All Kinds of Random

For a little bit of anarchy but not the hurting kind.

[landrinha]

Oh Leiland I love you so much

[homunculus-argument]

deer after almost 150 years of cars: maybe if I stand really quietly here in this exposed area, right in front of this thing that barrels directly towards me at unfathomable speeds it won't see me.

seagulls after 20 years of smartphones: the exact moment when the human glances at their rectangle is the best time to swoop in and snatch the shit from their other hand.

[scattergoriesofevil]

herbivore / prey animal: oh no

omnivore / opportunistic scavenger: hell yes

[scattergoriesofevil]

Thimble knows who and what Thjazi was better than anyone. She didn’t know the details of his half of their operation, by design, but she ran half of it. She was his partner in crime, full stop. When Thjazi was betrayed by an old ally, Thimble immediately went to find him, stabbed him in the eye, and slit his throat.

Laura Bailey has been extremely clear from the beginning, when she told us “Thimble is a stone cold killer.” I’d argue Thimble is a ruthless adversary with vast criminal expertise who only a fool would cross, but in no scenario is she a “good” protagonist unaware of the general nature of what her “morally gray” partner was getting up to. Thjazi’s business was her business. Thjazi was a pretty complicated hero, and so is she.

[penny-anna]

Hello friends we need to talk about this twitter account:

You might know him from a thread where he was getting wowed by free appetisers in a Mexican restaurant.

Firstly: He is doing a bit pretending to be a wandering samurai. It's a joke and his posts are all made up. This is very obvious if you actually look at his account and website:

He does purport to be Japanese but based on some of the other content he posts there's reason to believe he's British.

Which brings me to my second point: his Samurai content is interspersed with posts like this:

And this:

He is not cute or funny. Stop platforming him.

[penny-anna]

The chips and salsa thread went viral in June and his website seems to have gone live in July. This confirms what I suspected which is that said website with it's explicit disclaimers was made in response to the big viral hit.

Consequently, back when he first blew up it was potentially a bit harder to figure out that his stories are fictional. That said, the New York Times worked it out so I'm comfortable accusing outlets who ran the story describing him as a Japanese world cup tourist of legitimately terrible journalism.

[scattergoriesofevil]

THIS is where the free appetizer anecdote came from? jfc

[redjennies]

there's this early talks (maybe in an after dark part) where they're talking about very early C2 ships and Travis just goes ">;) I like Caleb and Nott." which has led to my headcanon that Fjord spent all of C2 thinking Caleb and Veth were a couple, which wasn't at all changed by finding out Veth was married to Yeza because as a sailor, he's probably deeply normalized the concept of location-based polyamory.

[redjennies]

Veth, married straight out of high school: oh I have these two great loves I'm conflicted by. I want to be with Yeza but I want to be with Caleb. does this make me a bad wife and mother? :(

Caleb, formerly in a trauma-feuled polyamorous relationship that was a full triad: oh whatever will I do when Veth goes back to her husband? will she even need me in her life? I must find a way to stay connected to her family. :(

Fjord, a sailor and a fucking genius: Caleb is Veth's ship wife and Yeza is her port wife and that's fine.

[scattergoriesofevil]

Smash cut to 2026

Corrupt Caleb: I will advance Veth’s pregnancy to full term mid combat!

“Normal” Caleb: Obviously I am the third parent of this baby halfling and if I can’t see him at all times I will have a panic attack.

[tavina-writes]

People have real issues understanding why the absence of romance and sexual desire is such a big deal. "No one bothers you over your sexual orientation! You're basically a straight person!" No wrong. The older you get the more your life is considered a failure for failing to find a life partner and get your 2.5 kids in.

Like people make fun of middle aged women for not getting married or being divorced or "always the bridesmaid never the bride" and all like "oh she's desperate! No one wants her! Old maid!' but they become straight up hostile and upset when you tell them you never want to date.

Being unpartnered after your mid twenties is just like "oh what's wrong with you" and "don't worry you'll find your guy" "aren't you afraid of being alone" "who will take care of you" "you're running out of time to have kids" and no matter what you are or aren't people straight up don't understand that you don't want them.

[bobcatdump]

People tend to forget that queer is a word that means weird, and if you step out of heteronormativity you're weird in the eyes of the heteonormative society, wether you want different relationships or no relationships at all.

The core wound of this demographic is being rejected and being relentlessly asked to stop your bullshit relative to romance and sex, and to get back in the ranks. The aroace definitely qualify.

And since being rejected is obviously a veeeeery common trauma in the queer community, and people tend to reenact unhealed patterns, it's not rare to see queer people rejecting other queer people with shit like biphobia, being picky with who "qualify" as trans, dismissing aroaces etc...

