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.

Historically yes, although I don’t think there’s been one as bad as Suella before, and certainly not one who is now among the betting market favourites to be the next Tory leader once they’re in opposition.

I see her more as a symptom of the nihilism that has overtaken British conservatism since the 2016 referendum. They’ve become obsessed with fighting meaningless symbols and vibes, and fixated on pulling down their opponents rather than building something up themselves. Nothing positive matters to them, it’s all about destruction.

In the 1980s, Thatcher’s Tories sold the British lower middle-class on a vision of home-owning, share-owning popular capitalist democracy, in which entrepreneurs and small-business owners would guide us all into a prosperous future. What positive vision like that do Tories have to offer to voters today? Single-sex toilets and criminalising the homeless? Suella literally has said that her ‘dream’ in politics is to deport refugees to Rwanda. They have nothing positive to offer and Suella’s rise is a symptom of that.

Exactly what I thought when I saw the username. Methinks the fascist doth protest too much.

For anyone unaware - that is the guy who’s spamming every comment section with a comment explaining how he considers all 2.3 million Gazans (including the 40% of whom are children under 14) to be equally responsible for Hamas’s 7 October attacks, and therefore deserving of what they get.

Yes. Literally the only truly evil senior British politician I have come across in my lifetime.

There are plenty of politicians in my lifetime who I have disagreed with quite severely on certain things - Thatcher, Blair, Corbyn, May, for example. But in each of their cases I honestly believe they were pursuing a course that they believed would improve the lot of the British people and bring about a better, fairer and more prosperous society - I might have disagreed with them (in some cases a lot!) about how to get there, but I never doubted their hearts were ultimately in the right place. Boris Johnson was the first who left me thinking he had no redeeming qualities - selfish and egotistical, heart very much in the wrong place. Boris was only in it for Boris.

But Suella is something else. Suella isn’t in it for the public good, but Suella isn’t in it for Suella either. Suella is in it to hurt people. That’s her overwhelming motivating goal in life and politics. She gets off on undisguised cruelty. She is genuinely evil.

Just imagine trying to use a terrorist mob as a yardstick to excuse the misdeeds of the advanced 21st century military of a modern democracy.

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…

Rishi Sunak’s father-in-law, everyone.

Some of us are able to comprehend complexity and hold multiple thoughts in our heads at the same time. It’s possible (and the only way to be logically consistent) to understand that:

• in Iran, Muslim fundamentalists are abusing/killing innocent other Muslims;

• in Israel, Jewish fundamentalists are abusing/killing innocent Muslims, and Muslim fundamentalists are abusing/killing innocent Jews;

• in Palestine, Jewish and Muslim fundamentalists are abusing/killing innocent Muslims.

This isn’t a weekend football game where you have to pick one side, wear their colours and then support them until the final whistle. This is real life, it’s complicated. Don’t turn mass suffering into a sport.

In the UK - that was a Liberal Democrat policy going into the 2010 election that was then implemented during the Coalition government. They increased the tax-free personal allowance, which effectively took two million of the lowest paid out of paying income tax altogether. It was hugely popular, and so the Tories later tried to claim credit for it even though it was literally something the Lib Dems forced onto them at the expense of some of the tax cuts for the rich that the Tories had wanted…

When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea. Thank you.

What on Earth would lead you to think Hamas cares about Gaza residents? The whole point of Hamas’s attacks was to provoke this sort of Israeli reaction. The innocent Palestinians who are going to die in this attack are no more than disposable pawns and human shields to Hamas.

What a weird attempt at logic.

Would you hold Israel to the same standard? They invaded the Palestinian territories in 1967, have held them under military occupation for over half a century since and in that time have killed rather a lot more Palestinian civilians than vice versa.

But sensible people do not use that as a pretext to say a blanket ‘fuck Israel’, because it is unhelpful, unconstructive and racist to blame an entire people for war crimes committed by members of their military. But I’m curious if you apply your logic on Palestine to the other side too?

Hamas won a plurality (44%) - not a majority - of the votes in the last elections in 2006. They subsequently launched a coup, sought to purge their political opponents and have ruled the Gaza Strip as a de facto dictatorship ever since. The people of Gaza have spent the last 17 years suffering from the combination of a Hamas dictatorship and a full land, sea and air blockade by the Israeli military.

So to answer your question: Hamas gunmen put Hamas in power.

Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem remain occupied territories under international law since the 1967 Israeli conquests.

No, fuck Hamas. Love for Palestine.

Innocent civilians are dying on both sides, but long-term it’s always the innocent Palestinian people who suffer most when the nationalists on either side start shooting. The skew in the death toll over the long course of the Israel-Palestine conflict is incredibly one-sided.

Europe is funding Ukraine by considerably more than the US currently. Short-term funding is essential equal between the two, but the US is providing basically no multi-year funding whereas the EU is providing significant multi-year funding.

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/09/11/europe-not-america-is-now-ukraines-largest-backer

That’s just a proper noun that some countries use for their parliament.

There’s a reason you wrote ‘Congress’ with a capital-C but the article wrote ‘parliament’ with a lowercase-P - the headline is using ‘parliament’ as a common noun (unlike, for example, the capital-P ‘Parliament’ of the United Kingdom where it’s also used as the proper noun).

Don’t just blame those killers who were present; blame the politicians who created an environment in which violent Hindu nationalist rhetoric is normalised, their supporters are encouraged to persecute religious minorities, and events like this happen with growing regularity.

There’s a reason that the UK, EU and US all had travel bans on Narandra Modi for a decade, for his government’s complicity in the anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat in 2002 when he was chief minister, in which hundreds of Muslims were killed by Hindu nationalist mobs. The world has known what sort of person Modi is for a very long time and it’s shameful that he has reached 9 years as Indian prime minister before many people outside the country have started to take note of what he is is doing to the country of Gandhi and Nehru.

I love that they actually turned this into an episode of It’s Always Sunny - it was entirely believable as the sort of scheme the gang would come up with.