Well I think I pay something like $95 for YouTube TV +Max. Netflix is like 12? I’m on a sweet Spotify+Hulu for 9.99 promo for years, but I think it’s going up to $10.99. Disney is like $9. It may seem like a lot, but that’s all I spend on entertainment. I don’t eat outside the home regularly. I don’t go see movies at theaters. I don’t buy things like DVDs and stuff.

And to be fair, it’s for the household. We’re poly so there’s a variety of interests. And if you divide that by 5 adults, it’s cheap.

I cancelled cable a few years ago and now use YouTube TV. I love it because I can record everything, never run out of DVR space. I can run 5 tvs with different shows on each. I can watch TV anywhere on my phone and laptop. I can stop on one device and pick back up on another. Well over 100 channels now (but I only really watch a handful). Every channel also has an on-demand section. Like TCM has what’s live but also a huge library to stream from.

I have Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Peacock, Max…but if I had to just use one service, it would be YouTube TV. It follows me, and is not tied to my house. If I go visit another state, it will even switch to the local news wherever I am. It has, by far, the most content in one spot for one price.

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Not everyone watches US politics, or Fox News. I live in the US and don’t know her. I am sure there are famous faces you don’t know because it’s not your field of interest. Can you identify famous contemporary painters by face? Physicists? Composers? Game designers? Belittling someone’s education because they don’t know something you do is pathetic and says a lot more about you than it does the person you were mocking.

I had a discussion about weird vs. norm with a friend the other day. We decided neither type of person is good or bad inherently because they are weird or normal. Different things comfort them. A weird person feels safe surrounded by people that “get them” who are weird like they are. Their personal identity is often centered on the fact that they are not “normal”. They take pride in it.

But the predictability of a more structured “normal” life is just as comforting to those who are “normal”. There are no rights or wrongs here, only the need for each type to recognize and respect the other. I don’t really like derogatory terms like “normie”, which I have more than one friend who uses (I don’t say anything to them about it, I can personally not like it without making demands on my friends to feel the same as I do). It’s like when I was in school, there were mostly right handed people, but every now and then there was a “leftie” or “southpaw”. They were different. I don’t recall ever seeing anyone bullied over being left-handed, but we all knew who they were. Humans and many animals focus on differences. It’s probably a residual primal thing. Wolves will kill deformed or sickly pups, for example.

Normal is boring to some, and weird is chaotic to some. Both are acceptable stances and shouldn’t be seen as adversarial by either group.

I identify as Salsageex

https://regenerationinternational.org/2019/07/23/plant-sentience-and-the-impossible-burger/

For me, sugars and processed foods (grains especially) were an addiction. I see a lot of advice about allowing yourself a “cheat” day now and then but I would advise against it. It’s like telling a drug addict it’s ok to shoot up now and then, or it’s ok for the alcoholic to have a drink on special occasions. Processed foods are harmful to us over time. So while it won’t kill you when you are 20 or even 30, it will catch up with you.

Push through those cravings. They will go away.

I have not used it enough to tell. I asked it to make a one-shot for me. It set up the entire plot, created the stat blocks for the monsters, set up the encounters. Created the traps and the puzzles. It even made the magic items, along with detailed descriptions and lore. I’ve had it help with making a custom setting, including custom races and classes. It’s not copy/paste perfect of course, but good enough of a framework that I can easily go in and tweak stuff. Definitely saves hours of work.

I hear a problem and I want to offer solutions. But I gotta fight that instinct.

I’m curious how much of that is instinct vs. cultural programming. I used to be the same way. My partner would tell me about something that has aggravated her during her day and my first instinct was to think of ways to fix whatever it was and not just listen and be supportive. But that’s the exact opposite as the conversations I might have with my buddy would go. When he tells me about a problem, I just listen and if he pauses for a verbal response, I ask him how he handled it, not give him advice on how I would handle it.

So is that a primal bias or a cultural one? Does it come from some sort of deep genetic behavioral coding that we much protect our female mate? I’m certainly not able to answer that with any authority, but my gut says it’s learned behavior. I’ve since let go of that desire to fix. And for me, it’s much more satisfying to always listen as support and learning without seeing it as a task. That’s the default. I don’t even think about a solution unless I’m specifically asked.

I think listening behaviors are quite culturally based as well. For example:

Here in the Appalachian mountains, suppose two guys are talking to each other, perhaps both leaning on a fence. The guy who is listening doesn’t watch the speaker the entire time. They don’t make occasional noises either.

My buddy asks if I want to hear a story about some trouble he had recently with a neighbor. I nod and look at him “Yea”. He then proceeds to look forward, out across the field and I do the same. Buddy says something that I support, like what he did that started the trouble. I nod, quietly, or even make that “this is ok” face. If I make that face, it’s like saying “That makes sense to me, nothing unreasonable about that”. Unless he says something that you know he expects support for, then you just motionlessly stare into the foreground.

If he tells me something the neighbor did that angered him, I will look at him and make the astonished face, he will look at me and nod, then he verbally confirms it as we go back to staring at the field. He will go on about it some, and I will quietly lower my head a little and shake it back forth to show my disbelief in how crappy his neighbor is.

Then whatever conclusion he comes up with, I’ll either say, “hell yeah, that’s what I’d do” or “whoa I dunno about all that now” or something similar. The cues for listening and the correct responses to them will vary probably within subcultures.

I totally agree. But I know I had a folder of bookmarks with all sorts of tools for making NPCs, locations, enemies, names for stuff, treasures, and so on. Now ChatGPT does all that for me. I found ChatGPT is a great tool to inspire personal creativity, too. When I tell it to invent puzzles, they are kinda meh by themselves but inspires me to put something more cohesive together.

Eventually, sooner than you might think, I can see an AI with cameras around the room, so it can see the players’ faces. It will be able to identify common emotional faces and can improvise accordingly. Honestly, I predict there will be live streams of a bunch of humans sitting around a table that is being run by the AI dungeon master.

The tabletop is one of those big digital screen ones, and the the fights are animated as they play. I would totally watch that haha. Maybe at some point it can generate movies based on the game session. I know we’ve all had some epic game moments that would be awesome movie scenes.

Nothing in it leads me to believe it could fully replace a human DM in its current state, but if it was trained specifically on every dnd module, rulebook, fan content, fantasy books and movie scripts, then possibly.

In my opinion that’s what we do. Every homebrew adventure is the product of our combined knowledge of the system and the genre. We use some things designed by others (if you use a creature from a monster manual for example, or run a module), we create our own things. But the things we create still depend on things we have learned. We’re just organic AIs with a slower and less reliable training process lol

I used it to run an impromptu one-shot for some friends. It created the outline, the story hook, NPCs, encounters, traps, treasures and the big boss at the end. I had to tweak stuff and all the combat rolls were made with real dice, but overall it was fun and I said I co-DM’d that night.

It also creates and runs interactive fiction stories. I told it I wanted to play a game like zork with it lol and it wasn’t exactly zork, but it was actually more fun and flexible than zork could have been.

Oh I did not know that. I thought it was a share link lol. I will copy the text to a file I can link

It is the log of my chat with openai.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ocuNIrl8lP13YQZrRGsCcWjcX-57CyDdNagB-7AyH1Y/edit?usp=sharing

EDIT: Copied the OpenAI chat to a Google Doc.

I totally appreciate all of your efforts! Thank you for being a pioneer.

Half the time when I comment, it just spins. :( Edit: Apparently when I comment it posts, but just shows spinning until I manually refresh. Must be on my end.

Tried to comment “looking good” but can’t seem to comment. Getting a timeout.

Looking good 👍