Bob stopped me in the break room to let me know about the new thing he was trying out. (1)

“Have you tried TV?” he asked. (2) “I watched TV last night, and it really helped me unpack some issues I’ve been having.”

Mark couldn’t help but cut in before I could answer. “I’ve heard that some people really went down a conspiracy rabbit hole after watching TV and it really messed them up.”

Alvin looked up from his sandwich. “I’ve heard people tell me that they learned a lot from TV,” but Simon, from across the table, quickly cut him off. Simon had personally seen things said on TV that he knew were untrue.

The conversation quickly got heated as all four insisted they were correct, and I slipped out to eat my lunch elsewhere.

It depends, right? TV is not a single thing. What you get is going to vary a lot depending on what programming you watch. Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood is very different than Bob’s Burgers or Law & Order or Ancient Aliens. The differences can be because of network specialization (Animal Planet vs. any news channel) or production values (local access) or even change depending on who owns the network (CBS).

All four of them were both right and wrong. And they probably were a lot closer to agreement than they thought. The problem was the way they referred to it all as “watching TV”. It made it seem as if they were talking about the same things, when they really were not.

This post is actually discussing how we talk about “AI”.

Featured Image by Pikurā from Pixabay

(1) No, this didn’t actually happen. It’s a fictional illustration.
(2) You can sort of substitute “YouTube” here, but it’d be even closer to say “online videos.”

One of the biggest problems with the idea of ethics around generative AI, particularly with artwork, is how it was trained. (1) Artists of assert — publicly and in lawsuits — that OpenAI and other firms keep violating copyright to steal their work to use for training data. The firms typically claim, while admitting they used to do that, they behaving more ethically now and respecting copyright.

I believe those claims are false, and that the efforts of visual artists to combat this are showing results in the generated output. Added to the shallow and repetitive nature of genAI images and the increasing public dislike of genAI images… well, it’s not looking good for them. (You may cheer or boo as you wish.)

Nightshade, and later, Glaze were developed in order to “poison” the training data. The alterations those programs make are subtle to the human eye, but are apparently quite noticeable to AI training data. It’s meant to make the training data unusable for the models without appreciably disturbing the human experience.

But the alterations are visible, and have a very specific “look” to them. At high intensities, the process is pretty noticeable:

You can still see the same patterns, although they’re much less obvious, at the low intensity setting as well. As above, the treated image is on the right. And just like above, it combines small dots and natural variation of texture and color into small blotches of patterns and lines.

While subtle, those are not compression artifacts; these are the same resolution being displayed side by side and saved as one image. (I tried making them into video or an animated GIF; the video encoding algorithm made it harder to see, not easier.)

But does it actually work?

Well, take a look at these images from OpenAI’s “Images” that made me go “huh.”

Because the way those “freckles” are blotches, the shadows in the woman’s cheek, and the pattern of the beard, seem awfully familiar.

I’ll admit, I’ve only generated a handful of images using their tool, and this does not show up in every image. It did, however, show up in the images generated with this style.

That’s exactly what you’d expect to see from images generated from poisoned training data.

This is Super Not Good for the big AI companies, even if I’m wrong about what caused these artifacts in the images.

If I’m right, then not only does this demonstrate that Nightshade, Glaze, and similar technologies are having an impact, but it also implies that the big AI companies are still doing exactly the same copyright violations as before. It also implies that these companies aren’t paying any attention to what they pull into their training data, which not only leads to poisoned images, but also makes them far more likely to suffer from model collapse. That’s a degree of lassez-faire that crosses the line into irresponsibility.

But it’s even worse if I’m wrong.

Because if what I’m seeing here is not the effect of Nightshade and Glaze… then that just means their product has significantly degraded than the already questionable quality that it had previously.

And that is perhaps worse.

Post-script: I was having trouble finding an authentic image on Pixabay that fit the theme of this post (although I eventually did, the featured image is by amurca from Pixabay).

So just to test things one more time, I asked OpenAI’s “Images” to create an image showing a robot copying off a human artist.

First, I did see the effect again, here with the same kinds of linear and blocky patterns in the shirt where there should be shadows and texture:

Secondly, it added this as a poster in the image:

I don’t know whether to be more amused or pissed off.

(1) As with all of my AI-related posts, I’m focusing on a specific aspect rather than trying to cover all the pros and cons of the technology. It is fair to say that I am an AI/ML realist about the technology, but am generally negative about the big companies and their late-stage capitalist profit extraction tactics.

“Doesn’t everybody feel that?”

You hear it all too often when you’re neurodivergent. I was trying to explain what RSD — rejection sensitive dysphoria — felt like while managing an episode of it, and was doing a poor job. I’d just quoted neuroclastic:

RSD can be incredibly intense, and we can feel it to the core of our being as intense physical pain, discomfort, and sensory overwhelm. It can be almost impossible to reign in these sensations when an intense episode is triggered.

But it still wasn’t getting the feeling across. That it’s not just “oh, I feel rejected” in the same way. That I wasn’t whining, or trying to hold a pity party. I was fully aware that my reaction was disproportionate to the objectively small triplet of rejections I’d been hit with that morning. Living alongside the wave of RSD was my extreme annoyance at experiencing it at all.

But that realization led me to a better comparison.

We all are affected by blood sugar. Whether it’s a “food coma”, being “hangry”, or somewhere inbetween, what you eat changes how your body operates. Paying attention to your blood sugar and the glycemic index and composition of the food you eat can produce real benefits for anybody.

