I feel like I’ve heard this son before…

Too many ads lying to me about hot single chromosomes seeking casual synapsis in my area.

Tekeli-li

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.

There’s a world coming in which every appliance and automated system you can imagine will have had it’s onboard OS pretzled together by vibe coders. Good coding by real human engineers will be considered a luxury process for high-end products while the masses live their lives in a sea of glitchy, unreliable, deeply insecure, highly networked cheap consumer goods, vacuuming up and reselling every byte of data they can get their claws into. This will be heralded by the tech oligarchs and their pet journalists and politicians as a great and revolutionary stepped forward on the March of Progress.

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 * * *”).

So much cybercrime. All the cybercrime.

It sounds like the real issue for these fuckwits is that script kiddies are running jailbroken models with darknet edgelord sounding names (WormGPT roflmao). This whole article is like some security company execs generating clickbait and citations to get attention by saying scary shit about a nothing burger.

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.

Shrek is love. Shrek is life.

it gives an example of the GM removing XP from a PC because their player IRL asked a question that in-game would be considered treason.

I’ve run lots of Paranoia (most recently last weekend for my 15 year old son and his friends) and I would never do this. It’s perfectly adequate (and makes much more sense) to have the Computer (and the other players) threaten the character about their treasonous behavior (the other PCs WILL just do this).

I have never once had a Paranoia game last long enough for the characters to earn XP and level up. My last game ended with the two surviving PCs, on their last clones, being captured and “reeducated” by commies (one clone was permanently blind too, after two other players used a device on him that triggered his “laser eyes” mutant power on super over charge… the funny thing was, he wasn’t even the intended target… they were trying to hit the PC who’s mutant power was “making things explode” and they misguessed who that was). The commie PC absolutely won that game, though she explosively sacrificed her last clone in the process. From character creation to this took about 6 hours.

so the GM prints out a sheet and makes the player fill it out under a time constraint.

I have absolutely done this. Here’s some other ideas from my games for you.

• “Reward” the characters for good behavior and punish them for bad behavior with drugs (happiness is mandatory and chemically enforced). Bonus if the drug dispenser has been hacked or sabotaged and the drugs do something other than what the computer thinks they do. Failure to take your medication is treason.

• I ran a game once that included a Pokemon GO mechanic… the computer had created a “training simulator” where the object was to catch commies. You could play it on your com device and various “commies” would spawn around the world as they were playing. The Computer assumed that whoever had the highest score was the best at catching commies, so that clone was automatically promoted to team leader… giving the players a huge incentive to drop what they were doing and try to catch high value commies, even at stupidly inconvenient and dangerous times.

• I ran a game where the characters were all Green clearance and were part of an “elite” team of troubleshooters called Team Eagle Justice. However, 1) Team Eagle Justice were actually just actors, who do a patriotic “reality” holoshow to inspire the citizens of Alpha Complex. 2) Team Eagle Justice had actually just been lured into an ambush by Commies and massacred and their clone vats had been sabotaged. So the Computer just promoted a bunch of random Infrared clearance clones to Green and made them into the new Team Eagle Justice. A bunch of secret societies took advantage of the situation to hack the Computer and have their own agents put on Team Eagle Justice. Mayhem ensued on live holovision.

I also usually throw in some home brewed secret societies.
Examples:

• In the Pokemon game, I had a secret society called the Trainers who’s goal was to “collect” members of other secret societies and “train them” to unlock advanced mutant powers (highly treasonous).

• In the game I recently ran for my son, there were two PCs who were members of the Philosophers and the Historians (they also encountered the NPCs Arist-O-TEL, Sock-R-TIS, Xen-O-Fon and Herod-R-TUS). These two societies were both trying to get an ancient text… but they were also fighting a brutal gang war between each other.

• In one game I ran for a friend’s birthday, I had a secret society called the Cultists who were trying to summon Cthulu from the nutrient vats. Of course, this was what actually ended up happening and the party went insane and died. (I assume IIA sector is now just permanently off limits).

Also, remember that knowledge of the rules is treason (as is knowledge of the existence of Role Playing Games). That means the rules are what you say they are and if a player wants to debate them with you or rules lawyer, that player is committing treason and treason is punishable by death. That means you can run Paranoia however you want. The important thing is having fun. Paranoia is silly and goofy. Play it that way.

Yiff.

Arnock, on the night of his joining. Kiteo, his eyes opened! Vulcans at Decatur!

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

I can see the potential future value I’m setting the precedent that we can nationalize giant businesses.

I don’t think Trump should be the one to set that precedent though.

Even a broken Berman is right twice a season.

I’ve read exactly one time travel story where that was taken into account. They were trying to communicate with the past using tachyon beams, and they had to beam them into space aimed at where Earth WAS at the time they were trying to communicate with it.

I always thought it was a “Dandy Lion,” like a fancy Victorian gentleman lion.

Also

“Uhuhuh… you thaid blow balls.”

“Yeah! Heheh! Yeah!”

"Based on the numbers we’re seeing on reddit, I would guess there are at least tens of thousands of users who are at this present time being convinced of these things by LLMs. As soon as the companies realise this, red team it and patch the LLMs it should stop being a problem. But it’s clear that they’re not aware of the issue enough right now.”

I like the part where you trust for profit companies to do this on their own.