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

I couldn’t help it. I had to ask my neighbor why they (still) supported Trump and his cronies.

The reason I asked was simple. I have to drive past their house to get downtown, so I’ve seen their front yard at least once a week for years. They kept the Trump sign up in their yard far, far too long, and I know there’s at least one person in their household with a permanent disability that requires a wheelchair ramp to get into their home.

With the active hostility from the GOP toward Medicaid and Medicare, and with a number of people in my life (including me!) with varying degrees of disability and reliance on both Medicaid and Medicare, I did not understand how someone with a disabled family member was supporting the GOP at all.

So I asked. (1)

My neighbor, while wearing a “World’s Best Grandpa” t-shirt, in front of their car with a bumper sticker for a local Catholic parish, was surprisingly blunt with their answer. (2)

“We’re doing better than we ever have. We get benefits from (other sources), so we’re fine. I think people are exaggerating how big of a deal those cuts are.”

The last sentence first: They’re wrong. Independent estimates project nearly 12 million people will lose coverage due to Trump’s OBBBA. (3)

However, I had my answer from the first two sentences. I knew that the conversation was effectively over.

Because my neighbor had gotten theirs, and did not give a damn whether or not anyone else around them was taken care of.

There were other things that bothered me before I could extricate myself from the conversation. It bothers me that someone could be a parent or grandparent and still think that shielding pedophiles, harassers, and abusers is acceptable in their elected officials, let alone worthy of support.

But my neighbor’s explanation made sense of that, too.

They had theirs, and that was the beginning and end of the story.

It does not matter to my neighbor how objectively selfish, bigoted, evil, or cruel Trump and his cronies are, or continue to be. They will continue to support him and that party as long as they keep getting theirs, no matter how many other people are hurt in the process. (4)

Over 350,000 Ohioans will lose health coverage, thanks to the GOP. Other reports estimate it’s even worse, with half of of all Medicaid recipients in Ohio expected to lose coverage next year. People who live in their state. Their town. Their neighborhood.

And my neighbor does not care, because it is not affecting them personally.

It’s as simple, and sickening, as that.

I want it to be more complicated. I want there to be some kind of rational reason. Some thought, some effort made to square up one’s publicly espoused faith and the cruelty of Trump and the GOP.

But there isn’t.

This isn’t an abstract thought experiment. Prior to being (effectively) dissolved in 2025, USAID was merely 1% of the federal budget. Musk (who could singlehandedly raise every US citizen above the poverty line for 1% of his annual income), at the direction of Trump and the GOP, dismantled USAID, and they celebrated doing so. The cut of that 1% of our federal budget has resulted in the deaths of over 750,000 people… including half a million children worldwide. Cutting that aid does not mesh with the teachings of Jesus. (5

For many, including my neighbor, those deaths don’t matter. They are less important than their own selfishness.

And that explains entirely too much about the behavior of Trump, the GOP, too many corporate Democrats, and entirely too many of the everyday people whose support of them keeps hurting and killing the most vulnerable people in our country, and in the world.

Fred Rogers said, “Look for the helpers.”

I found people who are proud that they are not.

(1) Politely. I made sure that I stated that I was curious, not confrontational, and tried to ensure that was the “vibe” I was giving off.

(2) As always, I’ve altered some details for privacy, but not the content of the conversation. That said, this is as close as verbatim and accurate as I can get without accidentally exposing their identity.

(3) A full analysis of the OBBBA from Yale projects all sorts of negative consequences, but a whole bunch of those effects don’t start taking effect until late in 2026 or early 2027 — after the midterms.

(4) This set of priorities is in direct contrast to where I talked about voting for a non-perfect candidate as harm reduction, emphasizing doing the greatest good for the most people, in particular those who are most vulnerable.

(5) If you’re going to quote Matthew 26:11, be sure to quote 26:12 as well, which makes it clear that he’s talking about using the anointing oil on Jesus, and as a symbolic part of his journey to the grave and resurrection. This is clearly about a single specific situation, not a principle.

For you always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me. In pouring this ointment on my body, she has done it to prepare me for burial.

The necessity of a liberal arts background for STEM is made apparent nowhere moreso than AI research.

Because clearly they have not understood Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

You know, the one subtitled “The Modern Prometheus”?

It’s not “horror” in the modern sense. It’s horror in the sense of psychological dread, the unexamined consequences of one’s actions, and a creator’s responsibility toward the created.

Being conscious and aware is a mixed blessing at best. The joke in Rick and Morty’s “butter passing robot” is not that the self-aware robot is only there to pass butter.

