The Copper and the Slopper. A DragonCon Tale.
Indie game designer, platinum-selling TTRPG creator on drivethrurpg, & fascist-punching military veteran. I provide RPG stories & tips, sage advice on sages, history, & geeky terrain projects. Political views are socialist, my own, & testy :) He/Him
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The Copper and the Slopper. A DragonCon Tale.
Four Seasons Total Landscaping would like a word.
The only thing this traitor's family should have been 'offered' is the bill for the ammo they had to waste on her.
Due to Order 66's timeliness, no one was ever held to account for the years and years of youngling trauma from Master Yoda's 'secret wisdom' private sessions...
New DC occupation logo just dropped.
Maisters of Donjons & Destriers also knew the struggle...
Pretty soon the promotion boards for O-4 and above will have a section evaluating your most recent appearance on Fox or Newsmax spouting gibberish.
The 'gurk gurk' sounds echoing from that room must drown out everything but the growl of MRAPs rolling down Constitution Avenue.
A republic if we can keep it. A dictatorship of we can't.
Though Democrats lament the eating of children, Republicans herald President Trump's push to eat more children as a victory for child eaters. We at the Baltimore Sun pride ourselves in painting this as a set of perfectly equal and valid viewpoints.
I find "history fans" (aka illiterate lumps) like this guy fetishize wars & combat (& violence in general) PRECISELY because the fantasy is as close as they ever get to it. Serve just once in-theater. Be on the receiving end of just 1 direct/indirect fire. You stop feeling this way instantly.
35+ years now of mostly positive approval rating of members of the Armed Services going to shit over the last couple months. Sad to see. I don't think people realize how many stars had to align post-Vietnam to put those conditions into place, & the impossibility of recapturing it once gone.
Can my toaster love? Does my ceiling fan experience ennui? Is my phone lonely? Is my electric razor soft-quitting? Are my lightbulbs considering unionizing?
Grown men, tears in their eyes, big, strong, burly men in hard-hats and thongs come up to me and they say, "Sir. Sir. Sir. This is the best Depression ever. Thank you so much. Affording stuff is so woke."
Pretty soon the only heroes we'll be thanking are going to come in the throwable, bready form.
He sees the word 'great' in Great Depression and gets jealous.
A Northern Refuge, by my lovely wife. Charcoal, 2025.
Two enter. One leaves. The Turtledome!
Worf.
I feel like the DNC pundit-class is currently interviewing three hyenas and one rabid crocodile for the job, as the actual Simbas out there (and there may just be a few flawed ones who mostly pass muster) scare them too much...
Increase a band! No more diminishing their names! Definitely Seeing Actual Dragons.
Increase a band! No more diminishing! Judas Pope.
Slightly diminish a band: AI Prompt Dragons Huey Lewis and the Washington Post
I'm a decent carpenter and will provide many, many fishes. Also, I know how to properly maintain a cardigan, which, with that weather, will be a key skillset!
The primary use case for AI is FRAUD. Give me any example, and the answer is the same. - Mimicking audio, art, and writing styles? - 'Enhancing' photos (personal/real estate)? - Reviewing job candidates? - Conducting "Research" - Completing school assignments? FRAUD
He's going to give them Alaska back if Putin promises to say something nice about Donnie, isn't he?
He's just hot... my dog takes nice cool floor breaks after about 15 minutes of laying on his bed. Those things trap heat like crazy! ðŸŒ
I usually call the people who rely upon AI tools 'Proudborgs'.
Anything to shame the Proudborgs is fine with me.
Proudborgs?
I also imagine the degaussing facility took a hit, and with any luck, one or more floating drydocks for their subs took some damage as well. One of their new Boreys almost certainly took a beating based on the electro-optical imagery in the report.
In a former life I was... familiar with... Tarya bay, and the thing is shaped like a giant funnel underwater, so hopefully every rotting, rusting, scrapheap in that base is slightly more rotting and rusting now. Their old Delta IIIs, Oscars, and Akulas could use a little light washing!
Sloppers is great!
There really does need to be a slur for ai users...
Sir Pattiswick Milton Bradfield-Combust, aging veteran of the Second Boer War, now amateur archaeologist and paranormal investigator on extended holiday in New England in 1920.
Pendragon by Greg Stafford did well, creating a sliding scale of a long list of opposing attributes (energetic/lazy, forgiving/vengeful), and within its implied setting of heroic Arthurian fantasy it worked, but still served - at best - as a starting point.
