Name her
Special Agent Cindy. Her friends call her Doodlebug.
I had an instinctive spasm of sympathy for this chick. It can’t be nice to wake up one day and find you’re an internet meme. For incompetence.
But, screw it – this DEI stuff is going to get people killed. If we can’t make companies stop doing it, at least we can shame people who take on jobs they’re grossly ill-suited for.
Have a great weekend, everyone!
p.s. if you want a PSD file of our girl in color with the background knocked out (an exploitable, if you will), drop me a line.
July 19, 2024 — 5:26 pm
Comments: 15
Too soon
That poof of smoke in the distance is a combine harvester. They took in the rapeseed field today. That is way, way early.
We’ve had a lousy Summer.
Still walking through the timeline of Saturday’s assassination attempt. I am speechless at the incompetence. One way or another, they watched this guy walk around for over half an hour, even apparently spotting him on the roof with a gun in time to stop him.
That kid was simultaneously the blandest and the luckiest who ever lived. Next to nothing has come out of his socials. One report said he posted something on Steam, like “Watch my debut July 13!” And both presenters nodded sagely because, you know, games.
But Steam isn’t a social platform in that way. So he either was in a community forum about a specific game, or (seems more likely to me) he put that on his Steam profile. Which is like putting it in your Twitter bio. It’s a billy-no-mates kind of move.
I’d love to see his Steam profile.
July 18, 2024 — 6:52 pm
Comments: 10
The blink of an eye
In the second picture, he had just turned to look at the chart behind him (images pinched from this tweet, which runs them as a neat animation). I don’t need to say more.
This is the chart he was looking at, by the way. Causing some online wags to joke that Trump’s life was saved by illegal immigration.
Oh, just come across my feed: a clearer version of the animation.
July 17, 2024 — 6:49 pm
Comments: 10
Carry on!
I’ve been stuck in a Zoom call this evening. I looked up in time to see my one hen go sailing over the hedge. Fortunately, she hadn’t made it all the way over and into the field next door. By the time I got out there, she’d found her way home (she was fleeing surprise chicken sex).
Some wild stuff coming out of Twitter today, if you want to keep chatting about it.
July 16, 2024 — 7:55 pm
Comments: 11
I have a cold
Luckily the miserable phase is usually not more than 24 hours, but I’m smack in the thick of it now. Looking forward to my gin.
What a miserable Summer.
We have the central heat on. Again. July 12.
It rained heavily this morning. I watched the weather satellite as one band of rain moved down the English Channel while another moved up the English coast at the same time. Like, how does that even happen?
I want a do-over.
July 12, 2024 — 7:28 pm
Comments: 4
I’m on a quest
My crippling addiction to short YouTubes continues. I’ve noticed more and more channels are using what are clearly AI generated voiceovers.
They’re pretty good, actually. They inflect well and very rarely make mistakes – but when they do, they’re doozies no English speaker would make. “Dee-butt” for “debut” is my favorite so far.
I figured out they were AI because so many different channels had the same narrator. David Attenborough is the most obvious one. He must be thrilled about that – I wonder why he doesn’t take action.
There’s one particular American English speaker with a mild hispanic accent who is for some reason drafted to do voiceovers for multiple police bodycam footage channels (yes, I’m still watching those). For no particular reason, I’ve been plodding around the internet trying to find it.
I feel like we’re old friends. I wouldn’t mind making him say “good morning” or “welcome home” to me.
In my defense, the cat has been sprawled across my lap all afternoon and there’s not much else I could do.
If you want to play with them, there are dozens, including:
FakeYou (really?) lets you type a sentence and try it out. It’s slow and locked up on me once. “Eric” is indeed Cartman. Pro tip: short sentences render faster but don’t sound like anyone in particular.
Topmediai says you can sample 3,200 voices, but only gave me Benedict Cumberbatch. I think they may be the source of the David Attenborough voice.
Invideo takes your single sentence and generates a whole video, voiceover and all. I wonder if people are really trying to climb YouTube or TikTok with robot videos. This is going to shit up the internet really badly.
I got started down this rabbit hole by a Twitter ad for Speechelo. For a mere £47 you can have all the voices in the picture above. One language and multiple voices I can see, but multiple voices and multiple languages? Who needs that?
If you visit their website, you’ll see they use a little pop-up provided by a software company called Provely. “Increase Your Conversions by 30% to 400% by Adding Real-Time Social Proof, Scarcity, Urgency, and Credibility to Your Website.” Sneaky bastiches.
In this case, there’s a rolling pop-up with the name of someone who has just bought Speechelo. If you watch long enough, the names repeat.
Yes, I watched it that long. What?
