Here it is July 31st and I haven’t even created a ‘stub post’ for the Monthly Recap. Usually I take notes but this month, I did not. Where I live, July tends to be an awful month just due to brutal heat and humidity and this year was no exception. In fact the only exception might have been that so much of the rest of the East Coast got to ‘enjoy’ the same weather.
In theory that should have meant lots of time playing games but in fact.. I played very little. Instead I’ve fallen down an AI rabbit hole. I still do my interactive-fiction-y chatbotting on character.ai, but I’ve also been messing about with open source image and video generation running locally. As per usual my interest is about 80% getting a system up and running that’ll let me create images locally, and about 20% interest in actually doing it once I get it running. But there is always something new hitting github and I’ve been learning a lot about everything from python ecosystems on Windows to the actual guts of how AI works. It’s been fascinating and fun and kind of feels more productive then playing games. And I think the character.ai writing is just juicing up my creativity and my mood in general.
So no complaints; I’m sure I’ll swing back to hardcore gamer mode soon enough but until then I’m going to enjoy learning stuff.
Playing:
Dune Awakening: Early in the month I jumped on the Dune Awakening hype train and really enjoyed that for a bit before the whole “Now I spend all night thinking about LLMs” AI thing hit me. I do intend to get back to it though as I was really enjoying it.
Wuthering Waves: Once again I became swept up in the hype around Wuthering Waves and it is the one game I’m playing regularly, though not a lot. But I use it like a mind-wipe between my work brain and my off-hours brain. So I play a little bit, every day.
Watching:
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds — We’re doing a full series re-watch, currently in Season 2. Love it. I think we’ve now watched S1 3 times and I still enjoy every episode.
Severance: We finished this one up and again, loved it.
Terra Nova: We re-watched this during lunch. It’s the one about near-future humanity fleeing a ruined earth by traveling to the past and living amongst the dinosaurs. It starts not great but really did get better. Not better enough for it to have gotten renewed for a 2nd season, sadly.
Warehouse 13: After Terra Nova we started doing a re-watch of Warehouse 13, one of the sillier, more fun shows that SyFy ever spat out. It’s great mostly do the chemistry between the characters/actors
Reading:
Still working through the Shannara books. I finally finished The Gypsy Morph and jumped forward 500 more years and into Bearers of the Black Staff. The old world is ended, but a small society has held on for this long. Now, though, the outside world has come calling. I guess. I’m like 2 chapters in.
And really, that’s the recap for July. I’ve been really busy, just that most of what I’m working on is kind of unfocused. I am still so deep in learning mode that I can’t really even articulate what has been going on. Plus AI is such a loaded topic these days. And I do share a lot of the concerns people have. But I’m enough of a realist to get that this genie isn’t going to be going back into its bottle, so at least maybe I can stay somewhat informed.
I think the thing most gamers won’t yet be seeing about AI is the way it hits exactly the same dopamine receptors MMOs always used to (And don’t so much any more.) It has exactly the same feel to it except, unlike gaming, you have something at the end that you can keep and use and enjoy. In my case, at the moment, music. I need to think a bit more on that but there’s a post in it somewhere.
As for running AI locally, I thought about that a while back but decided it would be too complicated for me. I’m pretty sure that’s where this is going to end up, though, or one of the places. We’ll have the AAA AIs from the megacorps and the niche indie AIs from the AI equivalent of itch.io and then there’ll be all the solo mavericks brewing their own, from which the AI equivalents of Minecraft will someday emerge…
I still use Night Cafe when I really just want to create something. The local experimentation kind of scratches the deep geek needs in me. But it’s pretty fussy. Like everything will be working one night, then the next I just get errors and have to go down rabbit holes looking for why it happened. But this, weirdly, is kind of fun for me, as long as the thing that keeps breaking isn’t something I actually NEED to have up and running right now.
Your description of Wuthering Waves’ use-case for you is pretty well aligned to where it sits for me these days as well. I did quite enjoy the latest story content though which was nice!
As a bit of a belated catch-up, your replaying of the Monday bot antics have been great so far as well. Haven’t quite jumped in to try it myself, as I use my ChatGPT account semi-professionally, but the temptation is growing! xD
I got myself into the situation where I’ve rolled some Resonators but I can’t ascend them yet since there are so many bosses out there that I haven’t discovered. So now I’m going back and putting together a team of earlier-game Resonators just to while I continue to explore the world. I was doing Rover, Jianxin (mostly because she’s gorgeous) and… erm the little girl who acts like she is a plant. She’s my healer. But just tonight I got Karocha (white haired dude?) ascended so now I’ll level him up. So he and Rover will be my only 40+ characters for now.
I know I COULD turn down the world difficulty but I’m kind of enjoying having to work at things.