But while those are good things for all people, they are mandatory, require a greater level of attention, have greater effects upon, and have to be manually controlled by people with diabetes. The techniques that diabetics use may be helpful for non-diabetics (though, such as with continuous glucose monitors, the amount of help for non-diabetics may be minimal), but monitoring blood sugar and paying attention to your diet is not optional for someone with diabetes.

Planning on having a large meal later? You have to prepare ahead of time. Want to do something where you won’t have access to food for a long time? You have to prepare in case your blood sugar dips too low. The consequences of failing to prepare are not temporary discomfort, but possibly coma and death.

And my irritation at having to pay attention to those things due to my own high blood sugar is exactly the same irritation I have with some of the more troublesome neurodivergent traits I have. Things that other people just do or intuit automatically, for me, require working through the steps manually.

For the RSD in particular: Yes, everyone feels rejection. It’s unpleasant for everyone. As I understand it, most people don’t have to manually deduce that what they’re feeling is rejection from the symptoms. They do not have to explicitly assess whether that rejection, once identified, is justified. They do not need to manually do techniques to bring their physiological response back to a more reasonable response.

And that’s just one trait.

I’ve discovered that overstimulation — good or bad — has an effect on not only my mental state, but my physical one as well. I have to actively curate my environment for hours both before and after a high-energy social engagement to avoid experiencing a meltdown from overload.

I can suppress it and “power through”, but I will pay for it later. After one recent period of “powering through” a stressful situation, I had intense fatigue and full-body aches (like the flu but without the sneezing and coughing or fever) that made me useless for a day, and really messed with my emotional state for days afterward. The effect is noticeable — if I’m not careful — even with “good” stress, like a big positive change in my life, or an enjoyable (but intense) experience, like going to a local music show, or going to Pride events. If I’m careless, the effects can be large even for small, excellent things, like how I was practically non-verbal for a few hours after watching Project Hail Mary in theaters. (1)

That’s very similar to the way my dad (and other diabetics) have to spend extra attention to blood sugar, his insulin, what one eats, and activity levels throughout the day.

So yes, everybody does feel “that”, probably, to some degree. Everybody feels rejection. Everybody gets overwhelmed. Everybody has blood sugar. Everybody has limits.

But not everybody has to live by manually monitoring those systems in order to stay functional.

(1) I often pause films, particularly emotionally intense ones, in order to avoid this effect.

Featured Image by Gerhard Bögner from Pixabay

A friend asked me for a take on a social media post by a mutual acquaintance.

I definitely did have a take, because the post said, explicitly and in so many words, that ADHD and autism are not disabilities.

I understand why some people need to think of ADHD and autism as diseases or disabilities. It’s gotta be a disease/disability to get accomodations and to get insurance to cover things. … But they just … aren’t.

• The social media post I’m referring to

And I want to talk about that for a minute.

I’m not screencapping, linking to the post, or naming the person because it wasn’t a public post. But additionally because I think they actually were coming from a good place. A place of saying that all people have intrinsic worth, regardless of neurotype.

Among the reasons I believe that is because the post pretty quickly clarified (“other than comorbidities”) that they felt the problems that neurodivergent people have are not because of some kind of inherent problem, but because of the way society is built, or the need to get legal or insurance accommodations.

…being neurodivergent is just a different way of being. One that evolved over a very long time. It’s just a
normal, healthy part of human diversity … The reasons why neurodivergent people have a hard time are due to the completely artificial ways that our society and in particular the corporate world has been set up.

• The social media post I’m referring to

That is a true statement, and laudable.

But immediately after stating that, they ended up sounding extremely reductive and ableist. They compared the disadvantages of their neurodivergence to those of other physical, inherited conditions, saying that their neurodivergence wasn’t as big of a problem as other, physical aspects of their phenotype and genotype. (1)

And that‘s a problem in two big ways.

The first, and most obvious, is that both autism and ADHD, let along the umbrella term of neurodivergence, cover pretty big spectrums of experiences, abilities, and deficits. And an individual’s abilities — and deficits! — can change over the course of a person’s lifetime. All types of neurodivergence cover a wide range of abilities and deficits that can impact an individual’s ability to care for themselves and interact with society. A sweeping statement like “autism and ADHD are not disabilities” is inherently reductive, and rapidly disproved by the wide range of those abilities and deficits.

The second, and more problematic, issue is that it erases the very people it hopes to value.

Again, I believe they meant to convey that all people have inherent intrinsic worth.

But they began the post by saying neither was a “disease” OR “disability”, and later used them almost interchangeably.

Doing so implies that disease and disability both carry the same, negative value judgment.

That they are both something to get rid of.

I will wholeheartedly agree that neurodivergence is not a disease.

But it is a disability. A disability that is worsened, like many others, by the lack of accommodation in our society, but a disability all the same. Having a disability is just … a fact. Because of something you can’t control and inherent to yourself, you have less ability in some areas. That just … is.

I have been effectively (if not legally defined as) disabled my adult life… because I require glasses to be able to see. Without them, I am simply not able to see. Luckily for me on that from, there’s assistive tech — glasses — that minimizes the effect of that disability most of the time.

I am not defined by my nearsightedness, but it’s still there.

Pretending that my nearsightness does not cause problems does not make the problems go away — it ends up making all the problems worse by ignoring the very real accommodations that I do need.

