Right from the start I referred to Ashley as my “pupperdog.” After a while though, I realized that she was actually my “pup ur-dog”—that is, some proto-dire-wolf aspect of a pit bull / boxer cross.
You can see it in her eyes. 🐕 #dogsofmastodon
I use micro.blog to send out my newsletter. I’m generally pretty happy with its newsletter system, but it does have a serious mis-feature: There’s a very narrow window for editing the newsletter between when it generates it, and when when it sends it out.
The main thing I want to edit is the front text that goes at the top of the email, ahead of the blog posts that I’ve identified as ones that should go into the newsletter. As near as I can tell, there’s no way to create that text until micro.blog gives me the draft newsletter. By default (the way I had it set up until a few minutes ago), there is then only 30 minutes before the newsletter goes out.
That might be fine, except in practice it turns out that the alert arrives after I’ve left on my main morning dog walk, and then the newsletter goes out before I get back.
As a stop-gap I’ve increased that gap to 3 hours (the largest gap the system allows, it would appear). That’s not perfect—I’d like to be able to write the front-matter anytime in the month before the newsletter goes out, and then edit it repeatedly over the month. But it’s good enough that at least I won’t keep missing it just because my dog gets to luxuriate in a long morning walk every day.
Somebody in the local HEMA Discord shared:
“The fact I gotta train 3–5 days a week to keep my body at “moderately broken,” while my cat sleeps all day, and can do parkour with ease, is a crime.”
Another guy said:
“Maybe the reason the cat’s ok and needs to sleep all day is because it spends all it’s waking time doing parkour. If you did parkour all day and then slept for 12 hours you’d probably be able to keep up with the cat.”
To which I said:
“I have spent the last 15 years of my life trying to arrange it exactly like this. I have not yet achieved complete success, but I haven’t given up.”
Now that I’m over 65 I qualify to get the pneumonia immunization. The doctor mentioned that it has much less in the way of side-effects than common viral immunizations—flu, covid, shingles, etc.
Maybe that’s true, as far as the fever and body ache side-effects. But as far as the soreness-in-my-arm side-effect, it is really, really not true.
I’ve been whacked in the arm with a steel bar and not had it hurt as much as my arm hurts right now. (Admittedly, I’ve mostly been whacked with steel bars very gently.)
Ow.
Here’s a dog wearing a cooling vest.
As someone who’s been paying attention to AI since the 1970s, I’ve noticed the same pattern over and over: People will say, “It takes real intelligence to do X (win at chess, say), so doing that successfully will mean we’ve got AI.” Then someone will do that, and people will look at how it’s done and say, “Well, but it’s just using Y (deep lookup tables and lots of fast board evaluations, say). That’s not really AI.”
For the first time (somewhat later than I expected), I just heard someone doing the same thing with large language models. “It’s just predicting the next word based on frequencies in its training data. That’s not really AI.”
Happens every time.
This guy has an app for bulk unsubscribing (and text in Section 230 that perhaps protects it).
Personally, I’d like the opposite of what this app is described as doing: I want a plugin to purge my feed of everything except posts by people I follow. (All the rest of that stuff is “objectionable material” as far as I’m concerned.) That would make Facebook usable again, maybe.
… focused on a part of Section 230 that spells out protection for blocking objectionable material online.
Source: NYT
Copper River sockeye salmon cooked in coconut oil with a soy-ginger-mustard-maple glaze. Cahokia brown rice. Sautéed red onions and red peppers. Delicious!
Jackie almost always gets up before me and makes the coffee. But every few weeks I’ll wake up first and then I’ll be the one to make the coffee. And when I do, I bring Jackie a cup of bed coffee.
Ashley routinely stays in bed until the second person gets up. #dogsofmastodon 🐕
I have written very little in a long time. But today I started working on something new, and I have a plan to get another (related) thing that I wrote a while ago ready to submit.
The older thing is a bit of steampunk-esque whimsy that I started as an experiment in voice, and found I rather liked. As it grew, I realized that it was longer than a short story, and a market I was interested in was about to open to novella submissions, so I thought I’d just let it grow.
One thing I do when I’m writing is to just drop bits in that seem cool, as possible set-ups for later bits. This often works out very well. Sometimes, though, those bits of set-up imply stuff that doesn’t get written. That happened this time, and I made a list of bits that either needed the follow-up stuff written, or else be deleted.
Since I was aiming at novella length (and I wasn’t there yet), I figured that I could just write those bits out. But several didn’t end up working out. So now my plan is to make another pass through the planned novella, delete the bits that didn’t go anywhere, turn it into a novelette, and get it submitted somewhere.
But that is all work for another day. Today I’ve started on something new: a sequel to that story. I remain delighted by the characters, by the steampunky world, and by the voice I used to write the story. And yesterday I came up with part of a new idea.
Just now I jotted down a few sentences, which I very much hope to get back to later today.
