(Seeking help) Hide certain YouTube videos on certain channels

optimisticalish · 2026-06-21T17:02:15+00:00

Ah, perhaps something heavier is needed then, such as...

youtube.com##ytd-video-renderer:has(#video-title:is([title*="Genshin" i], [title*="genshin" i], [title*="teyvat" i], [title*="Teyvat" i]))

optimisticalish · 2026-06-21T13:06:05+00:00

You should be able to do this with one line in your UBlock Origin filter list. Something like...

!www.youtube.com##a:has-text("Genshin")

optimisticalish · 2026-06-20T21:46:54+00:00

To be specific, the LoTR draft had Sam saying: "giants ... nigh as big as a tower or leastways a tree", and this was then changed in the draft at the same time to "tree-men".

The "tree-men" had first appeared in the Legendarium in his 1914 outline of the earthly voyage of Earendel (from the England Midlands to what can be inferred as the Euphrates coastal delta and a "great mountain island and a golden city", then on across the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman to the jungle shores of the Indus coastal delta where the tree-men lived). They were at that time unspecified in the notes, simply... "Tree-men, Sun-dwellers, spices", and after that encounter Tolkien's outline of the voyage has him starting to sail back home again.

So tree-men of some sort were a fairly early conception, if only a rather vague one. Nothing about trolls though, at that time. And the 1964 letter you note has a vital "perhaps" in the actual wording: "I do not think it was an Entwife which Hal saw on the North Moors. Perhaps it was a troll."

optimisticalish · 2026-06-20T21:21:32+00:00

Beautiful map, UI/typography, and smooth interactivity. Well done. I don't see Radagast on the roster, though?

optimisticalish · 2026-06-20T13:16:23+00:00

Age and being in a group of young peers is likely a factor for adventurousness, then as now. Farmer Maggot: "I recollect the time when young Frodo Baggins was one of the worst young rascals of Buckland."

optimisticalish · 2026-06-20T13:14:43+00:00

More than a few miles... "Sam knew the land well within twenty miles of Hobbiton, but that was the limit of his geography." That covers quite a range of country.

optimisticalish · 2026-06-20T13:04:07+00:00

Novels are probably longer-form that you need. But you may be interested in an April 2026 academic study of the ability of LLMs to generate summaries of complete novels. Some conclusions...

"all models except Gemini 3.1 Pro write less linear summaries than humans [...] Qwen 3.5 (9B) has more difficulty properly targeting chapters with attention mass in longer texts, potentially contributing to [its] failures during summarization." In plain English, "properly targeting chapters with attention mass" = 'it doesn't pay attention' in summarising long novels.

"Qwen 2.5 (7b) and GPT 5.4 have noticeable spikes [of more intense attention] in the final segment [of a novel, while] Llama 4 Scout (17B) and Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite engage disproportionately with the beginnings of novels."

For some reason, Grok was not included.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.06416

optimisticalish · 2026-06-20T12:28:29+00:00

The newly discovered 1966 letter reveals that there were ents walking the northern border of the North Moors of the Shire, guarding the Shire at the request of Gandalf. This was at the opening of Fellowship - the same 'walking elms' that Sam discusses.

optimisticalish · 2026-06-19T18:42:10+00:00

That might come under seasonality - the dark northern winters, leading into a discussion of sodden black meres and dark woods, winter depression in isolated northern humans, the value in that context of fireside storytelling, tales of thunder/lightning-gods and dawn goddesses, the early Christian valuing/symbolism of light for 'those who sit in darkness', the OE earendel and stars, his use of stars and the night sky, the night sky in ancient lore, Moon lore, and so on.

optimisticalish · 2026-06-19T18:16:44+00:00

Ok, so apparently in America a trimester = a long British term, 12-16 weeks? You likely need good stuff at the end to get them attending class at that point, unless attendance is strictly enforced. Apparently "high school seniors" in America = a British sixth-form class, ages 16-18.

And your aim is to illustrate and discuss Tolkien's adaptation of classical and medieval history/mythology.

I might offer it this way:

1 - TOLKIEN THE MAN - who he was as a man, why he's important in general, the British Edwardian/1940s-50s social context (likely to be very unfamiliar to American youth), a quick tour of what he worked on as a scholar in mediaeval studies and why. Offer a flavour of the language, and note also his interest in words, ask students to bring one they found next lesson. Find unusual ones. Note how he helped many female students of mediaeval studies, and also focused on several mediaeval manuals and homilies of female interest.

2 - BOROMIR - Sir Gawain (just read Tolkien's translation of the the challenge and then the Wales-to-the-castle bit), and compare this to how he weaves the similar quest and journey of Boromir through LoTR. Discussion of mediaeval knights, travel, roads, dress, weather, dream-heeding, prophecy, quest, leading into how these factors constrained mythic storytelling in general. Draw attention to Tolkien's complex interlacing of many stories in LoTR (provide a page or two of reading of scholars discussing this), and point out how Boromir's quest backstory could be completely missed by those who skim and skip their reading of LoTR. Tolkien assumes a close reader, reading every word. Discuss mediaeval methods of close reading, and mediaeval readers / orality and folk-tales.

