@MisterBoring said in Celebrities We've Lost 2025:

@Wizz said in Celebrities We've Lost 2025:

People Mag willing to just jump on that conclusion within hours seems pretty irresponsible unless their sources are like…the son himself, so. still taking that with a small grain of salt. enormously tragic either way, those two were absolute legends and it makes me heartsick.

Well, he’s been arrested for the murder this morning.

Yeeeeah, I was a little suspicious when the police said they weren’t looking for a suspect at the time. That usually means some variation of, “We know who it was and we’re just getting the evidence we need to arrest them.”

@Faraday said in AI Megathread:

@Aria said in AI Megathread:

I’m just sitting here watching this with a look of vague horror on my face

AI has no concept of this. You can ask it to “write secure code” or whatever, but it fundamentally doesn’t know how to do that. I sincerely hope it does not take a rash of Therac 25 level disasters to teach the software industry that lesson again.

Yeeep. I’m not in medical research anymore, but I used to work in the office that monitored clinical trials for massive university hospital system, including training clinical research coordinators on how to maintain documentation to standard.

You do not mess around with people’s lives, livelihoods, and life savings. If you break those, there’s really no coming back. I don’t understand why we have to keep learning this, but I guess some tech bro billionaire and all his investors that can’t actually follow along with what he’s saying need the money to upgrade their yachts.

@Hobbie said in AI Megathread:

I genuinely hope this bubble bursts with the force of a nuke because at some point in the near future an AI will introduce a genuinely serious problem that requires human resolution and there’s no humans around who have the knowledge to fix it for them.

tl;dr if you let dumb AI learn from dumb AI, AI gets dumber.

I cannot “THIS!!!” this hard enough.

My company is currently on a kick of “We’re gonna teach the product managers to code their own products! And the UXers! And the scrum leads! Everyone’s gonna vibe code and AI code and we’re going to release new features so fucking fast and it’s gonna be AWESOME!”

Meanwhile, I’m just sitting here watching this with a look of vague horror on my face because 1) my company works in one of the most heavily regulated industries in the country 2) is large enough that a single fuck-up can and has resulted in articles in national news publications because everyone likes to watch a giant stumble. So I keep looking at this “model of the future” thinking that we’re basically going to turn our code into a nightmare of non-functionality as hundreds of people get their sticky little fingers into it and only, like, half of them have any idea how it works. Meanwhile, the other half just shoves whatever the newest ‘agentic coding tool’ says into production because that’s what the computer told them and the computer must be right.

We’re going to get slapped with the sort of regulatory fine that could pay for 20 developers for the next five years, and then everyone’s going to stand there looking surprised.

I’m pretty sure we’re all just living in the plot of Wall-E now and I hate it here.

@somasatori said in AI Megathread:

I have actually had to unlearn using em dashes because I would do it constantly. I use a lot of parentheses now when previously I would just be like – . People have recently assumed that I was using AI (not great for clinical writing) and thus everything is over-parenthized. Over-parenthesesed?

Parenthosophized. Add it to the style guides now, please and thank you.

@Pavel said in AI Megathread:

@MisterBoring Either @Roz or @Aria explained… somewhere up in the higher reaches of this thread. I got a cramp trying to scroll that far.

I explained it here. Roz got mad that she didn’t know the dumb reason they’re called en dash and em dash.

@Pavel said in AI Megathread:

@Aria said in AI Megathread:

You should be–if you know how to use them properly–leaving no spaces between the dash and the word

That is a style guide difference.

ETA: At least it used to be, I haven’t checked recently. But when I was first coming up in the Professional Writing Arena we used some bastardised variant of AP style that required a space between. It also did weird shit with ellipses that I didn’t approve of.

You can use spaces between (I prefer spaces between because ohgodmyeyes), but having a space on one side and not the other like our dumb brand font does is what I was talking about re: stylistic inconsistency. We use a bastardized version of Chicago style where I work that does the no spaces.

