I’ve found it useful for TTRPGs too. Art generators are certainly helpful for character portraits, I also find ChatGPT can be useful for lots of other things. I’ve had pretty mediocre results trying to get it to generate a whole adventure but if you give it tight enough parameters then it can flesh out content for you - ranging from NPC name ideas, to ideas for custom magic items, to whole sections of dialogue.

You can give it a plot hook you have in mind and ask it to generate ideas for a three-act structure and encounter summary to go with it (helpful when brainstorming the party’s next adventure), or you can give it an overview of an encounter you have in mind and ask it to flesh out the encounter - GPT4 is reasonably good at a lot of this, I just wouldn’t ask it to go the whole way from start to finish in adventure design as it starts to introduce inconsistencies.

You also need to be ready to take what it gives you as a starting point for editing rather than a finished product. For example, if I ask it to come up with scene descriptions in D&D then it has a disproportionate tendency to come up with things that are ‘bioluminescent’ - little tells like that which show it’s AI generated.

Overall - you can use it as a tool for a busy DM that can free you up to focus on the more important aspects of designing your adventure. But you need to remember it’s just a tool, don’t think you can outsource the whole thing to it and remember it’s only as helpful as how you try to use it.

But … I thought the 2009 film was an origin story?

It was literally the story of how the Kelvinverse came to exist and it followed Kirk, Spock, McCoy and co from their Academy days.

That was my thought, I’m quite up for this. I enjoyed The Voyage Home, I enjoyed The Trouble with Tribbles - I wouldn’t want all Trek to be like that but there is absolutely a place in the franchise for light-hearted takes on Trek.

But removing Discovery from the timeline seems to be consistent with the prime timeline post-Discovery season 2 (in TOS etc) - e.g. Spock not talking about his human adopted sister, no further use of spore drives, and so on. It’s certainly explicitly the timeline of SNW (which makes multiple references to the events of Discovery s2) and therefore the timeline of Lower Decks.

That suggests the prime timeline as we know it is an altered timeline caused by Discovery’s jump to the future.

last couple of Picard seasons

I mean, that’s a pretty astonishing statement to throw out there, grouping together probably the worst single season of Star Trek with one of the best…

Could they play a Hexblade warlock?

The movie wasn’t that well-liked and wasn’t the perfect send-off for the original crew of Star Trek.

What a weird thing to say. I’ve always heard it described as one of the best TOS films and I always found the ending quite an emotional and fitting send-off to the TOS crew.

I like worldbuilding too and I’ve probably got a lot more than 50 pages of background on my world (it’s spread over a wiki so I don’t know how many pages it actually comes to). But is that really what you actually give to players at the start? I feel like not many players would have the patience to work through 50 pages of homework before they’re allowed to start playing (but congratulations if you’ve found a group who are that into your worldbuilding!)

A lot of my worldbuilding exists either for long-term campaign options, for peppering into dialogue or events to make the world feel a bit more three-dimensional, or realistically just for my own private fun that will never see the light of day.

For my homebrew world, I wrote a two page document covering:

• Geography: the rough layout of their starting city (the main districts and well-known landmarks), the main species that can be seen around the city (they’re not limited to playing these, but I think it’s helpful if you’re going to play a dragonborn to know whether you’re an outsider in this city or not), and a high-level sentence each on the handful of main locations that can be easily travelled to from the city - i.e. the stuff that any resident should know.

• Magic and religion: the pantheon of major gods and their domains, and a line noting there are other religious/magical traditions but most residents of the city would be unfamiliar with them.

• Politics: how the city is governed, who the noble houses are, and what reputation is widely known about each of them (not all of these are deserved…)

• History: some very high-level history of the city and world (at the level that an average resident would know - the equivalent of the name of this world’s Roman Empire who founded the city, and what happened to them).

I figured that two pages is short enough for anyone to read and get some sense of the world I’m dropping them in, without going into so much detail that it takes away their ability to explore the world (which is dramatically bigger than the city).

