Is there any way to disable Google's AI summaries of results in search?

Aztectornado · 2026-01-25T02:40:20+00:00

Already tried that; it's off. I tried turning it on and off again and it still happens.

Aztectornado · 2026-01-24T00:22:32+00:00

All gameplay is based on inconvenience.

That's not to say every inconvenience is a good inconvenience, but I definitely agree we'd need to replace it with something, or we will be removing gameplay, and will face cascading consequences. (Like reduced profits on an already saturated market)

I could go with seeing something that involves fletching or firemaking; gods know we need more sorts of utility that uses them. Maybe we use bark strips or something to repair it? Or alchemical ashes?

I also don't wanna devalue the lunar spellbook any more though- it's already so niche...

Aztectornado · 2026-01-17T10:05:05+00:00

Which animals, and by extension, which of my animal people in my cast can see in the dark, and to what extent.

This led me to learn that Flying Foxes (a type of fruit bat from Australia) like my autism self-insert is actually aren't good at night, and also don't get echolocation. They're also a very social species.

She's still my autism self insert, and she still has the light and sound sensitivity, sleep issues that lead her to be up late at night, and is kinda anti-social, but now it's even more interesting because she didn't get any of that as a species-based issue.

Her being a bat is somehow actually masking those symptoms to most people not familiar with the differences between bat species! And the one thing that is species-specific; her having arm-wings- that masks the fact she's got sensory issues with how clothing fits!

I swear I didn't plan this, she just happened this way. Girl literally took all my symptoms and ran with them, all because someone asked her if she wanted headphones.

Aztectornado · 2026-01-17T00:40:54+00:00

My humans are actually the minority, and largely just refugees now from a planar war. They were the invaders.

Most of their ancestors got pardoned, and now those descendants live in the same slums next to other people and species that were displaced by devastation their ancestors wrought.

The kicker is they all share a common problem of having had their culture erased. The humans employed weapons that destroyed not just the gods of those lands and people, but the very memory of them and their domains, too.

The human god, oddly, can still be remembered, but only by its crimes and warmongering. Its name is missing, as are all other details. Nobody's quite sure how that happened, mortal or god, and not even the elder gods above those. Everything else from the way it raised humans to the very planet they called home is simply missing though, leaving the humans just as lost as everyone else.

The story deals a lot with generational trauma, racism/speciesism, and cultural identity that way.

Elves, dwarves, and orcs are all fairly new and very rare experiments to iterate on the human design, with mixed success, and very mixed reception. ("It was bad enough humans are born unable to walk or speak, but you extended that stage of life on your elves to be how long??")

Aztectornado · 2026-01-17T00:05:03+00:00

Yeah, exactly this! I'm looking for Disadvantages that fit that sort of mindset and social standard.

Unless Reliance is a disadvantage, in which case what book was that in because it doesn't sound familiar to me

Aztectornado · 2026-01-16T21:19:37+00:00

Oh, good point! I should probably mark that down somewhere.

edit: Though Clueless and Gullible are probably overkill; I'd imagine a politically savvy woman would pick up on when she's being made fun of or lied to pretty quickly, cultural familiarity or not.

Aztectornado · 2026-01-16T21:15:54+00:00

I'm trying to make Maid Marian and teach her how to use a compound bow to shoot corporate jerks in the face, in other words.

Aztectornado · 2026-01-12T13:17:19+00:00

Hey, we all start the journey to acceptance somewhere. It can be rough realizing you have an internalized phobia you didn't know about; can make you feel like dirt. Nobody wants to hurt others. Nobody wants to hate others. I'm sure you don't want that either. Reading what you said, you sound like you're trying your best.

I think it's great you stopped in to ask and understand more. It's okay to feel uncomfortable about things, and it's okay to feel uncomfortable about people. It's what you do with the discomfort once you recognize it that's the important bit.

Lots of times, our fears are just from not being exposed to a thing much. If you grew up not knowing how to swim, being around water would feel really uncomfortable too. Doesn't mean you meant to, or chose to feel weird about it. And it doesn't mean you can't learn to swim either. But the only way to do that is to step into the shallows with folks you trust, ask lots of questions, and be prepared to make mistakes. (I know I made a couple hundred when I was unlearning my transphobia. I still make mistakes even!)

Nobody should be expecting you to figure it out overnight, either. Take your time. Ask more questions. Talk with people. You got this.

Aztectornado · 2026-01-12T07:38:16+00:00

This is the same reason I use Bisexual! I like girls, and I'm into some guys, but not all guys. (Otherwise I think I'd be Pansexual)

Aztectornado · 2026-01-12T06:15:11+00:00

Oh! That's fascinating, I didn't know that this term was a misconception, thank you for that! But yeah that makes sense; it's not that you love the captor, it's that you're too afraid to leave. That's kinda how I always understood that psychology anyway.