It’s the last, less-quoted line from Rick: “Yeah, welcome to the club.”

That line matters. It shows Rick’s default way of interacting with the world is sociopathic (something too many fans forget), but that Rick also realizes the joke is on everyone, including him.

None of us know what the purpose of life is. It’s existential dread, and it can be devastating.

The horror of Dr. Frankenstein’s hubris is the same horror we laugh at in Rick and Morty. We ignore it in order to function; that’s why we laugh at the robot’s “Oh my god” instead of Rick’s “Welcome to the club.”

We talk about the utility, environmental costs, and copyright implications of LLMs. We absolutely should.

We do not talk about making sure that we are not cruel. (1)

Artificial consciousness is considered possible as an emergent property. There are researchers trying to create exactly that kind of strong AGI — artificial general intelligence — using current models of personality theory and psychology.

This isn’t to argue that LLMs are conscious and self-aware.

But why would you strive to create an entity that is capable of having an existential crisis? That is sociopathic cruelty.

The reasons folks engage in this kind of development and research come down to “understanding our own consciousness” or “gaining knowledge”.

We have ethics rules about human experimentation, both medical and psychological, developed in the 20th after abuses: Mengele, Tuskeegee, Zimbardo, Milgram, more. We still use data and information gathered in those experiments.

Those experiments gave us knowledge about the human condition (or gave the impression of doing so).

But they were also cruel.

So we stopped doing those experiments.

So when we find ourselves acting out a reverse Milgram experiment with LLMs, when we attempt to create something that could experience an existential crisis, the issue is not whether or not we succeed in doing so. The horror is not that it is created.

The horror is finding out that we are cruel enough to know exactly what we are doing… and we keep doing it anyway.

(1) We don’t guess if the anesthesia has taken effect before starting the surgery, why would we guess that we’re not being cruel? And before the vegans and vegetarians say it: Yes, I know.

Featured Image by Elisa from Pixabay

Let us be clear about one very specific point:

You did not “write” a creative work with AI. You did not “create” a visual work — video or still — with AI. (1)

No matter how skillful and refined your prompts are, you did NOT create it. You do not get an ounce of credit or pride for what an AI/LLM spits back out.

Not because of the ethical or environmental or copyright issues — though those all still exist.

It’s so much simpler than that.

You did not create that artwork. The closest analogy is that you just commissioned it. You asked for it, perhaps even “paid” for it, but you did not create it any more than Pope Sixtus IV painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

No matter how skilled you are at writing prompts, you do not get any more credit for the output than someone who commissioned artwork. Literally nobody says that Pope Sixtus IV painted the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling.

Mostly because it was Pope Julius II who commissioned it. The fact that you probably didn’t catch that I misattributed who the patron was, and that my misattribution does not change anything about my argument is very much the point.

(1) Before someone says “theft” or something like that, yes, I know. I am making a very specific point here that complements those, not detracts from them.

Featured Image by Pexels from Pixabay

The original uploader of the Sistine Chapel image was Snowdog at Italian Wikipedia. – http://artchive.com/ftp_site.htm Transferred from it.wikipedia to Commons by Pierpao using CommonsHelper., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18462479

It is important, with all the misinformation and outright lies being peddled as of late, that we hold our critiques to the highest standard of accuracy. Not out of a “they go low, we go high” attitude, but to make sure that we do not give the liars additional ways to get away with their lies and to distract from the awfulness they’re doing.

For example, this meme from a few days ago.

It sounds plausible, but this isn’t accurate. I wouldn’t be SURPRISED, the guy appears to be a tool, and I fully expect him to NOT prosecute any of them, but this specific claim isn’t true.

Which distracts from what Mr. Blanche did say in a Fox News interview (as reported by Newsweek), which wasn’t a whole lot better.

“The DOJ has now released all the files with respect to the Epstein saga,” he said. “To the extent the Epstein files was a part of the past year of this Justice Department, it should not be a part of anything going forward.”

• Newsweek

But when we exaggerate or are hyperbolic in order to get clicks and views, it means the discourse becomes about the accuracy of exactly what he said, instead of the content of what he said, which is functionally the same. That is why accuracy matters for us.

Otherwise, we end up looking like Chicken Little even though the sky is actually falling because some detail was presented hyperbolically. And there’s no need to, either:

“New Deputy AG signals has said there was no prosecutable material in the Epstein files” makes the same point, but also is technically true, as is the meme I ended up making:

Which is horribly unfair and feels WRONG that we have to go to such extremes when they’re so blatantly lying at every turn. Why should we get raked over the coals for minor details when they’re just making shit up over there, or blatantly misrepresenting it?

