@thebardingreen - eviltoast
  • Technology Consultant.
  • Software Developer.
  • Musician.
  • Burner.
  • Game Master.
  • Non-theistic Pagan.
  • Cishet White Male Feminist.
  • Father.
  • Fountain Maker.
  • Aquarium Builder.
  • Hamster Daddy.
  • Resident of Colorado.
  • Anti-Capitalist.
  • Hackerspace Regular.
  • Traveler of the American West.
  • 46 Posts
  • 821 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • I mean I’m here to do just that.

    Do you have a plan to change Democrats?

    I can tell you how to change Democrats and not voting for them won’t work. You don’t have to like it, but we ALL have to live with it. It’s not just you and your principles on the line here.

    https://runforsomething.net/ or STFU. Literally lives are on the line and being mad at the math doesn’t change that or wash the blood off your hands when Republicans literally kill people and destroy lives. Sorry not sorry. Hating me for saying so doesn’t make me wrong. Hating Dems for predictably being what they are and doing what they do doesn’t mean they’re not the ONLY weapon we have to defend ourselves and others against Republicans. That sucks, I hate it, but I’m not going to hurt the world and the people around me by giving into that and making objectively bad decisions and encouraging others to do so. In fact, I’m going to be here to call you out for it.

    If you’re actually doing something to change Democrats OR have a realistic idea of how to start an actually relevant third party in a country with first past the post voting, you might have a leg to stand on saying that, otherwise seriously STFU, I will die on this hill and come back for more.

    EDIT: This is how you change the goddamn Democrats.





  • I agree with basically everything you said, although I’ve found more things than just the Gorn in SNW to be cranky about. While TNG era never TRIED to get science and engineering right… they tried WAY harder than SNW, which is saying something and NOT a good something. It’s like TNG’s attitude was “We know we’re goofy, but we DO have technobabble consultants, and we try to link some of what we’re doing to real physics and engineering” while SNW is like “We don’t even like, bother man… rule of cool in a Hollywood hipstery writer way, we don’t really know what we’re talking about, nor do we care… hey can we get mocha lattes to the writers room ASAP?” Major pet peeve of mine.

    Also, I love Carol Kane as an actress, but she’s just Lillian in space, and honestly, I really didn’t ever need that. It feels out of place, but shoe horned in anyway.

    Certainly, some of my joy in the show also just has to do with it just being better than Discovery (for which I’m like…oh thank god) and just gratitude that at least they’re trying to make something LIKE Star Trek.

    Lower Decks was a better show. So was The Orville.


  • I made a pretty nasty undead bbeg in a 3.5 game by applying both the lich and vampire templates to a necromancer, then giving him levels of the Vampire Lord prestige class from Libris Mortis. He also had the Swarm Shifter template, with swarm of undead parts. His skull would hover in the middle of basically a whirlwind of bones. I let the skull make Vampire drain attacks too, but also it was vulnerable to PCs trying to target it directly.

    The nastiest thing about him though was how many other undead he could control.


  • The Bard in Green@lemmy.starlightkel.xyztoScience Memes@mander.xyzDear Kevin
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    19 days ago

    Having worked with a bunch of Boomer and older Gen X EEs, it is a fucking misogynistic boys club of white ass old men with undiagnosed autism. I have never heard so many racist and sexist jokes in the workplace (except when I worked in VC, and those guys were JUST sexist).

    So this surprises me not at all (in fact, I think I’ve heard it before, but as “Black Boys * * *”).




  • Oh man, I hate the use of all the scary language around jailbreaking.

    This means cybercriminals are using jailbreaking techniques to bypass the built-in safety features of these advanced LLMs (AI systems that generate human-like text, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT). By jailbreaking them, criminals force the AI to produce “uncensored responses to a wide range of topics,” even if these are “unethical or illegal,” researchers noted in their blog post shared with Hackread.com.

    “What’s really concerning is that these aren’t new AI models built from scratch – they’re taking trusted systems and breaking their safety rules to create weapons for cybercrime,“ he warned.

    “Hackers make uncensored AI… only BAD people would want to do this, to use it to do BAD CRIMINAL things.”

    God forbid I want to jailbreak AI or run uncensored models on my own hardware. I’m just like those BAD CRIMINAL guys.





