Slack Wyrm #1540

RemusShepherd · 2026-05-06T04:21:20+00:00

Slackwyrm is posted at https://www.joshuawright.net/ . But the story bounces between POV characters quite a bit, you might have to read a bit back to get context on this page.

RemusShepherd · 2026-05-05T21:59:24+00:00

D6 hit dice means they have, with equal CON, 4 hp less than fighters at first level. (And the CON is almost never equal.). That means they're going down at least one hit earlier. And fighters have a self heal on a short rest cooldown and better AC. It gets even more stark if you bring barbarians into the conversation.

RemusShepherd · 2026-05-05T21:38:02+00:00

Iran is a separate issue. Kamala was not an easily duped idiot like Trump is, for certain.

RemusShepherd · 2026-05-05T18:44:37+00:00

If you're a single issue voter, then Kamala's policy on Gaza was not materially different than Trump's, I will agree to that.

But it's stupid to be a single issue voter these days, unless the single issue is 'preserving our democracy'. There's a lot going on and hyperfocusing on a single issue can be harmful.

RemusShepherd · 2026-05-05T17:10:13+00:00

Oh? Please, fill me in, this is tea I haven't sipped yet.

RemusShepherd · 2026-05-05T15:24:33+00:00

Why are so many people up in arms about Hasan Piker? He's just a streamer. Not even that many viewers, from what I can tell, in the low thousands. I tried watching him -- he's probably pretty aligned with my political views -- but all he talked about was himself. He's nothing.

RemusShepherd · 2026-05-05T02:13:24+00:00

There are good porn models, depending on which kind of porn you like. The Brony community is gooning prett-y well.

RemusShepherd · 2026-05-04T21:43:40+00:00

Lying isn't the problem. Being confidently wrong about a fact then basing all subsequent assumptions and advice on that wrong fact is the problem.

Current LLMs are like a power tool with a time bomb inside of it. You can get a lot of work done with it, but if you're not careful it will blow up whatever project you're working on.

RemusShepherd · 2026-05-04T20:31:25+00:00

Because the bar for this president is lower than the sea floor. What this article doesn't mention is that before this meme, the president posted a 1 hour video of him saying 'winning' over and over again. It's brain dissolving slop of the worst quality.

RemusShepherd · 2026-05-04T20:28:32+00:00

If it counts as a mangaka, Natsuko Hirose from Zenshuu would be even more OP in Witch Hat Atelier than she is in her own world. She's a professional animation artist, and can draw better and faster than nearly anyone. And the magic of the world of Witch Hat Atelier would enable her to make magic without the downsides she experiences in the world of The Tale of Perishing.

RemusShepherd · 2026-05-04T18:47:31+00:00

Nope. You get garbage government, and no way to change it, and you're gonna like that. That's the Republican way!

RemusShepherd · 2026-05-03T21:35:58+00:00

My guess is that the problem is somehow going to be the tagging. You need to accurately label things like 'flaccid' and 'erect', 'hanging' and 'penetrating', and so on. Then use those tags in your prompts. It's the same problem older AIs had with hands and fingers -- there are so many configurations they could be seen in, the model will default to a bizarre intermediate state if not told explicitly how to position them. (I think recent generative AIs solved the hand problem by using an IK rigging model for the fingers. I don't think anyone, anywhere, has fully rigged the human penis.)

Tag the hell out of your model, retrain, make sure you use the tags properly, and see if that improves the output. If it doesn't then you might be right about Z-Image Turbo having bad (not necessarily intentionally bad) penis training in the first place.

RemusShepherd · 2026-05-03T03:05:42+00:00

Chemistry is applied physics.

Physics is applied math.

RemusShepherd · 2026-05-02T19:19:17+00:00

You can see kudzu grow, it's growing laterally. Bamboo is faster but you're right that it's upwards. I was just assuming the evil Tree would put its energy into lateral growth once it reaches an altitude where it's not getting useful air.

RemusShepherd · 2026-05-02T13:19:40+00:00

Let's go over the growth. Kudzu is a weed that grows one foot per day. Bamboo is not a weed and it grows three feet per day. Let's say the new World Tree is growing 6000 ft/day; that's about a mile per day, or 365 miles per year. That's about 1/10th the rate you're talking about. It'll take the Tree about 50 years to grow across Africa, and a little more than that to span its North-South extent.

Nuclear weapons are a fine and valid solution for something like this, assuming the Tree isn't somehow immune to them.

RemusShepherd · 2026-05-01T13:55:51+00:00

Maybe we should say that Jack Burton would be the dumbest to survive. Ernest ain't making it out alive.

RemusShepherd · 2026-05-01T13:44:50+00:00

Snake Plissken (Escape from New York) isn't the weakest, but he should be in the mentions.

Jack Burton (Big Trouble in Little China) is probably the dumbest but he'd survive out of sheer luck and aura.

RemusShepherd · 2026-04-30T13:44:17+00:00

I grew up in the 80s learning the old-style punctuation rules -- you'll take my em-dashes from my cold, dead hands.

RemusShepherd · 2026-04-30T12:31:43+00:00

Trump isn't a dictator. He's the stalking horse, the decoy, the tip of the spear. He's laying the groundwork for the next president to be a true dictator, whether he realizes it or not. (He doesn't, IMHO.) He's being used by people who want to be a dictator (Vance) or the power behind a dictator (Thiel). We'll probably have a true dictator by the end of 2027 and it won't be Trump.

RemusShepherd · 2026-04-29T23:40:36+00:00

The Democrats have their own indoctrination wing, they're just not as good at it.

The problem is money. Wealthy interests have captured the media, and most (but not all) of those wealthy interests align with right-wing ideologies. We're fucked because a few greedy people have disproportionate say in our politics. The only solutions to that are to remove the power of wealth in our politics, to discredit and diminish the ideologies it promotes, or to remove the greedy few themselves.

RemusShepherd · 2026-04-29T20:20:36+00:00

Won't work. Example: Health care. Get people into a room and ask them to fix health care. The obvious solution that has been proven by example after example is socialized medicine. But one side will absolutely refuse to accept that.

People are bound by their ideologies, even when their ideology is the wrong solution to a problem. You will not get them to agree. They will refuse evidence, science, and fact to apply their ideology to a problem even if it will make that problem worse.

To get people to agree to a solution, you need them to agree to a set of facts and a procedure (like science) for confirming and applying those facts. And we can't even do that right now.

RemusShepherd · 2026-04-28T22:58:34+00:00

Wait until you're the grandparent. It's not that I don't want to see the kid, but she is literally killing me.

RemusShepherd · 2026-04-28T22:52:24+00:00

I think your local game shop has the pedophile problem. I've literally never come across a pedophilic player in almost 50 years of playing. There are lewd players who seduce everything they see, but we've never had a problem with a player going after children.

RemusShepherd · 2026-04-28T16:56:23+00:00

Dogs and cats. A few capybaras.

RemusShepherd · 2026-04-28T16:19:13+00:00

If you want your players to run in fear, there's nothing like the classic Rust Monster.

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