theinspectorst

I’ve found it useful for TTRPGs too. Art generators are certainly helpful for character portraits, I also find ChatGPT can be useful for lots of other things. I’ve had pretty mediocre results trying to get it to generate a whole adventure but if you give it tight enough parameters then it can flesh out content for you - ranging from NPC name ideas, to ideas for custom magic items, to whole sections of dialogue.

You can give it a plot hook you have in mind and ask it to generate ideas for a three-act structure and encounter summary to go with it (helpful when brainstorming the party’s next adventure), or you can give it an overview of an encounter you have in mind and ask it to flesh out the encounter - GPT4 is reasonably good at a lot of this, I just wouldn’t ask it to go the whole way from start to finish in adventure design as it starts to introduce inconsistencies.

You also need to be ready to take what it gives you as a starting point for editing rather than a finished product. For example, if I ask it to come up with scene descriptions in D&D then it has a disproportionate tendency to come up with things that are ‘bioluminescent’ - little tells like that which show it’s AI generated.

Overall - you can use it as a tool for a busy DM that can free you up to focus on the more important aspects of designing your adventure. But you need to remember it’s just a tool, don’t think you can outsource the whole thing to it and remember it’s only as helpful as how you try to use it.

The reason the board have given is - if true - a very reasonable reason to fire a CEO. The job of the board is to oversee, scrutinise and challenge the management, and if the management were lying to or withholding information from the board then that’s an obvious reason for the management to go.

American corporate governance standards are really hit-and-miss, and in a lot of these tech firms you often end up with situations of CEOs doubling up as chairs of their boards - e.g. Musk, Zuckerberg , Bezos -something that structurally neuters the ability of the board to do its basic job of challenging the CEO! So when I see an American board standing up to a CEO that’s trying to evade scrutiny, I feel that’s something that should be applauded.

It’s very binary in the Disney era. All the theatrical movies, the 2008 Clone Wars TV show, Rebels, and all the rest of the Disney-era TV shows are canon, as are all of the novels, comics, games etc released during the Disney era. Everything else is non-canon. Lucasfilm maintains a tight grip on canon and that’s a big part of what Pablo Hidalgo’s job is all about.

Before the Disney-era, the concept of canon in the Star Wars Expanded Universe was more complicated and fluid, and relied on ‘tiers’ of canon with the movies at the top, the TV shows next, certain novels next, etc. The idea of canon back then was that anything in the one of the lower tiers could be canon as long as it wasn’t contradicted by something in a higher tier. For example, if somebody wrote an EU novel that said that Anakin loved sand, that would be non-canon because it’s directly contradicted by Attack of the Clones; but if they wrote a novel that said Padme loved sand, that might be canon if there’s nothing in the higher tiers of canon to contradict it.

I mean, they’re obviously not going to, so I guess Zuckerberg better go dust off what I can only assume is his comically large chequebook…

He didn’t steal it. He took it to give to Spock’s son, who Kirk took to be raised by Spock’s family on the desert world of Vulcan for safekeeping … High ground!

Oh that’s very interesting. The script was actually written for it to be Kirk/Spock/McCoy rather than Kirk/Scotty/Chekov, but Nimoy and Kelley both said no because they were happy with where TUC left things for the TOS crew - which is why (for example) Chekov ends up running sickbay despite no evidence before of him having any medical training.

I’d never heard they had a version claiming Uhura would be there too.

I think for the Lego set it’s more that the average casual fan is more likely to recognise the name ‘Boba Fett’ than the name ‘Slave 1’. They’re a commercial enterprise and they want to sell these things to a wide audience, and marketing it under a name that was never mentioned on-screen in the movies wouldn’t exactly make that easier.

The whole thing is a bit of a storm in a teacup.

This is all a big misunderstanding. He’s fine with sand; he was saying he doesn’t like hands.

That’s why he kept letting people chop them off.

‘How did it get into space?’

‘The Force!’

‘That’s not how the Force works!’

Han is the mahn.

My recollection from interviews is that Dan Harmon and the cast found Chevy just didn’t get the show at all when they were making it. A huge amount of Community’s humour is a mix of meta humour and pop culture references. In the same way that Pierce claimed to never understand what Abed was talking about, Chevy didn’t understand most of what Community was on about - his frame of reference for what is funny hadn’t moved on in decades.

Even though he’s famously a dick, when he says he didn’t think Community was funny, he might actually be telling the truth - not just being petty.

Space-faring whale-like creatures are an extremely common science-fiction trope.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceWhale

Space whales that paid a key plot role in Rebels and now again in Ahsoka? If all you’ve watched is the Prequel and Sequel movies (not even the OT?!) then there are going to be an awful lot of Star Wars memes you might not get.

‘So long and thanks for all the fish!’ is what the dolphins say in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, when they leave the Earth and fly off into space, shortly before the Earth’s destruction to make way for a hyperspace bypass.

The Purrgil’s in Star Wars are also a species of space-faring cetaceans and OP is making a meme linking the two.

Me when Prequel fans lament that the Sequels were awful and ruined Star Wars and it’s all the fault of the youth for liking this sort of thing: ‘I’ve heard that before’.

I don’t think continuity in actors is anywhere near as absolutely critical as you seem to think it is. It was a neat touch that they dubbed in the digital appearance of Mark Hamill / Carrie Fisher / Peter Cushing, but I don’t think that means they need to do it every time - I see that as more akin to an Easter egg. When they’ve done this, it’s mostly for characters with small cameo roles, like Luke showing up in The Mandalorian. And I certainly wouldn’t approve of yet more retrospective tinkering with the OT - that time has passed.

I think most fans’ immersion can cope just fine with Genevieve O’Reilly, who we’re plenty accustomed to playing Mon Mothma, continuing to be her visual appearance in post-OT media. The same way we cope just fine with Vader with mask off in RotJ looking like Sebastian Shaw, and not a digitally-aged Hayden Christensen.

The Schwartz is strong with this one.

GotG3 is definitely worth seeing. Doctor Strange 2 and Ant-Man 3 were pretty missable.

I think the lesson I’ve taken from this is that the massive multiversal stakes of the latter two - which I assume Marvel thought necessary to try to top what they’d already done with Thanos - just don’t really work. They can’t top Thanos eradicating half of the universe, and they shouldn’t try.

Whereas GotG3 was pretty low stakes by comparison, but as those stakes related to a specific character we had come to care about then it just worked so much better.

Arrested Development, I admit, took me a few episodes.

Arrested Development took everyone a few episodes. Much of the humour is about riffing on repeated jokes set up in previous episodes - you’ve got to get through a few episodes first for these to start to click.

That’s partly why it was never successful when broadcast. It’s a show that should have been binge-watched but was released on broadcast TV, an episode a week, but tellingly it only took off in popularity with the DVD release (and later on streaming).

Well done to Apple for telling their customers they won’t get viruses…