A day in the life of Matt, a 20 something year old man whose mental faculties are so strained that they may snap at any moment.

{Edit 2023: So old now. My gnarled fingers can barely type this note. Ah, the roadblock reset nonsense I jammed into this story way back when. You'll probably find a lot of old stories that have those reset links. I went through and took them out - sorry it took 20 years. Now with Editor's Notes!}

[EDIT: 2014: I wrote this story to test the functionality of the basic editor, way back when I first joined in 2003. So take it for what it is. My humor runs toward the dark and the black, so you may not find it as amusing as I. At the time, I had been in my late 20's, living with the most irritating person in the entire world. So, so, so irritating. This story was a way for me to sublimate my understandable urges to kill her into a socially acceptable outlet. The parts of the story which are true include her complaining that the smell of bacon and the sight of grease was the same as "boiling animal fat and toxic fumes," all the while attempting to make subtle sexual advances and holding the fact that she was my landlord over my head. The situation ended badly, but not as badly as in the story.

Enjoy.]

v 1.0 Published story, 2003.

v 2.0 Updated some things, fixed a broken link, added a bit of content, probably created discrepancies.

My first song, as I learn FL Studio aka Fruity Loops. I am also teaching myself video editing with Filmora so I can strip out audio samples from movies I own. I hope it is better, by analogy, than my first story here.

This is from The Pink Panther Strikes Again, an absolutely hilarious and possibly offensive film by today's standards. 

"Pity Dreyfus"

It has to be that some pubescent little woke bitches got to cram in a bunch of writing right before the game was released. I notice the dog, for example, calls me friend. Not master. There was one line where he called me master and I am certain it was a cutting floor oversight. 

The fact that they rendered genitalia - both female alien scarred gashes and shriveled penises await your viewing pleasure - would be much more interesting if I was 10-12. 

If all these guys are so sexually aggressive, why aren't the women? I call misogyny and oppression of female sexuality. It's basically Victorian if you think about it.

Wait until the druid offers himself to you as a bear.

They are evil and make you worship Satan. Or Endmaster. Also, I tried to take a nap and my "friend' the Illithid aka mindflayer, has no shirt on and tells me he feels very close to me, like there was so much potential. I'm looking at these swaying tentacles and the oval mouth ringed with rows of jagged teeth, then down to his disgusting burned, alien flesh, and thinking - I love this game. What the absolute fuck is happening.

That seems unlikely. Why don't you go to speedtest and check your speed. I'd also try uninstalling multiple bloated extensions you may have on Firefox, and trying different browsers, clearing cache, all that fun stuff. 

This site has been reliable for a long time. I can't recall any downtime, except a brief window when leaving MAG and becoming CYS.

Age is irrelevant in this case. Your sentence should probably say, "I don't like RPG games, so I didn't know what this was before this thread." Boomers are people born right after World War II. The people who grew up with BG are probably Gen Y and the old people you're talking about are actually Gen X.

I've been entirely sucked into it, which hasn't happened since maybe Dragon Age: Origins. The writing, story, voice acting, quests, and ability to kill every single person without breaking the game makes it arguably one of the best RPGs in decades.

There is a bunch of prepubescent hypersexual nonsense thrown in, further complicated by nearly every innocuous dialogue line leading to interspecies copulation or full on bestiality, and the online bots are busy taking pro and anti LGBTQ+ sides on social media, but that hasn't spoiled my fun.

The removal of alignment and the changing of paladins from representing gods to oaths badly needs further development. That said, having a blast with my Drow not named Drizzt, who is also able to become a paladin.

This is great, Aldreda.

It can. It can write whole books if you take it off the leash. But the thing about machine learning - it's not AI - it isn't conceiving of a story. It's picking the most common and most probable next word. Dynamically. What this means, I believe, is that you basically get average work, or work that tends towards the average, at all times.

In its current state, machine learning is useful to simplify common tasks. And without question, it's great for writer's block. It'll be interesting to see if it spits out the same nugget, like the Arcane Nexus, to someone else, and if we end up with competing novels on the market (not with Harry Potter, just in general).

I hear you. The interesting thing to learn is that about 10% of TV shows currently in production - entire episodes are written by the machine learning bots - and evidently we didn't even know it. And evidently don't care. The execs have found that people will watch anyway, which means they make just as much money, which means they can get rid of most writers. Execs killing creativity is an old, tired cliche that is true.

What the Hollywood people are also doing is using the AI to predict which screenplays will be greenlit, even though it's being overseen by a human.

I tend to agree with you, but I wonder if it's preventable. I've already seen evidence of people in my sphere suddenly being able to write at post-grad levels. Real shame. One of my biggest strengths in college was the ability to churn out A essays, and now pretty much anyone can do it. 

I wonder if it's just not creative now and we're not looking far enough ahead. At one point, we didn't think any AI could beat a grandmaster in chess, then Go, considered creative and far more complex. AI blew through the old Turing test in like 2013 or something. At some point, machine learning and AI will meld into something closely resembling advanced human intelligence, as we are the creators. I assume they'll put on plays for us with all the old actors as nano-foggers, long in their graves or the nursing home, but nonetheless strutting about and belting out their AI-written lines.