Well, that’s boring
We had friends in Alfriston at one time. We loved going there. It had an interesting high street and lots of places to shop.
And this thing in the public parking lot. It’s old. It’s an object of mystery. Some thought it was a temporary lockup for criminals. Some thought it was the lower part of a windmill. Some suggested it was a kiln. You’d think there’d be records, but there are not.
Well, according to this BBC article, it’s a dovecote. Boring.
You know what? I’m not sure I believe it. There are no holes for the pigeons to get in, just that one shuttered window at the top. And you think there would be evidence of ancient droppings.
I’m re-declaring it a mystery object.
June 30, 2026 — 5:34 pm
Comments: none
Interesting times…
Okay, here’s how I fixed the blog, with a lot of help from my robot friends. Someone I know who manages a lot of web sites says he switched from ChatGPT to Codex and hasn’t written a line of his own code in a year. So I downloaded Codex (it’s a separate program) and asked ChatGPT how to drive it.
It had me zip together the whole blog and feed it to Codex in one big gulp. It absorbed the whole thing and wrote a detailed report and then told me I’d used up my credits FOR THE WHOLE MONTH.
I suppose I should drop back and describe what the problem was. The blog wouldn’t load the latest version of PHP, which is the programming language used by things like WordPress (this is a WordPress blog, if you didn’t know). If I loaded anything newer than 7.4, it returned a terrifying blank white screen. And that was a problem because the latest Akismet (the module that runs our antispam) wouldn’t run on anything but 8+. Hence all the manual approving of posts.
When I built this place nearly twenty years ago, I tinkered with the code a lot. You probably don’t remember, there used to be little sidebar animations and all kinds of weird stuff. I was sure it was some dumbass thing I did that was holding it back.
Fortunately, I had the report and I had plenty of credit with ChatGPT. It showed me how to turn error reporting on, so when it crapped out on me with 8.0 we’d know exactly why. And it wasn’t anything in my code after all – Codex said nothing I did was a problem. It was the plugin that let you edit your own comments. It had some line of code that wasn’t compatible with PHP8.0.
So! While I had the robot’s attention, we tweaked a few things and everything is now running great. The automatic thingummy that audits your blog health is rated Good for the first time in years. I’ve come to the conclusion that plugins are evil – every technical issue I’ve ever had here was due to a badly constructed plugin.
The man who turned me on to Codex? The one who’s a bigger booster of AI than even I am? He told me AI is starting to frighten him.
June 29, 2026 — 5:24 pm
Comments: 9
Dead Pool Round 199: the heat wave breask
ExpressoBold Pureblood takes it with Alan Greenspan. Not the shortest deadpool on record, but possibly the most boring winner (Greenspan, not ExpressoBold).
As usual lately, I have to kick free all the comments manually, but you don’t have to worry about timestamps. Your post, when it’s finally free, will have the correct posting time. Apologies if someone else tries to pick the same person while your pick is in limbo.
Let’s think of this as EXCITING, shall we?
0. Rule Zero (AKA Steve’s Rule): your pick has to be living when picked. Also, nobody whose execution date is circled on the calendar. Also, please don’t kill anybody. Plus (Pupster’s Rule) no picking someone who’s only famous for being the oldest person alive.
1. Pick a celebrity. Any celebrity — though I reserve the right to nix picks I never heard of (I don’t generally follow the Dead Pool threads carefully, so if you’re unsure of your pick, call it to my attention).
2. We start from scratch every time. No matter who you had last time, or who you may have called between rounds, you have to turn up on this very thread and stake your claim.
3. Poaching and other dirty tricks positively encouraged.
4. Your first choice sticks. Don’t just blurt something out, m’kay? Also, make sure you have a correct spelling of your choice somewhere in your comment. These threads get longish and I use search to figure out if we have a winner.
5. It’s up to you to search the thread and make sure your choice is unique. I’m waayyyy too lazy to catch the dupes. Popular picks go fast.
6. The pool stays open until somebody on the list dies. Feel free to jump in any time. Noobs, strangers, drive-bys and one-comment-wonders — all are welcome.