@Pavel said in AI Megathread:

However, various institutions are using flawed heuristics – be they AI-driven or meatbrain – to judge whether something is written by an LLM which do include em dashes and other common signs of professional/academic writing, and using those flawed judgements to punish students, workers, etc in ways that can dramatically impact their professional lives.

Funnily enough, em-dashes (along with emojis) are something that I use in my professional life to gauge whether or not something was written by an employee or written by AI. The giveaway isn’t that they’re included in whatever document, though. It’s that they’re formatted incorrectly.

Our brand standard font doesn’t like em-dashes and will format them like this-- which is both grammatically wrong and stylistically inconsistent (to the point that the forum software isn’t even auto-formatting it for me). You should be–if you know how to use them properly–leaving no spaces between the dash and the word. The professional writers will almost always catch this because it’s a clear grammar mistake. People who don’t know how em-dashes are supposed to work but had them inserted in by Copilot 365 or ChatGPT usually don’t notice the error.

It’s the same with emojis. The ones that you can make in Microsoft programs using keyboard shortcuts or from the available list in Teams have a totally different visual style than the ones that ChatGPT, Writer, and other LLMs spit out. If they show up in a piece, it’s almost always a dead giveaway that someone copied that content from an LLM into Word, Outlook, or Teams, and literally every time I’ve asked someone if they used AI to write that after seeing an out of place emoji, they excitedly confirmed they did.

The thing is, I’m not a manager and I’m not HR. The only repercussions they’re going to face from me judging something as “AI wrote that for them” is me making a bitchy little face behind my computer. If anyone else notices, they’ll probably be praised for being more efficient–right up until someone in leadership wants to know why something isn’t right.

Needless to say, I have a lot of Big Feelings about AI because my company uses it, I’m expected to write about what we use it to do for the public, I’m expected to write about how to use it better for our employees, and people think it can replace parts of my job. Which it can! And does! Often poorly. Especially when people don’t understand how it works, what it actually does, or that artificial intelligence is a terrible misnomer and it should likely be called ‘automation’ instead.

@Faraday said in AI Megathread:

@Ashkuri said in AI Megathread:

No one is coming for the em dashes

That is just literally untrue. People have targeted it so much that it’s been widely dubbed the “ChatGPT Hyphen”, and there are a bazillion articles written about how it’s a “tell-tale sign of AI use” by people who don’t know better.

I am not saying that the Wikipedia article was made in bad faith. As you note, it has many sensible disclaimers. But there are just too many people looking for “shortcuts” to identifying AI writing, and they’re liable to summarize and/or quote out of context without the necessary nuance.

I probably shouldn’t be sitting here laughing, but like…

I rattled off five different things I do in my writing that would probably get it flagged as AI, three of which are things I’ve been professionally trained to as part of published and in-house style guides. And now we’re arguing about “OMG em-dashes!” again, which is… summarizing and/or quoting out of context without the rest of the nuance.

Exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis.

@Faraday said in AI Megathread:

@Tez said in AI Megathread:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

Just as a note, many (if not most) of these “signs of AI writing” are in fact signs of professional writing as well.

The so-called “ChatGPT Dash” is just the em dash, widely used by pro authors and well-known in Emily Dickinson poetry. Rule of three, “has been described”, parallelism… most of these are common writing tools that many people just weren’t aware of before. ChatGPT is able to imitate those tools because it stole the published work of actual writers.

This. So very much this. I write professionally not as an author of novels or biographies or anything like that, but in the world of corporate communications. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of both externally-facing articles online and internally-facing intranet articles that I’ve either written or edited over the last five years in this job.

As I scan this article about signs of AI writing, I can see no less than five things that appear in my writing either because they’re a personal writing habit (m-dashes, rule of three) or because they’re in my company’s internal style guide (disclaimer-like language as a result of regulatory rules we’re adhering to, items being treated as proper nouns, excessive use of bold face when referring specific form fields or product titles).