July 8, 2024 — 7:44 pm
Comments: 4
Gah! Good dog!
Pazuzu has nothing on this guy. The tour guide told us how much the school children love this thing. It gave me the icks.
Back to the almshouse. Their heraldic symbol was a leopard and this wooden one was on the pinnacle of the roof for many years. If you go to the gallery section of the Sackville College website, the first image is the replacement leopard. The new one was carved out of mahogany and then coated in resin, so it should last a while.
I was surprised to learn it didn’t take many hundreds of years to age like this: he’s 150 or so. The College became very run down in the early 19th C and a mid-Victorian benefactor funded a lot of renovation.
“College” in this sense means “a group of people with a particular job, purpose, duty, or power who are organized into a group for sharing ideas, making decisions, etc.” Not an institution of higher learning.
p.s. his tongue and ears are hammered lead.
p.p.s. today is Mo the cockerel’s birthday. He’s six. Hatch day, really, but no need to be pedantic. Tomorrow is Sam the cockerel’s – hence why he’s called Sam. I don’t do anything special for them. They’re chickens.
p.p.p.s. okay, I did sing “Happy Hatch Day to You!”
July 3, 2024 — 7:38 pm
Comments: 2
Wot a nice mustelid!
I decided on the Google Pixel 7a phone in the end. Before I could nerve myself up to buy it, Uncle B handed me a box earlier today – he bought it for me! Awwww.
Next comes the misery of setting up a new phone. I’m sure the last time I did it, it swooshed all my old data up to the cloud and swooshed it back down onto the new phone. Now, you git yer USB-C cable and connect the one phone directly to the other by USB port.
Something vaguely obscene about that.
All done. I have a few work-specific apps that I’ll need to finish setting up from the office, and I still have to teach it to recognize my bluetooth devices, but it was pretty painless.
Then comes my favorite part: choosing a ringtone. There are like 70 of them already on this phone! We laughed ourselves silly over some of them.
Which is good. I have a spasm of anxiety every time I hear a phone ring, so I choose silly sounds for my ringtone and change it periodically. An unfamiliar or silly sound doesn’t trigger that same gut-level uh-oh reflex.
For my main ringtone, I chose a woman’s fruity voice saying “ringggg, ringggg!” There was a very good flock of chickens one, but I used to have a ringtone like it and whenever my phone rang, I thought there was trouble in the henhouse.
And for Uncle B’s custom ringtone, a scratchy Victrola record tune. Because old.
My old phone keeps waking up and looking around. I think it’s sad.
June 26, 2024 — 5:38 pm
Comments: 9
Inspiring.
You know how people say they laughed out loud but you know what that means is they smirked a little in their heads? Well, I genuinely laughed out loud at this video. Uncle B leaned out the kitchen window and asked what was wrong with me. (Huh. I didn’t know he was there).
It’s about Inspirobot, an AI for writing inspirational quotes, and there are some doozies. The man’s delivery helps.
At first I thought the creators had done the “Cards Against Humanity” thing, where they seeded it full of phrases that were guaranteed to match up in funny ways and only funny ways. Amusing at first, boring after a while.
But I’ve been playing with the Inspirobot itself, and it does seem more of a good faith effort. For the most part. Its platitudes are nonsensical, but bland. I’ve only seen one picture repeat.
Except they have given it some vocabulary words it shouldn’t have that can’t help but pop up in inappropriate ways.
Hey, changing the subject – real question. Have you ever come across a rogue bee? There was a bee that harassed Uncle B this morning, in his face, buzzing around his head, and would NOT leave him alone until he went inside. Happened again later when he came back out. Happened to me after work, also twice.
Then we were just standing there talking and a bee flew up and stung him on the arm. Left the stinger behind and everything. He’s got a nasty dark spot in the middle of the sting, which I don’t recall seeing before.
The rest of the bees (there are always bees on the chimbly; we have bees in the attic) were perfectly calm and normal.
I assume it was the same bee all day and he was just…psycho?
June 24, 2024 — 6:43 pm
Comments: 8
Merry Solstice!
These are the scrotes spray painting Stonehenge orange. Security at Stonehenge is very tight. As with the art gallery incidents, this had to be done with the collusion of the venue. And, in all likelihood, even higher levels. They probably even had consultation about the nature of the paint and how to insure it did no real damage.
The question is – why? Everyone hates these shitbags and fervently hopes they get hurt or jailed for it. It does nothing for their cause. Just – why?
Anyway, we got ourselves invited to a solstice party tonight, so I’m off. Have a great weekend.
p.s. From here, the nights start drawing in.
June 21, 2024 — 4:24 pm
Comments: 9