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: 25
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
The wheels on the bus…
I had an errand to run in the big city. It’s only, like, ten miles as the crow flies but it’s an hour and a half on the slow bus. The one that stops every couple of blocks once it gets to town.
I left Uncle B happily digging in the garden and went for a slow pootle around the sunny countryside on the upper deck of a double decker bus. Most enjoyable. The city was fun, too. All kinds of neat architectural details on the upper floors of the older buildings that you’d never catch from a car.
I never took the bus to school (well, I did but not for very long) and I got a car as soon as I was legally able, so I’ve never had to ride the bus. I have neutral to positive feelings about them. The buses here on the coast are clean, frequent and cheap (they’re also old and rattly and the roads are awful, but you can’t have everything).
There’s even a neat app that shows my bus moving toward me on the map in real time.
I have had a day. I hope you all have a weekend!
June 14, 2024 — 6:48 pm
Comments: 2
Pinched! (I hope)
We have to go out tonight, so I shall fob you off with something short and pointless. I’m not sure I’ve ever posted a picture of my demitasse from the House of Commons.
See the little icon of Traitors’ Gate? That’s their logo.
It was an Ebay purchase. I’d dearly love to think it was pinched, but for all I know they have a little gift shop and they sell Parliament-themed tchotchkes.
June 13, 2024 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 7
Huh. You really can’t go home again.
I’m applying for my absentee voting form and it asks for my location when I lived in the States. I don’t remember that question from before.
Even though I had lived in Rhode Island for twenty-five years, when I sold that house to move, the only property I owned was my mother’s farm in Tennessee. So I took a field trip to the farm and registered to vote at the local courthouse in Smithville.
The online voter application tells me if the address I’m giving is a rural route, to give precise directions how to get there. I’ve spent most of my day trying to find the farm on a map. I’m flummoxed.
It’s sixty acres somewhere in that scrubby triangle between Alexandria, Brush Creek and Hearn Hill Cemetery.
I sold it and I suspect the buyer knocked the house down, so that doesn’t help. The road names are different than I remember, so that doesn’t help. We’re talking dirt tracks in a lot of cases, so they may not show up on satellite. There’s a creek and lots of woods and a valley. Maybe a pond, though it dried up some years. I should be able to find the place!
As for giving directions, my mother always told people to turn left on Dead Dog Corner. This was supremely unhelpful to anyone who hadn’t been there before. Though it somehow astonishingly managed to weather the elements for over a year, the dog had vanished by about 1976.
I am delighted to report there is a non-zero chance that I lived off of Opossum Hollow Road.
June 12, 2024 — 6:34 pm
Comments: 14
Aliens
I found these alien pods growing in a small flower bed this weekend. You gardeners might recognize it; I aren’t one. Google lens (which is very good on images horticultural) told me it was cyclamen.
Yep. Uncle B planted some winter-flowering cyclamen in that bed.
Wikipedia tells me the name cyclamen refers to this round structure. It’s not a seed pod, though – it’s a tuber. Leaves and flowers grow from the top of it and roots grow from the bottom of it. Interesting beastie.
I took this snapshot on my old phone, which I use in the garden as a multimedia device. I spent a very angry half hour getting this image off the phone and onto my computer. Bluetooth failed, but wouldn’t tell me why. Email failed, but wouldn’t tell me why. Upload to Google Drive kept dropping wifi partway through and starting again from scratch. I tried two different USB cables and both were non-data cables (did you know there were data USB cables and charge only USB cables? I spent a different angry half hour learning that once).
Has anybody ever gotten that “nearby sharing” thing to work?
I couldn’t use my regular Google Photos because I’ve filled 99% of my allotted space. Every time I want to upload something I have to delete something first. In the end, I got it onto the Google Photos of an account I don’t use very often.
God, technology gets under my skin sometimes.
June 11, 2024 — 7:35 pm
Comments: 6
Er, happy birthday, I guess
If you don’t have Windows 11 yet, the search bar – pictured – has a different colorful, cartoony icon every day informing you that it’s National Frosted Cookie Day or National Ballpoint Pen Day (I didn’t make those two up – they are two of the things people celebrate on June 10th according to this website).