  • One of my favorite campaigns that I’ve run several times, the antagonists are a conspiracy of powerful undead who plan to undeadify a bunch of high-level characters and influential nobles (including a blue dragon, at one point), adding them to the conspiracy and creating more dangerous antagonists for the PCS.

    At each stage of the game, the undead have several plans hatching all at once and it’s difficult for the PCs to figure out what they all are and stop them. And they have to prioritize. There’s also an Imperial senate they have to keep track of (like how many votes they have on their side versus how many votes their opponents have, both those under the influence of the undead and those just on the wrong side of the political game).

    Each time they save someone, they add a powerful ally to their side, each time they lose someone… They now have a new dangerous enemy to worry about. By itself, this raises the stakes.

    Here’s some cool battles from that game… Each one is really nasty, but less so if the characters go in having done research and had previous successes. What makes them cool is that I spent the time to create the opponents… Not just stats but agenda, purpose and personality AND the consequences of winning and losing beforehand. The following monsters from 3.5 (that’s the era where I created this game, but there’s so much good material from all of those source books that you can go harvest for cool monster ideas).

    1) Bone Naga.

    One of my favorites. An arrogant young senator / nobleman (and potential regent / imperial heir, which is important) has had a statue of himself placed in the parkland outside the Senate building, where everyone has to see it walking to and from the Senate building.

    The statue is actually hollow, and coiled inside is a bone naga, using detect thoughts to spy on all the senators (and the PCs).

    To soften the PCs up if they mess with the statue during the day, the nobleman’s guards confront them and start a fight. If they mess with the statue at night, they get in a fight with the nobleman himself (who is a psycho cultist who’s been sacrificing teenage peasants to the devil he worships and who has a necklace that can summon lesser devils). The corpses of the sacrifice victims also rise as zombies (ghouls / ghasts - depending on character level) and join the fight if the PCS are stomping.

    2) Vampire Ninjas

    If you take the time to make the vampire ninjas as actual characters and think through their powers, they’re actually super nasty and can totally TPK if you’re not careful. Mist form / bat form combined with Ninja stealth and sneak attack? The vampires are trying to off the leaders of the local thieves and assassins guilds and take their place. Those two guilds are in a manufactured gang war started by one of the vampires (a halfling vampire assassin… Think about it. It’s super nasty). You use sneak attack to hurt the big fighter badly right at the start of combat. If the vampires are getting pummeled, they go in and out of mist form and then sneak attack from mist form.

    3) Blue dragon fight.

    In my world, dragons of all colors used to interfere in politics all the time, but then retreated from the world for some reason. It doesn’t matter why, what matters is that a blue dragon has started attacking imperial shipping after literally centuries of dragons leaving the humanoid world alone.

    If the characters go stop the dragon the fight is deliberately a little bit too hard for them… Like they should lose at least one or two people if they do this (Even if those people get resurrected later).

    However, if they’re observant they may notice that the dragon seems to be unwell and sickly. If they managed to get it to stop fighting and talk to them, they will learn that the main big bad has promised it eternal life as an undead (and the dragon is pissed because it’s dying had a stupidly young age… f or a dragon… of some mysterious illness). Of course, the big bad made the dragon sick. If they can cure it, they’ve made a powerful new ally. If they don’t deal with the dragon soon enough, the big bad will show up at the final showdown riding a dracolitch lol. If they kill the dragon, the big bad will show up at the final showdown riding a zombie dragon that can still use its breath weapon.

    There are some other really good scenarios in this campaign. An Eye of Fear and Flame and an army of specters are besieging one of the imperial relatives in his country estate. An entropic reaper has been summoned from the outer planes and is stalking and murdering the High-Ranking clergy of the imperial church. If they didn’t deal with the cultist guy, he summons ice devils to attack the Senate building. If they DID deal with him, his father raises an army and marches on the capitol.

    Oh right, another aspect of this game is that there are various military actions going on and if the PCS don’t intervene in them, they end in massacres. And of course the dead soldiers are raised to join the ranks of the undead army. Also, Charnel Hounds and Boneyards are awesome aggregate undead… The more land battles are allowed to happen without PC intervention, the more hit dice the charnel hound has when it shows up. XD