Minimizing the impact of a disability on a person’s life, particularly by comparing it to another disability, does not provide dignity, it is gaslighting erasure, no matter how good the intention.

We can, and should, address the ways that our society is built. Not just the lack of accommodations, but the ways that its structure actively harms others and transforms differences into disabilities.

But we cannot do that, no matter how well intended, at the expense of erasing the very real difficulties both large and small created by our neurotypes.

(1) There’s another issue, due to the specific example they chose, but that distracts from and is irrelevant to my point here.

Featured Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Are the monogamous people okay?

If pop culture articles are any indication, the answer is not in the least.

I’ve vaguely noticed a few more profiles on dating apps getting angsty about guys having female friends, and now I know why.

The new-ish relationship buzzword meme is “microcheating,” which, according to this Atlantic article, can encompass anything from sending nudes to someone other than your partner all the way to “a glance, a laugh, or non-sexual touching.”

So, basically, it’s whatever you use to justify your insecurity.

I will give both the Atlantic and Vox article I saw the smallest credit for acknowledging that what one person considers “microcheating” — or any kind of infidelity — may not count for another.

But this “microcheating” thing is just bullshit.

Yes, some of the things lumped under the “microcheating” umbrella are pretty obviously objectionable — sending someone else nudes comes to mind. However, the vast majority seem to be things that are, or at least could be, innocuous. Not only a glance, but also likes and follows on social media and other rather routine online behavior.

That’s not cheating. That’s insecurity. Add in an unhealthy lack of direct communication in the relationship, and you have conditions ripe for brain weasels to spin you a suspicious story about their motives and set you down a paranoid suspicion spiral.

Worse, shoving these insecurities under the “cheating” (micro- or otherwise) umbrella makes it easy to not have to address them. Calling it “cheating” ends all discussion; the other person is automatically “wrong”. They’re “cheating”, so that means they are the bad one. You don’t have to do the work of figuring out where that insecurity is coming from, or whether or not it’s reasonable.

It might not even be insecurity about the relationship per se. Zoe Yu — author of the Atlantic article — said on the Vox Explain It to Me podcast:

You might not actually object to your boyfriend liking some girl’s post. What you actually might be concerned about is the message that it’s sending to this person, given the social meaning that we’ve now assigned collectively to likes and comments and follows.

You might not actually think, “Oh, my boyfriend might be attracted to this person because he’s following her on Instagram.” It might actually be the fear of “How is this going to reflect on me? How is this going to embarrass me and how is it going to affect the way that other people see my relationship and whether or not my significant other is sufficiently loyal?”

Zoe Yu (via Explain It to Me)

So instead of addressing the insecurities in the relationship with the person in the relationship, or reflecting on and changing the way you relate to society around you, let’s just weaponize it against the person we love and call it “cheating.”

I’m sure that will work out just fine.

There was another quote from Zoe Yu that needs mentioning.

I think the bar for exclusivity has gotten inordinately high, to the point where people are demanding an exclusivity of emotion, of attraction, and you can’t actually share a laugh or share a private moment with anyone outside of this romantic relationship that is supposed to be at the center of your life.

Zoe Yu

Look, I’ve been in relationships where I didn’t get (or give) the amount of attention needed or deserved. And that’s an awful feeling. Particularly when combined with the visibility of online behavior; it can feel very devastating. For example, to be left on “delivered” while you can see them being active on social media feels pretty crappy. But that’s a matter of priorities, and something to talk about and work on together. Just calling it “cheating” is just an excuse to avoid directly discussing it with your partner.

The other direction of that assumption is just as toxic. Even if you’re in that place where you would like to spend all of your time with “your person”… there is a big difference between both of you working together to spend as much time together as you can and demanding all of your partner’s time and attention. Even if you are monogamous, that doesn’t mean you should spend all of your time and focus all of your attention on one person.

If nothing else, you should each get time to yourselves to do whatever you want with. There’s got to be some hobby or interest each of you is into and the other isn’t. Chess club, watching sportsball, political activism, macrame, mosh pits, D&D, gardening, whatever. If you’re demanding that kind of exclusive attention, then you are demanding your partner give up something that brings them joy.

I’m sure that will work out fine, too.

Featured image originally by Anthony Guillem (here’s an interview with him)

We need to talk now about what used to be unthinkable.

We need to talk about what happens the day after election day if they just … ignore the results.

I’m not talking about securing things before the election. I am not talking about redistricting, or the efforts to restrict voting rights, or how they keep bringing up the repeatedly-proven-false accusations of vote-tampering.

I’m talking about when a politician — or a whole political party — decides they just don’t want to follow the rules.

The typical answer — what’s supposed to happen — is that there are rules for that, too. Whether generally about government officials breaking rules or ignoring court orders, or specifically about election results, the answer is the same everywhere I’ve looked: some variation on “but the rules say they’re supposed to”.

There’s lots of talk about court rulings and how there are processes to keep things in check, and how things are supposed to go. There’s been movement to close possible loopholes in the laws, or clarify interpretations. Those are all good and necessary things.

But what happens when those processes are undermined, rendered toothless, or otherwise just… ignored?

We need to talk about it now, not because of which “team” happens to be in charge, but because their actions show that it is possible. Politicians (or most of a political party) ignoring the rule of law is not an unlikely hypothetical situation; it is happening right now.