Anything I write personally, I don’t use AI for at all and generally refuse to touch. Knowing my writing style, though, I’m just waiting for the day someone sees me using the MS Word autoformat for an m-dash (–) out of pure habit and accuses me of using ChatGPT to RP.

Anything I write professionally would almost certainly be pegged as written by AI, despite the fact that I have access to three different LLM products at work and largely refuse to use them–unless I’ve gotten a last minute request from a level of leadership I can’t delay. Even then, I use it to spit out a very rough draft at most, which I edit significantly.

On our team of seven people, one of my teammates consistently receives praise for her adoption and advocacy of AI tools. She’s also recognized by our boss’s boss as the team’s worst writer. I largely refuse to use them and am generally regarded as the team’s Luddite, and also get consistently praised as our best writer. The irony isn’t lost on me, but it does seem to be lost on management.

I’m sure this is some sort of big scandal, but all I can think is:

“Jesus Christ, I barely have the ability to make an alt–as in one!–on top of the one character that I have on one game. The last few times I tried, I either never finished CGen or went IC all of, uhhh, twice. Who has the energy and executive function to have multiple OOC identities with multiple alts for each of them?!”

@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Yam

Once we all had anxiety, or we had emotional/mental fatigue from being the person who did the who-where-aboutwhat? scene-organising labour too often.

Now we can top those legit reasons off with the fact that some get away with treating asking for RP as a violation of boundaries and a bannable offense. So yeah, who’s asking these days?

I don’t think I’ve seen anyone banned for asking for RP unless it was someone they had a no contact with and were approaching on another alt.

That said, I have seen someone go to staff and complain that they were being harassed by someone who they were trying to avoid, but who frequently asked them for RP or who often popped into rooms they were in to try to catch a scene. The thing is, there wasn’t a no contact and place and they’d never expressed to this person that they didn’t want to interact with them for fear of being seen as rude or as a bully–which is totally legit and a reasonable concern!

But. A big ol’ but here.

At that point it’s not harassment, it’s just the other person being annoying by not taking the hint. And my dudes, dropping a hint is not clear communication. It’s deliberately vague communication, which is hard enough in person when there’s also body language and facial expressions and tone to pick up on. Text has none of those things. Don’t drop hints, cross your fingers, touch your toes, and hope the other person clues in to what you’re (not) saying. Say what you mean. You can be nice about it! But say what you mean. The internet is not going to burn to the ground if you tell someone “Oh! Thanks for the offer, but I’m not really up for that.” or even just “No, thank you.” the way we were all taught when we were, like, five.

@helvetica said in Celebrities We've Lost 2025:

@Aria My mother is touting a picture of him holding me as a baby, today.

I’m gonna miss that dude! I rarely go to fancy restaurants, but I feel like every time I ever do… he’s there, out with one or more beautiful twinks. smh. single tear drop.

I met him a couple of times and was just showing a friend the photo of me and @insomniac meeting him at a standing room only Green Day show, like, ten years ago. I didn’t realize he was live when the pic was snapped. He put me on air talking about how I’d been listening since I was 14 and when I was off at college and they weren’t broadcasting online yet, my mom’d put the phone up to the radio on Thanksgiving Day so we could sing “Alice’s Restaurant” all together and horribly off-key.

Pierre Robert, 70

Pierre was a radio legend. He’d been on air since 1981, so almost anyone who ever lived in the Philadelphia region and listened to rock knew who he was. The man was so beloved by locals that any time he was covering a concert, the line to meet him would be almost as long as the line the meet the band. His love for music was legendary, as was his hilariously painted van “Minerva”, which was older than I am. His complete inability to keep to a schedule became a running joke that his audience dubbed “Pierre Standard Time” and his radio show frequently ran over just because he was jamming out and having a good time. He founded charities to fight food insecurity, launched city-wide holiday traditions, promoted small local bands, was willing to use his platform to cut off musicians who took extremist views or did a Philly audience dirty, and was always, always happy to stop and snap a photo with listeners.