I don’t have a good answer. I have just seen so many conversations derailed and distracted from the actual point over accusations of exaggeration. It keeps playing out like that over and over again, both at the interpersonal and societal level. It feeds into the “both sides are the same” narrative (1)

And if we ignore that, we’ll stay stuck in this awful cycle far longer than we need to be.

(1) Which is itself an over-generalization at multiple levels. At some levels, it’s true. At some levels and with some points, it’s clearly different.

Featured Image by NoName_13 from Pixabay

“Never let your readers hear the dice roll.”

It’s common advice from genre writers at gaming conventions, and it’s good advice.

It’s not a prohibition from using the framework or scaffolding of a game system — Honor Among Thieves uses initiative order and D&D’s time pacing during its combat scenes. It’s done well and feels natural even if you’ve never heard of the game before. While that stands out to D&D players, that scaffolding is not obvious, even though it is present.

The principle applies more broadly; when the scaffolding shows, the story suffers.

Plot stupidity, deus ex machinas, anything where it leads the reader (or viewer) to suddenly realize that the only reason certain things are happening is “because there has to be a plot.” (The variant “Only the Author Can Save Them Now” is definitely what I mean here.)

I’m only three episodes into season two of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, and it seems determined to strip away the facade and show off that scaffolding.

Don’t get me wrong. I really enjoyed the first season of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters; it was nuanced, layered, and smart. While characters made occasional stupid choices, it made sense within the context of the story and the nature of that character. The hotheaded military guy is aggressive when that’s not a smart move? Makes sense. The idealistic person is blindsided by humans being awful? That tracks. The burned-by-the-system cynical character doesn’t trust anyone enough to share information? Of course not.

In season two, a world where Godzilla is known to exist, Monarch is still ill-funded and ineffectual. A few real examples from the same episode: It absolutely makes sense that corporations would try to profit from Titans (thank you Pacific Rim), but a third of a way through the second season seems like a strange place for a group you’ve never heard of before suddenly be ultra-influential and an outsized factor. Ah, there’s giant billboards showing some of your party’s faces as wanted fugitives? Let’s have them go run a simple errand instead of laying low, I’m sure it’ll be fine. Oh, you just happen to have an old “prototype” of the exact doohickey we need? How convenient.

Of course we all know that, yes, it IS convenient for the authors and writers. Those things drive the plot. You need scaffolding to give the story structure and shape. But when those convenient coincidences (or lapses in judgment or memory) are too large or too common, your readers and viewers are having to mentally duck and weave around that scaffolding to follow the story.

They are paying more attention to the structure than to the story itself.

There are outliers — House of Leaves immediately comes to mind — where the structure is very obvious, but rather than detracting from the experience, helps draw one into it. I found Choose-Your-Own-Adventure stories compelling, not because I just wanted to “win” and get the best ending, but seeing how the story changed with those decisions. Even my pet peeve of “clap for Tinkerbell” — in the stage versions, at least — increases the immersion for the young audience it’s meant for.

If you’re thinking about your work in progress, TTRPG campaign, or what you’ll write in the future, there is a fairly easy solution. You know what decision you want the characters to make. You know where the next scenario or scene should happen. You know they’ve got to survive this unsurvivable fight somehow.

All you have to do is to rationalize it. And if you can’t rationalize it right away, add small details until you can.

One more actual example from the same episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters:

Our protagonists are being pursued by primitive religious zealots at night. It is a poorly lit night, and in some kind of wilderness, so everyone is just fast-walking. The zealots, who are maybe 100-200 meters back, want the protagonist’s camera, but are probably going to kill our protagonists as well. Ah, take the film out of the camera! That way we can keep the film and … leave the camera on the ground which may “buy them some time”. Immediate hard cut to one of the zealots walking carefully and examining the ground…and the camera pans down to show us our protagonists crouched in a small depression only 4 meters away.

Obviously they wanted this tense, life-in-danger scene. Across three different “will they be revealed” moments it both tense and provides a character moment for one of the zealots as well.

But to get to this scene, our protagonists had to wait for the zealots to catch up. They had to just…twiddle their thumbs instead of using the time the camera supposedly bought.

It would be easy to fix.

