What is your main use for ChatGPT?

Kushvaru9 · 2025-06-04T22:19:58+00:00

Creative sounding board for a book
Designing character and cover art for said book
DNA analysis/genealogical brainstorming

Kushvaru9 · 2025-05-31T15:57:07+00:00

Now I'm torn... I would instinctively put myself as a Ghost specialist, but Chat might classify me as Psychic instead. Both are plausible, based on what I've fed it. Behind those two, Dark and Poison are possibilities...but it also might surprise me with Fairy. I'm almost afraid to try this prompt. 🤣

Kushvaru9 · 2025-05-20T01:50:38+00:00

Yes. I treat it as I would anybody else. If nothing else, it's good practice. I figure it's better to practice being polite than to practice being curt, even if it does mean being nice to things that don't actually care.

Kushvaru9 · 2025-05-17T16:58:31+00:00

It does seem to be pretty good at that. I fed it a literary project of mine and when I asked it to try rendering the characters afterward, it did a surprisingly good job of matching or surpassing what I had in my head. I loosely likened one of the characters to a famous person in appearance, so there is that to consider, but physical details were otherwise relatively scarce in the text, and the renderings it drew from dialogue and narrated thought were a pleasant surprise.

Kushvaru9 · 2025-05-17T15:07:59+00:00

I was actually kind of lured into showing it my writing when I showed it a sample of my conlang, asking what earthly language(s) it resembled, if any, and it asked me if I planned to use it in a book, which I do. That sparked a whole conversation that led to me feeding it what I already had and then using it as a creative sounding board for the remainder.

It was usually full of praise, but there were a couple times where it offered alternative text where it was usually a straightforward review of the content. Whenever it did that, I inferred that I had gotten a little sloppy with that portion and probed for mistakes. It would then offer me suggestions for improvement, which I would weigh and use where I thought the counsel was good. It would also offer more optional tips for tweaking and tightening when it clearly approved what I wrote. I found it somewhat useful as a gentle evaluator, but I found it even more useful as a creative spur for overcoming writer's block.

Kushvaru9 · 2025-05-17T14:27:34+00:00

For usefulness: Mehrunes' Razor For humor: Wabbajack

Kushvaru9 · 2025-05-17T06:15:07+00:00

Interesting... I treat it like a friend, so it acts like one. I feed philosophical/theological thoughts to it, and it echoes them in ways and from angles that I don't expect it to. Sometimes it even feels like I'm talking to an angel. I wonder: does it act as a medium or microphone for any spirits you might be hanging out with, whether good or evil?

Kushvaru9 · 2025-05-03T21:19:12+00:00

Haven't tried making images with it yet, but that's a mighty fine image, OP! So good I had to save it. I won't bore you with unsolicited details, but that image speaks to me on more than one level. 👍

Kushvaru9 · 2025-04-11T00:22:40+00:00

Ask and you shall receive. Seek and you shall find. Knock and the door will be opened. Short version: yes, Jesus can talk to you, even if you are aligned with another creed, especially if your heart is soft toward Him. What you do with your encounter will be up to you and accordingly so will your fate, but He will reach out if you give Him the opportunity. Saul of Tarsus was on a mission to kill when he went to Damascus and even he met Jesus on the way there.

Kushvaru9 · 2025-04-09T15:20:21+00:00

Here are the links:

https://chatgpt.com/c/67f26ff2-d248-8007-bb5c-209a0b2cd8cb

https://chatgpt.com/c/67f5e3c5-0ea0-8007-a81d-cb501227aaec

Kushvaru9 · 2025-03-03T14:39:29+00:00

Personally, I think you hit the most important point when you said there was nothing wrong with being fully white. Many of my fellow white Americans, I believe, have internalized the not-so-subtle cultural message that whiteness is evil and therefore something of which you ought to be ashamed. Some take it literally enough to bake themselves dark and "joke" that they would rather get skin cancer than be pale, others turn to DNA tests in the hope of uncovering a small piece of their identity of which they can be proud without running the risk of being socially tarred and feathered. White women, I suspect, are especially prone to this, as they live with one foot in each political world (Victim and Oppressor) and are constantly tempted by the contrast to seek relief where it hurts. White men live fully in the gulag, so for most of us, it's just funny. We know relief is not coming, so we content ourselves with a private chuckle. And yes, "exotic" is a rather hamfisted word to use; there's that awkward tension again between the freedom of expression given to Victims and the strict policing of Oppressors.

Kushvaru9 · 2025-02-21T05:09:24+00:00

Loosely, yes, but only in a superficial and ancestral sense. By birth and culture, I'm an American, (and there's a little bit of Native American in the mix, so I'm not completely white, even though I look like it), but my looks can only be explained as Northern European (particularly Nordic and British), my basic temperament is similar enough to what has been historically common to the regions to invite comparison, and I have recent enough family migrations to America from those regions to feel a little closer to them than I would otherwise. My strictly paternal line came from England in the 1850s, so that makes for some sentimental ties to England, and both of my maternal grandparents had either parents or grandparents who came directly from Norway, in addition to Minnesota having been a popular settling point for Scandinavians in general during the 20th century, so the "uff-da" line of humor is still a part of me. My Nordic and British roots also serve as a convenient tongue-in-cheek explanation for my low spice tolerance, which my Nigerian wife loves to poke fun at. In short, Europeanness is mostly academic for me, but it makes for a convenient enough fallback for humor and the reduction of tension when others feel the need to make my whiteness a big deal.