For folks in Philly who love music, this one’s a kick in the teeth.

@somasatori said in Historical Games Round 75:

@labsunlimited said in Historical Games Round 75:

The beef between ancient Assyrians and Greeks might as well be a beef between vampires and werewolves for how relevant it is today.

I think that this is a good point, but man, some of these ancient grudges are 100% still around. From my own experience, they also tend to manifest in very strange ways and usually when you might not expect it (especially as an American).

Dude, from 1993 to 2018, North Macedonia was officially entered into the United Nations under the name The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Because they were fighting with Greece about who got to be Macedonia and who got to be Macedonians and whether or not there was the potential for annexation of one state by another. You might assume that this was all the result of the Balkan Wars in the early 1900s and the regional conflicts of the early to mid-1990s, which were absolutely the central point of contention.

But, like, you also had national governments throwing around references to what names had been used and where the borders were during the Roman Empire.

Some Roman guy who died in 150-whatever BC scribbled some stuff on a map after Rome conquered Greece and literally two thousand years later, people were using it to say “Hey, fuck those people over there in particular.”

@Tez said in Historical Games Round 75:

@DrQuinn said in Historical Games Round 75:

Especially since there are definitely players out there drooling to put that white hood on and let the things they don’t dare say in real life to a person out online.

Throw them out. Throw them the fuck out. I don’t think they are as subtle as they think they are. If you see it, if you sniff it, throw the poop out. You’re right that you will get people pushing boundaries, but you get people pushing boundaries regardless. Flush 'em.

Like a social contract is great, but also is going to probably ensure that your player base is mostly white.

Maybe.

I think we also have a tendency (duh, obviously) to take a very modern (duh, obviously) western idea on what isms are and what we would expect to see in play.

I have, on two different games about ten years apart, run into entire groups of people playing actual, literal neo-Nazis. Both instances were disturbing, but the second instance was particularly strange. Somehow, my character – who was Jewish – got painted as the asshole for not wanting to deal with some dude walking around with a shaved head and a swastika tattoo.

But even weirder than that? I found out after the fact that one of the women in the group was someone I’d known for a years. In fact, it was a friend I’d lost contact with. A friend who I’d had long conversations with most of a decade earlier about how she was never going to play a black character again after dealing with a guy on the White Wolf mods who had sent out a really gross email including a lot of stereotypes about black people and then got very much called out on it by, like, half the Mage sphere. Long conversations about how upsetting that was for her because she was no longer comfortable playing characters who looked like her because of that incident.

To this day, I don’t really know how I should feel about that or if I even get to have an opinion on that, because her feelings on the subject are entirely her own and not something I get to dictate. But needless to say, I was shocked to discover that one of the most racist characters I’ve ever encountered on a game, with a player that took umbrage to people not wanting to interact with a group of neo-Nazis, was played by a person of color who had previously felt personally victimized by racist stereotypes proposed in RP.

(Also, sorry if the quotes got busted. Phone typing sucks.)

@Pyrephox said in Historical Games Round 75:

I admit, I am a person who wants historically accurate -isms and resistances in historical games. Does that mean I want to see a bunch of racist, sexist, bigoted PCs? No, of course not.

But these societal forces shaped the era and had a lot of impact on the culture, the structure of society, and the pressures that drove people to accomplish amazing and heartbreaking things. When you remove, for example, the fact that suffragettes could be and were tortured and murdered by law enforcement for campaigning for women’s rights, then the courage it took to be a suffragette is diminished. If you’re talking about union-building, I think you have to include the fact that union-busters used racism to try and drive working class groups apart, even if that effort fails in the context of your game. If you’re talking 1920s-30s, it’s a bit repugnant to me to not make it clear that it’s an era when the people who made some of the defining music of the era couldn’t have a drink in the “respectable” clubs they played in. It also helps contrast some of the speakeasys which were integrated and even havens for LGBT folk of the era, etc. The fact that people had to find refuge in criminality because the laws were bigoted and unjust is a huge part of the story of the era.

