So this week we’ve arrived at the final installation of Abusing ChatGPT Lies, Damned Lies, and ChatGPT, in which it is asked to produce a biography of Dennis the Vizsla, who was, of course, the primary inspiration and main character (and boy was he a character) over at Dennis’s Diary of Destruction, back when it was Dennis’s Diary of Destruction. Surely with some eleven years of Dennis-related material to draw on, we could expect this installment to be the most accurate one, right? Right … ?
Category: Dogs
Lies, Damned Lies, and ChatGPT: The Beautiful Trixie
So this week it’s time for the penultimate episode* of Lies, Damned Lies, and ChatGPT, in which ChatGPT has a go at a bio for The Beautiful Trixie! But first, hey, look, it’s another LLM spam comment from our old AI friend Mr. W on a post about nicknames over at the animals’ blog, which once again demonstrates that it can read the post, but it can’t understand the post.
Continue reading “Lies, Damned Lies, and ChatGPT: The Beautiful Trixie”Teaser Tuesday: “Speak Easy”
Look at this, two Teaser Tuesdays back-to-back! Must be because I had a busy week and didn’t have time to take notes on amusing things my wife said about Killing Eve … But anyway, this time, I was reading Speak Easy, by the heavily-overrepresented-in-Teaser-Tuesdays-on-this-blog Catherynne M. Valente:
Not A Not A Review Of “Le Week-End”
So recently we watched the film Le Week-End, in which a very English and very bickering couple played by Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan decide the take the train down to Paris for the weekend, as one is able to do when one lives in Europe, apparently.
Partway through the film they bump into Ian Malcolm Jeff Goldblum—forever known to my wife as “The Jurassic Park Guy“—who plays an old college friend of Jim Broadbent’s character who has now become a successful author. Jeff Goldblum invites the other two to a book launch party, or something, at his apartment, various things happen, and then, as Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan were leaving the apartment at the end of the evening, I suddenly had to pause the video and back it up a little.
Continue reading “Not A Not A Review Of “Le Week-End””Wife: “What are you doing?”
Me: “I think I spotted something.”
Cross-Post: The Liebster Award
As I’m sure most readers are aware, I also run The Oceanside Animals blog (formerly Dennis’s Diary of Destruction). Proving the truth of the admonition never to work with children or animals, because they will steal all the scenes in which they appear, their blog has always been much more popular than this one, but every once in awhile, they share their fame with me. This week, I got to tag along with them on their Sunday Awards and Meme Show, when they were given the Liebster Award and I got tagged for it as well. Naturally most of the space in the post is devoted to Charlee, Chaplin, and Lulu, but I got to answer a few questions too. The show is reproduced here in its entirety with the kind permission of their agent.
Teaser Tuesday: “Range of Ghosts”
So this week I was reading Range of Ghosts, an epic fantasy by Elizabeth Bear, which — unlike most epic fantasies I’ve read — is set in what appears to be an analogue of the Mongolian steppes rather than an analogue of Western Europe, which is enough all on its own to make it interesting. Fortunately I also enjoyed the story.
Random Contract: “Night Watchman”
It’s been quite a while since I reached into my giant pile of rejection (and some acceptance) letters, so this week I spun up random.org to have it tell me which folder I should reach into. It selected folder I-J, from which I pulled an old contract from Hard Shell Word Factory (now an imprint of Mundania Press, home of some oddly specific genre categorizations), for the eBook rights to Night Watchman. “Hard Shell Word Factory” doesn’t belong in the I-J folder, of course, but, you know, sometimes things get misfiled. But anyway, I picked it, so here it is. Rather than reproducing all umpteen pages of the eBook contract, I thought I would just pull a few selected sections from it, which may serve as an interesting illumination of how the eBook world has changed since the year 2000 (or, as we called it back in those panic-stricken days, “Y2K”).
The Early Years: Jim’s Clarinet Sounds Like A Chicken
So last week, I posted an ancient report card progress report and mentioned that when I played the clarinet, our dog, Miss Marple (AKA “Missy”), would plant herself in front of me and howl. I further mentioned that it was too bad there was no video because it probably would have made us―or at least Missy―Internet stars. Well, there’s still no video, but since my dad knows where all his pictures are, there is, at least, photographic evidence:
Continue reading “The Early Years: Jim’s Clarinet Sounds Like A Chicken”
Teaser Tuesday 3/8/2016: “The Yellowstone Conundrum” Is Still Conundruming
This week I’m still reading The Yellowstone Conundrum, by John D. Randall, which some 400-odd pages in has begun to morph from a natural disaster epic into an urban warfare epic: Another Battle of Seattle, if you will, only this time between marauding street gangs and various pockets of Our Heroes trapped in the city by the one-two punch of a 9.5 earthquake (which, in this book, is vastly the punier of the two big quakes) and subsequent tsunami (not puny at all). In fact, one group of characters even gives a shout-out to “Escape from New York” by assigning themselves characters from the film. Oh, and for those who were worried — spoiler alert! — the dog is still with us. (In case you were wondering, he’s designated as the Ernest Borgnine character in “EfNY”, Cabbie.)
Continue reading “Teaser Tuesday 3/8/2016: “The Yellowstone Conundrum” Is Still Conundruming”
Teaser Tuesday 3/1/2016: “The Yellowstone Conundrum”
So this week I’m reading The Yellowstone Conundrum, by John D. Randall, in which Old Faithful really blows its top. Hilarity ensues. No, wait, not hilarity. What’s that other thing? Oh right. Disaster.
Continue reading “Teaser Tuesday 3/1/2016: “The Yellowstone Conundrum””
Viscosity 