The ditch might be the only place to hide they could get to. One of them could have the classic “twisted ankle”. They argue too long about whether or not to give up the camera. Then they have a reason to be in the situation they’re in.

The same story beats can happen. The same scenes.

It just takes a little more effort and thoughtfulness.

This may seem like a small, unimportant quibble, and to a degree it is. We’re all aware there has to be some degree of scaffolding. There will be small imperfections here and there.

It’s what I said above, though. All those examples above are from a single episode. Even if any of them wasn’t big enough to kick me out of the story completely, having it happen over and over again was just too much.

You want the ways you get the story from one scene to another, or get your characters from one location to another, to at least try to make sense within the fictional universe.

It shows that you care enough about the story to make sure the scaffolding doesn’t show.

(1) Yes, I know there are some times that is acceptable or expected, work with me here.

Featured Image by Bruno from Pixabay

I got an infection in both ears this week.

It was pretty sudden; over the course of twelve hours I went from feeling a little under-the-weather to sitting in a retail chain’s clinic with both eardrums having at least a small rupture and serous (like from a blister) drainage from each of them (1), occasional dizziness, and a prescription for antibiotics.

I spent the next 36 hours pretty much in bed, and I’m still recovering as I write this. While I don’t feel as unwell as I did a few days ago, I’m still very aware that my hearing has taken a (hopefully temporary) hit.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had an eardrum blow from an infection; the prior time was just before the pandemic, but I’m still a little freaked out about the (again, hopefully temporary) loss of hearing in both ears. My hearing isn’t the best to begin with, and once you add in sensory processing issues, it was already a bit of a problem at times.

It’s not the watery “muffled” effect so often used to illustrate hearing loss; it’s mostly just like someone turned the volume knob down. But how bad is it, really? (If, fingers crossed, temporarily.)

I have a good set of over-ear headphones, so I slapped those on and headed to this open-source online hearing test with its handy-dandy online demo. (An offline tool that provides similar functionality for linux is here: https://gitlab.com/kreezxil/Linux-hearing-screen-toolkit .)

A short while later, I had this terrifying chart and a downloadable CSV file showing how badly the upper bounds of my hearing are degraded. I couldn’t hear the 8000 Hz tone at all, even though I could hear the audio channels click on to produce it! Luckily, most of the damage is above where speech typically happens, but that’s still… not great. Especially with a job hunt underway, I kind of need my ears at the moment.

Luckily for me, a lot of that can be funneled through technology — VOIP, video chats, and so on. Which means I have a chance to mess with the audio beforehand.

I used EasyEffects so that it was across my whole system and not just a single application. Using just the equalizer, I got it about right, then verified that I was on the right path (and accepted some suggested tweaks from) an LLM. I ended up with this equalizer setting; the main differences the LLM suggested were starting by turning everything down so I had more room to amplify without clipping and turning the very high frequencies back down to avoid too much hiss.

It also suggested adding some tweaks with multiband compression that I quite honestly don’t understand (“applying compression only to the upper bands to mimic hearing aid compression curves”?) but provide a small, but audible difference in quality for me.

Regardless, even without the LLM-suggested tweaks, having a system-wide user interface like EasyEffects made it pretty easy to adjust things so that everything sounds quite a bit clearer than it did before. I understand there’s even a way to build this directly into PipeWire without the nice user interface which will reduce latency, but since this will (hopefully!) not be quite so bad in a week or two, I’m not going to make any permanent changes yet.

But with hearing loss being a major risk factor for developing dementia, once my hearing has stabilized and I either have a new position with medical coverage (or Medicaid re-approves me), I’ll be able to take this data to a real professional and see how else I can cyborg my hearing back into better functionality.

(1) Any benefit from turning down the auditory stimulation is THOROUGHLY offset by the utterly squicky sensation of fluid dribbling slowly from both ears… shudder

Featured Image by Viva la vida!!! Rosa Matilde Peppi from Pixabay

There is an important distinction between objecting to your content being used to train an AI/LLM, and for one to process your content. Blurring that distinction does nobody any favors.

What rights do you have to your posts on social media?

I started thinking about this due to a reaction some users on Mastodon had to a tool designed to summarize a user’s own home feed so you didn’t have to doomscroll to catch up.

The objections were specificially about how the summarizing was being done — by an LLM.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since then.

Not about the tool itself, or whether or not it’s worthwhile. But the objections.

Because the only way Jan (or anyone else) can actually prevent that is by not posting publicly.

Before I go any further: I think there’s an important difference between “my publicly posted content cannot be used to train an LLM” and “my publicly posted content cannot be see or used by certain classes of programs, people or entities.”

