Abel

No big self help lemmy so I had to ask it somewhere else. Alright, I'm an university student but:

• I don't like too much noise (no parties or bars).
• I only go to university twice per week and it's far from home.
• I don't like dating apps.
• Social media imo stresses me out instead of helping me.
• Can't steal friends of friends: New city, I know no one here.
• I suck abismally at sports. Also I don't have a sporty profile.
• Board/cardgame shops usually catter to people aged 30 and over as they can actually buy the games.

I'm just, like, out of ideas where to meet people aged 16-26. My best shot so far was in public transport but I'm usually too tired to bother. Been thinking of joining a DnD table or something just to meet people already rofl.

Hi there, I'm a trans man and just separated all winter clothes that are too undeniably feminine for me. They're the large pile on this picture, which should have ten or so sweaters. However I'm fairly petite, I have 161cm and slim shoulders. I wear S size (with some XS or M sprinkled in). I'm not sure transfem shelters would need such small clothing and I've been thinking in giving them to other shelters instead (but not thrift stores). Thoughts?

Hi there. I live with an old woman who sometimes pockets some money to work as an informal dogsitter of sorts.

So she got a pretty good amount (half a month's minimum wage where I live) to take care of a removed for a week. She doesn't accept pissfingers, though this is one of the top 2 questionable dogs she ever accepted. An adult female shih tzu with a teeth pointing out (like this picture) which means it probably came from a puppy mill.

This dog took an instant liking to my pensioner, but not to me. Also we're both females of similar stature and the dog's owner is also a female. So it's not man shy.

Whenever I approach this dog, she retreats and hides herself under a table or wardrobe. If I approach her within a range of 3 meters, she gets further away. When my pensioner is home, the dog follows her around like a shadow (expected behavior for a companion dog I think) but also puts herself between me and my pensioner barks at me when I get near. The dog never barks at me when I'm alone with it.

Whenever I open my bedroom's door, she also begins barking. She doesn't stop barking when she sees it is me. The only time she won't do that is when we're both in the kitchen, which is also our dining room, probably because she hopes I'll throw some scraps from my table (which I never did, but my pensioner does even though I told her not to do it).

She also barks back whenever a dog barks in the street. We live on the third floor of an apartment.

The dog is not bite/scratch oriented. The only time I can go near the removed is if both her and my pensioner are cuddled together in the sofa or bed. She either won't bark or ceases barking when I sit down in the sofa, but still keeps looking at me like I'm a convicted criminal. She allows herself to be pet, but is visibly uncomfortable when I try to do so, even when I don't pass my hand over her head.

Probably the worst thing though is that she has a piss mat. She usually knows how to use the piss mat, but when no one is looking she will pee in front of my bedroom's door (which is always closed). Our floor is carpeted.

Things I have tried so far that didn't work: Talk to the dog in a "toddler" tone, squat to talk to the dog, lay on the floor to talk to the dog, share space sitting next the dog, pet the dog and then give her some kibble (she wouldn't eat from my hand), put the kibble in front of her and retreat my hand (she would burrow it within the blanket instead of eating), live normally not paying attention to the dog whatsoever.

Dog also really dislikes going out for a walk and hides before being collared.

I'm thinking in buying some treats on a pet store and try the kibble strategy again but with something tastier.

Those pictures were using img2img, and a sketch of mines as a base:

AI not understanding what a portrait is

In tweaking the prompt, I noticed that my model didn't understand what a "portrait" was at all. It fared better with "face shot". From now on I also removed "armor" and "helmet" from the prompt. I also replaced "knight" with "paladin", as "knight" was biased towards full-armor pictures.

Even with "borzoi" and the picture, the AI wouldn't understand what a borzoi was at all without the "dog" keyword.

Those pictures were using img2img, and the photo of a borzoi as a base:

not bad, but not a borzoi

I tinkered with the prompt a bit more, adding "ear, dog ears" to the negative prompt and "fluffy fur, long fur" to the positive prompt.

fluffy!

Were we begin to see better results, but I dialed the fur part to "fluffy long fur" and also put in "long thin snout"

yeah only reptilians have snouts

I added "dragonborn" to the negative prompt (this is a D&D portrait model, after all) and immediately saw better results:

dogs are back!

Just as an experiment, I now brought the prompt outside img2img and into txt2img to see how solid the prompt was (images are at a lower resolution because I used fewer steps):

solid results!

The results are surprisingly better outside img2img.

Added "watermark" to the negative prompt, brought it to 50 steps in DPM++ 2MK.

photorealistic much?

I began to have some deformed snout problems, so I brought it back to Euler a. Also put the height at 768 back again so the AI would be biased towards giving me closer portraits.

nope, it gave me even bodier shots

Just as a treat, I switched "paladin" back to "knight". Maybe it would give me different results outside img2img?

