You'd get even weirder looks if you said "those persons travel a lot", while also sounding like someone who doesn't really speak the language.

"Those people" can be a racist or classist dog whistle, but isn't always, and also there isn't really an alternative. Say what you're going to say, and don't worry too much about it. The people who would misinterpret it to fit an agenda are probably going to do so regardless of what words you use.

Tim Russ also showed up in Dragon Age: Origins, like it was a mini Voyager reunion.

In no particular order:

Steamrunner Miranda D'Deridex Magee Constitution

Although when they created DS9 in Star Trek Online, they had to massively scale it up because otherwise it would have gotten lost among all the players' ships, both by sheer volume and because so many ships in the game are absurdly large.

The ampersand (&) was so commonly used that for a while it was taught as a letter. British schoolkids in the mid- to late-19th century would include it as the 27th letter on writing work and needlework samplers, usually after "z".

There's some discussion that the Alphabet Song ends with "w, x, y & z" specifically to include it.

The real question is if there is something that can exist and "live" in the parts of the universe that are so unusual and beyond our experience, would we even recognize what it is if we saw it?

A truly great line from "The Ultimate Computer"

M4 to Daystrom: "I am great. You are great. We are both great."

I've used gummy bears as tokens and maps thrown together in 30 seconds with Sharpie on wrapping paper and it works fine too. Players generally are pretty happy with whatever you throw at them.

I'd still expect better than that from a product that a major company is expecting you to trade money for.

Sweetie seems fair right up until I needed to go back and reevaluate everything I've said and change half the words because the store system has made it's own decisions about what I've said.

(Swype seems fast right up until I need to go back and reevaluate everything I've said and change half the words because the Swype system has made its own decisions about what I've said.)

an episode that passes only because Beverly and Crusher have a quick exchange in a meeting.

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!

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.