Maybe Janeway was just secretly really racist against Asian people. Just because society has left bigotry behind doesn’t mean all members of that society have.

Can’t be personalized, as I basically never visit Liquor stores.

Either that, your you visit liquor stores so much your don’t remember visiting liquor stores! :D

The first step to fixing a problem is admitting you have one. And Texas has a problem of Republican politicians leading the state to disaster. Whenever a disaster strikes due to Republican policies, Republicans circle the wagons, huff and puff, and say, “how DARE you. How dare you make this moment political! Now is not the time for politics!” They commonly do this after school shootings, and now you’re doing the same thing after a mass death event caused by Republican policies.

Life is political. The right has trained people to view being “non political” as a social good. This allows them to play politics more freely, while the rest of the population is obsessed with not introducing politics except in a few narrow windows. Republicans bake politics into their entire life from their social circles to their religion. Democrats are more concerned with appearing noble, haughty, and above it all. They hate dirtying their finely manicured hands with the rough business of politics.

I’m sorry, but these hundred people are dead largely due to Republican policies. The flood was exacerbated by climate change, which Republicans support. The relevant federal programs were slashed due to a Republican president, and local Republican leaders refused to invest in badly needed flood warning systems. This is not a natural disaster; it’s a Republican disaster.

Natural disasters, in terms of death toll, are always more of a function of politics than nature. Japan manages to have giant earthquakes with low death tolls; their political system is functional and provides and enforces good building codes. In more corrupt nations, the same strength of earthquake will kill a hundred fold more people.

You’re sanctimoniously claiming that isn’t the right time for politics. But this is the exact right time for politics. If you want to make changes, the time to do it is when political pressure is greatest. Otherwise, we just end up with less-than-useless “thoughts and prayers.”

But I suppose you care more about covering for conservatives than you do about actually saving lives in the future.

Curing lepers? Jesus would be barging into insurance company board meetings and cursing everyone there with leprosy.

More people need to be educated on how to order grey market pharmaceuticals. You can’t find everything, but when you can, it’s often best to bypass the US pharma system entirely. Unfortunately this isn’t really viable for acute conditions, but for long-term medications you are doing yourself a disservice if you don’t look into overseas pharmacies.

Rant? Oh don’t get me started on how we’re dropping the ball on the naming of the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. This is by far the largest object in the entire galaxy. The center of centers. The pit at the bottom of the world. The bottomless pit that pulled the whole galaxy together. The monster of monsters. The terror of terrors. The thunder upon the deep. The ravenous maw that devours entire Suns. And what name do we call it? What ancient monster or demon do we invoke to give voice to the howling terror around which the galaxy revolves? None. We call the bloody thing Sagittarius A*.

Yes, that’s it. That’s as good as astronomers can do right now apparently. How could you call such an unholy terror a name that’s more appropriate to an IRS accounting file? How could you use such a mundane name when Charybdis is right there! Or Scylla works too!

Like JFC. Where’s the sense of romance? Where’s the passion and the fire? We’re talking an object with the mass of three million Suns. It has a whole retinue or stars that orbit around it, and it throws them around like playthings. The Earth and the Sun already dwarf humanity to cosmic minutia, and this monster does the same to them. It’s a monster lurking in the depths of space. And the best we can do to name it is fucking Sagittarius A*. The thing is a literal cosmic monster, something right out of mythology.

Like, I’m not even some Eurocentric who thinks everything needs to be named after Roman or Greek sources. I like keeping the planets specifically Roman for consistency. But there are no shortage of wonderful names out there coming from other mythologies. Laniakea is a beautiful name. And I would be fine with naming the big black hole after some terrifying monster in any number of mythologies. But we have to stop calling it A*. It’s just wrong.

My favorite one-shot was a ranger that was “Stephanos Eoforwine”, literally just Steve Irwin. I found a complicated combination of spells that would enable him to have what was essentially a video camera, so he was producing nature documentaries in the wilds of the Forgotten Realms. He was a ranger and had all his stats poured into animal handling. The guy had a +20 animal handling. Half of that bonus came from a homebrew magic item “the shorts of the crocodile hunter.”

His animal handling skills were so high, that they were downright reality-warping. During our one-shot as part of a larger campaign, the party met Stephanos. And he was out in the woods looking for some wonderfully ridiculous legendary creature known as the “tree elk.” Literally a species of full-sized elk that live on the boughs of trees. I said in character that’s what I was searching for, as a joke. The DM had me roll for it. And I rolled a nat 20. Combined with his bonus, he rolled a 40 on an animal handling check to look for tree elk. And by god, he found them. Whether they existed before that moment or not is anyone’s guess. But from then on in the campaign we would occasionally see an elk bounding through the treetops. His animal handling skills were so high that with a high enough roll, he could conjure entire species into being!