In the second Trump administration’s first 15 months in office, district court judges ruled it was violating an order in at least 31 lawsuits over a wide range of issues, including mass layoffs, deportations, spending cuts and immigration practices, the AP’s review of court records found.

• AP/Scripps

So what will we do when some bullies, er politicians, simply stop following the rules? When they start actively targeting the very systems that are supposed to keep them in check?

Not just the big non-profit activist organizations.

I mean the rest of us. All of us.

This isn’t an activist thing. This isn’t a “politically engaged” thing. This isn’t a “my team or your team” thing; I’d be just as concerned if it was the other party saying the same things.

It’s one thing when it’s in a story. We are used to seeing and reading characters dealing with such a situation.

It’s a weird, uncomfortable question to ask in real life.

Ideally, it’s the sort of question you want to ask yourself before you need to decide.

“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”

• Donald Trump

But I’m very much afraid that, as a society, we already have given our answer.

Featured Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Sometimes it just ends up being pretty dots.

I keep trying to find new and different ways to look at and predict barometric weather data due to the way that it tends to correlate with me being in pain. Hell of a motivator, you know?

Some of the ways have been more successful than others. I want to tell you about this one for two reasons:

1. What does not work is just as important as what does.
2. Why I think it didn’t work.

Where I live, pressure fronts typically travel from west to east, going across Illinois and Indiana before reaching Ohio. That meant that, in theory, I should be able to get barometric pressure data from OpenWeatherMap for stations west of me, and actually be able to see the “waves” of barometric pressure in the air. After all, my graphs from the barometric pressure from my phone clearly demonstrate when fronts move through.

I got a sampling of 175 stations in a strip going from me to the Mississippi River, created a script to record the barometric pressure from all of them without exceeding the free tier’s API limits, and did an initial collection run. Once I had that, getting some interesting and useful plots was the next challenge.

And it sure looked like it was going to be a success. Not only could you kind of see the colors (or height) as representing the pressure, but you could also see change over time.

Those two renders are from data 24 hours apart, so of course they were different. It was time to turn on the data collection full-time, render a bunch of “frames” in the background, and then combine them at the end.

It’s worth noting that I am compressing and simplifying a lot of experimentation and frustration at getting the renders to overlay the map properly.

So after another 24-odd hours, I was not happy at seeing that I hadn’t thought things through.

At first glance, it seems like it worked. But… both the Z-axis and the colors used were relative to the data for each frame. Whoops.

So I needed to go back and make it standardized across the whole data set.

And that’s when I realized the other, bigger problem: scale and resolution.

The reason my graphs from the data from my phone look so dynamic — this is the last 36 hours from when I’m writing this, which includes some storms weather moving in early this morning — fits into only two of those blocks on the Z-axis of the chart above.

I am currently sampling the barometric pressure to the hundred thousandths every two minutes. The data I have access to from OpenWeatherMap is updated every 15 minutes (on average), and is whole integers only. So when I plotted the data I had gathered from OpenWeatherMap… it’s basically just showing us the barometric pressure’s “tides” from the heating and cooling of the atmosphere from the sun, not the pressure changes from weather systems that I was hoping to see.

It’s interesting, and it’s pretty, and it definitely gets the idea across that the atmosphere is a dynamic thing over our heads, but it’s not really useful, either. It also took FOREVER to render.

Unfortunately, this isn’t something I can fix, not even by narrowing the dataset of stations I sample from. The data from my phone’s sensor is a lot “noisier” than the data from OpenWeatherMap. I have to be careful to not read meaning into random noise, and to smooth out the data from my phone a bit.

But because I have collected the data with greater precision, I can smooth it (or not) as needed to eliminate noise. But there is no way for me to get greater resolution from data when it doesn’t exist.

That doesn’t mean the pattern is not there. It doesn’t mean the pattern is there, either.

It means we cannot say for sure with the current data that we have.

Luckily, the phone I’m using to record barometric pressure does have enough sensitivity to let me see the pattern.

But it’s an important reminder that our conclusions are only as good as our data.

This goes for all sorts of data, whether it’s barometric pressure or sociological and psychological studies that did not record and control for the subject’s neurotype.

Featured Image by Enrique from Pixabay

I’ve been working with two programs that make interacting with your music using mpd even easier, regardless of source.

First, I’ve updated some things with mpdq. It runs in the background every few minutes, and if there aren’t enough songs in the queue, it adds some. It chooses the songs to add based on some presets you create that are based around what genres are selected. I fixed some bugs and cleaned up references, as well as gave it a way to list what the presets it knows about are.

But most important is the addition of an interactive mode where you can not only quickly (and easily) change the preset it uses, but also preview what those rules are.

You can see it fill up the queue here after I choose the “Techno” preset. I have the loud output on, so it shows you what it’s choosing (and not choosing) and why as it fills the playlist. (The very pretty interface on the left is rmpc, the Rusty Music Player Client.)

You can get mpdq at GitLab or GitHub

I also made mpdcontrol (or mpdc for short), which throws together a bunch of possible sources of music – from Radiotray-ng bookmarks, mpdq’s stations, regular MPD playlists, other playlists from simple listen to DI (or similar playlists for streaming stations), and your music collection’s genre, artist, and album, makes them look a bit pretty, and lets you keyword search and select as many as you like. For example, “trance” would display and let me select from Digitally Imported stations, albums I own that contain “trance” in the name, the genre Psytrance, and so on.