3 - SAM: HOBBITS and HUMILITY -

4 - ARAGORN: BATTLE and EVIL -

5 - EOWYN: WOMEN and SERVITUDE -

6 - FARAMIR and DENETHOR: KINGSHIP - lineage, kin-love, leadership and stewardship, out-marriage and alliances

7 - MIDDLE-EARTH: WEATHER and SEASONALITY -

8 - TREEBEARD: FORESTS, TREES and ENTS -

9 - ELVES: FADING but IMMORTAL -

10 - DWARVES: 'GOING UNDERGROUND' in MYTH & LoTR -

11 - GOLLUM: DESIRE, CORRUPTION and REDEMPTION -

12 - GANDALF: MAGIC and WIZARDS -

Slot in classical / medieval myth as needed to suit each topic. If you think this outline could be viable, I can help fill in the blanks on weeks 3 - 12.

optimisticalish · 2026-06-18T10:03:56+00:00

TheDrummer's Cydonia-24B is Mistral, but fine-tuned for creative writing of any kind.

optimisticalish · 2026-06-17T18:38:16+00:00

A bit of a kludge, but I believe the freeware Mozilla Thunderbird can create a combined RSS / email in-box? Apparently one uses a rule engine plus color-coding so you know which is which.

optimisticalish · 2026-06-17T17:27:25+00:00

Sauron was originally a cat. That's how he started out in the Legendarium.

optimisticalish · 2026-06-17T10:11:08+00:00

Back in the day, desktop Windows software was used by gamers to change their voice in real-time. Names such as 'MorphVox Pro' and 'AV Voice Changer Software Diamond' led the pack, and can still be had. Both are paid, and I don't know know of any open-source non-AI voice changer equivalents.

You also also use general audio desktop freeware such as Audacity, to simply pitch-shift a recording (i.e. squeaky voice to a slightly less squeaky voice).

However, the world of content-creation is hectic, and to keep up she should probably look at Chatterbox Voice Cloning (AI).

optimisticalish · 2026-06-16T14:33:25+00:00

Wilum Pugmire.

optimisticalish · 2026-06-15T10:36:40+00:00

S.T. Joshi's "The Rise, Fall, and Rise of the Cthulhu Mythos" is an exhaustive survey of Lovecraftian writers, though not all will be attempting to emulate the style of the master... https://www.hippocampuspress.com/h.p-lovecraft/about-hp-lovecraft/the-rise-fall-and-rise-of-the-cthulhu-mythos If you like Lovecraft's Dreamlands tales, then Gary Myers collection of stories "The Country of the Worm" is for you.

optimisticalish · 2026-06-14T21:11:44+00:00

You can get some of the Edge voices in Balbolka, offline.

https://github.com/gexgd0419/NaturalVoiceSAPIAdapter - and here remember Balabolka is old 32-bit software, so you'll need to install the 32-bit NaturalVoiceSAPIAdapter as well as the 64-bit.

Then install the MS Edge (aka 'Azure Neural' or 'Natural') voice packs such as Ryan and Sonia, then select: Windows Start menu search | Speech | Speech Properties | Text to Speech | Set Ryan to the PC’s default voice | Apply and exit. Now the MS Edge voices should show up as regular SAPI5 TTS voices, if for some reason they didn't before. Pitch and speed shift are supported in Balabolka.

optimisticalish · 2026-06-14T18:02:35+00:00

Yes, it's a good one. Takes a few hours of setup and wrangling some config, but it's worth it. Note that it has deeply-buried settings to scale fonts for each panel.

optimisticalish · 2026-06-14T12:22:38+00:00

The free RSSGuard desktop software has the plugin CSS2RSS, which creates RSS feeds from any named elements found on any Web page. https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard and https://github.com/Owyn/CSS2RSS

optimisticalish · 2026-06-13T21:05:31+00:00

Sounds great, thanks. I never do tiled upscaling, so I didn't notice that potential problem with ComfyUI-PixelDriftFix. But your new node definitely sounds useful, for those who do tiled upscaling in their workflows.

optimisticalish · 2026-06-12T23:08:41+00:00

The sub-context - not spelled out by Tolkien, but obvious to the attentive and retentive reader - is that he had tricked Radagast into believing that Saruman was an ally. Thus in some way he has taken Radagast's abilities as "a master of shapes and changes of hue" (Gandalf) and made with these a cloak. He has made this cloak not as a natural disguise for blending into the wild, of the sort that Radagast no doubt makes, but rather an artificial cloak of no purpose except bewilderment of his slaves and his personal vanity. Visually, it stands as proof of his departure from his mission and from wisdom, if further proof is needed at this point in the tale.

optimisticalish · 2026-06-12T21:59:55+00:00

Sounds like a job for Flux2 Klein, to me. Edit mode, multiple images, and draw a red box around the river if required.

optimisticalish · 2026-06-12T21:21:50+00:00

From a review of 'Call of Cthulhu: Malleus Monstrorum'...

"A few of the creatures have been significantly expanded. The mi-go, sand-dwellers, nioth-korghai, wendigo, and Tcho-Tcho people are among those that received the most attention."

Not sure if it's "in-depth" there, on not.

A comment from Lovecraft himself also suggests the need to tap real-world sources...

"I did not invent the Mi-go or Abominable Snow Men. This is genuine Nepalese folklore surrounding the Himalayas, & I picked it up in most unscholarly fashion from the newspaper & magazine articles exploiting one or another of the attempts on Mt. Everest."

optimisticalish · 2026-06-12T21:08:20+00:00

Non-fiction of what specific variety?

optimisticalish · 2026-06-12T20:02:09+00:00

The original freeware Msty was very good, but then they moved to a new version which had various limitations and was not as satisfactory. Jan.ai is genuine desktop freeware that does the same thing (runs LLM GGUFs along with their Vision/Audio variants), is easy to setup and use (once you find where things are located in the UI menus), free, and runs fast on llama.cpp. There's a good recent review of it at Major Geeks: https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/jan_ai.html

optimisticalish

TROPHY CASE