There’s also no real cost to people not remembering what’s in the two-pager - people can get away with assuming it’s a fairly generic fantasy world at first and I can easily resupply key info while DMing - but I figure most players like to know a bit about the game world before they start.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_25th_Anniversary_(computer_game)

Okay, but that’s not really what they did with Sela.

Sela wasn’t ‘Tasha returned’ - she had nothing in common with Tasha (in terms of personality or her role in the show) except for being played by the same actress. She clearly wasn’t just a backdoor soap opera route for Tasha to return.

Also she was only actually in four episodes (on the first of which the character wasn’t identified and Denise Crosby was an uncredited voice only). Sela’s brief appearances were so memorable that we tend to forget how minor her role actually was across the span of TNG - Tomalak had a bigger role, for example.

The reason the board have given is - if true - a very reasonable reason to fire a CEO. The job of the board is to oversee, scrutinise and challenge the management, and if the management were lying to or withholding information from the board then that’s an obvious reason for the management to go.

American corporate governance standards are really hit-and-miss, and in a lot of these tech firms you often end up with situations of CEOs doubling up as chairs of their boards - e.g. Musk, Zuckerberg , Bezos -something that structurally neuters the ability of the board to do its basic job of challenging the CEO! So when I see an American board standing up to a CEO that’s trying to evade scrutiny, I feel that’s something that should be applauded.

The Host - the one where Riker ends up hosting the symbiont.

I mean, they’re obviously not going to, so I guess Zuckerberg better go dust off what I can only assume is his comically large chequebook…

Oh that’s very interesting. The script was actually written for it to be Kirk/Spock/McCoy rather than Kirk/Scotty/Chekov, but Nimoy and Kelley both said no because they were happy with where TUC left things for the TOS crew - which is why (for example) Chekov ends up running sickbay despite no evidence before of him having any medical training.

I’d never heard they had a version claiming Uhura would be there too.

My recollection from interviews is that Dan Harmon and the cast found Chevy just didn’t get the show at all when they were making it. A huge amount of Community’s humour is a mix of meta humour and pop culture references. In the same way that Pierce claimed to never understand what Abed was talking about, Chevy didn’t understand most of what Community was on about - his frame of reference for what is funny hadn’t moved on in decades.

Even though he’s famously a dick, when he says he didn’t think Community was funny, he might actually be telling the truth - not just being petty.

GotG3 is definitely worth seeing. Doctor Strange 2 and Ant-Man 3 were pretty missable.

I think the lesson I’ve taken from this is that the massive multiversal stakes of the latter two - which I assume Marvel thought necessary to try to top what they’d already done with Thanos - just don’t really work. They can’t top Thanos eradicating half of the universe, and they shouldn’t try.

Whereas GotG3 was pretty low stakes by comparison, but as those stakes related to a specific character we had come to care about then it just worked so much better.

Arrested Development, I admit, took me a few episodes.

Arrested Development took everyone a few episodes. Much of the humour is about riffing on repeated jokes set up in previous episodes - you’ve got to get through a few episodes first for these to start to click.

That’s partly why it was never successful when broadcast. It’s a show that should have been binge-watched but was released on broadcast TV, an episode a week, but tellingly it only took off in popularity with the DVD release (and later on streaming).

How is it ‘scripting’ when most of the games have tonnes of injury time? This is how they’re applying the injury time consistently to address the problem of time wasting etc at World Cups. They’ve been very transparent about this.

They’re taking the same approach in Premier League and EFL games this season. Sheffield Wednesday vs Southampton the other week had 15 minutes of injury time too.

Just accept you made a ludicrous argument and were wrong.

Those are the rules. 10+ minutes of injury time were pretty common at the men’s World Cup last year, even without interruptions for head injuries.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/63710986

It sounds like you may have really wanted England to lose and so you’re interpreting things through that lens.