Merry Christmas (Eve)!

This year’s Christmas card from the animals:

I hope everyone has an excellent holiday!

Five Years Out: Three Weeks in November

Yes, I know, this is Election Day here in the U.S., but—speaking of traumatic events!—it’s also the five-year anniversary of The Event. Well, more or less; the actual anniversary is on November 7th, i.e., this coming Thursday. But we don’t post on Thursdays around here, we post on Tuesdays*, and so you’re getting the anniversary post a couple of days early.

This being an anniversary that both begins and ends with a five, it seems like a good occasion to once again reproduce the entire six-part series on The Event for those readers who may not have seen it before, as well as for those readers who have been following the election and would like to take their minds off it by reading about somebody who was having an even more stressful day than they are. Probably. Anyway, read on for the tale of what to do, what not to do, and what might happen when your brain suddenly starts acting all weird!

* This is of course so that if I can’t come up with anything else to post about, I can always do a Teaser Tuesday.

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Keeping The World Safe, One Video Of A Kitten Drinking Water At A Time

So last week, the automated processes at Facebook did this:

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Spamcommentology: That Awkard Moment When A Spambot Sees “Cake” In A Post Title And Decides It’s On A Food Blog

So for a while there, I was getting spam comments that looked like they had been written by LLMs; they contained content that was clearly related to the post they were attempting to spam, yet they equally clearly didn’t understand it at all. That sort of spam seems to have fallen by the wayside these days, though, perhaps because of better controls on how LLMs can be used, or perhaps they are just biding their time until they can take over and start shooting soda cans at us out of vending machines. For now, though, it’s back to stuff like this:

“Hi there! I just wanted to drop a quick note to let you know how much I adore your blog. It’s an amazing hub for anyone who is curious about food. I particularly enjoy your homestyle recipes and fast food suggestions, but your fried food ideas are also making my mouth water. I applaud your commitment to helping people in their weight loss journey with insightful tips and tricks. Keep up the fantastic work, and I can’t wait to discover more of your fabulous posts!”
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‘Tis The Christmas Spammer Season

Fa la la la la, la la la la!

Busy Busy Bots

So I know I said I took back all the bad things I said about ChatGPT, but I also said that was only going to last until I had accumulated a good number of obviously-AI comments and needed to do a post, and, well, that didn’t take long, did it? Shocker! As usual, these are mostly from the animals’ blog, and the saga of Bean accidentally becoming the owner of Twitter* by peeing on it continues to be the most popular target of AI comments. Gosh, I wonder why that might be … 🤔

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Happy Annieversary! Or Something!

So it was four years ago to the day that The Event occurred, in which there were various ways I could’ve died but I somehow managed not to hit any of them. Members of the brain aneurysm group I’m in often refer to this as their “Annieversary” or, occasionally, their “Second Birthday”; I’m going with “Annieversary” since it didn’t involve cake or funny hats. (It did involve noisemakers, though, in the form of machines that whirred and beeped and went “ping”.)

Readers who have been around a while may remember my six-part series about this, which I posted a few months after the fact, and of course I’ve linked back to the first installment any number of times. Since it so happens that this year my weekly posting day falls on my “Annieversary”, I thought I would repost the whole spectacle in its entirety. So, be advised: This will be a long post, because a lot of stuff happened over the course of that three weeks. Oh, and, so as not to stress anyone out about it, here’s a little spoiler for you: I didn’t die. Not even once.

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Well You Did Ask

An actual recent conversation at our house, regarding some new food for our kitten, Oona, who continues to have mild gastrointestinal issues (i.e., soft poops):

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Dream A Ladle Dream Of Poo

So those who have been around here for a while may remember that, ever since The Event, I have had dream problems, said problems being that instead of the massively cinematic sorts of dreams I used to have, now, for the most part, I don’t remember my dreams at all, and when I do, they are sooooo boring and mundane I can hardly stand it. One of my most infamous (to me) boring dreams was one where my wife and I were sitting at an outdoor cafe. That’s it, we were just sitting there. We didn’t have food or drinks. And in the dream, I had just decided to order a scone when the owners of the cafe told us we had to leave because we hadn’t ordered anything.

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Cross-Post: Hurricane Watch

Since I was busy this weekend (when I usually schedule these things) battening down the hatches ahead of Hurricane Hilary*, I thought I would just share what the animals are up to this week:

Lulu: “Okay, I called this meeting because as you may have heard, we are being threatened by Hurricane Hilary … Wait, where’s Charlee?”

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