Tag: Dogs

It’s 1997 and somebody is wearing my shirt.

~ James Viscosi ~ 14 Comments
Hint: It’s not the dog.

It’s 1999 and Tucker would like you to state your business before he will let you talk to his mom.

~ James Viscosi ~ 9 Comments

It’s the entire 1980s and am I a boy who likes to sit with dogs while reading, or a boy who likes to read while sitting with dogs?

~ James Viscosi ~ 10 Comments

… Yes.

Things haven’t changed all that much since then, either, other than what form the books take. Oh, and now there are cats involved, too.

Meta AI, Making Sure To Focus On The Important Things

~ James Viscosi ~ 13 Comments

Me: (Posts a 30-year-old picture of our cats staring at our goldfish, Milo, in his bag)
Meta AI: “Oooh! Hey! I know all about Milo! Want to hear his story? I know his favorite food! Really I do! Did you ever want to be a Goldfish Inspector? Let’s see what their duties are! Also if you would like to book an appointment for Trouble and Pooh Bear to come and inspect your goldfish, just let me know!”

Also Meta AI:

  • “Milo is probably a goldfish and Trouble and Pooh Bear are dogs.”
  • “Let me just make up some stuff about what a Goldfish Inspector might do.”1
  • “I have no idea what Milo eats. Maybe flake?”2
  • “Did I mention that Trouble and Pooh Bear are dogs???”
  • “Maybe you should go look at their blog!”3

Well okay, I can get behind that last one at least.

  1. Which, do be fair, seem to be fairly reasonable duties for a Goldfish Inspector to have. ↩︎
  2. It wasn’t flake food. It was probably pellets, most likely from Hikari. ↩︎
  3. If you saw all this and said to yourself, “Self, I bet the animals are going to get a lot of mileage out of this as part of Oona’s on-again, off-again feud with ‘Zuckerbot‘, congratulations! You have been around here for more than five minutes. ↩︎

Lies, Damn Lies, and ChatGPT: The Chattening

~ James Viscosi ~ 17 Comments

So a while back, I had done a series of posts in which I had asked ChatGPT about a certain vizsla dog whose blog was much more famous than this one, and its responses ranged from semi-accurate to outright fabrication. In the intervening years I have been using ChatGPT off and on to amuse myself with important questions like “If all the most iconic Kurt Russell characters were dropped into the film Aliens, in what order would they get killed or cocooned and which would be the last one left to defeat the aliens at the end?”*, because it’s fun to see what it comes up with; but recently, the animals’ large friends over at the Leonberger Life blog posted the results of asking ChatGPT about their Leonberger Bronco, and the results were interesting; so I thought I would give ChatGPT another chance to lie about Dennis. To wit:

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Merry Christmas (Eve)!

~ James Viscosi ~ 12 Comments

This year’s Christmas card from the animals:

I hope everyone has an excellent holiday!

The Early Years: Mmm, Potato

~ James Viscosi ~ 8 Comments

So a while back, I pulled some old Villains & Vigilantes (I think) character sheets, which people seemed to find amusing, so I figured I would dip back into the stack and pull out another one. Since I ran the game, most of the sheets in this stacks are going to be NPCs, and of them, most are going to be villains, because, after all, you gotta have villains to go with your vigilantes. Here’s today’s:

Continue reading “The Early Years: Mmm, Potato” →

Five Years Out: Three Weeks in November

~ James Viscosi ~ 16 Comments

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.

Continue reading “Five Years Out: Three Weeks in November” →

Words, Words, Everywhere The Words

~ James Viscosi ~ 10 Comments

So I’ve sort of been collecting amusing (to me, anyway) screen shots of Spelling Bee words that were not accepted. Most of them are words I didn’t expect it to take but that I wanted to spell anyway, and since they’ve started to kinda clutter up my device with pictures, I figured it was time to finally post them. (Like I said before, it’s not easy keeping an author blog going when you’re not authoring …)

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But Turds Are Non-Migratory

~ James Viscosi ~ 10 Comments

Ever since our dog Bean got bitten by a baby rattlesnake a few months ago (he’s fine now, after a course of antivenin, an overnight hospital stay, and of course a couple thousand dollars in vet bills), he and his sister Lulu have not been allowed outside unsupervised. This situation is likely to continue until rattlesnake season is over, especially given that we subsequently caught Bean investigating another baby rattlesnake, although at least this time he was keeping a healthy (seven feet or so) distance. Of course, this means that when they go out for their morning ablutions, somebody has to go with them, and because I’m the early bird around here, that someone is usually me. And speaking of early birds, lately I’ve been bringing the phone with me and running the Merlin app from Cornell University, because it’s interesting to see what birds have been hanging around. Surely this information is of interest to the cats.

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