All we are, is passages, avenues through which other people travel. We are each others’ byways, highways, continuously passing through each others’ lives. Passengers, drivers, hitchhikers all.
Dear Diary – April 30, 1999
February 20, 2026
Holy smokes, how many months??
February 17, 2026
ChatGPT is frighteningly good at writing literary analysis…
August 5, 2025
🧾 Conclusion
Adam’s Stepsons takes the core questions of Blade Runner and distills them into a tight, character-driven drama. It lacks the sweeping visuals of Villeneuve or the noir cityscape of Scott — but it delivers something arguably more intimate:
A quiet horror — and quiet triumph — in the collapse of identity, where the artificial doesn’t just mimic life…
It replaces it.
Over the weekend (my first with no student work to grade — finally! — since April), I decided to ask our “old” friend ChatGPT if it could analyze my sci-fi novella Adam’s Stepsons. Really, I was just curious what it would say.
It said…a LOT.
It correctly interpreted the title (something that many readers apparently didn’t get). It correctly identified the main themes as part of a “post-humanism” sub-genre of science fiction. And once I gave it three short excerpts (from the near the end of the story), it gave a frighteningly accurate thematic and symbolic analysis of the entire novella…just from three short excerpts of a total of about six pages.
I won’t copy all it gave me (you all can go try on your own and see what it says!). But let me share what the program thought were key themes:
Continue ReadingFifteen years and counting…
February 21, 2025
Hi, everyone. I know I haven’t posted in a while now (about three months).
Things happened. I’ll see if I can deal with that in a post this weekend before returning to regularly blogging about astronomy and etc.
Winter is still here! (In the northern hemisphere.) Going on walks and hiking in 3C windy weather only makes hot chocolate taste that much better…
☕️
Lots of catching up to do!
November 12, 2024
Hey, everyone. It’s been a while since I posted anything. Things just got way too busy.
I hope you look forward to a bunch of articles about space!
FB is a piece of festering algorithmic garbage
October 8, 2024
Yesterday, I wrote a (what I thought was a) rather benign post about Earth’s new “mini-moon,” a tiny asteroid that will orbit us for about two months.
Within hours, Faceturd flagged it as “spam.” It was blocked from my FB page because it “tried to get likes” and etc.
First off…so what? Is’t the point of FB to get “likes”? Nobody sees the post otherwise, right?
Second…it was about a mini-moon! All of three people on WordPress saw this! I seriously doubt this went viral. How does sharing a blog post constitute a “violation of community standards”?
And then it occurred to me….FB is merely trying to corner the market.
It is a monopoly. Pure and simple.
They’re terrified that the recent veto by the Gov of Cali on their control of the internet will not actual stem the anger against their control.
And so they assert it.
FB must go. It must be destroyed. It must be regulated, divided, monitored, and controlled as a utility by the government.
This is censorship, pure and simple. Zuckerberg et al are trying to control who writes what, who posts what, who spreads information about what.
Pure and simple
%&$#% YOU FACEBOOK!
I write what I want. This is not rocket science.
Then again, only an anti-scientific company would understand this.
Sorry for the long absence…
September 2, 2024
Haven’t posted anything in about five or six weeks. Sorry!
I was going to initially post something about the Boeing crew that got stranded on the ISS, but NASA kept delaying their decision to use SpaceX. It was a given that they’d have no choice.
Boeing, quite obviously, cannot be trusted to spend millions of taxpayer’s dollars and make a proper spacecraft.
Anyway, I’ll start posting something more interesting soon.
In the meantime, here’s a Star Trek TOS selfie by Catwoman. I mean Lee Meriwether. (S3:14, That Which Survives)
Who wants to train AI for free, hands up! 🙌
July 10, 2024
Post a comment on Reddit, answer coding questions on Stack Overflow, edit a Wikipedia entry or share a baby photo on your public Facebook or Instagram feed and you are also helping to trainthe next generation of artificial intelligence.
Well, if they’re scrubbing my public FB page for data,
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
I’ll take up my vorpal sword and
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
O frabjous day!
PS I hope this helps hapless mindless office workers compose emails.
And the $10,000 question is…
June 25, 2024
What jobs have you had?
What jobs have I *not* had would be a better question.
Right…
- Lawn mower (right after I got my “working papers” at age 14, along with my social security number — this is now assigned at birth in the US)
- Pizza dough maker (seriously, that’s all I did at first)
- Pizza maker and deli worker (same restaurant)
- Tarred the school parking lot and roof (no idea what this job would be called)
- McDonald’s (who hasn’t? Both opening and closing, including cleaning the deep oil fryer. Ugh.)
- Gymnasium weight room staff
- Gymnasium pool cleaner
- Volleyball court setup and take down
- Softball umpire (all four work-study jobs at college with a max number of hours per week)
- Bookstore clerk (Barnes & Nobles)
- Dishwasher (summer time only)
- Short order cook (same restaurant as the dishwasher job)
- Stock boy (stationery store for all of two days)
- Temp worker (stuffing envelopes for three days, yawn)
- Blockbuster clerk (out of business video rental store—anybody remember VHS tapes?)
- Bookstore clerk (used bookstore in Ann Arbor, mostly stocking and organizing overflow in the basement, although I did help set up a comic book and gaming store annex)
- First year composition teacher (this was a paid TA job for one semester in grad school)
- Computer software store clerk (mall seasonal job—I got in trouble once for suggesting that a customer try another software store for a game series we didn’t carry rather than lie by saying we’d let him know when we got it; I hadn’t realized lying was company policy…)
- Computer salesperson (my first “full time” job—I lasted two months—definitely not slick enough to work for sales commish)
- Kinko’s (computer design department)
- Weekly newspaper (computer layout)
- A small H&R firm (computer design…you can probably sense a trend…)
- Assistant language teacher (the jump to Japan)
- Language instructor (late night after school cram school for junior high kids)
- Assistant Professor (both part time and full time contractual)
- Professor (it’s amazing now to see how I wound up teaching TESOL…)
This may not include some odds and ends here and there when I was in JHS and SHS. I worked a lot of summer jobs and Christmas/ New Year’s break jobs. I worked most weekends while I was a full time students, and most Friday evenings, too. I don’t recall the pay for all of them, but I remember the pizza dough job paid $3.15 an hour, and four years later McDonald’s paid a whopping $3.75 an hour.
You know, I’d be very interested to find out what jobs my colleagues have had. In college when I borrowed money to study abroad in Germany, my classmates wandered around Europe for the summer while I returned and had exactly $0 to my name and worked double-shifts. I wonder how many literature or history professors spent summer days getting burned on their arms with 400F cooking oil or getting yelled at by bankers because their document wasn’t printed fast enough…
Obvious, really, but..
June 22, 2024
How do you waste the most time every day?
Probably by responding to pointless writing prompts <snark>.