You can choose multiple items as well using fzf‘s multiselect. For example, you could choose the album “The Warning” by Queensryche and the band “The Warning”. And then change your search filter and search for “Mindcrime” and add the album “Operation Mindcrime” and then it will add all of those

I also tried to make the chooser kind of “smart”, in that if you choose a new mpdq station, it puts that last, or if there’s a stream playing it will clear the queue instead of cropping it (because the stream may never end), and things like that.

You can get mpdcontrol at GitLab or GitHub.

Featured Image by whoalice-moore from Pixabay

I knew I was going to have a hot take when I saw the video title “When Players Ruin Your DnD Campaign“.

And, even though it’s an ad, I indeed do have a hot take. Not about the supplement, but the advertisement.

DM: I spent 18 hours designing this political intrigue storyline. Secret alliances, betrayal, hidden motives.
PLAYER 1: Meh.
PLAYER 2: That sounds lame.
PLAYER 3: I stab the bartender.
PLAYER 4: I hit on the waitress. Can I roll athletics for that?

Just in case it wasn’t clear that “ruining the campaign” is the same as “the players deciding they wanted to do something different,” the commercial makes it very clear:

DM: Well, do [these supplements] have something for players ruining my campaign?
NARRATOR: Indeed. Especially for that.

It’s something that GM’s have faced for a long time: What happens when the players decide they want to do something that you didn’t expect? Hell, it happened with the very first D&D campaign I played in last century.

It can be inconvenient. It can throw you for a loop and scrambling for materials. It’s definitely where supplements like the one being advertised might be helpful.

But just because the players decide they want to do something different does not mean that your planned campaign is ruined or that the prep work you did was wasted.

Is It What Your Players Want?

The first thing you need to do is determine if your players just made a different choice … or if they are not interested in the kind of campaign that you prepared or module you selected.

Speaking directly to the commercial: That DM is trying to run a kind of campaign those players don’t seem to want to play. Perhaps it’s a mismatch of the material, perhaps it’s different play styles.

That’s not what I’m addressing here, though. This is when the players have two options you expected, and they just chose (or thought of) a third you did not expect.

Rails And Clocks And Specificity

There’s three things that determine what you can do with that campaign, module, or prep work instead of just calling it “ruined”: How “on rails” it is, what clocks are associated with it, and how specific it is.

Many purchased modules and campaigns are “on rails”, with players intended to go through a specific sequence of events roughly in a particular order, as opposed to more a “sandbox” style. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, but knowing which type you’re working with is useful.

Incorporated with the idea of a campaign having a literal clock or calendar are also its metaphorical ones, often with some kind of event that kicks things off. The clock for a royal war of succession, for example, starts when the king dies, but not until then. That’s a flexible clock; the event that starts it happens whenever. An inflexible clock is tied to something that progresses regardless of player (or NPC) action, such as a ritual that can only be done “on the fifth of Redmoon” or “in five game days” . You want to know what clocks your campaign has, and what triggers them starting.

Finally, is what you planned highly specific to an existing location in your world, or can it be plopped anywhere? A campaign that is highly integrated with an existing setting (whether your own or something like Faerun or Forgotten Realms) is very specific, whereas something like “A lost temple that is discovered nearby is rumored to hold treasure” is not.

If your campaign is not specific, and its “clocks” start over some conveniently arbitrary action — like that example of a lost temple that has just been conveniently discovered in nearby wilderness — the it’s easy. You use the traditional solution of “filing off the serial numbers” and making the adventure happen where the party happens to be.

Adapting things becomes trickier when it is more specific, or its clocks are tied to a date in the campaign world, or a specific series of events has to happen in a specific order. But if you’re running a campaign, there’s one solution that I don’t hear very often:

The scenario starts to happen anyway, even though the players are not there or experiencing it.

Why Should I Bother If The Players Are Not There?

Let’s use the commercial’s example of political intrigue. Say, a struggle for succession and power after some destabilizing events that have already happened, which means the “clock” has started, and it is highly specific to a location and established NPCs. However, the players left the region chasing after a bad guy, so they are not present to “do the campaign”.

That situation isn’t frozen in amber, waiting for the players to return. Things still happen. The NPCs you spent all that work creating are still doing things.

I think a bit about what would probably happen. Would other adventurers step in, or even be able to step in, and take the player’s place and intervene? What happens in this campaign or scenario if no adventurers (or heroes) show up?

This can vary wildly. Some campaigns and scenarios will stay effectively stagnant until an outside force interferes, e.g. “The Curse of Strahd”, while others, such as “The Red Hand of Doom”, or “The Rise of Tiamat”, will have world-changing events occur if nobody does anything.

You only need the rough shape of what happened at this point. Think the Wikipedia plot summary of a film at most. In fact, I would encourage you to not think too hard on the specifics.

Because your players will start to hear about those consequences.

Things are happening elsewhere. Somewhere in the Vale is overrun. Prices double due to corruption at a trade port. They hear the name of an NPC they knew as a crimelord instead mentioned as “Mayor Fisk”. Even the campaigns like Strahd will still generate these rumors, such as hearing that travelers and caravans keep disappearing near a specific location.

What the players hear can be fudged, or even flat out inaccurate; they are rumors. Those rumors may draw the players back to the original campaign. Depending on its clocks and how “on rails” it is, they may be able to effectively “join this module, already in progress.”

