Messages

Ha! Not as good as Beyond Zero!

When I was at college some friends and I messed around in a band called Gut-8 after the character in Beyond Zero. Terrible stuff.

I'm booked for the weekend also and will see you guys there!

It'd be fantastic to meet any other forum-goers should you attend.

[Dirty Shirt]

I've been tearing through books post-Christmas. Aside from that Chat GPT one on the other thread that I gave up on, I've demolished Godkiller by Hannah Kaner and a couple of early novellas from Adrian Tchaikovsky but the book I've most enjoyed so far has been Dirty Shirt by the forums on John Ware. It's a hugely enjoyable tale of the The Royal Munster Fusiliers at the start of WWI. It doesn't skimp on the horrors of the situation but at the same time its told in a very convivial manner that pulled me right in as a reader and had me enaged from the off. It's not humorous but there's a lightness of touch to the storytelling that draws you to the characters and the situations they find themselves in. I highly recommend it to anyone here.

That's interesting IP. I've experimented with using GPT for coding. It was that that led me to use to to write a bit of dialogue - I was working from a similar state of mind that GPT could give me a framework that I'd then edit into what I actually wanted.

In both cases it was a bit useful to give me a kickstart on something I wasn't confident of, but not really a good substitute for doing it all myself and I eventually stopped. With this book, what I think someone did was write a plot summary into GPT or similar and got it to do the donkey work for them. I've absolutely no idea why anyone would do that tbh as it just produces some weirdly phrased crap like the paragraph I posted above, and surely you'd need to sell a LOT of print on demand books to make it worthwhile. Nobody who read one of these books is going to read another by the same author. It all feels a bit self-defeating.

With things like literature and art, my own view is that there's no place for AI in it. The spark of creativity isn't there. I'd never knowingly purchase anything using it, and I've stopped supporting stuff that has. That's even before you get into the morality of it: I know artists who rely on comission work and whose work is being scraped and stolen and it is very upsetting for them. That's another debate though.

I wonder if Elson regrets giving Wrath chains for hair? Must be such a faff to draw!

I'm sure I've read that he has said this, and that's why she went hooded for much of the previous series!

My wife is in an author chat group and there's a huge concern there over AI generated books: it sounds like its a growing problem. Someone just churns out loads of them and whacks them on Amazon. The book I have has no reviews on Amazon, Goodreads or anywhere else I can find (although the author has a website)

I'm not sure AI colouring books is of the same concern but presumably thats just the same deal but leeching off someone elses art. There's a data poisoning tool called Nightshade thats now been released and a few artists I know are very keen on it, but I think its too early to say if it will make a difference.

Succinctly cleared up! I had no idea about that.

Most AI writes better than that

Burn!

Chat GPT is exactly what I'm thinking as the author here, yes, as that's the only AI I've had experience of.

Ironically my original post contains spelling mistakes and missing words so perhaps the writer of this just wrote it really fast between work calls.

I got a book for Christmas that is so awkwardly written that it reads like it was either generated by AI, or has been fed through a translation programme that's made it come out all weird.

Not naming names and edited slightly in case I'm making a terrible accusation againts a legit author, but here's an extract from literally a random page in the book:

"Behind the second army the <snipped> forces arrived. Horses both tamed and wild aided their speed. Like the many animals to follow us, they drew to their plight. Knowing forests, they swifted the warriors beyond path and road, eliminating countless miles. They galloped forth with a frightful torrent."

The whole book is like this - every single paragraph doesn't quite make sense. Dialogue is awkward, sentances poorly built (and there's tons of grammatical errors)

It may be that the author simply has a style that I don't like but I'm suspicious I'm reading my first AI-generated book. Last I experimented using an AI programme to write a couple of dialogue scenes for me that I wasn't feeling that I could then edit into something decent, and it churned out stuff a bit like this.

Anyone else come across anything like this?

Good question. I think 3 or 4 episodes also.
At heart, I want to like everything in the Prog so I'm usually up for giving something another go. A new series will entice me to start afresh, or just an excuse (I picked up Enemy Earth again in the new year and read it all back for example)

The exception would be if I really found the content of the strip distasteful. This doesn't really apply to the Prog but I've read other comics where the subject matter is so unpleasant to me that I'd just mentally stick that in a 'never again' category.

The one place I found that mentions anything relevant seems to suggest that the number of zombies you kill depends on the roll of the dice. Seems like a poor idea, but I guess I'll have to play it to find out.
A quick skim through the book shows that you're told how many zombies there are in any given fight, and the last section indicates that the number of zombies killed determines your success, so I'd assumed that the winning route is just wherever you encounter the correct number of zombies. But you suggest there's some other bug?

Yeah. In every combat you face x zombies, roll a dice for your weapon and kill y zombies, and then you take 1 damage for each one left standing. To complete the book you have to have killed every single zombie, otherwise when you get to the end you lose.

That in itself isn't a lot of fun, but the problem with it is that it's not actually possible to survive the book even with max stamina. I understand the reprint allows you 20d6+20 stamina which is still not enough, even if you ignore the max stamina cap (the book doesn't actually say you can't go over initial stamina). There's too much damage to take, and not enough healing.
I think I ignored my stamina in the end and finished on -30 or thereabouts. It could be playable with some modding, but the whole book feels like an unplaytested, botched attempt to update FF and it wasn't fun to play.

I did a quick review of it somewhere on this thread where I moaned in more detail, I think. If you do give it a go I hope you have a better experience that I did!

Also what a magnificent collection there Fortnight! Some of those books are very vaulable now: Deathmoor alone was selling for about £250 when I made my last ebay pass at finishing my collection, and Revenge of the Vampire was about £500. I'm definitely envious.

They look wonderful all lined up like that.

My foray into game books was the Grailquest series.

I had a couple of these as a kid and really liked them. The daft, convivial style of writing was lovely and they weren't very hard either. I also understand they're not very good as the series continues though.

I'm familiar with Troika - it's one of those OSR games that seems to be built specificially for people who are very deep into grognardy. The rules seem to be deliberately written to be clunky and tending towards high turnovers of characters rather than campaigns and the like. The setting at least is fairly unique.
I'm never sure what the deal is with these kind of games when more streamlined modern rulesets exist that crucially you can houserule to your own requirements. Having met people who love games like this, it all feels a bit gatekeepery tbh, as a backlash to the hobby becoming popular and letting in loads of new people that they don't like.

Within the metal scene (possibly other music scenes too?) there's been a swing towards putting stuff on cassette again. As far as I can see it's a mix of nostalgia and elitism: backlash against digital music and CDs that fetishises a format thats crap and we moved on from for good reason. Cassettes don't even have the nice bits that vinyl does (giant artwork, lovely smell, weird ritualistic nature of having to go to the effort of putting one on) and their only benefit is that they're very small and portable, which doesn't stack against modern music formats, so for me its very much regression for the sake of regression. But anyway - I find games like this a bit like that.

I've got Advanced Fighting Fantasy around somewhere, which is also pretty bad for a roleplaying game ruleset, but may have been a good gateway system. I know I ripped off the Riddling Reaver plots for other games as a kid!

Dynosty! That's possibly the first strip I stopped reading and never went back to. Hated it.