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

TL;DR: Google patented a system that will silently swap out your page for an AI generated one if they want to. It is time to stop using Google search.

There are quite a few people who have been annoyed at Google’s AI summaries and promoted search results. To those people: You made the right choice.

If you’re still relying on tricks like adding a bit to the end of your search or an extension, this news from Forbes indicates that soon won’t be enough. (1)

A patent granted to Google on January 27, 2026 titled “AI-generated content page tailored to a specific user” describes a system that evaluates your company’s landing page in real time and, if it decides the page won’t perform well enough for a specific user, replaces it with an AI-generated version assembled on the fly. The user never sees what your team built, they see what Google’s machine learning model thinks they should see instead.

The system described is not just a summary on the search. The article says this system will invisibly change what the user sees instead of your site, changing what is presented in your browser.

That alternative page isn’t a cached copy of your site. It’s a dynamically assembled page built from the user’s current query, their search history, their account context, and whatever Google can extract from your original page. The patent describes possible elements including personalized headlines, suggested product filters, a product feed, sitelinks to product detail pages, and even an embedded AI chatbot. In other words, a complete brand experience built by Google. Not you.

This is terrifying. Even if you use a different search engine, Google is the “default” for so many people that it’s practically a common noun. This is a degree of change and control over what others see that nobody should have.

And you can stop it.

How?

Stop. Using. Google.

If you don’t like those AI summaries and don’t want it to get worse, you have to vote with your (virtual) feet. That’s it. Change the default search engine, everywhere you can, and stop using products that won’t.

This is something you can do that has real results, as we can see with Microsoft’s floundering from shoving Copilot into everything and users, en-masse, simply not using it. The company is changing what they are doing as a result.

The same has to happen here.

I personally use — and recommend — Kagi for search. It’s a paid service, but their argument for why it’s worth being paying for makes a lot of sense to me, and I’m very happy with the results. DuckDuckGo is frequently mentioned, as is Brave, but there are loads of search engines that respect your privacy, and if you want, you can use (or even self-host) SearXNG.

(1) The viewpoint from the Forbes article presumes this is a bygone conclusion, and focuses on how businesses can cooperate with this, and make the web less friendly for humans and more useful for AI.

If there’s one insight we all need to focus on most, it’s this: your job is no longer to build a destination. It’s to build a parts library. And one that’s well documented so that when an AI agent re-assembles those parts for the human on the other side, the parts are put together in a way you wish to be represented.

As a technical matter, this is simply bullshit. Delivering different content depending on the capabilities of the viewer has been around since MIME/Multipart email was first developed last century. Delivering sitemaps and mobile-optimized pages is a matter of course, and has been for years.

One of the biggest gaps when moving away from Discord — at least for me and my group — are some of the specific bots and services that can be used with our group calls.

I do NOT mean AI-powered chatbots. These are utility programs.

Specifically, there’s four things that we tend to use:

• A text chat bot for die rolling and simple reminders
• Audio streaming from an MP3 or OGG streaming station
• Using a local soundboard (the quite excellent Kenku-FM)
• Audio recording (we’ve been using Craig, which is currently Discord-specific)

With the exception of recording, there are not official ways to do this, and I was concerned that the processing demands of the official recording solution (Jibri) would exceed the hardware for the decade-old laptop I’m building all of this on.

I did find some scripts that had limited functionality, required adding a browser extension, or hadn’t gotten updates since before the pandemic, but found them not meeting the needs of this project in some fashion.

Using those as a base or inspiration, and with a non-trivial amount of help from an LLM (1), I developed and tested a solution for all of the above that works in your browser, without installing anything (2), and without being a huge change to your workflow (3).

ASIDE: A big caveat is that any of the audio functions effectively require you to use a self-hosted Jitsi Meet server due to the way that the public instance does shard load balancing. (4)

The quickstart? Go to the GitHub pages page for the project in a new tab https://uriel1998.github.io/jitsi-bot/. It will load all four bots into iFrames in that tab, where you can toggle them independently. Put your conference URL into the appropriate field, and click “Toggle Bot”. It’ll reload in that frame and connect; the field will change colors once it’s connected. You can also see a log if you scroll down inside the iFrame.

