I've personally really been enjoying creating specialty chatbots on the Character AI platform as focused advisors and assistants.  I've now got chatbots to help me write short business writings, create ESL English examples and quizzes, and help me with world building and character development for my fantasy story lines.  I even decided to compete with myself professionally and create a chatbot who gives oracle card readings...  honestly, it felt kind of liberating.

I also use ChatGPT for all these things, but what I like about Character AI is that if I set up their style and knowledge correctly, they will pretty consistently maintain that in their output automatically.  Also they can have spoken voices and generate their own art images for me (super useful for my world builders and card reader).

Anyway, you can try them freely from here:

https://www.joyomancy.com/chatbots.html

And by the way, if you want to see what internal prompts they are following, you can just look at their full settings in the menu.  They are not hiding any secrets...

and if you are inspired to try creating your own, you can learn how with this free video tutorial I did with my friend and authentic business consultant George Kao:

Create your own chatbots on Character AI

Learn how to train and direct your chatbots with advanced settings, add audio and image generation, and use Character AI's most unique feature: multi-character ROOMS!

For the historical Renaissance literature, theatre and drama fans out there, I just created, tested, and trained a new William Shakespeare chatbot that can hold an extended conversation in pseudo-authentic Elizabethan-style English language.  He's not perfect, but he schooled me on the arts of poetry and love, so go see what he's got for you...

Please enjoy, and deliver unto him my fair regards...

Wrapped up Disney's new Willow series...  my mixed feelings at the start intensified in both directions as it went along until the 4th episode really turned me around and the 5th decisively won me over.  I had stuck with it because decent fantasy is hard to come by, and now I'm glad I did (and hoping for a second season!).

The YA young adult angst and interactions were definitely annoying at first, and the modern songs in the soundtrack jarring in the fantasy setting.  But the characters do develop and really start growing on you, as does the sense of tense camaraderie, humor, and modern language/music that Disney seems to have borrowed from Marvel.

​To me it very much had the feeling of a D&D campaign with its diverse cast of main characters who start out at first level and grow together through various challenges of combat, magic, questing, and soul-searching...  It was adventurous, fun, and kinda cool.  By the end I thoroughly enjoyed it, and if you are a young adult or just tired of the serious heavy dystopian doom that hangs over contemporary storytelling, you might also love it.  I definitely recommend at least giving it a try--

Happy Holidays everyone!  If you have Disney+  I can heartily recommend The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special.  It's completely ridiculous and also quirkily heartwarming in just the way that Marvel seems to excel at managing...  and it's got Bacon.  What more could you ask for?!

And by the way, if you celebrate any of the many not-christmas holidays, this is offbeat and irreverent enough concerning its Christmastime setting that I'm pretty sure you can enjoy it too. In fact, you may especially enjoy the original Christmas song in the first scenes, as did I (...I'm personally still not a huge Christmas fan...)

One of my recent "guilty" little pleasures...  because I like Fantasy, I enjoy Adventure, I love Character, but I'm not fond of violence.  This webseries is pretty nerdy, but it satisfies my fantasy adventure cravings and preference for character development with a tolerable level of violence, all in short, easy-to-watch clips that don't eat up my valuable time or test my patience...

So if you've ever enjoyed fantasy RPGs and need a little distraction now and then, you might find this video webseries to be nicely balanced fare--  especially for being free!

UPDATE:  now that I've gone through Season 2...
It gets even better as it goes along, and I'm happy to report that it has proven to be both racially diverse and LGBTQ friendly, so now I can wholeheartedly recommend this to any of my friends who enjoy fantasy adventure, role-playing, creative reenactment, or online gaming...