Eric (cabin fever)

Anybody less into RPG theory than me is a 5E-only troglodyte and everybody more into RPG theory than me is a fart sniffing navelgazer.

My folks ended up sit either 23s or 24s, and I cannot express how unpleasant it is doing tech support for them. They're just unpleasant to use, user hostile, and flat-out programmed wrong for good measure. My dad's is in some incurable update loop, both are riddled with slopbots, they suck.

May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your crotch if you’re using ChatGPT as a search tool.

And the rest of you, have a great Friday!

Fuck my stupid screenwriter life

I miss my S5 so bad, I upgraded to the S9 I'm on now and I hated the lack of a removable battery. And now everything sucks, not just the battery, so if this dies I'll go jump in a river or something I guess?

a sketch of a smartphone with tactile buttons for home/window/back, headphone jack, no AI BS, sim card thingy you can open with your nail, camera that doesn't cover the damn screen, and a 5 inch/127mm screen which is a reasonable size

I wouldn't say I'm massively into phones or anything but I sketched this out of frustration bc why are there no modern phones with these features, it would be so perfect and I'm mad the only ones are old and slow

a woman in a plaid shirt sits at a table with a boy behind her ALT: a woman in a plaid shirt sits at a table with a boy behind her

If one can't appreciate gorgeous people from older media, what are we even doing? Gif related.

in case you've never seen it, this is Roger Ebert on The Mummy

Heartbreaking: the writers retreat with only 20 slots annually didn't have space

"Yeah," said Zaphod, stepping into it, "what else do you do besides talk?"
"I go up," said the elevator, "or down." "Good," said Zaphod,"We're going up."
"Or down," the elevator reminded him.
"Yeah, OK, up please."
There was a moment of silence.
"Down's very nice," suggested the elevator hopefully.

the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy quote I think of most often these days is, “What do you mean, why’s it got to be built? It’s a bypass. You’ve got to build bypasses.”

Any connection to certain modern technologies is purely coincidental, and mostly harmless.

Oh fucking hell yeah dude this has to be like your Olympics

Every deep insight, every cunning turn of phrase, every moment of poetry that LLMs deliver was strip-mined from an actual human being who laid their heart bare in prose.

So how do the best human writers stack up against their own plagiarized work?

Trip the bastard in the subway

My desire to stay well informed is constantly at odds with my desire to stay sane.

"The Islamists oppose women getting an education," I mutter, as I aim my missile at the girls school

If you have the prerequisite knowledge to know that something is correct, you don't need the machine, and if you do not, it can never help you because you can't check it.

That's the problem.

Spent the last 3 days looking for my ereader, turns out it was wedged between my mattress and the wall. Not my finest moment. Oh well, been a tough few days. Pratchett time, baby.

ly on privatized communication networks and data storage facilities to access and manage an array of goods and services, from personal documents and music files to online shopping and e-mail. It is presaged by applications like Gmail and Google documents, which provide users with large amounts of storage space on Google’s servers to store their personal documents and correspondence. In return for this convenience, Google reserves the right to mine its rapidly expanding databases for commercial purposes. If this business model is still in its infancy, one of its dominant emerging characteristics has become evident—a reliance on the interactive capability of networks to gather information about users. The terms of access to the “cloud” will include the capture and commodification of information about how, when, and where, we make use of its resources, a fact that renders the metaphor doubly misleading. The portrait of user activity made possible by ubiquitous interactivity will not be ephemeral, but increasingly detailed and fine-grained, thanks to an unprecedented ability to capture and store patterns of interaction, movement, transaction, and communication. Patterns of users’ Web browsing, for example, could be correlated with those of online shopping, communication, and, eventually, advertising exposure. The information clouds here are far from ephemeral, fleeting forms: their details are captured and fixed in a manner

whenever i read pieces critiquing the adoption of cloud computing from the early 2000s, it's invariably soundtracked by the jaws theme

Fun fact, it takes place in my neck if the woods too. I did a full on DiCaprio point when I recognized the train in the title card scene. Doubly funny because I saw it while 4000 miles away in Dublin

As an Eric with a middle J initial, I have a much different relationship to my middle name, it doesn't feel like me. But I might still use it professionally because its very authorial sounding.

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people local newspaper reporters are rarified elites instead of ink-stained wretches driving their Honda Civic to a crime scene so you know don’t have to rely on Nextdoor and the police press release.

Every day I am filled with hate because my heart overflows with my love of the computer. aftermath.site/ram-prices-h...

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Gentlemen, I've done the impossible. I've revived a dnd campaign after 6 months of hiatus and had things go off mostly smoothly.

a man sitting at a table with a shirt that says get hype on it ALT: a man sitting at a table with a shirt that says get hype on it

Gentlemen, I've done the impossible. I've revived a dnd campaign after 6 months of hiatus and had things go off mostly smoothly.

Cursed with bad at small talk itis

I am here to be rude, because this is a rude technology, and it deserves a rude response. Miyazaki said, “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.” Scam Altman said we can surround the solar system with a Dyson Sphere to hold data centers. Miyazaki is right, and Altman is wrong. Miyazaki tells stories that blend the ordinary and the fantastic in ways people find deeply meaningful. Altman tells lies for money. And I’m glad they’re lies. Because the makers of AI aren’t damned by their failures, they’re damned by their goals. They want to build a genie to grant them wishes, and their wish is that nobody ever has to make art again. They want to create a new kind of mind, so they can force it into mindless servitude. Their dream is to invent new forms of life to enslave.

oh "the left" is missing out on AI? yeah, i'm a socialist, i'm for humanity. good. no reason to act like this lifeless and error prone tool is going to do much of anything for me or society.

from one of my favorite AI critical essays in the last six months: anthonymoser.github.io/writing/ai/h...