Liberal, Briton, FBPE. Co-mod of m/neoliberal

  • 2 Posts
  • 120 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle



  • They have duty shifts, each will have an officer in command. In a three-shift system (i.e. where each shift lasts 8 hours), you might have the captain commanding the day shift, the first officer the second shift, and another more junior officer on the night shift. Other times (like when Jellico commanded the Enterprise) there can be a four-shift system. If something important happens when the captain is off duty or asleep then the shift commander can always wake the captain - but the vast majority of the time (i.e. all the days in between episodes, which we never see) then nothing eventful happens during the night shift.

    On the Enterprise D, Data often commanded the night shift since he didn’t need any sleep, but in principle any officer (even at Lt Junior Grade or Ensign) could be put in command.

    I ended reading up a load on this for a Star Trek Adventures game.



  • 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.









  • It kills people.

    Daylight savings time practices have been linked to increases in deadly traffic accidents, workplace injuries, medical errors and overall mortality.

    In 2018, researchers in Spain penned a letter that was published in the journal Epidemiology regarding a link between deadly car accidents and daylight savings shifts. After collecting data from capital cities in Spain between 1990 and 2014, the researchers found a 30% increase in fatal traffic accidents on the day clocks sprang forwards. On the day clocks fell backwards, they saw an increase of 16%.

    […]

    One of the serious health concerns related to time shifts is acute myocardial infarction, or heart attack. Researchers in Italy wrote a 2018 review published in the journal Internal Emergency Medicine investigating daylight savings’ potential effects on heart health. They reviewed seven existing studies from the United States and Europe looking at more than 80,000 cases of acute myocardial infarction. They found an increase, from 4% to 29%, in heart attacks after clocks sprang forwards.

    Incidence of stroke may also increase after a clock shift. For a 2016 study published in the journal Sleep Medicine, researchers in Finland investigated the connection. They analysed more than 3,000 hospitalizations from 2004 to 2013 that occurred in the week following seasonal clock changes. They next compared those cases to a control group of 11,000 expected hospitalizations. The findings showed that hospitalizations for ischaemic stroke, the most common type, increased by 8% in the two days following a daylight savings shift. When looking at the whole week post-shift, the increase was 3%. The association was stronger for people assigned female at birth and those who were older.