She ended up picking out a d12 in her team's colors from the chest of random dice at #GeekyTeas in Burbank. Looking forward to running a game for her very soon.

How about we give ICE's budget to NASA and see what they can do with it? #Artemis

It's like waiting on the tarmac for a gate to open up for half an hour, except you're feeling gravity for the first time in a week and a half and you just went to the fucking moon.

I'd be eager for some fresh air after being in a small room with three other people for ten days.

#Artemis

Bravo nerds. Well done. #artemis

The AI Overview actively gets things wrong about me and my career, how can I trust it with things I don't already know about

The #Artemis mission is a reminder that it used to feel like every day we were moving toward a better, if still imperfect, future. Sadly that feeling has been harder to come by of late. Here's hoping the crew gets home safely, and that we can one day live in a world that is worthy of our optimism.

I was legit wondering if this was our equivalent of Soviet era broadcasts of Swan Lake.

Having a kid who likes science when NASA is sending people to the moon is fun.

I don't use AI in my writing.

AI, on the other hand, steals my writing to train up on so it can do its work.

The recent discourse about how writers use it but pretend they don't pisses me off. If you're using generative AI to write your stories, you are pissing me off.

You. Specifically.

Maaaaaaybe but LLMs hallucinate tons of shit and if you don't have domain knowledge (which is one big reason a writer might research) then you might not know what your LLM is making up. I tend to stick to primary sources whenever possible; I have a couple of decades of experience with Googling.

The board game Pandemic, set up for family game night.

A missed call from "CDC", marked as likely Spam.

Sat down to play Pandemic for family game night (kiddo's idea) and my phone rang with a call from the #CDC. I didn't answer, in part because it was marked as likely Spam. Odd timing to say the least.

(Also looked it up, probably a real survey from the CDC -- not spam)

He'll be happier writing a Lord of the Rings movie. Good for him.

Can all of us who said this was a bad idea months ago get lucrative consulting contracts with the Disney Corp now?

Horror Novel ‘Shy Girl’ Canceled Over Suspected A.I. Use

There are more than enough talented unpublished authors out there. We don't need AI slop wasting paper (even digital paper).

www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/b...

Probably not gonna happen, but imagine if Stephen Colbert used the extra attention from his last week of shows to announce on air that he's running for President. If what matters most in politics today is the ability to garner and hold attention he's more qualified than most Senators and Governors.

Can a game really call itself an RPG if it doesn't have a moment early on where you get overencumbered after raiding a bandit camp and slob your way back to a trader to sell off a bunch of trash gear?

a 20 sided dice with the number 10 on it Alt: a 20 sided dice rolling and landing on a Natural 20

Sign that I'm raising a nerdy kindergartner: she thought that "merchandise" referred to gaming dice in a sports team's colors. So now she wants a d20 to match her T-ball team.

a skull and octopus in a red circle Alt: a skull and octopus in a red circle, aka the Hydra Logo from Marvel's Agents of SHIELD.

Just thinking for no reason at all about how our way to show that a character was unredeemably evil on Agents of SHIELD was that they killed their own dog.

Anything that forces you to look at your work with fresh eyes is useful. An instant fix version would simply not be as good.

If you're not under production timeline constraints, finishing a draft in minutes vs. hours doesn't make any difference, so take your time. Make the work the best it can be.

I just did the mostly copy-and-paste job of taking a screenplay outline from a doc and putting it in Final Draft. It's exactly the kind of rote task I could see people being tempted to outsource to AI. But the few subtle adjustments I made more than made it worth the few minutes of extra time.

Now seems like a really good time for some directors/showrunners/actors/producers with deep pockets to launch a new studio that focuses on stories told by real artists without any AI used whatsoever. An ethical alternative to consolidated slop mills.

And after all that, the Pitt/Cruise AI fight scene appears to have been just digital BG and face replacement on multi-angle green screen reference videos of two real live human stuntees fighting.

In other words, like most AI hype — it was a con. www.shokunin.studio/blog/2026/2/...

And if you *pay someone* to tell you to have AI generate text for you, you are a fool who deserves to lose all your money.

Everyone who has worked in publishing or read screenplay submissions for a production company can tell you about the piles of dreck they've had to sift through to find good writing -- well before AI was ever a thing. AI just makes the pile bigger, without copyright protection.

Filling the shelves with AI slop will make it harder to find something good to read. And in the process a lot of talented writers will lose their livelihoods or never get discovered in the first place.

They boast that AI can "write a novel in a day" as if that fixes a problem. But there have always been plenty of books on the shelves. The thing is, readers want quality, not sheer quantity.

And yes, this also applies to sci-fi, romance, YA, and whatever other genres you don't personally respect.

An infuriating aspect of the "Just use AI for everything" era is that when you need to call a company and speak to a human, they don't actually employ people anymore. Even if you do find a number it just rings three times and hangs up. How is anyone expected to do business this way?

I'm sorry. As a technology writer, I'm supposed to be telling you that this bet will some day pay off, because one day we will have shoveled so many words into the word-guessing program that it wakes up and learns how to actually do the jobs it is failing spectacularly at today. This is a proposition akin to the idea that if we keep breeding horses to run faster and faster, one of them will give birth to a locomotive. Humans possess intelligence, and machines do not. The difference between a human and a word-guessing program isn't how many words the human knows. I'm sorry. I know that when we talk about "digital sovereignty," we're obliged to talk about how we can build more data-centres that we can fill up with money-losing chips from American silicon monopolists in the hopes of destroying as many jobs as possible while blowing through our clean energy goals and enshittifying as much of our potable water as possible.

Córy Doctorow with another verbal bullseye: pluralistic.net/2026/01/13/n...

Imagine how many problems could be addressed in higher education if university presidents didn't need to spend most of their time asking rich people for donations.

Not sure what drama is happening in the board game space.

But on a completely unrelated note to my above comment, I personally did not care for the film "X-Men 3" when it was released.