Cityfaringcountrymouse

However, it is also saying that AI chatbots "improve efficiency" and that "anyone entering this field must be comfortable working alongside these technologies," and I fundamentally disagree. (Have you tried to talk to a customer service bot?)

It also says "Myth: Using AI with a class is cheating. Reality: Responsible AI use can enhance learning if you engage with the material thoughtfully and in-line with class rules." And I also fundamentally disagree with that statement.

I’m not saying that’s a good thing but it’s not as if AI invented the incentive to have someone else do their thinking and decision making.

That said

And you know, I thought it was a fair question, so I said that if you eat enough troll meat, you start getting troll-y. And then I went further and just treated it like troll flesh is a general contaminant - if you eat enough troll, you'll turn into a troll, but if you bury enough dead troll flesh in a forest, the trees will start growing in strange ways, and will scream and heal and bleed when you hit them with axes.

I liked this idea. So as we played further, I just played around with the idea of Troll Origins, and I came up with something sort of like the Odyssey, but instead stealing Helios's cattle, it was Hathor's, and the horrible, awful, unending immortality was her curse of the army that pillaged her lands. A god of healing does not condemn you to die, she condemns you to live.

And then I got this fun idea for maybe the king that led the army is still kind of alive in the troll taint. Like a sort of literal fisher king. The kingdom is sick because he is, literally, the kingdom. The trees that bleed, bleed his blood and their screams are his screams. He is both the faintly green bear running down the mountain and the faintly green deer and there is no way past this without suffering. He is the entire ecosystem, and he eats nothing but himself and he dreams nothing but death and yet still, on and on and on and on, he lives.

Anyway they're traveling next session so I'm throwing this shit at them. I already have some gross ideas for like. Describing everything like it's a body (flowers red as blood, white as bone, pink as meat, grass fine as hair) then finally throwing horrible living things at them. Trees that grow eyeballs that turn and stare at them, or flowers with teeth instead of petals and trolls that speak in long dead tongues about how they wish they'd never tried to rob a god.

Dust if you must, but wouldn't it be better

To paint a picture, or write a letter,

Bake a cake, or plant a seed;

Ponder the difference between want and need?

Dust if you must, but there's not much time,

With rivers to swim, and mountains to climb;

Music to hear, and books to read;

Friends to cherish, and life to lead.

Dust if you must, but the world's out there

With the sun in your eyes, and the wind in your hair;

A flutter of snow, a shower of rain,

This day will not come around again.

Dust if you must, but bear in mind,

Old age will come and it's not kind.

And when you go (and go you must)

When they meyowl pathetically for more food, it's not because they're trying to "trick" you into feeding them again. They just want to be fed, and they're smart enough to notice the correlation between certain sounds they make and the responses they get from you.

They've figured out that if they want to communicate to you that they want more food, if they make those pathetic sounds, you're more likely to behave as if you've understood what they're trying to communicate.

When your cat waits for you to look away then yoinks food off of your plate, it's not because they love crime. It's because they're social colony creatures who instinctively share food with each other and they don't understand why you're not sharing the best foods with them.

Your cats are very intelligent, social creatures who see you as their Very Strange sibling.

They've learned how to make intricate sounds just to communicate with their humans. When the sounds they make elicit the responses they want, they learn that those sounds are the most effective way to communicate their desires.

Because they were speaking Spanish. Apparently.

He also used to be this way but about any "minority".... Up until "the incident".

My oldest sibling is my half sister from my mom's previous relationship. My mom is white and her old fiance was black, making my sister a mix race baby.

Apparently we were visiting for a family reunion with my dad's side of the family(all white) when "the incident" happened. I was like 3 at the time and have no memories of the event.

My dad said that everyone was talking in his dad's living room when my oldest sister came in and asked my mom to re-tie her hair since it came loose while playing.

Just as she finished fixing her hair, my grandpop said something along the lines of "that N***** hair" or "she's a cute kid even with that N***** hair" (the exact words have been lost to time) and you could hear a pin drop.

Thankfully, my oldest sister had not been exposed to any hate speech up until this time in her life, so she had simply thanked my mom and ran off to go play. But the way my dad tells this story...

He said he had never once been scared of my mom in his life, except in that moment. He described it in the same way one would describe seeing something otherworldly and possibly demonic crawling out of a corpse.

My mom told my grandpop he was going to come into the other room with her for a minute. They both disappeared for several minutes while everyone else kind of had awkward conversations for a while before they came out of the bedroom.

Grandpop then apologized to the room, found my oldest sister and told her he had used a bad word when talking while she was there and apologized for doing so, and then stayed relatively quiet for the rest of the trip.

He also apparently had NEVER used that kind of language again according to the rest of the family.

To this day, no one knows what she said to him! Apparently she was too angry to talk about it at the time and later had simply forgotten most everything because my mom has one of the shittiest memories of man kind!

I think that my grandmother didn’t become the first woman race car driver because she’s the sort of person who thinks that every time you eat at a dining table you need a full table placement. You can’t just bring a plate and fork to the table you’ve gotta have like tablecloth, placemats, two kinds of knives, the works. Her mind cannot comprehend a universe where you could just eat a sandwich off of a napkin at the table.

So in the same vein she couldn’t conceive of a woman race car driver because there weren’t women race car drivers when she was a kid. She was like “oh it just wasn’t done back then” so she didn’t even try even though that was her dream job.