This is a huge part of why I opted not to open that game–not because I don’t agree with you, but because I do.

My original intention wasn’t to muck with The -Isms or the timeline at all, trusting that the vast majority of the player base wouldn’t engage in anything so egregious and that the few who’d come in with the worst intentions would be obvious and easy to boot from the game.

It was the very first question I got being “But what about the racism?!” that led to me to a bit of a knee jerk reaction of “Well, I’ll just lift it out. Blah blah blah, players imagine all sorts of crazy stuff, they can imagine this, too.” Especially since, given the OGoA setting, there would be plenty of other horrors for characters to come up against.

It was my attempts at presenting historical examples and this person who is intelligent and insightful and whose opinions I generally trust going nowhere that ultimately changed my mind. Despite evidence to the contrary, it seemed like they just couldn’t be convinced that while this was the predominant attitude of the time, it wasn’t universal and it would be perfectly reasonable and also historically accurate for people to play characters who didn’t hold those views.

That left me sitting there thinking that my options for running something in the time period would effectively be:

• Erase the history of this very real oppression that people experienced and those that fought against it.

• Neglect the history of the people that fought against that oppression and potentially expose players to really awful prejudice and abuse.

• Write a guide that would effectively boil down to “Okay, But How Much Racism is Cool versus How Much Racism is Too Much Racism?” with all of the ick I feel even typing that, nevermind the potential for any of it to be taken out of context or implied to endorse at least some terrible things as acceptable.

When I realized that none of these seemed like very good options, or at least not options I was comfortable with, I couldn’t move forward with the game. Not because I don’t think those stories are worth telling, but because I think they need to be approached with a level of awareness that I’m not sure I trust a mass of strangers to consistently demonstrate on a public game.

@Ashkuri said in Missed Settings:

@Aria said in Missed Settings:

The thing is, the first person that I brought the idea to was like, “But what about the racism, Aria?!”

This comment made me go and read through this thread about MU* historical accuracy again. I guess some players find it disruptive to delete The -Isms from a historical setting, some find it disruptive not to delete that, and (like your friend and yourself) these types don’t easily mesh together.

To be fair, if they’d been pointing out the need to develop a divergent history or something, I think that would’ve been entirely reasonable. If they’d been pointing out that intersection of early labor movements with fights against racial injustice, this also would’ve been an excellent point! Wanting to see those things included in games instead of lifted out as if that solves everything, I totally get. But this was like…

“It’s Appalachia. Of course all the characters are going to be horrifically racist. Because it’s Appalachia!”, effectively painting all of the people of an entire region as a monolith of unvaried views or possibility for nuance without exception. And, like, that’s just not true of any single point group of people literally ever or history wouldn’t have gone the way that it has. Hence the examples I was providing. For every predominant view and systemic issue that’s historically accurate, there’s also counterpoints to it that are historically accurate without having to engage in presentism.

But! I digress, and if I digress anymore, this should probably be Historical Accuracy Argument #385 or something.

@somasatori said in Missed Settings:

The same as above, but leveraged towards The Strange and some other Monte Cook projects as well. Even stripping away the Cypher system altogether, things like The Strange or Old Gods of Appalachia seem like they’d be great MUSH fodder and you could probably do OGoA with something like FS3 given that the main characters are rarely supernatural themselves. Some of those other radio play style podcasts would be cool as well: the White Vault, Magnus Archives (also a Monte Cook project), and so on.

I was, at one point, actually actively working on an Old Gods of Appalachia game with the full intention of using FS3 and then stealing some of the inspiration available to me in the OGoA game system. (There is a published one. I backed it on Kickstarter awhile ago.)

