Grrrrr
OUR CLOCKS CHANGED LAST WEEKEND. As Uncle B can attest, this will be followed by weeks of me pissing and moaning about it. Please stop. Please pick one and stick to it. I don’t care which one.
The image is when I asked Grok for a picture of an angry stoat. Not bad.
I’ve been playing around with Grok images to include in some art for work. Sometimes, it’s spectacularly good. Sometimes it’s spectacularly weird.
I need a very specific image: a Medieval soldier sitting on a chair in a candlelit room as seen from below. It gave me some pretty good options, though I can’t seem to pound “as seen from below” into its thick skull.
And then it started making the soldier sit at a table with a weird little animal perched on it. Over an over again. Different soldier, different animal.
It swears that every time you ask it a question – unless you specify you’re modifying an earlier prompt – that it starts from scratch. Clearly not.
So I switched prompts and asked it for a picture of a Medieval peasant shovelling out a stable. It gave me a rather nice close-up picture of a fox. I typed “that’s not anything like what I asked for” and I got a snivelling apology.
Shit is weird, man.
March 31, 2025 — 5:28 pm
Comments: 7
Is this real?
According to the original poster “I asked chatgpt’s new image model to script and generate a series of comics starring itself as the main character. The results genuinely gave me chills.”
I dunno. Too perfect? Here’s the thread.
Have a good weekend!
March 28, 2025 — 6:56 pm
Comments: 4
¡Adios!
There it is: my office chair. Left at the curb for the trash man.
It’s been broken for as long as I can remember (the back comes loose), but it’s still the most comfortable chair in the office. I must readjust it twenty times a day.
I reckon I have 7,500 butt hours in that thing. Harder’n hell to throw it away.
Do you feel that – a connection to things you’ve used a long time? It’s like a superstition, like something of me rubs off on my personal property.
March 27, 2025 — 7:37 pm
Comments: 7
Chicken City Live Stream!
Live stream. Chickens burbling. Soooothing. Not available now, check back tomorrow (it’s chicken bedtime). No idea what the connection to Tim Pool is.
The bottom fell out of one of my henhouses today. Halfway out – if it had come all the way out, I’d have a chance to fix it. As it is, if I give it a yank, I’m afraid I’ll break the whole poop tray. And then where would we be?
Lousy stinking stupid Chinese chicken hutch.
It’s not a safety issue. If they fell through it would just dump them out in the run (I don’t close the pophole), but they have to have something to stand on to to hop up on the perch. So I put an Amazon box in there.
You can take the girl out of Tennessee…
March 26, 2025 — 6:43 pm
Comments: 4
Another day, another hoard
Another detectorist find, this one in Yorkshire again (a very rich place for neolithic artifacts).
The metal objects had been purposely destroyed – they think by burning and subsequent burying – in one of the most puzzling acts our ancestors often perpetrated. Still, that’s how we find these great piles of stuff to this day – they buried them themselves.
And a very great stack of stuff it is. Eight hundred items, including lots of horse-related equipment, 28 iron tires (meaning they had chariots and/or wagons), spears, jewelry (that’s a brooch up there) and other items that proved there was a vast trade network 2,000 years ago, stretching right across Europe and perhaps into Rome. They were more prosperous than expected, too.
Have you ever noticed that every time we discover something new about the ancestors, they were more sophisticated than we realized?
Thanks to Uncle B for this one.
March 25, 2025 — 7:50 pm
Comments: 4
Not the most exciting show on TV
Ladies and gentlemen, I present the Fish Doorbell. Or visdeurbel, because the Dutch language is just the English language spoken by really drunk people.
To give you an idea how fast-paced and exciting it is, that’s the Fish Photo of the Week (for March 11. Maybe there’s been a super interesting one by now).
It’s an aid for fish looking to swim upriver to spawn in Utrecht. It’s a live webcam. If you spot a fish, poke the button and the lock keeper has a look. If there are enough fish, he opens the lock and lets them through. They’ve been doing this for five years now.
I haven’t seen a fish yet, just little bits of junk floating in the water. Still strangely soothing.
March 24, 2025 — 6:08 pm
Comments: 6
Spotted on a side street this morning
There was no cat, Flo or otherwise. Is this a joke I’m not getting, or is it a Brit thing?