I saw a recent reddit post where someone asked what alignment would a father questing to save his daughter be. Why let a question like that this get in the way of a great game concept? At best you'll find one that sorta fits, at worst you'll strangle some potentially awesome emotional scenes!
One more - alignment systems are unnecessary limiters for roleplay. Its possible for some to do it well, but most players hamstring more realistic, heartfelt portrayals in order to 'fit' an alignment.
If you've only ever played one TTRPG, please don't try to make your own system and call everything you do 'innovative'.
"Vibe" historians use the word RESEARCH, but they really just mean "stuff I saw on a YouTube history short", and they need to pick a different word. I watched RxCKSTxR do funny voice overs for animals on YouTube but I don't feel comfortable calling that veterinary research...
Still bad, but the original post is inaccurate as to which 'president' is being advised.
Not to be pedantic, but the text of the agreement specifically states the "president" in question is the President of Paramount.
In a nutshell...
Every member of this community should pull their kids out of school over this. You're gambling with kids' lives here. They won't, of course, because we're a trauma-numb society, and barely grumble anymore when our oligarchs kick us.
I tentatively geolocated the picture to off the coast of Metline, Tunisia. The hull marking throws me, as what looks like "ND" simply can't be found anywhere. Interestingly, the hull-shape reminds me of the French Diane-II class, specifically the Oréade.
Universe - give me the strength to go to dinner with my wife and her mother tonight. Not because she isn't an amazing woman, but because once again, my head demons are trying to convince me - with 0 evidence as usual - that my wonderful mother-in-law doesn't like me.
Our current DNI has clearly never taken a single analytic tradecraft course in her life. What a joke (on us, sadly, but a joke nonetheless).
I like to say even footage caught on a video trail-cam is biased, as while the wildlife might seem to be simply going about their lives absent commentary, the hunter still exerts the agency as to where the camera is pointed...
Icelandic butter would like to have a word. :)
To inspire and lift your Saturday, especially if you, unlike me, get to play TTRPGs this weekend! My favorite Helvegen cover from Kalandra, vocals by Katrine Stenbekk. www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6by...
Oh, and also, TTRPGs for everyone.
A platform which pushed environmental stewardship, UBI, regulating AI & venture capitalism, pre-Reagan-era wealth taxes, ending qualified immunity, nationwide union-building, banning corporate homeownership, & ending religious tax havens would re-energize voters.
Make this a liturgy. Apply it from everything to AI predation to regime collaborators. Repeat it to yourself. Practice it. Pass it on.
So, in short, my response to your suggestion that it wouldn't take more than an afternoon is that you're absolutely right, with one caveat: Most of that afternoon would have to be spent teaching the users what it CAN'T do, and how to fact-check, fix, and otherwise repair the garbage that results.
Why? Because it fits the paradigm, and it sounds amazing. Trust me, I'd love a tool that could do 1/10th the things of which LLMs are assumed capable. But no, LLMs are TEXT PREDICTORS. That's what they should be called, because that's an accurate a description as you could ever make.
Unfortunately, that's not how ai is marketed. Instead, these tech gurus are trying to market ai as EXACTLY what the Terminator franchise taught you it was. Or HAL from 2001, or Mother from Alien. That it somehow 'understands', or can 'contextualize' or 'analyze' anything.
Blank stares. Most of the questions were those someone from the 1910s would ask about electricity, like, can it steal my soul, or will the wires reach down and snatch my baby from its trundle? Mind you, these are smart people - intelligent, computer-savvy adults.
I made an animated graphic showing them a bunch of words on a blank space, and had the words pair up in logical ways. The probability of the word "destination" following the word "final". I explained tokens and embeddings.
My favorite part was trying to force them to unlearn decades of sci-fi expectations of what ai could do. I kept having to remind them that what they were using was an LLM, and that it had no earthly way of understanding or expressing 'context', no matter how much they wanted it to.
Not even one afternoon - a 2-hour class on how to spend more time teaching ai to do a relatively simple thing without making shit up than it actually took to do the original write-ups manually. And most of that time was spent fact-checking ai's many, many hallucinated employee 'accomplishments'.
I had the dubious honor of teaching TSA supervisors how to use ai to write performance reviews and award write-ups. I didn't want to, but I'm the 'education' guy, so it fell to me to develop & deliver a course on how to use the plagiarism machine to decrease time spent crafting written evaluations.