Microsoft would like you to know it’s Hattie McDaniel’s birthday. They pinched the thumbnail right off her Wikipedia page and colorized it.
Everyone knows Hattie McDaniel won an Oscar for her role in that movie you must never, ever, under any circumstances, watch. It must make your brain hurt to be a lefty.
Changing the subject, you know how they’ve talked about using VR to help people get over phobias? Do NOT go there. The last, like, three games have put me in high places and expected me to function and I get wobblier each time. It doesn’t help that my headset responds to signal problems by violently shaking my point of view like there’s an earthquake.
I don’t think I’ll ever be ready for Richie’s Plank Experience.
June 10, 2024 — 6:32 pm
Comments: 7
Thanks, I guess
This arrived in the mail today. It’s a little rubber robot or astronaut keyring. It’s been through customs. Twice. With it was a card with an envelope. The envelope had the Ebay logo and “Thank you for shopping on Ebay. Support our shop, merchants give small gifts”.
Inside was a printed card that reads (and I have produced the typos, smashed together words and weird punctuation verbatim):
Thank you!
Dear valued customers,
How are you today?
Firstly, thank you’very much for your purchase; wereally’vafue your business.Your item is in another package and usually arriveswithin 1-7 working days, which you may have alreadyreceived.If you haven’t received it yet, don’t worry,it may stillbe in transit andwill arrive in time.
When you receive it, we sincerely hope that you willenjoy it.
We value every customer’s feedback and suggestion.Please feel free to contact uis onfine if you have anyquestions andneeds.
There is no indication anywhere on any of this what the name or location of the shop might be. From the slight Engrish, I’m guessing China. But the shop? I haven’t bought anything from Ebay for weeks, and I don’t think the thing I bought came from China.
This was a globe-hopping waste of a tiny bit of everybody’s resources.
Oh, the last thing I bought was a Manta sleep mask. Mucho recommendo.
May 30, 2024 — 5:58 pm
Comments: 9
Permission to break the blog?
In a thread below, Deborah HH opined that she missed the “recent comments” blurb in the sidebar. I do too. Without it, you can’t tell if somebody has revisited an old post with a new comment.
So I roused my lazy ass and had a look at the innards and, sure enough, a plugin I was relying on for the function has died. There are other ways to do it, but my blog is so old and eccentric that I can’t use them.
The layout of WordPress blogs relies on Themes, which set everything from column width to header graphics. There are thousands of them. If you have an orthodox website, you can swap themes all day and everything will fall into place. If you’ve done a bunch of weird, ignorant things to your Theme, it won’t.
I went looking for a WordPress Theme that was anything like the current three-column layout I have to use as a starting point for a clean new Theme and discovered something scary: about half the Themes out there won’t work with my outdated version of PHP (a scripting language for the Web). And my version of PHP is old because…you guessed it. My Theme is too eccentric for a newer one.
Meaning, I gotta modernize or, sooner or later, I’ll be forced to update PHP “for security reasons” and everything goes boom.
All of this to say I’ll be breaking the blog at some point. I can do a lot of tinkering without switching entirely, but I have to jump eventually. Things may look weird. Color might sneak in. A sidebar might disappear for a while. But I should be able to replicate everything eventually.
Maybe.
May 28, 2024 — 6:55 pm
Comments: 7
Also gay
Ever since the first Assassin’s Creed game released in 2007, fans of the franchise have hankered after a version set in Feudal Japan. Well, this year they’ll get it. Good and hard.
It has two playable characters, a Japanese woman ninja and this guy – the one black guy in all of Feudal Japan (yes, he existed. No, he wasn’t a Samurai).
But that apparently didn’t piss off their fanbase enough, so they decided to make one or both LGBTEIEIO.
Part of the ongoing “I have control of this property you love and I’m wiping my bottom with it” trend in modern media. I can understand why activists do it – they’re activists – but I can’t understand why the shareholders put up with it. A failed videogame (or movie or TV series) is a very expensive proposition. BlackRock isn’t sliding them that much DEI money.
Have a good weekend!
May 24, 2024 — 7:48 pm
Comments: 9