Don’t like the iFrame? Then load the bot you want separately:

https://uriel1998.github.io/jitsi-bot/streaming/streaming.html

https://uriel1998.github.io/jitsi-bot/soundboard/soundboard.html

https://uriel1998.github.io/jitsi-bot/chatbot/chatbot.html

https://uriel1998.github.io/jitsi-bot/recording/recording.html

The chatbot has quite a few commands; try !command to start. It includes a die roller, card shuffler and drawer, text tarot card draw, and being able to respond with text files. You can put your own text in (if you run the bots locally) to meet your needs.

The soundboard bot will accept any audio through the virtual microphone, so if you’d rather play your local music player through there instead of the streaming version, go for it!

The recording bot will record audio tracks per-speaker and as a single combined whole. It will save the audio in chunks as .webm files every few minutes, so when prompted, tell your browser to save that filetype automatically.

That is both to allow the script to run in a smaller memory space and to protect against data loss if something crashes. There’s a merge_recordings script in the repository for Linux, Windows, and Macs to automatically stitch them together with ffmpeg and clean it all up.

You can see the rest of these guides for moving away from Discord to NextCloud and Jitsi Meet on previous posts on my blog.

Featured Image by Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay

(1) Because I know this is contentious for some folx: I know enough to follow the structure, but I don’t know the specific syntax and commands to achieve specific goals. I also am not claiming any authorship or copyright on these scripts; any restrictions on their use is based off of the license of the code that was used for a base/inspiration. While functional, they are intended to be proof-of-concept. The idea is to maximize the public good against the use of the LLM to assist me in developing these.

(2) Okay, technically you need a virtual microphone for the soundboard bot and ffmpeg for merging recordings for the recording bot. Get a free virtual microphone without having to use OBS: Windows,Linux,Macs. Get ffmpeg : FFmpeg download page (Windows builds), FFmpeg download page (Linux packages), Homebrew ffmpeg formula

(3) I have touched base or put in issues with the dev team for both Craig and Kenku. Craig’s development team pointed me (ironically) to their Discord; I’ve not seen a response from Owlbear Studio. However, see #1 above; PLEASE use this proof of concept to do something better.

(4) If there’s a way around it without running a headless browser as a client, I cannot figure it out. If the Craig dev team, Owlbear, or any other coder want to focus on a value-add beyond these, PLEASE use this proof of concept to do something better.

If you just want to have video chat (and optionally a text chatbot helper), then using the public instance of Jitsi is easy to set up and has plenty of features. The big advantages of using the public instance of Jitsi are that it’s EXTREMELY simple, allows telephone call-ins, and that you don’t have to worry about total upstream bandwidth.

The downside is that because of the way the public instance does load balancing, that these simpler bots may (and probably will not) work on the public instance. On a public instance, adding in a separate audio stream for music or a soundboard or recording streams requires (effectively) running a whole other headless browser session for each stream.

It’s possible to use virtual microphones (or OBS) to mix in a soundboard or music stream on top of an existing speaker’s audio stream. However, OBS is not a lightweight application, and dumping extra audio into an existing speaker’s audio means that others cannot independently adjust it, problems with sound “ducking” from noise cancellation, and more.

My use case — audio-only calls and recordings for preservation and to use when writing recaps — happens to work well within the resource limits that I (and probably you) have. And because Jitsi Meet itself is just a forwarder, I can run it on the laptop already running NextCloud. Not only does this give us more control over everything, but it allows the usage of those lighter javascript bots.

Estimated time: Approximately 30-45 minutes, mostly cut-and-paste into configuration files. More if you need to install and configure a reverse proxy before beginning.

Before You Begin

Take a look at my bandwidth comparisons/estimates for audio and video egress for Jitsi and make sure your upload speed can handle the demands. This is the single most important consideration… unless you add on other optional services. Because of my bandwidth and how my group works, I’m restricting it to audio-only. If you want the default video options, I’ll tell you what NOT to change below as well.

Getting Started

Get A Separate Subdomain

The other big consideration is that you will need to be able to route traffic to the right place. You will need to obtain a separate subdomain name — the same process as you used for getting a DNS name from the NextCloud guide will work perfectly — regardless of which solution applies to you below.

I am going to presume for this that you already have a reverse proxy set up, but I will also show how to configure things if you do not use or want one.

Here’s an explainer about what a reverse proxy is, and a quickstart for nginx and caddy.

If you already have a reverse proxy

If you have a reverse proxy already in place, this is relatively trivial and I’m assuming you know how to add a forwarder to whatever you’re using. An example nginx config is available. Continue to “Setting up Jitsi Meet” below.

I don’t have a reverse proxy, and I now want one.

