There's a few notable crater lakes in Quebec. My favourite by far, though, are the Clearwater lakes/Lac Wiyâshâkimî in the far northeast. Two impact craters almost right on top of one another, now filled with water. What makes them really interesting to me is that they aren't caused by one space rock breaking in two just before hitting the ground. The two lakes have been proven to be created almost 200M years apart, which means two separate asteroids hit almost exactly the same spot, separated by 200M years or so.
Basilisk
joined 1 year ago
The Aldeans, from TNG's first season "When The Bough Breaks" are close, though they don't necessarily treat their advanced technology as "sacred", though they certainly see it as infallible. The whole setup of the episode is that they would hide the planet away from the universe at large and have only appeared before the Enterprise to steal their children as the now-deteriorating technology is causing the Aldeans to become sterile.
Try that on a small planet, I guess.
They seem to be bookending the season with flashbacks to Pike's expedition to Rigel VII. His decision to withdraw there cost people their lives and led to Zak corrupting the local culture. Now he's back under fire, under seemingly unwinnable odds, and forced to make the call to leave people behind again.
Ortegas was in the alternate future with Pike at the time of "A Quality of Mercy", which is not necessarily "plot armour" but if we assume the timeline still hasn't diverged — Pike not having had his accident yet — then it would seem reasonable she should get through to survive long enough to see the point of divergence and therefore survive long enough to be on the bridge with Pike when he meets the Romulans. However, that's all very timey-wimey and subject to a lot of "maybes" and "what-ifs".
I like the Gorn being legitimately scary, but to me it kind of retroactively highlights how silly "Arena" was. You can't really compare modern TV with the episodes from the 60s, but stick one of these Gorn on the planet with Kirk and he would have been proper fucked. I can accept it easily enough and take it with a grain of salt that, if we assume they were going to re-shoot the episode today with Paul Wesley and modern cinema techniques that the fight scenes wouldn't be these silly ponderous things and the episode would probably largely not have Kirk confront the Gorn at all, mostly running away until the big climax with the "cannon". However, it is kind of an unforced error, where they could have simply introduced the aliens as a totally new species without really losing anything while also not highlighting how silly the rubber suit Gorn was.
If you do go up by Témiskaming, you might check out Parc National d'Opémican, which is an old lumber site with historic buildings. It's just outside of the town. There isn't a huge amount there, but it's all brand new and makes a decent place to stop, take in the lake, and get out to move around a bit.
I've done the drive from Calgary to Toronto a number of times, one place I try to stop at every time is Kakabeka Falls, just outside of Thunder Bay. It's a beautiful waterfall with nice facilities right off the highway and it tends not to be super busy. Conveniently placed right around where I usually am ready for a chance to walk around without needing to hike for 20 minutes to get to actually see the falls.
It's been a very long time since I was there, but there's also the Saskatchewan Science Centre in Regina. I remember enjoying it as a kid, but that was almost 25 years ago, so it may have declined. Science centre are usually a great place to visit though, so it's probably a safe bet
AI very provably does use other peoples' art more than any other artist. It needs huge amounts of media that's used as a basis for training material — far, far more than your average artist will consume. You can teach a person how to draw, sculpt, paint, model, etc. without ever showing them another artist's work. You really can't do that with ML tools we have currently. It's not completely impossible, but you would be relying on getting a lot of training data in another way and it would probably require a lot of input from humans on the output end to make a model that can come up with something reasonably comprehensible. A
We don't have much in terms of laws about this kind of usage because it's not like in the past a company like DC comics has decided that they want to make Jim Lee's style to become the "official" style of DC comics, but they don't want to pay Jim Lee, so they hire a Chinese art factory to mimic his style and cut him out. Something like that wouldn't be illegal in the sense of current laws, but probably would have been substantially more expensive than simply hiring Lee himself. However, it definitely would have been unethical. It also would likely have caused a legal challenge that might have affected how our laws deal with replication of a "style". Even in cases where a company establishes their own style guide based on an art style of a specific artist as is common in animation (where it's understood that the usage of that style is part of the concept art), there is typically an evolution in how that style as it standardizes- See "Steamboat Mickey" versus current versions of Mickey Mouse, or the changes from the first season to the current season of the Simpsons for example.
This isn't about using AI tools for your average DM to make art resources for their home campaign. That's a perfectly reasonable use-case. It isn't as though your average DM is likely to be commissioning custom art every time there's a new character in the campaign - they'll do what we've always done: Find reference material that's "close enough" from copyrighted works and say "something like this." But if a company is going to start digging into AI, then we as the audience have the right to say, "No, I'm not going to support that and won't buy a product produced in that way. I assign value to art made the 'traditional' way" The obsolescence of industries due to technology is not an inevitability - by all rights it's entirely possible that an automated process to make perfect, nutritionally balanced food bars that are both cheaper and healthier than a McDonald's burger could have been produced by now - but no one wants that. Very few people have a diet that consists entirely of Soylent. Just as there's more to food than nutrition and value, there's more to art than pictures. The so-called "free hand of the market" goes both ways.
I'm a digital artist. I'm in an interesting position in this debate, because I see the value and the power of tools like MidJourney and Stable Diffusion and the like. The prospect of training an AI tool on my own work and giving it to the public to be able to make their own art using my style is exactly the kind of artsy-fartsy "concept" thing I dig. I use things like "content-aware fill" tools and special brushes in my work that are basically cousins to these systems and they help me immensely. But also I think that artists should have the right to choose whether their work is used in this way and that if a company is profiting from the usage of an AI model that's been trained from mass scraping of the internet there should be some legal consideration for that.
May or may not be an actual room in a castle, but there's often going to be one or multiple cesspits. This could literally be simply a pit under a garderobe/bathroom or it could be a walled and enclosed space, but if present it would be serviced regularly by gong farmers.
AI discourse has way too much "Throwing the baby out with the bathwater," especially from a lot of people who have no idea what they're talking about. AI, as a thing, is not a perfect system. It's not a magic panacea that will cure all. There are legitimate concerns about how much it infringes on creative spaces and how it may put people out of work. There are also legitimate concerns about the AI training data scraping web-hosted content indiscriminately without permission. However, these are not the same as AI just being "bad".
Do I think a D&D campaign led by a ChatGPT-like DM would be "good"? Probably not as it stands. I've played a lot with ChatGPT and its limitations are pretty obvious. Could it get better in the future? Probably. Is it an interesting possible way to get to play D&D if you can't get a group together? I mean, it's gotta be better than nothing, right? But the real interesting prospect to me is machine-learning powered tools for the DM. A System that's trained on WotC-owned resources that lets you just choose a paintbrush that's labeled "cave" and draw out a series of tunnels and have it automatically populate with crystals and mushrooms and visual points of interest, which lets you sketch out a good-looking map in minutes. Then, as your party is in the cave, the system knows what type of "biome" you used so it has a button to let you generate a random encounter, which it takes from your character levels and where your players are. There's a lot of ways that "smart" tools could take a lot of work off the DM's shoulders that would be great. I don't know if they're in the pipeline, but the point is that AI isn't a boogeyman that's just out to steal jobs and IP.
Literally, Qapla'! is "Success!"
Ok, I know this was probably meant to be Troi and Crusher, but in Star Trek it's not impossible, so I found it funny. Riker had the transporter duplicate, not Crusher!