Category: Personal

grist for the blog writing mill

whbeebe

I have, since very late December and into all of January so far, been writing like a madman. Not because I’m mad in any sense of the word, but because there’s something inside driving my creativity with regards to the written word. Not software development, but the literal written word that flows through my mind and out of my fingertips and into every post on this blog. I can’t give you a definitive answer to why this is happening. I can say it doesn’t appear to be letting up and for me that’s a good thing as far as I’m concerned.

Part of this flood of writing is traceable to a personal decision I made around Christmas that I would write about anything that crossed my consciousness horizon. Anything, especially if I experienced it. In the past I’ve been far too selective about subject matter, but not anymore. I think it’s finally sunk in that anything can be the subject of a post or story if you let it. By stopping myself from being so “picky” the floodgates have opened for me.

I’m sure a lot of this will read like crap. So be it. I’d rather it be human-generated crap than AI generated crap. I guess in a way this burst of writing creativity is my response to the AI LLM’s ability to create seemingly human-written content. I suppose if you read enough original written content and then have your machines mine steal that content from the entire internet for “training content,” that the AI software will regurgitate writing that seems plausible at first glance.

That’s not for me. If there are mistakes in my writing, they’re mine and mine alone. Bad prose, misspellings, grammar errors, syntax errors, too many commas, whatever. It’s all me and all mine. And that’s the way it should be.

More to come…

disney, please stop spamming me

whbeebe

I dropped Disney+ when they notified the world how they were going to jack up their monthly fees to view their streaming service. I’d already grown “fatigued” with all the MCU and Star Wars content that was flooding the service, so all I needed to pull the trigger and leave was that cost increase announcement. That was back in August (see link below).

Then in November Hulu and Disney+ announced a dual deal, as well as a cheaper advertising supported tier, so I signed back up, ostensibly to watch all the content on Hulu. And there’s been quite a bit of it. Disney+ came along for an additional $2.99/month, so I wasn’t too annoyed to have them back.

But you’d think that it was Disney+ that was the king of the duo if you look at all the spam advertising they’ve sent me. This latest was from ABC, a legacy TV channel I absolutely loathe. And what are they advertising at the top of the spam advert? An episode from their dumber-than-a-bag-of-hammers Golden Bachelor. I will have been married for 40 years come this July. The idea I want to watch some old fart get married is so far from anything I want to watch as to be totally alien. At this point in a human’s life, marriage means absolutely nothing unless there’s money and a pre-nup involved. Otherwise just shack up and be happy in each other’s company. Take all that money you’d spend on a formal wedding and elope to some really nice vacation spot while Earth’s climate still allows for such excesses.

I’ve clicked the link to be removed from all ABC advertising, so hopefully nothing else will come in from ABC. But this isn’t the first such spam advertising email from a Disney “property,” and I don’t think it’ll be the last. I wrote above that I thought $2.99 for Disney+ wasn’t going to be such a big deal. Now I’m not so sure.

Links

shedding sunday — applications and subscriptions