But even if they do not, doing this can make your campaign suddenly feel alive to your players in a way that it did not before. The rest of the campaign world is not a static backdrop, but something that changes around them. The choices they make have consequences and matter.

To me, that doesn’t seem like anything has been ruined at all.

Featured Image by Joel Fazhari from Pixabay

If you just want to scroll past the “why”, go to “Free Video Chat For Everyone In Three Minutes Or Less” header below. Otherwise, read on!

There’s something unique about the way society is right now:

It’s less risky to video chat semi-anonymously (1) than to exchange actual contact information.

And nowhere is that more evident than in the online- and app-driven dating scene.

With apps (and forums and Discord servers and and and) there are now places where we curate the amount of personal information that we share with others. Sometimes that’s a Discord username, or keeping messaging “on app” with a dating app. That way, if someone turns out to be a creep (or worse), your real life is not exposed.

I wish that were a joke or exaggeration. I personally know far too many women who turned someone down after a few messages and had that “match” get verbally abusive and threatening. So that’s a real thing.

Some of the apps now include a built-in videochat, but many still don’t. And perhaps it’s someone you met on a forum, or a virtual introduction. Or you want to retain as much privacy as you can even while using these apps. (2) Or even that they’re using Android and you’re iOS.

Or any other reason why you’d want a quick, easy, disposable way to video chat.

Jitsi Meet will let you do exactly that. Even if you just found this and need it in three minutes.

Ready?

Free Video Chat For Everyone In Three Minutes Or Less

In another browser tab, go to the public Jitsi Meet instance at https://meet.jit.si/

Click “Start Meeting” with whatever phrase it suggests. Put a name and make sure your camera and microphone have the permissions they need.

The name you put here is what the other participant will be able to see, so just put your first name or username they know you as. Click Join meeting. You will get the next screen:

You will want to log in so that you are the moderator. Your login credentials are not shown to other participants, so you can use your Google login (or any other).

Then you’ll actually be in the meeting.

Click the person+ button at the bottom menu. You’ll get this invitation popup.

Send that link to the other participant(s) “in app” or on the forum or whatever. They can open that link in pretty much any browser (including mobile versions), and connect up just like you did.

Once you are done with the conversation, disconnect.

That’s it. You don’t to have to remember the room name, just use a randomly generated one each time. No application to install. And since it’s free, why not try it for yourself?

(1) This is semi anonymously because the concern here is privacy from the other participants, not the server itself; we use a login in this example. (2)

(2) However, using Jitsi, even with a login, is arguably far more private in a data privacy sense than using an app’s built-in videochat, given that Match Group just settled a data privacy lawsuit this year after selling user’s photos for face training.

Over the last year since I wrote ytcs, a way to browse YouTube channel feeds without the extra cruft, there have been both some changes that I’ve made over time to fix where something broke, and ideas I had where I could sand some edges off and make the experience better.

After all, I use this thing.

If you’re just interested in the program (and a quickstart on using it), check it out at GitHub or GitLab.

So first, I documented a bunch of changes I’d made, cleaned up a few things, and did a few last minute additions, and called it version 1.0.0. This really sums up the prior year’s tweaks moreso than things I actually did just today.

I finally gave up on the idea of supporting both rofi and fzf and switched the project over to fzf entirely. Doing so made it possible to queue multiple videos, see thumbnails and descriptions in the preview window, and launch the whole thing in a dedicated kitty window. I also made it so you could filter out Shorts with --noshorts if you’d prefer; I know many channels repost excerpts as shorts so it gets repetitive.

Under the hood, feed parsing was rewritten pretty extensively. If xmlstarlet is installed, the script can use it as a much faster parser. Per-channel caches were added so unchanged feeds don’t need to be reparsed every time. Refresh output became a lot more informative, and cache handling got smarter about where files are stored and how the script behaves when launched through a symlink.

Subscription management improved as well. --addsub can now add subscriptions directly from YouTube handles and channel URLs, and if necessary the script can resolve handles through the YouTube Data API using YTUBE_API_KEY (although you need to sign up for that on your own). I also updated the pile of yt-dlp options needed to keep working around YouTube’s latest “ideas”. The README was rewritten and old rofi themes were removed.

I hit “publish”, and almost immediately found bugs.

Sigh loudly.

While fixing the bugs, I realize that timg doesn’t always auto-detect kitty graphics, so I added a function that let you try to force them. That’s --fancy, which lets you force kitty graphics in preview windows without using a dedicated new kitty terminal window. Your mileage here will vary depending on what you try to force it to do. This may not work if you’re trying it, say, inside tmux inside of kittyterminal, or there may be strange formatting errors in the preview window if it’s a different size than expected.

A number of annoying bugs got fixed. Preview subprocesses now inherit the right settings, so image previews actually work the way they’re supposed to. Feed refresh will no longer overwrite a good cached XML file with an HTML error page or malformed response. Derived directories like parsed_time/ and thumbnails/ are skipped during cache scans instead of generating pointless warnings.

Playback got quieter and less messy. Direct URL playback no longer dumps video IDs to stdout, invalid URLs now respect quiet mode, and missing cache files no longer trigger awk errors when watched markers are updated. Vertical videos also now use their own geometry settings, including Shorts and direct links from TikTok and Facebook.

Hit “publish.”

Once again, almost immediately find more bugs.

Sigh even more loudly.