My plan was to set it in a mining town to allow us to both mix the eldritch horrors aspect along with some of the politics of the labor movement so players could contrast the ancient horrors beneath the earth with just, y’know, people? Kind of the way 28 Days Later has zombies but those soldiers are also just as scary and threatening?

The thing is, the first person that I brought the idea to was like, “But what about the racism, Aria?!” and I was like, “Well, if I’m asking players to imagine a world in which the bones of the earth are full of unknowable monstrosities older than mankind itself, maybe even older than the world itself, I’m pretty sure I can ask them to imagine a world that’s just not inherently shitty to people of color.” And they were like, “But people will be confused without the racism because of historical accuracy.” And then I pointed out a whoooooooole bunch of examples of coal miners in Appalachia banding together across racial lines and they were still like “BUT PEOPLE. HISTORICAL ACCURACY.” and I took that to mean “BUT THE RACISM.”

And then I decided that if I couldn’t persuade one single person that we could probably just, y’know, not include 1920s style racism and generally be fine, with less people being offended by the erasure of it than the allowance of it, this was actually a terrible idea and promptly gave up.

@catzilla said in Your first game?:

@Aria said in Your first game?:

@catzilla said in Your first game?:

@Aria My very first scene on New Bremen my character was meeting her new packmates (on New Bremen you had to start in a pack so there was basically LFG/PUG packs on the game).

She walked in on one of her packmates cuddling/kissing a Pookie. In their animal form.

@catzilla I don’t remember that rule, though I’m not sure if it was because it didn’t apply by the time I made my Fianna or if it’s because in Werewolf, I mostly played a Kinfolk…

…who was the mate of Sturm Magnarsson. Ohh, god, the horror stories I could tell that came as a result of dipshit late teenage me being like, “Well, she has Survivor as a Nature and he’s the alpha of the Fenrir and he’s asking for her, so it makes sense IC.”

If there were ever a lesson in “It’s what my character would do!” blowing up in a player’s face but in exactly the wrong way from how it should, that was it. That was it right there. No, little baby Aria. No. You tell more people to fuck off when they start getting weird at you. (Adult Aria, too, honestly.)

That name kind of rings a bell but I don’t think I ever properly played with them. I did play a Shadow Lord kinfolk that was mated to a big shot PC named Aldrich something? I can’t think of anything the player did but the PC provided a bunch of drama/trauma for my kinfolk (in what I remember as a fun way).

Dude, if you’re talking about the PC that I think you’re talking about–and I might be wrong here since it’s been twenty years–he was awesome. The player was from Brazil, learned most of his English RPing online, and was still a better writer than 90% of the people I’d run into. We lost touch over the years, but I still tell stories about him and his Vampire PC in the VtR reboot as prime examples of how to play an asshole without being an asshole OOC.

Aldrich/Chris March/Eduardo, wherever you are in the ether?

@catzilla said in Your first game?:

@Aria My very first scene on New Bremen my character was meeting her new packmates (on New Bremen you had to start in a pack so there was basically LFG/PUG packs on the game).

She walked in on one of her packmates cuddling/kissing a Pookie. In their animal form.

@catzilla I don’t remember that rule, though I’m not sure if it was because it didn’t apply by the time I made my Fianna or if it’s because in Werewolf, I mostly played a Kinfolk…

…who was the mate of Sturm Magnarsson. Ohh, god, the horror stories I could tell that came as a result of dipshit late teenage me being like, “Well, she has Survivor as a Nature and he’s the alpha of the Fenrir and he’s asking for her, so it makes sense IC.”

If there were ever a lesson in “It’s what my character would do!” blowing up in a player’s face but in exactly the wrong way from how it should, that was it. That was it right there. No, little baby Aria. No. You tell more people to fuck off when they start getting weird at you. (Adult Aria, too, honestly.)