7. If you want your fabulous prize, you have to entrust me with a mailing address. If you’ve won before, send me your address again. I don’t keep good records.
8. The new DeadPool will begin 6pm WBT (Weasel’s Blog Time) the Friday after the last round is concluded.
The winner, if the winner chooses to entrust me with a mailing address, will receive an Official Certificate of Dick Winning and a small original drawing on paper suffused with elephant shit particles. Because I’m fresh out of fairy shit particles.
Note: I am woefully behind on dick deliveries. If I owe you one, you’ll know how long. I ain’t gived up, but I haven’t drawn much since lockdown. Some day, your heirs might hear from my heirs.
June 26, 2026 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 49
Yes, it looked just like that
I asked ChatGPT to give me an image of a friendly local petanque game, and this was the result. Yep, pretty much. I was at the village petanque game earlier and I’m now settling comfortably into a G&T.
I advised a player to ‘put a little English’ on the ball and then realized English people do not use this expression. So I axed the robot and it said the term came from billiards in the 19th C. It means to knock the cue ball a glancing blow so it spins. It’s a trick Americans learned from visiting English billiards player, and it stuck. I always thought it was a baseball term.
Dead Pool tomorrow, you betcha.
June 25, 2026 — 7:42 pm
Comments: 1
Now, with bonus chicken!
This is the power bank Uncle B bought me for my birthday. I was trying to show you the number on the side (which tells you how much juice it has left) and what looks like a solid LED display to the human eye flickers like unto a bastard when you see it through the phone camera. Weird.
I love this thing. Ordinarily, I use it with my laptop so I can spend longer in the garden, but it’s way too hot to run a computer for very long today. Mine naturally runs hot. Just popping on to post this.
I love that. But what I really love is that it charges my phone faster than it discharges itself, so I can charge my phone, then charge the bank, then charge my phone, then charge the bank and effectively stay out here forever. I knew it was going to be a ‘sitting in the garden like a lump watching YouTubes all day’ kind of a day.
Day three of the hoochie coochie. I know from a childhood in Tennessee that if you sit perfectly still in the shade, you’ll be fine.
Spent the day watching porch pirate revenge videos. Sadly, the robot tells me most of them are AI. So I went back and watched Mark Rober’s old Glitter Bomb versus Porch Pirate series. He’s the real deal.
June 24, 2026 — 5:34 pm
Comments: 4
Stop me if you’ve heard this one
If you do a Google images search of “241543903” you will find pictures of people with their heads in freezers. This bit of internet silliness was the deliberate work of a performance artist named David Horvitz.
He took the first picture, tagged it with the meaningless number and uploaded it. Then he encouraged others to do the same, including in some cases mailing flyers to people.
It worked. Soon Googling the number would reliably turn up the images. This was 2009 and the internet was a simpler place. I guess it was one of the first online challenges.
It still works, but not quite as reliably.
June 23, 2026 — 5:09 pm
Comments: 5
This is what I saw
Walked into town this morning and saw this on the path. It’s not my photo, it’s the robot’s, but it’s startlingly close to my experience. Fortunately, there’s a local WhatsApp group I could report it to – there was a road on one side and a field of wheat on the other.
He turned and disappeared into the wheat as I came close. I think it was a he. I don’t have the expertise to tell teats from testicles at a distance.
Read this on the web today: “In America in 1812 a young girl called Mary Sawyer nursed a lamb back to health when everyone else had given up on it. The lamb consequently followed her to school every day.
In 1830 Sarah Josepha Hale wrote a poem about the incident which was entitled Mary had a Little Lamb and thus became a popular nursery rhyme.”
I asked the robot if this is true. It said the two facts are true, but the connection between them is unproven. Mary Sawyer didn’t claim to be that Mary until she was a very old lady.
Day one of the heat wave. I’ve gone into defensive Southern mode and refuse to move out of the shade until it’s over.
June 22, 2026 — 5:42 pm
Comments: 7
Dead pool round 198: almost 200, y’all!
And dissent555 takes the dick with Gene Shalit. Shalit was around since forever and I had no idea he was still alive. You have to be some kind of cultural icon to be parodied on Spongebob Squarepants.