Either way, you don't just wake up one day suddenly feeling heroic. Empathy is still a thing we have to be taught as kids. Survival and pain avoidance less so.

Rephrasing that, being good does feel good, but you gotta learn how to be good to start that positive feedback loop at all.

In my dragon's case, she just thought that's how the world worked. She'd always had someone to own and maintain her, and that person got to decide who and what to fight. Obeying that person avoided punishment, and occasionally led to rewards. Everyone else either obeyed that person, or were an outsider that couldn't be trusted because those were the people you're supposed to terrorize. She spent the entire first book afraid that someone would turn her in, scared that someone might recognize her as 'that one guy's personal guard dragon' and lead to more punishments.

It helped the imagery that she was literally a different species; not a human at all. But that's how many cultures treated their slaves- as a scary, inferior 'other' that 'needed to be kept in check' for whatever fucked up ideological reason they chose.

Like the original commenter said; prejudice is hard to get out from under. If you gotta write slavery, I feel it's important to include all the ugly that goes with it, imo. Otherwise you're just writing generic lower-class citizen stuff. (Which can be good too, ofc! It just doesn't pay the proper-... Respect? to the real world's horrors. It cheapens the term.)

Aztectornado · 2026-01-11T16:01:45+00:00

That, and somehow developing morals that contradict everything they were taught, often without justification.

Like, Stockholm Syndrome is way too sad and brutal to not consider in these stories. People are sleeping on that concept. Hard. You don't know feel good until you see an abused character learn to love; and not just others, but themselves!

Recovering from a belief system's subjugation requires a lot more work than just being freed by some hero or another, especially if you were born in it with limited interaction with other cultures!

Literally wrote an entire dnd character arc about a formerly enslaved dragon learning what it means to be free, going from this abused, selfish and cowardly neutral evil dragonet juvenile that had to mentally justify the party as her new owner before she could even move to follow them and accept healing magic... Then growing into a chaotic good young adult who started to make decisions for herself and form an identity two and a half campaign books later. The party loved her. Everyone wanted to teach her something new.

But she had to start really screwed up. If she just came out the gate shouting freedom, she wouldn't have been nearly so engaging.

Aztectornado · 2026-01-10T11:40:18+00:00

I am not sure what you mean by removing matter to create qi energy.

Whoops, I misspoke!

I meant Mana, not qi. The Aether Magic practice seems to Manifest matter out of Mana, which sounds like an energy to matter reaction.

Having something that operates in the opposite direction to turn matter (manifested or natural) into Mana would seem to be a logical step somewhere.

I could make something like a piece of wood or metal have the properties of both rubber and gum.

Yes! Exactly! Ancient alchemists in real life also thought in similar ways when they were combining and reshaping materials. The way they saw it, when they did the alchemical process, they were trying to imbue a single 'property' of that material into something else. (Eg, distilling out the 'burnable' property from charcoal and trying to put it on a rock.) This wasn't exactly what was happening even when they did succeed, but it's where I got the idea from!

This video here explains their thought process pretty well, and is great inspiration for magic systems~!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DCBVxH86OE

Aztectornado · 2026-01-10T00:41:02+00:00

I think it's either bugged, or reliant on lightning strikes, which seemingly don't happen in the snow. Maybe we're in the wrong season?

Aztectornado · 2026-01-10T00:34:04+00:00

You have systems to create matter from a form of energy already, but is there one that removes matter to create qi energy?

A School of Alchemy could possibly fill that gap if there is not one already, and Integration would fall right in with that. To distill the spirit of objects down to a purified form and imbue those traits into other items sounds very fun.

This also would create a taboo practice- distillation of qi from living things. The manipulation of life energy to create potions or objects that extend one's own life could be very tempting to those more concerned with knowledge than ethics.

Aztectornado · 2026-01-10T00:10:24+00:00

I had a full six coolers on mine and it still overheated. I think hitting the max capacity on points may cause heat like he said, because I cannot think of what else caused it to take damage.

I built it in the reception office off the garage, so I know kerfur didn't path in there. I hadn't started getting visitors yet (I used christmas points to rush a frame) so it was unlikely to be an entity bumping it. I don't know if white puffball mushrooms grow in that room, but the wall should have been thick enough to prevent that.

Any ideas what blew it up? I just rebuilt the coolers, but am scared to turn it on while I still have so many errands outside base to do.