And while I was there and reloading things to test, I got super annoyed at how long it took to refresh my personal feeds. So while I was working on the program, I tried to improve performance for feed refreshing (I have over 200 feeds, so this was something I really wanted to do). The watched-state code used to run grep against watched_files.txt for every visible row; now the watched IDs are loaded into memory once and reused. Grouped refresh got the same per-channel caching treatment as chronological refresh, which means unchanged feeds are no longer reparsed unnecessarily. Feed downloads are compared to the existing cache, and if nothing changed the script leaves the old file alone.

Also, refresh now deletes thumbnails older than 30 days, quiet mode suppresses routine curl errors when LOUD=0, and a few presentation bugs were cleaned up. Emoji in titles no longer confuse the grouped view, title cleanup is more reliable, and grouped refresh progress once again shows the channel title instead of a cache filename.

Hit “publish.”

Almost immediately realize I still have a super-old unused CLI option that needs pruned.

Groan.

Also realize I could easily add casting support as a new feature using catt.

Since I’m already here…

Which brings us to version 1.2.0.

If you pass --kast or -k, the script resolves the video URL and sends it to catt cast instead of playing it locally in mpv. Since -c has long meant chronological browsing, I left that alone and used -k for casting.

This release also removes the long-dead --cli option and its leftover configuration cruft, improves vertical-video detection for direct TikTok-style URLs, and fixes the harmless but ugly grep error that appeared the first time you played something before watched_files.txt existed.

Finally, the README was updated again to make it clearer which arguments are positional, including direct playback URLs, --import FILE, and --addsub URL.

If you are interested in the program (and a quickstart on using it), check it out at GitHub or GitLab.

Featured Image by Pexels from Pixabay

TW: Non-explicit mentions of sexual and physical assault and discussion of their depiction.

I once argued with a professor about the meaning of a poem.

It was exactly like the stereotype. I even said, “Why can’t the refrigerator just stand for a fridge?” But the professor insisted that they knew the true meaning of the poem.

I’ve met a lot of people who had similar experiences. Maybe you’re one of them.

I’ve got some good news.

You were right.

But so was the instructor you were arguing with.

And you were both completely wrong, too.

The problem is that we’re all talking about the wrong thing. Or at least, we’re talking really, really imprecisely about it.

The poem — or story, or film, or play, or artwork of any kind — actually has no meaning at all. It just … is. Ink on a page. Waves moving through air. Pigmented glass mounted in a frame. It exists, just like these pixels do. Nothing more or less.

What we are actually talking about are two different experiences:

• The experience the creator(s) of that art wanted or hoped someone would have
• The actual experience of those who interact with the art

Those two things can be very, very different.

Take Fight Club. Written by Chuck Palahniuk, a (then closeted) gay man, it was adapted into a film by David Fincher just before the turn of the century. Academics have talked about the themes and interpretations of both in the quarter-century since, but let’s focus on the film.

A few years ago, Fincher pretty clearly stated that he intended to make a critique of hypermasculinity and fascism, and that he thought it was “fairly obvious.” But a lot of people missed that entirely, instead celebrating (and even recreating in real life) the hyperviolence and hypermasculinity that it was mocking.

On the other hand, there was me, who missed that aspect entirely. What resonated with me was the rebellion against consumerist conformity. I took the hypermasculinity as one way to reject and break out of the cookie-cutter meaningless life of chasing the “right” apartment, the “right” job, the “right” accessories from the “right” store. The idea of breaking out of one culturally-imposed template, regaining your individuality, then imposing another template onto yourself just … doesn’t make sense to me.

But none of those takes are about either the book or the film.

They are about our individual experiences creating or interacting with the film.

It’s fascinating to talk about the difference between what a creator intended and what the audience experiences. We can talk about how effective that creator was in communicating that intent. We can talk about how well the creator did and did not convey their intent, or how that changes for different audiences and why. Discussing the different ways people experience and interact with art, what it means to them, and why, can broaden and deepen our own experience and understanding of the art.

But we cannot talk about the “real” intent, message, or themes of any artwork like it is a fixed constant, inherent in the work itself.

Because we know that meaning changes over time.

American Beauty, which came out the same year, includes a similar theme (among many) of breaking out of consumerist conformity. About following passions and dreams instead of going where others think you’re supposed to go.

It also features a sequence where Kevin Spacey’s character becomes infatuated with Mena Suvari’s, and very nearly has sex with her. Suvari’s character is explicitly a minor aged 17, Spacey’s character was 42 years old. In some states that’s legal, in some states, that’s a crime.

When I first saw the film, I was closer in age to Suvari’s underage character than to Spacey’s middle-aged man. I registered the fact that Survari’s character was a minor, but just as a data point. She seemed more identifiable as my peer group than a middle-aged man. When I watched the film, the sexualization of the character (including the roses one that’s featured in the poster and the trailer) came across as tempting and seductive. Something can be tempting and still wrong, after all. That’s why it’s a temptation.

When I watched the film fifteen years later, that had changed. Now that I was near the age of Spacey’s character and had kids of my own, my brain kept shouting “THAT IS A CHILD” throughout the whole sequence. I no longer felt anything like seduction; just revulsion.

That changed feeling really drove home how self-deluded and self-serving Spacey’s character is. It altered the whole theme of the movie for me from “What will you do to follow your passions?” to “How selfish are you as you follow your passions? How many people are you hurting as you follow your dreams?” That feeling only intensified as the allegations against Spacey became public a year or so after that.

