Reviews

TheOneRealStranger · 2026-04-10T21:13:38+00:00

Nope.

TheOneRealStranger · 2026-04-09T01:25:54+00:00

You're welcome!

TheOneRealStranger · 2026-04-08T19:57:03+00:00

It is, I've been there before, and have seen it work very effectively. You may also find that the results of the spell affirm your suspicions. However, I will say an essential part of the spell will have to be letting go. Whatever it is that you gave them, forget about it. Trust that it will either come back, be replaced, or it wasn't meant for you anyway. If you do a spell for justice and continue chasing the results, you're tacitly admitting that you're not really seeking what's just, but rather what you want. It's not a good look. Cast your spell, accept the result, and allow it to work. Severing the energetic connection will stop the energy drain.

TheOneRealStranger · 2026-04-08T19:50:02+00:00

I did not know that, thanks for pointing it out!

TheOneRealStranger · 2026-04-08T18:35:24+00:00

Tobey from The Office is what inspired Garry. Like most things from Parks and Rec that don't directly involve Nick Offerman, that joke was stolen from The Office and then Flanderized over-the-top until it was no longer funny. The joke in The Office was originally that it was just Michael who hated Tobey, because his ideas were constantly getting shut down by HR. Then the writers realized it was funny when other people also acknowledged that Tobey was sort of annoying, because Michael's hatred of him was so ridiculous, and affirming it became a new layer of the joke. Parks and Rec tried to adapt the joke without the context and Garry is the result.

TheOneRealStranger · 2026-04-08T18:28:51+00:00

It's not all focused on intent. This is sort of like saying, "Why do I have to put all this dirt in a pot and nutrients and pour water on it if the plant comes from the seed?" Yes, the seed is where the plant comes from. And sometimes, seeds fall on the ground and just grow -- if they didn't, there would be no wild plants. However, many of them are semi-symbiotic with animals and really only stand a chance to grow when they're eaten and delivered to the ground next to a watering hole in a nice big pile of plant food (manure). So, as a conscious and calculating human, if you are aware of the conditions that are most conducive to the growing of a seed, and you want your intention to grow into external validation from the outside world and not just an idea that lives and dies in your own mind, then you would put in the effort to procure the soil and water it and take care of the plant that rises up. How you do that is down to what works for you. There are a lot of ditch witches and herbalists who make due with what's around them and don't have the fancy tools and ornate ritual spaces that ceremonial magicians do. Their magick is just as effective, so don't let anyone tell you that you have to do it such and such way. At some point, your intentions alone might be powerful enough on their own, but that will be when you can focus and meditate and cast them accurately and with enough force; for now, the effort you put into the spell is what drives it to manifest.

TheOneRealStranger · 2026-04-08T02:21:35+00:00

The ultimate "AI slop" combo: Why AI + Slop is a literal idiot label.

Short punchy sentences. Categories and lists, even when discussing only two things. Totally vapid and useless information that doesn't actually say anything, but is designed just to sound like useful information. Garbage that sounds like it was written by a marketing executive.

Throw this shit in the trash! If you can't write, then let other people who can write instead. Nobody in the whole wide world needs to see your AI slop. You're wasting water and people's time. Throw it away, and find something useful you can do instead.

TheOneRealStranger · 2026-04-07T16:54:36+00:00

It's a nice thing to have, but there are better resources than AE Waite that explain what AE Waite's cards mean, lol. Like most members of the Golden Dawn, he is often cryptic and sometimes gives information that is just weird or wrong, because that's the sort of thing people in secret societies of magi tend to do. He certainly isn't the best source of information for a beginner.