I got a lot of metal snout sillyness, but this is the funniest one.

Back to "paladin", I also removed some keyword smashing from the prompt (shit like "high detail" and stuff I originally copied from somewhere else).

Results got much more consistent. Don't litter your prompts!

Also told it to give me a pencil portrait, just for fun.

Not bad, but you can see the AI was struggling against the model.

And this is why I went to emaonly-safetensors-1.5. Emaonly understands what a face shot and a portrait are! It doesn't understand the "anthropomorphic with armor" bit, though. I just got pictures of regular dogs.

Not bad, but you can see the AI was struggling against the model.

Back to D&Diffusion, I removed even more litter from the prompt. Now it only has strictly what I said I had written in within this post.

blurry

For a DPM 2++ Karras entry with 50 steps, this level of blurriness is utterly unnaceptable. Some of the keywords were added back in. Euler a gave me this:

bad quality, but right vibe

You know what? I like this. I brought it to img2img. I reduced the CFG scale from 7 to 4,5, Resize and Fill mode.

not a borzoi

The snout got shortened. The paws are awkward, but I don't think they ever won't be. I'm getting tired and lunch is getting cold, so I will just add "very" to the "long thin snout" part of the prompt and call it a day.

somewhat more borzoi-like

Before going to lunch, I noticed that I actually liked one of the images from earlier more. Remember him?

So I threw it with the new prompt in img2img while I went for lunch. It gave me back a lot of borzoi-face-shaped armor. I knew that it meant something was wrong with my prompt. The differences between my nice dogs face shorts and this sillyness was:

face shot of borzoi dog paladin, fluffy fur, medieval, high detail, sharp focus

vs

face shot of borzoi dog paladin, long thin snout, fluffy long fur, medieval era, Intricate, High Detail, Sharp focus, modelshoot style, natural colors, strong shading

So - "long", "Intricate", "High Detail", "modelshoot style", "natural colors" or "strong shading". I have an itch it is "modelshoot style". And, from the subsequent generations, I was right.

I added "portrait" back as well. I didn't like the lens effect of "sharp focus", so I removed that keyword.

The face began to get a little silly. I noticed that the snout marks were alike a labrador's, so I added labrador as a negative prompt. It worked in that the snout suddenly got a lot less wrinkly and longer, but I didn't think the output was aesthetically pleasing. I noticed that the base doesn't even look that much like a borzoi - the AI tries to capture my prompt into a more popular breed like a Poodle. We probably need a Lora to really generate borzois. So, after a hour and 300 generations later, I'll declare that singular generation from the beginning as a winner.

face shot of borzoi dog paladin, long thin snout, fluffy long fur, medieval era, Intricate, High Detail, Sharp focus, modelshoot style, natural colors, strong shading

Negative prompt: ear, dog ears, dragonborn

Steps: 50, Sampler: Euler a, CFG scale: 7, Seed: 245185935, Size: 512x768, Model hash: 937f4a8401, Model: D&Diffusion3.0_Protogen-fp32, Denoising strength: 0.75, Version: v1.2.1

Hello, I've been looking into email providers. I'm not an activist, just a regular user concerned over privacy.

I used CTemplar in the past until it shut down. Had a cockli email and although it isn't Google the privacy isn't stellar either. I tried to get into Proton, but being unable to use Thunderbird on he free plan was a massive turn-off for me since I like switching easily between different accounts.

After a bit of searching the following came across for me as the best services: [free] Autistici, PARANOID, Disroot. [paid] Posteo, Elude.

Assuming I theoretically got invites for all the free services (they're all reliant on manual approvation), which one would you recommend?

@edit: After reading a bit on the free services, I decided that I will choose them in a Disroot > Autisci > PARANOID order of priority,

Hello there. I've started my MG 2e RPG read. I've fallen in love with the setting, but I really didn't like the GM's "The Mission" part of the game.

It reads like a rushed sequence of railroads: Mice run through a pre-determined and pre-calculated sequence of encounters with a very specific number of checks, then find a place to rest where they're allowed only a short respite before hitting the road again.

I've first thought that it was going to be an easy thing to just rip that part off, before I realised that the entire game seems balanced on the fact mice have arbitrarily few checks. Screw this, and I'll also screw with the "checks" economy and overflow opportunities to call Bonds/Instincts/Goals as well.

So: Can I and it actually won't break the game? Should I just find another game?

Hello there. Angry parents stories are sadly more common, but I remember reading back on Reddit a heartwarming story about a dad who accepted fully his daughter. So while we all know how "bad" relationships usually go, I'm curious to hear about people who had love and support in their journeys.

/c/mahjong@lemmy.nerdcore.social is online!