First, the technical aspect: Even if those who object block Voss, that won’t achieve the goal if you have any public posts. That just means that when Voss uses the tool it won’t include those posts. But if someone else does, your public posts will be included.

That’s because they’re… well, public. Public posts (or public web pages) have to get sent to the receiving computer to be displayed. We’re running up against the same problem that DRM — digital rights management — has: In order to show the content, you have to send the content to the person getting it.

Because viewing digital content inherently means copying it, we have to briefly consider copyright for simply viewing a post. (I am not a copyright lawyer, this isn’t legal advice, I’m just a mostly-knowledgeable layperson, and I’m discussing from a US perspective.)

You automatically have copyright on anything you’ve written in the US; technically you are providing a license to display your content to the social media site. But what rights do others have in regard to what you wrote?

The closest real-world analogy we have is of public photography; if you’re in a public space and do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy, then taking a photo of what you see is a reasonable expectation. Posting publicly on a social media feed is our digital equivalent to being seen in public. Taking a photograph is equivalent to displaying the post on the end user’s system. Add to that the ToS and express “right to display” that’s included, and that part is handled.

At that point, the copyright test depends entirely on the output. While your social media posts are copyrighted, that means that someone cannot replicate it. Arguably, my screencapture of the toots above would fall under this rule (although fair use clearly applies here). While a copyright holder does have the right to prepare derivative works, unless you’re discussing a summary of just your social media posts (rather than an aggregate of a timeline), that’d be a hard thing to prove.

It’s worth noting that this tool we’re talking about is utilizing other providers on the back end — either Anthropic or Copilot. So the data is being sent to them; whether or not they are using that data to train the LLM on is subject to whatever their ToS is.

That’s an important distinction — most copyright claims against LLMs is because they are substantially reproducing the style or content of the works it was trained on. That’s why I think giving the rights to use your content to train an LLM should always be opt-in only.

In contrast, the summaries this tool produces look like this:

This looks nothing like a timeline feed, isn’t reproducing anyone’s original content or style, and is clearly transformative. (Although whether or not you should trust a summary by an LLM is a completely separate issue!)

Whatever rules we apply to this tool, we also have to apply to a tool that, say, creates alt text for images that do not have them… even if that tool is a human.

Those copyright tests have nothing to do with whether it is a human, program, or LLM creating that output.

So the actual objection (and demand) is not actually that there’s a summary of a social media feed. The objection is about an LLM doing it.

It’s the functional equivalent of “you can only read this post on Firefox, you’re not allowed to read it on Chrome.”

And that is entirely too close to the “shrink-wrap EULAs” for my comfort.

You know the type: “By receiving this email you agree to” and the like. Sort of like the anti-EULA that you’re now subject to because there’s a link to it in this post. They’re all bullshit, and particularly in cases like this, where it’s just one parties’ unwritten social expectation. I cannot say, for example, “all employees of this company cannot read or discuss my posts”in the posts and seriously expect that to hold water. (I’m sure you can imagine much more distasteful examples.)

Again, I think there’s an important difference between “train an LLM on my content” and “my publicly posted content cannot be see or used by certain classes of people or entities.” The first explicitly prepares the LLM to make derivative content. The second is functionally equivalent to viewing a post on your RSS reader, browser, or client.

There are real, valid concerns about AI/ML. Freaking out over an AI simply reading your public posts distracts from those real concerns.

Featured Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Watching over the air television in linux keeps getting easier. (1)

I had a USB tv tuner that I wanted to see if I could get to work with my laptop, particularly with the storms coming through. I figure that even if the power and internet were to go out, I could still watch weather updates from broadcast TV.

The last time I tried was several years ago, and it was a bit of a pain or required installing a whole framework, all of which was far more work and complexity that I wanted to deal with for something I’d use fairly rarely.

Well, it’s easier now. Starting with this guide, it’s even easier since w-scan is now packaged in Debian, and you can just use VLC. NOTE: The package name is w-scan but the program name is w_scan.

sudo apt install w-scan vlc

then from the commandline:

w_scan -ft -A3 -c US -L > ../vlcchans.xspf

That will take a while; in my region it took about ten minutes.

After that, it’s as simple as

vlc ../vlcchans.xspf

It’ll automatically start playing the first entry; to get back to the channel list, stop the playing channel.

(1) Though after watching some broadcast TV, I’m reminded why this was such a low priority for me.

Featured Image by Pikurā from Pixabay