Kudos for keeping up! I have not yet, it’s been a wild two years.

Absolutely bamboozled

I never got plastering logos for whatever brands you love to consume on everything you own. Like buying decals and stickers and shit to put all over your car, laptop, whatever else. Since when do we pay to advertise for brands…?

Get my resume together

Well how about that. It’s also my birthday. Happy birthday, Leni

Morality and religion are the same in society, broadly speaking. Any of the myriad interviews with a non-religious person being asked how they derive morality without religion is telling enough for that.

If you had asked me 10 years ago, it’d be a firm “atheist”. A year ago, “agnostic”. Today, I don’t identify with a religion, but I think there’s a lot of interesting things within them. Given a charitable interpretation of any of them’s texts, as well as looking at the parts where a large number of religious systems agree you can arrive at some pretty profound pieces of wisdom.

I don’t necessarily think these things tell us much about our origin, or what happens after death, or speak to any kind of deity. What they do speak a lot on is the human condition. What we value, what themes and motifs speak to us.

I don’t really like the terms “religion” and “religious”. To me, those are the organized, preachy kinds of almost-cults most of us here have problems with. I prefer referring to my own personal beliefs as spirituality. Where the two differ, in my mind, is that religion is found externally. Someone converts you, or you’re born into it. Spirituality is found through self-reflection. Some of the self reflection processes involves talking to and learning from others, but it ultimately comes back to a deeply individual assimilation of this new knowledge with the unique lived experiences you’ve had.

One day, when I’m in actually GOOD shape, and have a bit more grey.

Joining a sword fighting gym. Absolutely fantastic community, and while I’m currently laying in a hot tub to soothe my absolutely dead legs, I’m definitively in the best shape I’ve been in in my adult life.

I was wondering if Firefly being the immediate de facto response to this had lived its life. It appears not.

Garbage in; garbage out. Using AI tools is a skillset. I’ve had great use with LLMs and generative AI both, you just have to use the tools to their strengths.

LLMs are language models. People run into issues when they try to use them for things not language related. Conversely, it’s wonderful for other tasks. I use it to tone check things I’m unsure about. Or feed it ideas and let it run with them in ways I don’t think to. It doesn’t come up with too much groundbreaking or new on its own, but I think of it as kinda a “shuffle” button, taking what I have already largely put together, and messing around with it til it becomes something new.

Generative AI isn’t going to make you the next mona Lisa, but it can make some pretty good art. It, once again, requires a human to work with it, though. You can’t just tell it to spit out an image and expect 100% quality, 100% of the time. Instead, it’s useful to get a basic idea of what you want in place, then take it to another proper photo editor, or inpainting, or some other kind of post processing to refine it. I have some degree of aphantasia - I have a hard time forming and holding detailed mental images. This kind of AI approaches art in a way that finally kinda makes sense for my brain, so it’s frustrating seeing it shot down by people who don’t actually understand it.

I think no one likes any new fad that’s shoved down their throats. AI doesn’t belong in everything. We already have a million chocolate chip cookie recipes, and chatgpt doesn’t have taste buds. Stop using this stuff for tasks it wasn’t meant for (unless it’s a novelty “because we could” kind of way) and it becomes a lot more palatable.

Damn, I was too fatigued of the game by then. Guess I’ll hit it in, like, 2 years when I replay it finally

I’ve got credit roll. I know there’s a lot of replayability in a few aspects, but I doubt I’ll play more til there’s more baked-in mod support.

For a space game, the world… universe felt small, and I think that’s mostly down to the fact that travel is almost entirely a menu affair. There’s nothing between the quest start and the quest zone but a menu and a load screen. Or 3. The major faction quest lines were fun enough but not super varied or long. I didn’t do the UC questline to be fair, seemed like it was gonna be a lot of space fighting and I had enough by that time.

Bethesda design choices abound. Annoying inventory management, bad UI. Companions calling out random crap incessantly, I bloody know I’m carrying a lot Sarah, you told me 14 items ago. And 13. And 12. Loot seemed pretty lack luster, too, particularly for not-weapons. I found some legendary armor pretty early that I had no incentive to change until near the end. That made looting anything that wasn’t a weapon feel uneventful, and weapons were only marginally better, just due to larger functional variety.

Good things… Definitely the ship building. I wish the ships were more than a glorified chest and some weapons, but the designing itself was fun, if a bit clunky on controller. Gunplay was fun. Generally playing the game itself was enjoyable enough.

Overall, it’s a Bethesda game. It’s a space opera. It’s not a space exploration and flight sim. If that checks your boxes, it’s pretty aight.