I have nothing for you today. Have an excellent weekend!
March 21, 2025 — 7:51 pm
Comments: 5
Let there be collagen
So, I bought one of these. Yes, it was expensive. Shut up.
This is all part of weasel’s ongoing crusade to not look so damn much like her father.
I asked my buddy Grok what RLT will do and he do say:
Skin Health: It’s said to boost collagen production, which could reduce wrinkles, fine lines, and signs of aging. Some use it for acne, claiming it lowers inflammation and speeds up healing of blemishes or scars.
Pain Relief: People report it helps with muscle soreness, joint pain, and conditions like arthritis by reducing inflammation and improving circulation.
Wound Healing: There’s talk it accelerates tissue repair, making it useful for cuts, burns, or post-surgery recovery.
Hair Growth: It’s marketed for stimulating hair follicles, potentially helping with thinning hair or conditions like alopecia.
Mood and Energy: Some say it lifts mood, fights fatigue, or even eases symptoms of seasonal affective disorder by mimicking natural light exposure.
Muscle Recovery: Athletes often tout it for faster recovery after workouts, supposedly by enhancing mitochondrial function in cells.
Sleep Improvement: Near-infrared light might influence melatonin production, helping regulate sleep cycles.
This thing is big – much bigger than I could see in the picture. And heavy. And BRIGHT.
First session was yesterday. I did 20 minutes and afterwards felt like I’d had a touch too much sun on my face. You know the feeling. So today I did ten minutes and it was fine.
An hour later, I had my lunch and took my supplements (yes, I’m one of THOSE people) and immediately afterwards had my very first niacin flush. Been taking niacin for years and never knew what they were talking about.
That had to be what it was. It was terrifying (though, I gather, completely harmless). Do you get them?
I’ll let you know about my gadget.
March 20, 2025 — 6:57 pm
Comments: 6
I’m sorry I can’t do that, Dave
I’ve been using AI more and more lately for text answers (not just lurid pictures of weasels). It’s only a Google search with a synopsis afterwards, but that’s a surprisingly useful thing. Grok is my favorite so far. It has a colloquial writing style that reminds me of…well, me.
That’s an odd issue, but it’s not uncommon for computers to throw curveballs like this. Since rebooting fixes it temporarily, it’s likely a software glitch rather than a hardware failure. Here are a few potential culprits and things to check:
Curveball! Did you ever expect kind of chatty informality from your computer? (My new computer occasionally begins to spew [ and ] in the middle of my text. It’s done it twice and a reboot fixes it, so I’m not inclined to worry).
Not awfully keen on the Microsoft one (Copilot?). Never used ChatGPT. Uncle B is pals with Leo, the AI built into the Brave browser.
Someone suggested today that if you take your car to the garage and you’re not awfully good with cars, you can get AI to explain the problem and give you a hint if they’re telling the truth and what the costs should be.
I think this is going to be useful, after all. Not world shaking, I don’t think, but useful.
March 19, 2025 — 7:52 pm
Comments: 4
Look! It’s a ball!
Uncle B calls over his shoulder, “there’s a ball on flightradar24.” And I’m like “?” Sure enough, there’s a little round icon on the map and the site lists the aircraft type as “ball”.
Obviously, a hot air balloon of some kind. Probably unmanned, judging from the picture. Set out from Burghausen and it’s going about 20 mph, so it’s been up there a while.
Pink Aviation is a military aircraft spares website, so probably not them. Grok tells me there’s a helicopter training service in Austria called Pink Aviation. Probably not them.
I got Grok baffled on this one. If that’s the actual balloon in the picture, I see no place for gear or propulsion, though it must at least have a transponder. That’s roughly the way the wind is blowing today. Just a giant lost balloon?
Uncle B writes to add:
Apparently: “The STU1000 is a Worner Gas Balloon model, specifically the Worner Gas Balloon NL-1000/STU. It is used by Pink Aviation and can be tracked on Flightradar24.”
For some strange reason it is currently parked at an RAF base in Cambridgeshire. I think we can safely discount little green men, though I do hope the RAF hasn’t decided to buy them for interceptor duties. At a stately 20mph you’d be better off with tea leaves than radar.
March 18, 2025 — 4:31 pm
Comments: 9