This is medium-difficulty, but is the cleanest and best way.

You’ll need to switch some things about your NextCloud AIO setup. From the Administration settings inside NextCloud, first click Open Nextcloud AIO Interface and then Stop Containers. Let that finish.

Open a terminal where your docker-compose.yaml file lives. If following my guide: cd $HOME/apps/nextcloud. Now stop and purge the mastercontainer (which will NOT delete your data):

sudo docker stop nextcloud-aio-mastercontainer  
sudo docker rm nextcloud-aio-mastercontainer

In your docker-compose.yaml file, open your editor and add these under environment::

      APACHE_PORT: 11000 
      APACHE_IP_BINDING: 0.0.0.0 
      APACHE_ADDITIONAL_NETWORK: ""

You can also optionally remove ONLY the entire lines under ports: that begin with:

- 80:80
- 8443:8443

Close your editor, and bring everything back up: sudo docker compose up -d

While all the containers spin back up, take that time to set up your reverse proxy to point at port 11000 for NextCloud. I personally use nginx, and there is an example config in my guide ready to have Let’s Encrypt run on it, as well as the example nginx config for Jitsi Meet here.

Continue to “Setting up Jitsi Meet” below.

I don’t have a reverse proxy, and I don’t want one.

This is the quick-and-dirty-but-it-is-running-NOW solution.

If you do not have a reverse proxy and do not want a reverse proxy, that can work by specifying a port for Jitsi to use. We are going to assume 8444 here. Separate guides may suggest using 8443, but that is already being used by NextCloud AIO. You will still need that separate subdomain.

Continue to “Setting up Jitsi Meet” below.

Setting Up Jitsi Meet With Docker

Because we already have Docker set up and running from setting up NextCloud, the official instructions work pretty much out of the box, although we’re going to tweak them and the order we do them in for clarity.

Back to the terminal! We are going to change to our user’s apps directory, create required directories, and download the program files for Jitsi Meet:

cd $HOME/apps
wget $(wget -q -O - https://api.github.com/repos/jitsi/docker-jitsi-meet/releases/latest | grep zip | cut -d\" -f4) -O latest_jitsi_meet.zip
unzip latest_jitsi_meet.zip
rm latest_jitsi_meet.zip
ls -d /*

The last shows you what directories exist here; there should be your nextcloud directory and one that begins with jitsi-docker-jitsi-meet, for example jitsi-docker-jitsi-meet-35879bb. Move into that directory: cd jitsi-docker-jitsi-meet-35879bb

We’ll create some mandatory directories:

mkdir -p ~/.jitsi-meet-cfg/{web,transcripts,prosody/config,prosody/prosody-plugins-custom,jicofo,jvb,jigasi,jibri}

We will also copy the example configuration: cp env.example .env

And then we will let a helper script generate some strong internal passwords for the .env file: ./gen-passwords.sh

Editing Jitsi Meet’s Configuration

Use your editor of choice to open .env. These are the entries to change, and why:

If using a reverse proxy

# If you are using a reverse proxy, alter these lines:
# We are going to use 8444 so the port forward instructions
# are the same
HTTP_PORT=8444
# Comment out this line with a hash mark like so:
# HTTPS_PORT=8443
# Your PUBLIC_URL line should NOT have the specified port
# at the end, like so:
PUBLIC_URL=https://meet.example.com
# Turn off Let's Encrypt certificate generation, HTTPs, etc. That is all handled
# by the proxy.
ENABLE_LETSENCRYPT=0
DISABLE_HTTPS=1
ENABLE_HTTP_REDIRECT=0

Continue to “Everybody Change these”

If NOT using a reverse proxy

# If you are NOT using a reverse proxy, 
# put a hash sign in front of the HTTP_PORT line.
# If Jitsi complains that it is commented out, 
# change it to something random you 
# are not going to use. 
# HTTP_PORT=8000
# Change HTTPS_PORT 8444
HTTPS_PORT=8444
# For the PUBLIC_URL line, 
# put your domain, but also make sure 
# it has the ${HTTPS_PORT} at the end.
PUBLIC_URL=https://meet.example.com:${HTTPS_PORT}
# Change these lines to enable Let's Encrypt, have HTTPS working, and 
ENABLE_LETSENCRYPT=1
DISABLE_HTTPS=0
ENABLE_HTTP_REDIRECT=0

Continue to “Everybody Change these”