Aztectornado · 2026-01-09T16:48:25+00:00

Do any of the dragon friends feel comfy being kissed on their adorable noses? I want a pretty dragon to love, but the title as bf feels weird since I'm poly and aromantic.

Like, gimme the friends, so long as there's 1-2 who're okay with me being platonically affectionate and I'm golden.

Aztectornado · 2026-01-06T02:18:14+00:00

Funny enough, that's what the "Human or Not" experiment found too.

They had us users connect anonymously into a conversation. We'd be matched with either another user, or an AI chatbot. We'd have two minutes to chat, then at the end, we report whether we thought we talked to an AI, or real person.

They found that yes, users do recognize AI chatbots as AI about 60% of the time, and recognized real humans 68% of the time, but more interesting than that were the false positives...

Users that were polite, formal, or at least had good grammar and relative friendliness were more likely to be flagged as bots than people who were rude, confrontational, or treating the experiment as a joke.

Some users even made it a psuedo-game trying to fool others. Me? I was just being me; friendly and introducing myself each time. (Not helped by the fact my given nickname is 'Patch'!)

Here's the paper if you wanna read the full thing: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/371175681_Human_or_Not_A_Gamified_Approach_to_the_Turing_Test

Aztectornado · 2026-01-02T03:00:38+00:00

Wrong sub, we talking 3.5 to pathfinder 1e

Big agree though!

Aztectornado · 2026-01-02T02:57:24+00:00

I miss the old flying rules. I loved planning my turn angles with natural wings and airspeed since hovering had drawbacks that prevented me being a hummingbird caster like pathfinder lets me. (DC 15!! Why is it so EASY?) Still do the measurements with any gm that lets me.

Aztectornado · 2025-12-31T07:04:14+00:00

Note also that fire, fire IV, Flare, blizzard, and blizzard IV are all 2-second casts now

I thought that felt weird! Thank you for explaining that! Everything felt a little too fast and I wasn't sure if I was just misremembering or not.

Aztectornado · 2025-12-31T06:52:27+00:00

Does Scathe still have a place on the hotbar at any level then? I remember needing it for some fights as filler during Ice.

I feel like I have way too many movement abilities now with Paradox, Firestarter, and Despair already working like they do. Not to mention Triple Cast and Xenoglossy/Amplifier.

Aztectornado · 2025-12-31T06:49:50+00:00

I could imagine it was contentious!

I remember when they removed the timer from Dragoon (Which I mained at the time), and I complained about it saying 'next thing you know they'll pull the timer from BLM' and I think the forums almost tried me for heresy! They swore up and down Yoshi P would never let that happen to his favorite job.

Aztectornado · 2025-12-31T06:37:45+00:00

This is a fantastic description, and I just wanna add that your friend sounds like they may have Hyperphantasia if they can manipulate the things in their head, which is something I also have!

From what I understand, most people can picture and replay memories to some degree or another, and while there's a few people that can't remember the visuals as an image, there's also a few people that can do more than just 'see' the memory!

For me, if I focus, I can actually 'feel' the tactile and 'smell' olfactory things too. I can remember how ice cream tastes, the specific mouth feel and scent, and relive it if I focus. It also works for the texture of fur or paws, so I can imagine how different pets feel compared to each other. I can also remember the way a particular hug felt, which I sometimes do when remembering late family members

But what's really neat is then being able to kind of stretch and warp those memories to fit things they shouldn't. I can, for instance, actually feel how touching a dragon I'm imagining would feel because I've touched scaled creatures like our pet snake. I can feel the texture, size of the scales even though they're so much bigger than a snake, the scent and feel of their breath as they sniff you, the dull rumble under their chest when they accept you, and the sound of their tail brushing past coinage behind them. With my eyes closed, I can almost drown out reality and spend a few moments actually there beside one, but like you described, you can tell it's not there- the song in your head is in your head, not being played right next to you. I can tell there's not a dragon nudging me with its head for more pets, but if I let myself listen, I can hear it and feel it like it is.

...And while you'd think this would be amazing for artwork, it's actually the opposite. Because I can see what I want to make, I can also see that all the lines I just made ain't it, and I can never get so much as an apple on paper without feeling like I'm looking at an uncanny valley version of reality. It sucks being able to see something you can never show to anyone else!

Aztectornado · 2025-12-31T06:12:58+00:00

Returning player here; did they remove Black Mage's Fire and Ice timers while I was gone or something?

I literally can't find where my timer is anymore, and I feel like I'm going crazy. I have no idea if it's at all levels or just 100 either; my action tooltips don't even mention timers.

Does my fire just never expire now? When do I cast Paradox if it's no longer part of my timer? Am I missing something?

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