deathmtn

Real history is often weird.

The quarrel with the archbishop came to a head in May: Mozart attempted to resign and was refused. The following month, permission was granted, but in a grossly insulting way: the composer was dismissed literally "with a kick in the arse", administered by the archbishop's steward, Count Arco. Mozart decided to settle in Vienna as a freelance performer and composer.[50]

Can you imagine this? “Count Arco, get your boot ready.”

It's a fan that is embedded in your ceiling — but also a bluetooth speaker! Sure, why not.

Junior calisthenics (up to seven fingertip push-ups now!), 12 pull-ups.

Around the 20-minute mark in this episode of Past, Present, Future, Lea Ypi pointed out that the what I think of as “religious” free trade is derived from viewing property rights as unquestionable. If you have a right to property, then you have a right to do whatever you want with your property, including trading it, or using it to force other people to do things to stay on it (in the case of land), and to refuse to let the state take any of it (in the case of money). Piketty also made this point, but over the course of hundreds of pages instead of in a few sentences.

AI information laundering turns out to work more directly than I thought.

Sam’s investigation into the inclusion of child sexual abuse material in the LAION large language model, a hugely important and sensitive story that we ultimately worked on over the course of nearly a year before we even launched, consulted with a lawyer on, and spoke to many experts for, quickly became an article called “They Delete A Database To Train AI Generative Images To Contain Child Sexual Abuse Material” on a website called “Nation World News.” Jason's scoop about a Russian stowaway became “LAX Passenger Arrives on International Flight Without Passport, Visa, Ticket, Report Says” on the Clayton County Register, another site full of AI cloned articles. Emanuel’s lighthearted interview with John Hittler became “The Man With the ‘worst Last Name In Human History’ Reveals How He Discovered Its Benefits” on “Nation World News” and, separately, “How The Man With the Worst Last Name in Human History Discovered Its Advantages” on “World Nation News,” a totally different website.

…

Over the last few weeks Jason has been researching and experimenting with a series of AI tools that promise to “spin” articles for their users. One, called SpinRewriter, lets users create 1,000 slightly different versions of the same article with a single click and to automatically publish them to as many WordPress sites as you want using a paid plugin. It also offers a tool that lets users manage as many websites as they want from a single dashboard. A company called Byword gleefully advertises the “SEO heist” that “stole 3.6M total traffic from a competitor” with this One Weird Trick (exporting the competitor’s sitemap and creating AI generated versions of 1,800 of their articles).

The article goes on to say email is the only safe way to send content. Grim.

OK, those just tasted like oranges that sat in a Tupperware on a summer afternoon because some mom left them in the car at the soccer game. Maybe our broiler isn’t hot enough.

The guy landed osotogari against a kid that was fighting pretty hard tonight. Kid skill development: amaze

Junior calisthenics. 12 pull-ups. Forgot to think of a new workout.

After hearing even more praise, I decided to check out Allan Holdsworth. Obviously a very unique guitar player, but his songs, which are actually built from very sophisticated music theory, all sound completely rootless, in a way that I find uncomfortable. Gonna let myself stop trying to like this legend.

It’s occurred to me again that I have absolutely no plan for what to do in another Trump presidency. When 2025 me looks back on this, he will be pissed.

I don’t know how common horseradish will be if we end up in a food shortage in the future, but I just tried horseradish on bread, and it’s pretty good. So, there’s one world decline strategy for you. You just have to come up with a few more, and you’ll be good.

Some Madonna song with a “waOWW” kind of sound in it was playing in Trader Joe’s. I thought it was Yoshi.

In other music attribution mistakes at Trader Joe’s, they also played some ‘00s pop punk, possibly Blink-182. Some shopper was singing along, and I automatically assumed it was a teen. Obviously, that part of my brain was not updated; it was a woman who was well into her thirties.

There were quite a few Nazi camps for kids in the 1930s in the US.

Junior calisthenics, breakfalls, 12 pull-ups.

I started a hex crawl at D&D yesterday. In short, instead of centering your planning around a dungeon and some loosely sketched surroundings, in a hex crawl, you divide a large outdoor area into hexagons and then define what is or could be in each hexagon. The hexes are more shallowly designed than a dungeon, but usually more involved than a dungeon room.

Of course, you can also have dungeons in hexes. They’ve got to be shallower than some 100-room megadungeon if you’re creating them from scratch, unless you have a ton of time.

I’ve found the format appealing for a while because hey it’s Open World. But I have an instinct that’s opposed to it for that same reason.

It feels like because it’s an open system, you’re going to have to come up with more anticipated stuff than you would if your PCs were in a dungeon. What if they go off the map? Even if they don’t, there’s plenty of undefined places to go within a hex, which is typically several square miles. You can’t plan all of it.

You can’t (and shouldn’t) plan everything in a dungeon, either, but while you may make it a sandbox, it’s more or less a closed system. That’s comforting to me, for no real reason.

To me, the Final Fantasy-style airship is a nightmare because players can go anywhere, and you have to have the entire world defined or get ready to say what’s on a continent you haven’t thought about. Still, though, it seemed like a novel experience.

So then I thought about real-world airships. Those deliver a novel experience, but they’re “limited use.” So, I threw one of those in there.

In the end, the hex crawl worked well. I didn’t have to improvise any more than I normally do. (And I do like doing that and think it’s important and what makes it not a slow video game — I just want to avoid being put in a spot where you have to pull the “you just can’t do that” emergency brake.) I was, again, actually overprepared despite thinking the opposite. I think the players visited four hexes, plus an airship. So you definitely don’t need to plan for every hex on the map. Probably just the ones they’re near.

I tend to think of the interconnected mess of the rooms of a dungeon making things richer. While that is true in a sense, it also clamps down on variety somewhat. I think some people are OK with dungeons being a collection of completely unrelated things, but I think it makes every dungeon seem the same when you do that. It feels fine when things in one hex have nothing to do with its neighbors, though!