WAPO Headline: O.J. Simpson and his knife had a relationship, but there's no evidence of Simpson wrongdoing.
Man, Tullius. Your stupid joke present of enormous shoes for Centurion Varro's birthday is really going to make those archeologists scratch their heads one day... share.google/k50YBYQ9yQfl...
The 'silly' episodes always sounded worse in the previews, then when I actually watched them, I loved them! Ep 2 of this season was both hilarious and touching! No spoilers, but I love the broad, heavy pause before Spock, referring to the improbability episode, said "...sing"
And highlighting the lack of consumerism here is key - its a rare bastion of gentleness and community. Public media gives us a very rare, sometimes jarring contrast to late-stage capitalist tv/movies/streaming, and, as you say, it treats children as little adults with intrinsic value.
Sometimes, when I start to question the worth of something I do/support, I look for creatures like him to hate it - then I don't question myself quite so much...
O.J. Simpson and his knife had a relationship, but there’s no evidence of Simpson's wrongdoing.
I hope he Conans (I'm using this as a verb) the crap out of his last 10 months. Middle fingers to CBS Every. Single. Night.
You're not fooling me, Cerberus. Where's the third head, hrmm?
Oh hi Mark!
!!!
To this day, I love searching along the coastlines here, either in-person or on Google Earth, finding all sorts of lovely late 18th and early 19th century forts, redoubts, barracks, and other structures!
I just want to say - @patriciatallman.bsky.social is an amazingly beautiful person. Stuntwoman, actress, writer, and a beloved sight at any convention!
Get in! No time to explain. The dungeon is a mimic.
I'd like to be civil and agree they're "people" at all, but they're not. They're rabid animals, and should be treated as such. The pendulum return swing 2026-2029 needs to break the conservative backbone in the U.S. permanently, and painfully. Reconstruction 2.0. Make Grant Proud Again.
Ba'al-Za-Bubba.
Now overload them with class-action suits, and work to disbar all of them.
Not sure how I never saw this before, but... wow!
Late to the party, but wow - amazing art!
These three fine Cliffs would like to have a word...
I did that early this month; my face tingles (and maddening forehead itches) were off the charts!
When I said several years back government employees and federal contractors needed to heavily unionize in a meaningful way, despite decades of precedent against it, the last 6 months has been heart-breakingly vindicative. Mass walk-outs in key, mission-essential departments need to start now...
If you can reach out and help these folks, please do so! This is a nightmare scenario for any small company in our sphere!
And here, folks, is where future CI training courses will begin with the message: "So back in 2025-2026, when the Russian SVR and Chinese MSS recruited their second-highest number of former US Gov personnel, only surpassed when DHS fired 500 Intel & Analysis personnel later that year..."
Congrats to you and your team!
Awesome news. That said, for those in the comments who whine "So what, the SC will just reverse it" - what does that add to this conversation? For some people on this thread this might be the only tidbit of hope they've heard today. What does anyone - yourself included - gain from minimizing it?
I believe she caught him wearing a garment made of two kinds of material.
You all misheard - he said 'nein' deals in 90 days. Nein. Mission accomplished.
Schrodinger's Emperor is simultaneously in charge of stuff and has no idea who's in charge of stuff. Understood.
It's #NewComicBookDay Part 2 with a super cool offer from our pal @patrickhorvath.bsky.social !
Reconstruction ended too soon.
"There is a client list. Its on the AG's desk. Mango Mussolini wanted his stupid BBB to pass. It would be a shame if it didn't... Oh, it passed? Now there's no client list." How anyone sees this as anything other than a giant mob-boss racket boggles my mind.
One wonders if certain state officials, as shareholders in Applied Meteorology, Inc., a private forecasting service in Texas, might have selectively ignored warnings in order to push Texas (among other states) to adopt privatization of previously NWS-provided services.
Ah, my yearly half-second long, 10x per minute, 3-hour long game of *was that a mortar, a 107mm rocket, or an RPG hit somewhere nearby* was a real hoot tonight.
"... Some writers have explained the English constitution thus; the KING (Billionaire), say they, is one, the people another; the peers are an house in behalf of the KING (Billionaire); the commons in behalf of the people; but this hath all the distinctions of an house divided against itself..."
"...where the highest judgment is required. The state of a KING (Billionaire) shuts him from the world, yet the business of a KING (Billionaire) requires him to know it thoroughly . . . by unnaturally opposing and destroying each other, prove the whole character to be absurd and useless..."