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.

https://archive.ph/yYV7y

I Call Modi ‘A Fucking Fascist’ Who Would Take India’s Freedom, Diversity And Democracy

Beigel Bake on Brick Lane.

I think he was pretty clearly there with the intent of his presence being antagonistic. He’s not just a random Jewish man who coincidentally happened to be walking through the area at that particular time, he’s a pro-Israeli activist who was hoping his presence would provoke a reaction as part of an attempt by political partisans to paint mainstream pro-Palestinian protestors as racist.

But - regardless of his intent - if the only reason the Met could point to for them believing his presence might have actually been antagonistic is his ethnicity and his religion, then on the surface he hasn’t done anything wrong.

I think this episode should be read in the context of a wide-ranging assault on free speech and the right to protest by the current Conservative government, which is encouraging a pattern of overreach by the Met police in response to legitimate protest.

Greece has become the first country in Europe to announce a ban on bottom trawling in all of its national marine parks and protected areas.

It doesn’t say EU, it says Europe. The Guardian is a British newspaper, they know the difference.

Brexit meant Britain left the EU, it didn’t literally move Britain to a different continent.

Hasn’t the UK already done this? The French are currently protesting against it.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/15/environment-conservation-france-protest-uk-ban-bottom-trawling-fishing-uk-eu-trade-deal-tca

Wait - weirdly it’s the same journalist who wrote both articles. How did she manage to write an article two days ago about a UK ban, and then write again yesterday about Greece being the first European country to do this?

But … I thought the 2009 film was an origin story?

It was literally the story of how the Kelvinverse came to exist and it followed Kirk, Spock, McCoy and co from their Academy days.

He also reprised the character in season 2 of Picard.

I think apart from the Q scenes at the beginning and end, this Easter egg scene (and the punk’s post-Spock reaction to being asked to turn down the music again) might be the only salvageable thing from that train wreck of a season.

James Tiberizzus Kirk.

Rishi: we have a plan for tackling the cost of living crisis.

The plan:

No, they’re not even proposing to replace the House of Lords here. All they’re proposing is to remove the remaining 92 unelected hereditary peers (out of around 800+ total unelected peers) who survived Blair’s 1999 cull of most hereditary peers.

That was my thought, I’m quite up for this. I enjoyed The Voyage Home, I enjoyed The Trouble with Tribbles - I wouldn’t want all Trek to be like that but there is absolutely a place in the franchise for light-hearted takes on Trek.

No, it’s member of Parliament who’s not a frontbencher - i.e. who’s not a government minister or an official spokesperson for their party in Parliament.

Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves and Ed Davey don’t hold government office, since they’re opposition politicians, but they’re not backbenchers.

For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Spock died for our sins according to the scriptures;

And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third movie according to the scriptures:

And that he was seen of Jim, then of the rest of the crew:

-- Roddenberry 15:3-5

You do have to feel for these red wall Brexit voters.

Apparently they require constant visual assurance that they are in fact still in Britain, and can’t just maintain this information in their heads like the rest of us.

eight member states, including Hungary and Italy

Fascists are why we can’t have nice things.

https://www.centreforcities.org/publication/the-housebuilding-crisis/

Compared to the average European country, Britain today has a backlog of 4.3 million homes that are missing from the national housing market as they were never built.

[…]

Housebuilding rates in England and Wales have dropped by more than a third after the introduction of the Town and Country Planning Act 1947, from 2 per cent growth per year between 1856 and 1939 to 1.2 per cent between 1947 and 2019.

This has been a key factor behind the UK’s long-standing housing crisis, which has led to inflated property prices and soaring rents in recent decades.

Non-paywall link: https://archive.is/JCp2k

Calling the government’s reforms a “grubby concession” to backbenchers who want to block housing development, Matthew Pennycook, shadow housing minister, has pledged that Labour would enact “mandatory targets that bite on individual local planning authorities” if it came to power.

The issue of housing and planning is set to be a point of contention in this year’s general election, with the Centre for Cities think-tank estimating that the UK has a historical backlog of 4mn unbuilt homes, with an average house in England now costing more than 10 times the average salary.

I assume that’s the reaction they were going for by expressing the stat in that way, but aside from shock value it isn’t that informative.

Child mortality is usually expressed as ‘X per 1,000 live births’ so you have some sense of scale. We’ll never live in a world where zero children die before their 5th birthday (simply because of illnesses and accidents) but expressing the number of deaths per 1,000 gives you a sense of whether the number of deaths is a lot or not.

Here’s a UNICEF article that provides some more context on the 4.9 million global figure for under-5 deaths: ‘The global under-five mortality rate declined by 60 per cent, from 93 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 37 in 2022.’ To add more context on 37 per 1,000: in San Marino that figure is about 1.5, in the United Kingdom it’s about 4.1, whereas in several countries in sub-Saharan Africa it remains above 100 deaths per 1,000 live births - which I find to be a frankly much more informative and terrifying way of understanding the number.