The context matters.

The film did not change at all.

I did. The world did.

So my experience of that art and what it means changed, too.

We cannot say that art has any inherent meaning. We can only express what that art meant to us, at a particular point in time in our lives and the world’s history.

The poet meant that the fridge was a symbol of something, according to that instructor. To me, when I read it in class, it represented a refrigerator.

Years later, after I talked about that poem and professor at a convention, I found the textbook and poem at home. While the poem still worked for me the same way it had decades before when I first read it, now I could see what the instructor was talking about, and how the poem also worked the refrigerator into the symbolism of the poem.

Saying that art does not have inherent qualities like “intent” and “meaning” and “themes” does not take anything away from the artwork. Instead of there being just one possibility, recognizing that meaning and intent only emerge in the interactions provides us with a vast changing array. Instead of people being “correct” or “incorrect”, it gives additional resolution to the way we think about experiencing art, its creators, and the interactions between them all.

Fun fact: I clearly remember the parts of the story about the poem happening, other irrelevant details about the incident.

But I cannot remember the name of the poet or the poem at all.

So now, for me, that refrigerator symbolizes that art does not have any inherent meaning.

And that meaning is correct, too.

Featured Image by Petra from Pixabay

Dynamic lighting is one of those features that is really cool about online play. It’s not just a visual trick; it’s a constraint that creates tension. Not knowing what’s on the other side of a wall matters. It forces decisions, and increases tension.

But if your players don’t all have the same information (maybe they’re opposed to each other, or they’re in different parts of the dungeon), that starts to break. A ping on the map works, sure, but it broadcasts to all players. It tells everyone something happened, including the person who wasn’t supposed to know.

I found Hint, a seven year old script by B. Lawson, that worked pretty well. It lets the GM signal something to specific characters. But it only worked with characters that were in the “journal”. Not tokens, not players.

Tying everything to journal characters works fine if everybody’s fully using Roll20, and you have full character sheets for each player. But that falls apart if some players at your table are using D&D Beyond or paper sheets. This version lets you target by player name or token.

This updated fork now supports using player or tokens to send messages to (you probably want to use players), and has a lot of customizability built in, including a way to change the message or recipients when you run it.

Lots more detail about how to use it (and the script itself) at GitHub; you can see a demo of it in action on YouTube or embedded below.

Featured Image by Mitaukano from Pixabay

I’m going to preface all of this by saying that Game Master style charts, just like any other personality classification, only have any use to the extent they help you make sense of the world and how you fit into it. As actual science, they’re crap. None of them are prescriptive; they just describe you in more generalized terms. (1)

That generalization can still be useful, particularly if it helps you figure out things about yourself.

But it’s really important to remember: If none of this works for you, then don’t sweat it.

That out of the way: In a recent video, Dadi from Mystic Arts (which is well worth following, YouTube, Patreon) talked some about this particular chart of game master styles:

The idea with the chart is that you classify yourself on this chart, so for example, I’m somewhere like this blue dot near the X-axis.

But that’s only where I tend to default to, not really all of what my style is. So it hit when Dadi also said he didn’t feel represented on this chart. He wanted to excel in all areas, so his “dot” on the chart would be this big yellow circle.

Dadi also pointed out that there needs to be a Z-axis reflecting something like intensity, and that’s where it kind of all clicked for me. He was describing a bounded heatmap of sorts.

Remember that from this point forward, we’re talking about the colored area as a single gamemaster.

The outer colored circle below represents one’s ability, and the intensity is expressed by the color. The areas of high intensity might be where you tend to gravitate toward with your play style.

Or you can flip it on its side and see that intensity Z-axis as “height”, if that helps you think about it.

Or maybe you’re really skilled in some areas, and are inexperienced or lacking skills in others, regardless of how much interest you have in them. That could be represented as the outer limit being irregular or uneven.

Or if you really really dislike something, having values on the intensity Z-axis go into negative values.

You might have noticed that these projections don’t all match and aren’t really accurate.

That was intentional. Because I’m using science-sounding language here, I wanted to help drive home that this is just a way to think about things.

This is a tool to help GMs or players understand their strengths, weaknesses, and play style.

This is a self-categorization tool, nothing more. It’s descriptive ONLY. If it got much more complicated, it would be easier to just fully describe how you play and what’s important to you.

But if this kind of visualization helps you understand yourself or your GM better, if it helps your experience running or playing tabletop RPGs better, then that’s awesome!

(And then go check out Dadi. For real.)

(1) Think about that for a moment. How could any zodiac sign or Meyer-Briggs classification be more accurate that describing you as an individual person?

If you’re a guy and tired of hearing “all men”, then take a lesson from this guy.

Woman: What would you do to me if I walked into the room right now?
Man: Right now?
Woman: Right now.
Man: Dude, like, like, I have to physically do something.
Woman: What would you do to me?
Man: You’re forcing me.
Pause.
Man: Nothing, what? Why would I touch a random person that walks in my room? WHAT KIND OF QUESTION IS THAT?

I don’t know why she’s laughing; he’s doing the right thing. This is what the default answer should be. Full stop.

If his response wasn’t yours, think about the implications of what your response says about how you think about women.

And if it’s not the response of your friends or those around you, it’s up to you to set them straight.

Read this before commenting: https://ideatrash.net/2024/03/a-review-of-men-2022-for-men.html

Featured Image by Sammy-Sander from Pixabay