Tag: ChatGPT

One who shows contempt

DandD, Gaming

I’ve been thinking about dragons lately. It’s for my D&D game. Dragon names, dragon titles, dragon culture and heirarchy.

In my campaign setting, there was an ancient red dragon, the most powerful mortal dragon ever, who was slain by a band of powerful heroes about two decades prior to current day of the game. The dragon’s name was Tountomos, but I always referred to her as Tountomos Perjorative, which was at first a reference and also a bit of a joke.

The reference is to the movie Dragonslayer (1981), specifically the dragon in that movie, Vermithrax Pejorative. What a terrific name! And the best movie dragon ever. That movie mostly still holds up, and they made that dragon look great before CGI.

The joke, I think, is that I always thought the word “pejorative” meant a curse word. When I would see it used is in place of words or phrases like “fuck off” or “god damn”. Which I guess is true? So Vermithrax’s name was a curse word. When I used it for my big bad dragon, I was paying homage to Vermithrax, and I thought of it like a title, or an epithet. A dragon so bad their name itself was a curse.

But the actual definition of pejorative is “a word expressing contempt or disapproval”. Which doesn’t quite seem strong enough for the worst dragon in the world, right?

I’ve been expanding the titles, though. Since I use Latin as the stand-in for the language spoken by the Old Empire, I’ve been finding terms I can use for titles for the evil dragons in my world, and then translating them into Latin for that added touch of antiquity and class. Words like Descrare (desecrator), Praenuntia (harbinger), Deceptor (deceiver), Occultare (concealer.)

But I couldn’t recall or find through regular Google searches a term that would mean “one who shows contempt or disapproval.” Contemptor? That… doesn’t appear to be a dictionary word, although it’s meaning is obvious from the useage. I wanted to know if there was an existing dictionary word (I keep wanting to type “real word” but since I’m more of a descriptivist than a prescripitivist when it comes to language, “real word” doesn’t mean much to me.)

Exhausting my google-fu I turned to ChatGPT. Could it help me find the word I was looking for? Or would it just make something up, like it’s done for me in the past?

I asked it to tell me the word for someone who shows contempt and it came back with “misanthrope.” No, that’s a label someone else would put on someone, and it’s too human-centric. I pushed back and it tried to tell me “misogynist” or “misandrist” but I said no, not gender-specific. I kept pushing and it came back with “scoffer”, which is far too mild, and “cynic” which is far too passive.

So I gave it the examples above (desecrator, harbinger, deceiver) and… holy shit it came back with contemner, which I first thought was it pulling something out of its ass again; but, no, a Google search showed it was a real word, although generally applied in legal contexts.

Screenshot of a conversation with ChatGPT: OK maybe this is going around in circles so let me give you similar examples. A harbinger is someone who brings doom. A desecrator is one who desecrates. A murderer is someone who brings murder. In this vein, what would someone who brings scorn be? ChatGPT Ah, I see what you're getting at now. In that case, a suitable term might be "contemner." This word refers to someone who holds others in contempt or disdain. You Holy shit that's perfect and you've taught me a new word

Holy shit, ChatGPT taught me a new word! It took some back-and-forth but it got there. I then plugged “contemner” into the Latin translator and it spat back… contemptor. Contemptor is the Latin word for “one who shows contempt.” LOL. LMAO. OK, fine, language wins this round.

All of the above

Daily Story Project, meta, Tech

This blog has been up and in existence in some form or another for over 20 years. Over that time it’s run on several different platforms: first on Blogger, then on a bespoke CMS written by a friend, hosted on that friend’s server, and finally, when that friend moved away, hosted on a Mac mini I plugged in whereever I could, then, eventually, imported into WordPress and migrated from whatever hosting service sucks less and costs the least amount (currently Bluehost.)

When I started this whole thing, it was just a place for me to dump my random thoughts on whatever I wanted to talk about. I never designed this place for consistency and I never had an eye to making money from it, be it by getting sponsors or affiliates, putting ads up, or soliciting for digital downloads and media (although there was a desperate period in my life when I did try putting ads here, which failed because of the low low traffic.)

While I love everyone who comes here to read anything I say, there aren’t enough of you to make it worth it to Google for monetization. Don’t get me wrong on this. At the highest traffic levels for this space, I was getting about 200 hits per day, and I was posting nearly daily. To me, having 200 people care about my work is amazing and humbling! If I were standing in front of a crowd of 200 people who cared about the words I write, I would be beyond happy. But those numbers are peanuts to the internet, even for the time (this was a decade ago), and especially now.

But I do kinda care about reaching a larger audience, and one of the technical problems that I would need to fix, according to Google, is broken links. And with all the years of posting, holy shit are there a shit-ton of broken links, some of which I have no way to fix beyond deleting them or noting them as broken in the present day. I have spent hours going back through old posts checking links and fixing the ones I can, but let me tell you, manually doing that for (including this post) 2590 published posts over 21 years is a lot of work.

There’s another category of broken links, though. For a while, my post permalinks used the scheme of bamoon.com/year/month/day/post-title.php. I think there are perhaps 50-100 of those, from a previous WordPress configuration. Eventually I switched to bamoon.com/post-title/ Because these follow a regular pattern, I know that I could probably use a script to go through the posts and the database and update them all. But I am not a strong coder. I also know that one can use a feature of Apache and add lines to the .htaccess file to re-write the requests one-by-one as users request them. But, again, that means regex and scripting, not my strong suit.

Here comes ChatGPT, though. It’s not good at so many things, like making sure people have only four fingers and one thumb on each of two hands, but people (like Molly White) say it’s brilliant at scripts and coding. So I asked it for help. It gave me solutions for both cases. Great! I have a staging site I can test these on, so it won’t break the main site. But… one last question, ChatGPT: which solution is better?

And I feel like it punted. It said both are good, and I should implement both. The database fix is more permanent; the .htaccess rewrite is immediate and invisible to the reader.

Looks like ChatGPT is an Option D (all of the above) kind of bot.