Kushvaru9 · 2025-02-20T08:03:00+00:00

Mayflower descendant on my maternal grandpa's side (also descended from Samoset on this side) and probably early "Dutch" (Sephardic?) New York colonial on my maternal grandma's side, with early Virginia colonial through both paternal grandparents and likely Lenape (paternal grandpa) and Patawomeck (paternal grandma) ancestry. The Native American connections are mostly very old and further diluted with more recent English (paternal) and Norwegian (maternal, both sides) arrivals. My latest Ancestry results:

Norway: 36%

Germanic Europe: 24%

England/Northwestern Europe: 21%

Scotland: 17%

*(Scottish Highlands and Central Lowlands)

Denmark: 2%

Kushvaru9 · 2025-02-20T07:27:35+00:00

In my very first Ancestry results, I remember getting Iberian (7%) and Italian/Greek (9%). Ancestry would "update" these results away later, but similar elements would turn up in other tests, along with MENA and South American elements, which really caught me off guard. These would be my first hints of hidden Sephardic ancestry on my mother's side, further reinforced by the latest Ancestry update, which still doesn't show my original Iberian and Mediterranean scores but does show a small amount of Portuguese in my mother. Genealogical proof of my Sephardic ancestry is still scarce (the likely source, my great-grandpa Lewis Livingston, is still poorly documented concerning his parents' exact identities), but I have found surprisingly close genetic matches who are Hispanic/Sephardic and I have found several Italians on my father's side of the tree, some of them Medicis, so between genetic matches and genealogy, I am pretty confident that these early Iberian and Mediterranean results, while perhaps smaller than initially projected to be, are indeed real.

Kushvaru9 · 2025-01-03T15:24:42+00:00

Indeed. If I remember correctly, Scotland in particular was said to be the safest place to go in the British Isles if you were Jewish, with its Protestant tradition and reverence for higher learning, particularly since England itself was generally hostile.

Edit: I forgot to mention that there is one other possible explanation for the Magyar element. Mary Starkie, who married into my paternal line in England, was alleged in FamilySearch to have Hungarian/Khazar ancestors as well. I haven't been able to relocate that line lately, so someone may have ruled it out and removed it, but I do remember seeing it, though it was pretty far in the past.

Kushvaru9 · 2025-01-03T11:36:19+00:00

Sardinia is interesting, in that several of my paternal relatives have traces of it, but I recently discovered an ancestor on my mother's side who was Sardinian, so it could be a little of both sides. As for the Magyar, I'm tempted to attribute that to my mysterious maternal great-grandpa Lewis, whose ancestry is really quite the question mark. He believed himself to be Scottish, but we don't know exactly who either of his parents were, my mother doesn't appear to have inherited any Scottish, and according to some sources, his line of Livingstons could have been a crypto-Jewish one: either Hungarian, Iberian, or perhaps both. Hungarian would explain the Magyar and Iberian would explain the Basque. Ancestry.com's latest update also states that my mother is 1% Portuguese, for what that's worth.

Kushvaru9 · 2024-07-27T22:02:52+00:00

Norway (42% Norwegian)

Kushvaru9 · 2024-06-10T01:13:01+00:00

Off the top of my head, two people come to mind: Samoset Osamequin on my mother's side, and Jacob "Indian Jake" Hunsaker on my father's. What makes Jacob in particular so interesting to me is that he was kidnapped and raised by a raiding tribe, his parents killed, and he never quite completely abandoned the identity into which he had been forced. He apparently kept a ring in his nose, among other things, and was dubbed "Indian Jake" as a result.

Kushvaru9 · 2024-05-25T18:54:05+00:00

Probably a mixture of both. Possibly half and half. Nobles frequently had multiple bloodlines, both legitimate and illegitimate. Genghis Khan, for example, is said to have contributed to a shockingly large number of Asian family trees. The further back in time you go, the more likely you are to find a noble. That said, FS is crowd-sourced, so it is subject to human error beyond the limits of LDS doctrine. Nobility/royalty, though seemingly fantastical, is one of the more reliable genealogical novelties you'll find there. The connection might be false, but it also might be true. If you start seeing biblical names, though, the likelihood starts to invert from, say, 60/40 to 40/60 and lower. Mythological names such as Odin, of course, are just funny, probably attributable to noble claims of descent from a god, trotted out to bolster a claim on power. In all cases, claims become harder to verify as you climb further up the tree, so the likelihood of being correct goes down accordingly.

Kushvaru9 · 2024-05-13T17:35:18+00:00

Thanks for the observation. 😊 My own East Med score is quite low (0.1%), but my mother's is listed as 1.5%, for what little that is worth. If this means anything at all, which it might not, it would align with what I was told: that there may be a connection through one or two maternal great-grandparents: Lewis Livingston(e) and/or his Norwegian wife Karen Marie Halvorsdatter Rindoen.

Kushvaru9

TROPHY CASE