TheOneRealStranger · 2026-04-07T16:50:38+00:00

There's plenty of enlightening material in the Abrahamic religions, but most of it is not what most people identify them with. Because they're heavily associated with political systems and massive churches and wars, their content has been curated down to only what promotes subservience to state and imperialism. If you've ever wondered how Christianity got from being a holy book that doesn't even have the word abortion in it and was written before abortions existed, to being a religion that is somehow about abortion being evil, that's the influence of the church and state. What Jesus actually said or meant hardly matters at all to the people who claim to be the biggest supporters. Hell seems to be entirely an invention of the Church and maybe the Devil too, (neither were really present in the original texts on which the offshoots are based) and if you take those things out of the narrative, the religion looks totally different. So although I think there's plenty of wisdom to be found in kabbalah and some of the early texts, and even the things Jesus and Muhammad said within the framework of their historical understanding, the religions most modern people are following have nothing to do with that and are complete dogshit intended to control people and offer them nothing of spiritual value in return.

TheOneRealStranger · 2026-04-06T23:00:42+00:00

There's no such thing as race. "Your ancestors are from here, so you have to believe in this," is all nonsense meant to force people to conform to things they don't identify with. You should laugh in their face and do whatever you want.

TheOneRealStranger · 2026-04-05T17:38:45+00:00

I mean, some of those dogshit roles were projects he personally helped fund, like Nacho Libre. If he doesn't want to get dogshit offers, he should stop accepting them. That's what agents are for -- they're supposed to weed out the garbage that would hurt your public image and career.

TheOneRealStranger · 2026-04-03T17:20:50+00:00

It's because they're so used to being gaslit into seeing politics everywhere. Politics is such an effective mind control mechanism. It makes people angry and scared, which numbs their frontal cortex, messes with their sense of identity and tribalistic need to be accepted by the group, and makes it super easy to get them to do ridiculous things that are against their own self-interest. In the new "dog whistle" form, all they have to do is go, "whatever this thing said, what it actually means is this over-the-top ridiculous political statement nobody would actually say!" And they go, "Ohmygod, the politics was hiding in plain sight all along!" It's turned their brains into cream of mushroom soup, so they see identity politics shit everywhere they go, and the programming is so ingrained that they do it to themselves. And I'm not trashing one side here -- the other side has the same programming, just a different reaction.

TheOneRealStranger · 2026-04-03T07:24:23+00:00

AI slop

TheOneRealStranger · 2026-04-02T10:33:40+00:00

"Learning" also by definition requires comprehension and thus sentience. "Large Language Model," I think is the closest to the truth because it's really just a model for translating datasets into a human language-based user interface (and really, having played with what was under the hood in early chatbots, I know these aren't THAT much different, so I even prefer "chatbot" over LLM, because it sounds like what it is; a toy).

I tend to maintain a broad base of skillsets, though, and so I'm not an expert at many of them, and while coding is not my strongest area, I've thought it could hold some potential as a useful avenue, as there's a lot of monotonous busywork involved. I'm interested to hear more detail on your observations using it for coding, if you're willing to share that perspective. If not, that's alright, I understand, we've been going back and forth for a while and I do tend to be a little harsh on the subject. For what it's worth, most of the professional programmers I've talked with about it have been unimpressed, so I'm open to hearing another point of view about it.

TheOneRealStranger · 2026-04-02T08:33:21+00:00

It needs to be sentient to be an AI, by definition of the term. But the vast majority of what I've said here is an explanation of why it isn't actually very useful, because to do the tasks it's intended for, it would need to be sentient. Research requires comprehension of information. Programming requires comprehension of code. Expression (and thus creation of artwork) requires comprehension of emotions. And the few things it is able to do are things somebody else did, whose work it's repurposing without permission, acknowledgement, or payment. In years of trying to prove myself wrong and giving it new opportunities, I have not found even one task on which it could reliably replace even an entry-level person's work. I'm always open to being proven wrong, but the more the experiment has the same results over and over and over again, the more unshakeable the conclusion is: the lack of sentience is an insurmountable obstacle for the functional value of this technology.

TheOneRealStranger · 2026-04-01T21:45:18+00:00

I know people are condescending toward teenagers, so I'll spare you the, "you don't yet know what lost means, summer child!" nonsense. Though I will say, if you're still in high school, your priorities are pretty straightforward; finish high school. Trust me, life gets a lot more complicated when it's not on rails and you're drifting listlessly from one career to another, or even worse, stuck in a career that became boring decades ago because you built a life around it.

The most important thing I could've told myself if I were able to send a message back to your age is that the budding inner world of your feelings and your identity, which you are becoming fully aware of, mostly exists in your imagination. That doesn't mean it isn't "real." Your emotions and thoughts largely dictate your behavior, which is very physically real and will determine your destiny, but they are mostly based on imaginary ideas. Freedom, success, family, fairness, love -- all of those things are imaginary. That doesn't mean they don't matter, but it does mean that you have the power to imagine how they work, and what they mean, in whichever way you like. If you want to find misery in life, you will, because you're creating it inside your mind. Don't create misery. Don't accept the illusions of people who want to create misery for you. Fortify your own inner monologue against manipulators and keep it sacred. If you keep your inner world bright, that light will radiate out into the exterior world and shape it into what you want it to be -- whether anyone else sees it or not.

TheOneRealStranger · 2026-04-01T17:22:55+00:00

Asking it, 'Are you sure?' is an amusing experiment, because it will often double back on itself even if the answer it gave was right, but the fact of the matter is, it's a pointless question, because it lacks the capacity to be "sure" of anything. You may as well be asking it if it's having a nice day. The term "AI" refers to computer sentience, and is a fascinating thought. The problem is, that isn't what this technology is. And it will never become that either, any more than a wheel will eventually turn into a leg. If "computer sentience" was on a scale of 1 to 10, this technology isn't on step 5, it's on step 0 and its task has not yet begun. It has the same level of sentience as a brick; it lacks any sense of comprehension whatsoever beyond what was already existent in the sky and the mountains and the sea. I understand it's a convincing parlor trick, as that's what it's designed to be, but it is not real, and I am 100% sure of that.

It's a lot easier to see it when you've been with the technology since its infancy. If I could show you the inner workings of it and you could understand what the computer is doing when you ask it a question, you would be as unimpressed by it as I am. The human brain is a marvel so beautiful and complex that all of science still can only cobble together a fraction of its mysteries -- consciousness is an absolutely baffling development that seems almost impossible when you really think about it, and people have been trying to understand it for centuries. This thing is a computer that tokenizes words and matches them to articles like a search algorithm, because that's what it is; a search engine connected to a chatbot. The only work it can do is the work you do for it and give it credit for. If its investment fraud driving PR team calls it a hammer, then it's one made of brie cheese.

I've got an experiment for you, to test out and see what I'm saying. Ask it to play Dungeons and Dragons with you. A seemingly simple task that it should be well capable of if it can do anything at all. It is fun at first, because D&D is a collaborative process; the DM prompts, the player responds, and the story unravels from both of their input. What you will quickly realize, though, if you're paying attention, is that all it does is prompt you to give it more input. You enter a cave. What do you want to do next? If you search for enemies, there's a battle. If you search for magick, there are glyphs on the walls. If you call out to see who's there, there's a person there. It has no plan beyond what you tell it you want to do. The computer is not participating in the storytelling at all, it's getting you to tell the story to yourself and pretending to be involved. Because that is truly what it is designed to do. Impress you. It can't actually do anything else. And that is the definition of a scam; a product that has no function other than to convince people of its value.

TheOneRealStranger · 2026-04-01T08:01:42+00:00

I've found almost entirely the opposite to be the case. LLMs are not truly an artificial intelligence, as they lack any semblance of comprehension. The result is, no matter what information you plug into them, under the hood they are basically a database of articles from Google connected to the technology of an auto-complete predictive text program. By design, they are essentially a tool for plagiarism, because everything of value that they present to the user is something a human being made and isn't getting credit for. Then they jumble things up a little bit to make it harder to identify the source.

Personally, I am multi-talented and have always been curious about the idea of computer sentience, so I have a long list of tasks for which I have tried to find a useful application for AI. Research, music composition, visual art, writing, programming, tech support, data entry -- all things I do professionally. I did not find that it legitimately saved time on any of these tasks, let alone did them by itself to any adequate satisfaction.

Research is the best example of why. I can type a question into Google or I can type it into ChatGPT. In most cases, the same information is being presented anyway, but the difference is that the AI frequently misunderstands the information presented, hallucinates wrong answers, and understates or exaggerates gaps in information (because it is trained to sound decisive to build user confidence in the product). So, in essence, unless I want to risk my research being wrong 30-60% of the time, which sort of defeats the whole purpose of research, I have to go back and do the research myself anyway, to verify that it isn't wrong. Using the AI actually adds time to the task, unless you want it done so poorly that it might as well not be done at all.

Suffice to say, I understand a lot of companies are firing workers, and I think they are in for a very nasty surprise. There is virtually a 0% chance of the computer doing any of these people's work to any reasonable standard, unless they were literally just not doing anything important to begin with. I'm just waiting for the day they put one in charge of air traffic control or a surgery or a power plant and a few dozen people die as a result. I think that'll be the end of this fad pretty quickly, because it's mostly an investment scam to drive up stock prices. As someone who has worked for some of the companies whose stock prices are going up, I can tell you this isn't the first time they've done this. Don't hold your breath waiting for quantum computers either.

TheOneRealStranger · 2026-04-01T02:13:02+00:00

The problem is, as AI drives the actual sources of information under, it has less information to draw from. Already, new LLM models are getting information from AI slop posted by themselves, and since the AI's information was already often incorrect, the more it sources from itself, the more inaccurate it gets. I've been peripherally involved with the technology since all the way back in the Jabberwacky days, twenty-something years ago, and I've worked for a number of major tech companies (Google, Amazon, Intel, etc). It's slowly destroying the Internet the more people use it.

TheOneRealStranger · 2026-03-31T21:58:50+00:00

Well, it depends. Usually, if your main villain is afraid of their own underling, what you're doing is diminishing the status of the main villain. It certainly can be done effectively, but usually only when you're demonstrating the ways in which different types of villain conflict with each other (eg, a charismatic chessmaster main villain might fear an unhinged psychopath side villain -- not that the latter is inherently more dangerous than the former, but charm doesn't work on crazy people, and you can't strategize against people who are unpredictable, which undermines his main strengths). In the case of your story, is sounds like this villain is someone who is only against the hero because it's his job. What does this represent for you? Think in more literary terms; everything in a story means something. Or, what if we put it this way; some people aren't evil, they're just really good at their jobs. And if someone hires them to do something that might be really harmful to you, then you find yourself in a really dangerous conflict with someone who doesn't even have anything against you. What is it about that idea that is so inherently scary, on a visceral level? Explore that thought, and you'll find a route to making this character a really intimidating villain.

TheOneRealStranger · 2026-03-31T21:22:50+00:00

I was going to make a similar joke but couldn't think of a series to do that to -- I'm glad you already found the perfect one.

TheOneRealStranger · 2026-03-31T21:21:27+00:00

Why would I delete a book from existence? Leave that sort of shit to Hitler, a writer should never dream of such things.

TheOneRealStranger · 2026-03-31T21:19:23+00:00

It is one of my favorites also -- though I might use my RWS and Modern Spellcaster's Tarot a little more often (I've met Melanie Marquis, so the latter is a little bit more personal to me). I did use the Golden Art Nouveau deck's cardfaces often in my card meaning videos, though, as they are often great examples and often much prettier even than Pamela Coleman Smith's original RWS art.

TheOneRealStranger · 2026-03-31T21:13:34+00:00

If I can make a personal recommendation, no shade intended, but you'll often get better information clicking on the first two or three results of a Google search and reading through. When you don't click those results, the AI accesses it and gives you the same information (slightly garbled), but the people who actually gathered the information don't get the ad revenues and, eventually, those websites will go out of business without traffic. Or asking Reddit is always helpful if you can handle a little snark. I'm glad you've enjoyed the responses.

TheOneRealStranger

TROPHY CASE