for me? Because, given my understanding of BFAs and what you described, I don't see how those two concepts would work together. As you said, the principle behind BFAs is plugging the barrel so more gas is directed to the action, rather than our of the system. If you had a BFA fitted to a weapon that was firing blanks which were tipped with wood or some other fake projectile, my assumption would be the debris would collect in the end of the barrel behind the BFA post. Hell, that's why we always hated training with blanks, it was always a nightmare to clean out the carbon buildup in the weapon after since none of it was expelled in the firing process like it would be in normal operation. Compacting a shit load of debris in the barrel of your weapon does not seem like it would be the intended outcome of a training event, but dumber shit has happened.

I am sure that there are blanks (especially in the context of a Hollywood armory) which are designed in such away to more closely resemble real ammunition, I've just never worked with something of that ilk, and it doesn't jive with my (limited) understanding of how firearms work.

You might be getting confused with the circumstances around Brandon Lee's death on the set of the Crow, which makes sense since that has been a hot topic when discussing the situation on Rust's set. As I understand it, in the case of Lee's death, they had taken live rounds and "converted" them to dummy rounds by removing the bullets, dumping out the gunpowder from the cartridge, and then reinstalling the bullets. However, they did not remove the primer from the cartridges, because they wanted the bottom of the cases to look pristine for shots where the revolver was loaded.

At some point, one of these "dummy" (but still very much not inert, thanks to the primer) rounds was accidentally fired. Because they had removed the propellent, only the primer detonated. This provided enough force to dislodge the bullet from the case, but not enough to expel it out the barrel. No one checked the barrel before a blank was loaded into weapon for the scene where Lee's character was shot. Blank detonated, dummy bullet is dislodged, Lee is killed.

So, while both productions are staggering examples of safety protocol failures on film sets, the circumstances are differ in the details.

That's not really what BFAs do, at least not the models I've used. You seem to imply that weapons with BFAs fitted are still firing real rounds, which are rendered safe by hitting the adapter. That's not true. They are firing blanks, which are cartridges with the bullet and some of the powder removed. Pull the trigger, you get a pop, a flash, and some smoke. Yay!

Pull the trigger again though, and you're very likely to have a misfire because the next round failed to feed from the magazine to the chamber. This is because most semi or fully automatic weapons use some of the energy of a fired round to cycle the action which expels the spent cartridge and feeds a fresh round into the firing chamber. When you fire a real bullet, it actually acts as something of a plug in the barrel for the very brief period of time it travels through it. This allows the pressure to overcome the resistance of the weapon's action, and thus operate.

When you fire a blank, there's no bullet. No bullet means no plug, which means that all of the gas from the explosion just rushes right out the end of the barrel and is not enough to cycle the gun. This, you have to manually run the action, turning your scary big black assault rifle into a quaint bolt action rifle.

So, how do you solve this problem? You make your own plug and stick it on the end of the barrel to redirect all of the energy through the weapon system rather than expelling it. That's a all a BFA is, a metal post matched to the diameter of the barrel that screws into place to plug it. This has the additional positive of preventing anything from exiting the barrel accidentally while firing blanks, which is useful in the training contexts that you often see these devices, because you're often "firing" on other people.

If you were to use a BFA in the manner you describe, i.e. with a real bullet, you're certainly going to damage the shit out of your weapon, and possibly wind up in the Emergency Room because you caught some metal splinters in the face when the end of your weapon exploded.

Then you leave me no choice. I hope you stub your toe. Not the big one. The lil guy. Just remember, you've brought this curse up on yourself.

I mean, if they spill enough Amish blood to the point where sailing and docking is involved, don't you think someone should stop them?

I had almost managed to scroll away before I remembered what soaking was, and now I want an apology for the image that you've placed in my head

Depends on your bunny rabbit stance, I reckon.