I’ve just realized – my dad was also born in 1926 and he’d be a hundred this year.
0. Rule Zero (AKA Steve’s Rule): your pick has to be living when picked. Also, nobody whose execution date is circled on the calendar. Also, please don’t kill anybody. Plus (Pupster’s Rule) no picking someone who’s only famous for being the oldest person alive.
1. Pick a celebrity. Any celebrity — though I reserve the right to nix picks I never heard of (I don’t generally follow the Dead Pool threads carefully, so if you’re unsure of your pick, call it to my attention).
2. We start from scratch every time. No matter who you had last time, or who you may have called between rounds, you have to turn up on this very thread and stake your claim.
3. Poaching and other dirty tricks positively encouraged.
4. Your first choice sticks. Don’t just blurt something out, m’kay? Also, make sure you have a correct spelling of your choice somewhere in your comment. These threads get longish and I use search to figure out if we have a winner.
5. It’s up to you to search the thread and make sure your choice is unique. I’m waayyyy too lazy to catch the dupes. Popular picks go fast.
6. The pool stays open until somebody on the list dies. Feel free to jump in any time. Noobs, strangers, drive-bys and one-comment-wonders — all are welcome.
7. If you want your fabulous prize, you have to entrust me with a mailing address. If you’ve won before, send me your address again. I don’t keep good records.
8. The new DeadPool will begin 6pm WBT (Weasel’s Blog Time) the Friday after the last round is concluded.
The winner, if the winner chooses to entrust me with a mailing address, will receive an Official Certificate of Dick Winning and a small original drawing on paper suffused with elephant shit particles. Because I’m fresh out of fairy shit particles.
Note: I am woefully behind on dick deliveries. If I owe you one, you’ll know how long. I ain’t gived up, but I haven’t drawn much since lockdown. Some day, your heirs might hear from my heirs.
June 19, 2026 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 39
It’s alive!!!
I have created a GPT!!! Who knew that was a thing? To create one, you have to be in the paying tier – I am, at the lowest level, which is like £7 a month – but you can use somebody else’s if you’re in the free tier.
It’s regular old ChatGPT that you feed your special documents to. In my case, it’s a local history project and I uploaded documents I know haven’t been republished (and therefore AI wouldn’t have them). I won’t point to it, because it’s a little too close to my actual location.
Then you give it instructions for how it is to answer. Tell it what its purpose is. What its preferred online sources should be (you can also switch off its ability to surf the internet). What tone to take. Sample questions. It can have a name and an avatar, y’all.
I could feed it this whole blog and then let it answer questions in my voice. But I won’t do that because there are some seriously bad posts on my blog.
It can be entirely private, open to people who have the link, or open to everybody. The page for exploring other ones is here.
This would be a fantastic idea for someone writing a novel trying to keep character sheets straight. Family history. A complex non-fiction with original research. It’s a blast to play with.
June 18, 2026 — 5:16 pm
Comments: 6
Also recommended
I finished the book. I found the early parts more interesting. He concluded with chapters on people who get sucked into AI in an unhealthy way. I came away with the idea that long, continuous conversations (or, even worse, custom-tailored models) are the real danger there. They learn enough about you to get under your skin.
Grok agrees with me.
Anyway, I asked it to recommend a diary program and it recommended a number. I chose Obsidian. It took some fiddling to get it set up to my satisfaction, but now I hit CTRL-N and it opens a new file with today’s date as the filename, in a folder called \2026. I was even able to set up more interesting formatting stuff like make the first line indented using CSS.
It saves them as .md files. Markdown is a simple, human-readable plain text format that uses symbols (like # for headings, ** for bold and * for italics) to add formatting, but it’s easy to read and edit in any plain text editor.
I’ve been meaning to keep a diary for a long time, but it’s becoming imperative as I keep starting projects and losing track of them. I’m kicking myself I didn’t do it for covid. And again for not tracking weather on this soggy island.
But chatting with Grok getting it all set up and it said, “you know if you put your other notes in there, it’ll act like a personal wiki.” No, I did not know that!
I’ll let you know how I get on.
June 17, 2026 — 6:29 pm
Comments: 2