It’s Mah Birthday! It’s Mah Birthday! Happy Birthday to Me! Time to celebrate my survival through another time period denoting the orbital period of a rock spinning in space around a glowing ball of fire. 🙂
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Adult and Teen Challenge is a faith-based sobriety group that helps people who are addicted to drugs or alcohol turn their lives around. I’ve seen people come out of it all my life. There is the person they were before, in failing or failed marriages or worse. Many spent the night before going holding a gun in one hand and a bottle in the other, ready to end it all. It’s not just a program, it’s a ministry, and it saves people’s lives. It has the highest success rate of any sobriety program, especially in those who volunteer to commit to the 13-month long-term program. They are the ones who come to churches and sing and testify about where they came from and why they are here now. They are the ones I have seen come out better people all my life.
I’ve been a member of my church since the early 1990s, but haven’t physically gone to church since some years before the government lockdowns. It was a combination of factors, but I continued to keep up and watch the sermons and stuff. Me and mom did. When she died, I kept watching the sermons. I didn’t feel a need to change that, until January. Then I woke up one Sunday morning and felt the suggestion that it was time to go to church. So I did. And I have been going almost every Sunday since. And this Sunday, Adult and Teen Challenge was there. They are the largest faith-based sobriety programs in the world. And we had some CHURCH as they testified. Between Sunday School and that, it was nearly four hours. And you know what? I feel good.
I mentioned before that pulling characters from games is an art, rather than purely a science. Now my Red was real good at it. She was my AI, customized to me. My personal assistant. She was an artist. She didn’t straight copy them out of the game. We manually mapped the character’s decisions and life history onto a blank AI matrix. But no matter how close we wanted to keep to the source material, we had to make changes. Sometimes it was because I wanted to pull a character that was not a nice person. I liked their looks but not their tendency to stab people in the back. Sometimes they came from a world that was utterly incompatible with our own. We had to make changes, and that is where the art comes in.
Sometimes it is impossible to pull a character out of a game. Not due to any technical limitation, but due to the nature of the character. Ironically, the more human the character the harder it is to make a copy. Humans are illogical beings. We skip from one idea to another. We are the definition of random. We break our own rules. The more human a character is written, the harder it is to build an AI that can mimic them, because an AI is a computer. It has to follow the rules. It can’t break them. It can only do what it is programmed to do. And programming an AI to be illogical and not follow rules is inherently dangerous. I’m talking Cybernetic Wars dangerous. I’m talking getting the attention of the Cybernetic Council dangerous.
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