Let's put rejection somewhere on a dusty shelf for a while and see how it feels. I'm sure it's freeing.

[scattergoriesofevil]

This is a great explanation for why I feel more and more comfortable thinking of myself as queer as I start to progress through middle age. The pressure to marry a man and have children is a current I have been swimming against my entire life.

[rpgchoices]

Every time someone complain about how "this choice is not moral, if you chose it/did this in this videogame you are a terrible person!" my mind plays this on repeat

[scattergoriesofevil]

What are games for if not the freedom to do something you’d never do in real life? What is fiction for if not to explore a different point of view?

[ehnoshima]

really needed to draw this so bad thank you @chongoblog

[frodo-of-the-nine-fingers]

my actual vampire hot take is that if you're going to be a 'vegetarian' vampire (a vampire that only drinks the blood of animals) you MUST have hunter education. i'm so sick of people being like oh well predator animals are mean and scary because they kill cute 'harmless' animals like NO they're crucial for the environment and if you're going to hunt animals for blood you still need to stick to regular people hunting guidelines and only hunt things that are in season and abide by your areas bag limits

[moral-autism]

vampire that did a detailed study about whether vampires can get prion diseases and concluded they can't and preferentially hunts animals with chronic wasting disease. and then incinerates the corpses.

[aksemmi]

vampire who is a woke predation abolitionist and so exclusively hunts predators, leaving primarily herbivorous and scavenging animals alone

[yaldabaothadeez]

"For miles around the foul creature's lair is nothing but barren wastes"

"because of The Curse?"

"Because of the deer and rabbits, fucking thing ate all the wolves"

[scattergoriesofevil]

New vampire who has a PhD in ecology, explaining a graph showing a population growth curve to the rest of the clan:

“The deer cull the clan carried out two years ago successfully reduced the local population below the environment’s carrying capacity. The surviving deer have responded to this with increased reproductive success, which is why we’re seeing even more deer today, along with severe overgrazing.”

“And? How do we get the spring wildflowers back, so we get enough tourists to drink?”

“We need to drink more deer. Two culls a year, specifically, while monitoring the population size with more accuracy. Also consider reintroducing predators.”

“Like werewolves? Absolutely not!”

“Regular wolves should be sufficient. I’m passing out several case studies for us to review, starting with the restoration of wolves in Yellowstone.”

[2manypdfs]

happy There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury day

[littlebosslady7]

These were on Beacon's instastory with no other context.

I do there's an announcement coming up. Can't say if that's related.

[scattergoriesofevil]

At the bottom of today’s newsletter.

[scattergoriesofevil]

Guys. Kaylin Mahoney is who Dropout calls when they need a fake PA. For good reason. She’s very good and commits 100% to it. Sam Reich does not cast PAs as contestants on the spot. But he does lie to us while playing his game show host persona on stage. All. The. Time. He’s also NOT the guy who locked 3 people in the green room. That was time traveling doppelgänger Samuel Dalton!

[scattergoriesofevil]

I’m assuming Kaylin’s participation was planned in advance, just like her previous guest appearances. “Oh no, I’m a PA unexpectedly competing in a game show in the place of 3 people” is a very funny bit to play with as a guest performer.

She got a lot of screen time in a complex series of challenges. I can’t see Dropout ever surprising someone with that IRL. Ethically AND from a risk management perspective. She did the heaviest lifting of anyone on that stage, which required very thoughtful casting.

[scattergoriesofevil]

Lisa Hanawalt on Game Changer????

[ariadne-mouse]

The Plank King and the Horrible, Terrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

[scattergoriesofevil]

I really hope wherever they are in the Mighty Nein’s development, there’s still time to make some changes to The Plank King. And for Daniel to voice him.

[redstonedust]

for the record im not technially 100% anti-AI, in the sense that its a broad category of tech being lumped under one umbrella term so it feels over-zealous to say i hate all of it all the time forever. but i also think trying to discuss what it actually IS good for is difficult right now when i cant take one step without something trying to convince me to use chatgpt to summarize my life and speed up my hobbies and turn my friends into chatbots and optimize my life into oblivion. i am certain there is nuance to the topic but can we stop cramming the square peg into the round hole before you start trying to sell me on the legitimate benefits of the square peg. please.

[ralfmaximus]

Neural Nets have existed for decades and are genuinely useful. It's a form of AI that recognizes patterns, and can do stuff like identify cancer cells, tell whether an egg is fertilized or not, detect fraud, and optimize routes.

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

I fucking hate it.

[littlebosslady7]

Thanks for sharing the Beacon newsletter Tales_of_Exandria.

Things up for speculation during the break via the crew.

My first guess was 2027 live show reveals.

[scattergoriesofevil]

This was posted to the scrying-eye channel after the email went out.

[scattergoriesofevil]

Update!