Or “oo-ran-oose”

“Planet George’s Anus.”

Uranus is such a stupid name. The proper name for the world is Caelus. All the other planets use the Roman names of the gods. But for some reason, we decided to go with the Greek name in the one case that would obviously cause problems. The only reason “Uranus” and “anus” sound similar is that they have different roots. “Anus” comes from the Latin, while Uranus is Greek. The ancient Greeks didn’t have this problem, as they only had the word for the deity. The Romans didn’t have this problem, as they named their god Caelus. But for some asinine reason, we insist on calling the Seventh Planet Uranus instead of its proper Caelus.

We should rename it. I don’t care if scientists at the time of its discovery preferred Uranus. We’re allowed to move to more sensible names. We shouldn’t be stuck with this forever. In fact, Herschel, the original discoverer, wanted to name it George. Bode came up with the name Uranus, apparently unaware of the Latin/Greek mismatch.

It’s high time we give the Seventh World in our star system the proper respect it is due. The seventh planet is Caelus, not this ridiculous Uranus. We can do better.

See if I were DMing that I would say that even with a vow of silence, your character would still need to communicate, via writing or body language. So get used to doing interpretive dance at the table!

Ah yes, there is a surprisingly common mutation in Georgia that causes humans to be born with an additional elbow and forearm on each arm. The Atlanta mutation it is commonly called. This is why, famously, people born in the state of Georgia are prohibited from participating in any Olympic event that involves throwing or hurling objects.

Then later in history…

An hawk flies down and attacks you, joining the wolves and the humans. They’ve got the fucks birds in on it now! God is dead.

Yeah, except we’ll have thousands of nutjobs running around. Each running their own instance of your New Testament LLM. Each thoroughly convinced they are the messenger of the new digital messiah. According to the text of the Bible, many people walked away from their lives and abandoned everything to follow Him. Considering what we observe in modern cults, that doesn’t seem an unlikely historical reality.

An LLM trained on the words of Jesus won’t just tell people to live good lives. It will be telling people, "give everything up and follow Me (the computer.) And if it was a good enough LLM, it would be pretty persuasive for good number of people. The one saving grace is that JesusGPT isn’t going to be healing the sick, walking on water, or raising the dead any time soon. But words alone can be quite dangerous.

I would accuse you of being an LLM for being so literal, but I think LLMs are better at analyzing metaphor than you appear to be.

Oh God, we already have a problem with people believing ChatGPT is giving them divine visions and prophecies. The last thing we need is LLMs specifically trained on holy texts! You’ll have a tenth of the population believing in their new digital prophet.

Jesus Fucking Christ. We’re going to have to go full Butlerian Jihad here, aren’t we?

I think you’re confusing fascism with general reactionary behavior and generic racism/bigotry. Fascism is more specific than that. A core part of fascism is that it ultimately doesn’t believe in anything. It’s just power for the sake of power. You demonize minority groups primarily just a cynical tool to gain power. Do you think Republican politicians actually personally care much about trans people? I’m sure they’re not exuberant fans of trans folks, but until very recently, Republican politicians were fine treating trans people with simple neglect rather than overt hostility. But the movement needed a new enemy, and so they all learned to tow the line.

If you trained an LLM on pre-2015 right wing literature, it wouldn’t have monstrous opinions of trans people. That hadn’t yet become party orthodoxy. And while this is one example, there are many others that work on much shorter time frames. Fascism is all about following the party line, and the party line is constantly shifting. You can train an LLM to be a loyal bigot. You can’t train an LLM to be a loyal fascist. Ironically, it’s because the LLMs actually stand by their principles much better than fascists.

There’s a lot more going on in politics than “insert vote, recieve outcome voted for”. Gerrymandering, simply being stuck in an area where you are the political minority, politicians campaigning on an entriely different platform than the actions they take later while in office… I could go on, but I expect my words would be wasted.

Irrelevant. I speak only of intent.

The dead girls weren’t even old enough to vote.

Then they didn’t vote for anything, and thus my blessing/curse is irrelevant.

I wish for people to get exactly what they voted for. If you voted for compassion to others, I wish for compassion for you. If you voted to hurt other people, I wish for you to get every ounce of cruelty you wished upon others to be brought down upon your own head.

In b4 you start running your mouth off about how it’s okay to wish death on the bad people because of what they’re doing to you/the good people. Two wrongs don’t make a right, and even if it did, you’re aimed at the wrong targets. Get your scope zeroed in properly.

I wish only that people’s cruelty be directed right back to them. If you feel that someone telling you “I hope you get what you voted for” is anything but a blessing, then that says some pretty damning things about you. If you voted for good intentions to others, then I am wishing good things to you. If you voted because you wanted to see people killed, then I hope your wrath falls on your head instead.

Regardless, I hope every single member of that county gets exactly what they voted for.