Everybody change these

IMPORTANT : If your public IP address changes, for example, if your modem resets, you will need to change the public IP address in this file manually, then bring the containers down and rebuild them.
docker compose down && docker compose up -d --force-rebuild

We are going to fill in our public and LAN IP settings:

# Media IP addresses and ports to advertise by the JVB
# This setting deprecates DOCKER_HOST_ADDRESS, and supports a comma separated list of IPs
# PUT BOTH YOUR PUBLIC AND LAN IP ADDRESS HERE.
# JVB_ADVERTISE_IPS=74.111.11.111,192.168.1.5,
JVB_ADVERTISE_IPS=

We will use the TURN server from NextCloud AIO. The TURN_HOST is the domain of your NextCloud AIO instance, you get the TURN_CREDENTIALS from the Turn Server Secret in NextCloud Talk’s settings.

# Enable Turn
TURN_HOST=example.com
TURN_PORT=3478
TURN_TRANSPORT=udp,tcp
TURN_CREDENTIALS=biglongstringofstuff

Jitsi is set up to be open by default. Which I don’t have a problem with, except for that whole bandwidth thing… so we’re going to require authorization to create a room, but anybody can join an existing room as long as there’s an authorized user already in it.

# Enable authentication 
ENABLE_AUTH=1
# Enable guest access  
ENABLE_GUESTS=1
# Select authentication type: internal, jwt, ldap or matrix
AUTH_TYPE=internal

These are some changes to hide video user interface elements, since we are only doing voice calls. If that is not your use case, save the configuration file and skip to “Port Forwards.”

TOOLBAR_BUTTONS=microphone,hangup,chat,participants-pane,invite,profile
HIDE_PREMEETING_BUTTONS=camera,select-background,invite
ENABLE_LOBBY=0
ENABLE_PREJOIN_PAGE=1
ENABLE_WELCOME_PAGE=1

Save the configuration file.

We’re going to also define those same restrictions elsewhere for redundancy. I also put in a resolution restriction of 320px just in case someone still turned on their camera so it won’t immediately clobber the bandwidth. Create and edit the file ${HOME}/.jitsi-meet-cfg/web/custom-config.js and put this in it:

config.startAudioOnly = true;   
config.startWithVideoMuted = true;
config.resolution = 320;
config.toolbarButtons = [
    'microphone',
    'camera',
    'chat',
    'invite',              // invite button explicitly enabled
    'profile',
    'participants-pane',
    'hangup'
];

Save that file as well.

Port Forwards

This is going to be radically different depending on the make, model, and software your modem/router is using. Here’s an existing guide which covers many varieties.

You will need to forward port 10000/udp to the computer you’re installing Jitsi Meet on, regardless if you are using a reverse proxy. If you are using a reverse proxy, it will handle everything else.

If you are not using a reverse proxy, additionally forward port 8444 tcp/udp (or whatever port if you chose something different above).

Bring It Up And Secure It

Change back to the directory where your docker-compose.yml file is, and type docker compose pull && docker compose up -d && docker compose logs -f to let you see the logs. It should reach a steady state without errors; once it has, press Ctrl-C to get out of the logs.

I only created myself as an authorized user; you only need to have the people who are creating or moderating rooms to be authorized.

IMPORTANT: TheDesiredUsername should be JUST a username; for example, bob instead of bo*@*****le.com

The commands below will enter the loaded Docker container, create TheDesiredUsername with password TheDesiredPassword, then show you a list of all registered users, then exit. Do NOT change meet.jitsi in the block below.

docker compose exec prosody /bin/bash

prosodyctl --config /config/prosody.cfg.lua register TheDesiredUsername meet.jitsi TheDesiredPassword

find /config/data/meet%2ejitsi/accounts -type f -exec basename {} .dat \;

exit

You’re done! If you’re using a reverse proxy, you should see the Jitsi welcome screen if you go to just the URL. If you chose to not use a reverse proxy, you will always need to put the port at the end: https://meet.example.com:8444

You probably noticed that there are quite a few other features that you can enable here: a recording component, a transcribing component, a whiteboard, collaborative documents, and so on. I have not enabled them because we have them handled through NextCloud already or they put a non-trivial load on the system. Recording and transcription, especially if you are using video, will require much beefier hardware than the decade-old laptop everything else is running on.

Next I’ll do a full overview of the bots — including how to get per-speaker split recording — with your self-hosted Jitsi instance.

Featured Image by Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay