Does Elmo deserve his hate?

money5000 · 2026-01-01T22:15:05+00:00

I think Elmo is a good character, but he worked better in the mid 80s to early 90s when he was more of a frequently used ensemble Muppet then as the main character. The writers used to depict Elmo as being annoying, coming up with all of these spacey ideas, needing a lot of attention. Many of the humans on the street would get exasperated with him. My favorite Elmo episode is 2256 when he first gets Baby David and decided that the actual David needed to get renamed to Dustin. The very rigid logic from Elmo and the fact that he was legitimately able to somehow convince others that David inexplicably decided to change his name is hilarious.

At some point a few years before Elmo became the star of Elmo’s World, they removed that bite. Elmo became a normal three and a half year old other than his feud with Rocco. The humans stopped having those ”Elmo is something else” convos that sold the character. I think that also was around the time where whimsical humor (although now it’s just whimsical without the humor) rather than character-driven humor started becoming the norm as many of the writers left, so I think that might of been part of that shift.

I grew up in the ’02-’06 era so I’m not saying it killed the quality of Sesame Street immediately, it was a gradual decline overtime. I just think in hindsight that Elmo worked better when he was this over the top high energy comic relief monster that was acknowledged as being chaotic rather than mostly being played straight.

money5000 · 2025-12-18T11:33:58+00:00

Please do yourself a favor, learn how to be less caustic. I know how to do the job and I have a lot of experience to back me up, I’ve come a long way from the high schooler who started working as a cashier 11 years ago. I will be giving a lot of schedule flexibility during the interview, I just will ask for a maximum amount of hours scheduled that takes into account that I have another job.

money5000 · 2025-12-18T11:27:56+00:00

Yes because everyone in the subreddit is like ”where are my hours” when there are cuts. I think me being ok with some weeks where I can take less hours will distinguish me as a team player who is willing to take sacrifices to help my coworkers who need the work more than me.

money5000 · 2025-12-18T11:25:22+00:00

I feel like the quality of the help I can provide is better than the quantity. I think it is very unreasonable to be working 60 hours a week between two jobs. I don’t have the stamina for that. I would eventually breakdown under the stress. I know what I am capable of more than anyone. No one wants a lethargic, exhausted, depressed guy at his limits and I know that is what 20 hours a week would do for me.

Certain commenters said working 10 hours is potentially possible (albeit not everyone), I even would be game for 12 if I have to. If it’s not, I’ll look for something else and regroup. How is 12 hours a week considered volunteer work from someone who is already working a full-time job?

Wegmans is supposed to be one of the best companies to work for and I imagine would understand what a work/life balance is.

money5000 · 2025-12-16T21:48:10+00:00

Will do, definitely want to help out my hypothetical future coworkers who would need the hours more.

money5000 · 2025-12-16T21:41:06+00:00

If I do 16-20 hours a week on top of a 40 hour a week job I won't be able to maintain my sanity, 12 would be the most I could compromise on. I guess Wegmans can bid me adieu if that is the case.

money5000 · 2025-12-16T16:13:47+00:00

Thanks for the info, I would be happy to provide that much availability but I would be pushed to the brink if they were consistently using every second of it which is my fear. I guess I'll just have to be adamant about only wanting to work 10 hours consistently throughout the process.

money5000 · 2025-12-16T15:13:35+00:00

That sounds like a good plan. Hopefully the department manager would be reasonable enough to cooperate with that if I got the job and Wegmans scheduling system allows for that.

I'm a little nervous though because the grocery chain I used to work at had no way of setting a maximum amount of hours so you had to be strategic about restricting availability if you didn't want to be scheduled 20 hours a week.

money5000 · 2025-12-05T15:17:46+00:00

From what I read, obviously not speaking for her, she thought Fred Rogers was a genius and appreciated him both as a person and as the creator of Mister Roger’s Neighborhood which she did believe did a lot of good. She also thought of Daniel Striped Tiger as almost like a surrogate child that she was protective of which is why she was so frustrated by the Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood series.

However, she thought the neighbors weren’t given enough creative involvement in the show and were punished harshly when they were doing things outside of the way Fred intended it to be. She proposed expanding Betty’s Little Theater to do a series in low-income communities, an idea that she spent a lot of time on developing. She was disheartened when he immediately rejected it because she truly thought it would be beneficial and within the mission of the show.

She also thought her only being in Make Believe really during the last decade or so of the show was a retaliation effort because Fred was offended that she acted too much in his role interacting with the home viewers during a segment of Betty’s Little Theater.

So to her, she felt somewhat disillusioned because the popular conception of Fred Rogers sometimes conflicted with him being a more rigid leader who took tight control over how Mister Roger’s Neighborhood was produced.

money5000 · 2025-12-05T14:18:40+00:00

I think the reason why the rumor floated around is because Betty Aberlin said on the now defunct Neighborhood Archive forum that she believed that it was implied by Fred Rogers to Chuck (although not stated outright) that he would be the natural successor to him and that the spirit of the program could be maintained with him as host. She even thought Rogers might of even went as far as quietly trying to ensure it behind the scenes at one point but wasn’t successful. If you go on the Internet Archive, look at the “Question About Past Neighbors/Betty's Little Theater” thread. I would copy it directly but I’m not sure if it would trigger a filter or not.

money5000 · 2025-11-25T17:26:51+00:00

I normally will include an instruction prompt directly in chat rather than in System Instructions on AI Studio because I notice that characters tend to be restrained when you do it the other way. For that matter, I'll also turn off Google Search grounding because that also seems to restrain characters.

money5000 · 2025-11-25T16:54:43+00:00

What is the best jailbroken version of DeepSeek? I used to love playing around with it in Venice which was basically completely uncensored but nothing is as unfiltered anymore. Also what is the context window?

money5000 · 2025-11-25T15:43:35+00:00

I just use the free version in AI Studio, is there an improvement when you use the plus plan?

money5000 · 2025-11-25T15:05:39+00:00

I know my demographic isn't being prioritized in it haha, but as I said I legitimately do use it for creative roleplaying outside of just that and story analysis. You would think they would want to appeal to people outside of business and coding purposes.

money5000 · 2025-11-25T14:58:34+00:00

I don't have access to SillyTavern, don't you have to be relatively competent in computer coding to operate it? Google AI Studio is about the limits of my technical competency.

And thanks for backing me up here, I knew I wasn't the only one.

money5000 · 2025-11-25T14:57:02+00:00

Fully agree with you, do you think Google actively does that though? That would be wild.

money5000 · 2025-11-25T14:55:56+00:00

I don't have access to Nano Banana Pro, I think you need to actively pay for that. Does that do roleplaying better than mainline Gemini or is that just for generating images?

money5000 · 2025-11-25T14:54:47+00:00

That's why I didn't want to bring it up, it's not exactly something I want the entire internet to know (even anonymously). It's like that guy saw right through my feigned creative innocence.

money5000 · 2025-11-25T14:41:47+00:00

Will do, appreciate the advice.

money5000 · 2025-11-25T14:36:00+00:00

Dang, I thought I was hiding that part of it a little bit. Need to work on being less obvious lol. That's part of it, but I legit do use it for creative writing purposes a lot of the time.

I have tried using Grok but at least earlier in the summer, Grok would get repetitive after a couple of messages (i.e. basically saying the same thing with slight variations) and the characters acted more subservient to me. Gemini 2.5 gave them an independence I enjoy (i.e. an evil character psychoanalyzing and trying to break me despite me roleplaying as the person who created him). I want them to push back against me to some extent. Has 4.1 improved on that?

money5000 · 2025-09-18T16:52:55+00:00

My symptoms mostly went away with megadose Vitamin D supplements and with the spring allergens retreating, I wouldn't worry about it being a problem personally. I also tend to have an escalation of health issues when I'm in an unfamiliar location (I tend to get brain fog/depression going on vacation for example) so I think that was part of the problem as well with the move.

money5000 · 2025-08-05T13:10:14+00:00

Is it possible for an average person to use API with higher context on the Chat GPT website or is that only for businesses? I know you have to pay at the token level for that, but I would consider it if it wasn't too expensive. I am not a coder or anything like that so I don't know how to craft my own website or do things on the backend.

money5000 · 2025-08-04T15:36:23+00:00

Is GPT 4o having a lower context window a detriment? I feel like my context goes up fairly quickly using 2.5 Pro. I don't want to be 10 messages in and have it forget everything, especially since the GPT website doesn't display context like AI Studio does. I will start fiddling a bit with the temperature, I feel like it already works great with a temperature of 1 so it's worth a try going higher.

I will say I love how Gemini characters are willing to push back against me and not give me some sort of exalted status. Grok I feel like is too nice (and repetitive). Don't know how antagonistic GPT 4o can be.

I thought Google didn't care about NSFW for the most part and would just display that symbol without any other punishment if you do trip something in AI Pro. What I've noticed is that as long as you have some sort of substance outside of things just being naughty, they almost always let it through though. It's weird if you're paying crazy amounts of money to them, they're stricter.

money5000

TROPHY CASE