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Rush

Well, we saw Rush. Twice.

When I found out that Geddy Lee had laryngitis and bronchitis on the date of our original show I was not optimistic that we’d be seeing them play on the rescheduled date of July 11. Ten days didn’t seem like enough time to heal. When asked, I told people “I’m cautiously unoptimistic.”

Well, I was wrong.

Due to the cancellations there were seats available, so we got seats for July 13 as well.

Both shows were great. Apparently being a millionaire rock star has advantages, among which is access to great doctors who will “use the nuclear option” on laryngitis and bronchitis. Geddy sounded great. The whole band was incredible.

The first night we were pretty far back in seats from which we could see the whole production. Fantastic! The next night we were about 4 rows up, stage right, about 50 feet from Alex Lifeson, with a great view of Anika on drums and we could really see the band interacting with each other.

A week later we are still talking about it. We are still in such a great mood.

 

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Human Creativity Is Not Artificial

I found this article a few months ago via the 32-bit Cafe Discourse forum. One of the participants wrote it…

The Colonization of Confidence

It’s great. READ IT.

A little background on it. The author is, in fact, a professional writer and is blind. Not sure that matters at all, but maybe it does? Is an intelligent blind writer harder to sweep up in the Generative AI Hype Train? I have no idea.

Anyway, I enjoyed this short story a lot. Apparently it is a true story. Frankly, and I mean no insult to the author, there are parts that seem fictionalized. Nothing huge. A little bit of the dialog. Makes no difference if it is. It works.

In short, the story deals with an author in a writing group. One member of the group, a tech bro, has a boner for AI. Also, he’s a fucking douche. The rest of the group falls under his spell even as he destroys a good man’s confidence in his own writing.

Just read it. It’s about a 15-minute read, and worth it. Because here’s the thing.

WRITING is only done by humans. Not machines.

Writing, like all art, is a fundamentally human endeavor. Creating art involved human cognition. Remove human cognition and what you have left – is – just – shit.

I am doing writing at this exact moment. Sorry, if a machine put these exact words together, it’s not writing. ART is done by humans. I’ll go so far as to say that anyone who uses AI to write, or to even brainstorm, or to help arrange their thoughts on “paper” is not writing. Sorry. They just aren’t. If that’s you, then you are not writing.

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Website Details, Blogging, and Ethics

First. Yes, I’m posting a lot today.

A couple of years ago when I “discovered” the notion of the IndieWeb I also spent a lot of time exploring blogs. By blogs, I mean REAL blogs. The kind written by real human people, about their lives and opinions and ideas, on which they are not trying to sell things. I don’t like that the interwebs have become, in the mind of the Great Unwashed Masses, just a marketplace. I don’t like “app culture”. So I looked for other bloggers doing good work and started following them via RSS (in my case, using the Reeder app — yes — I know – a fucking APP!!! — but in this case it’s doing the lord’s work).

If you still don’t know what RSS is and why it can make your life better, read this thing I wrote.

So, getting to the point…

I found the blog Minutes to Midnight, by a person who would become an internet/blogging friend, Simone Silvestroni. Looking over his blogroll I found other good writers. I also discovered the word “colophon”, which I will be adding to this site, but more importantly on his colophon I found some really interesting information that I actually care about. In particular, notions of website accessibility and how green a site is. Lots of good links and info on that page! For example – links. Look people. Links need to be easy to find. The text needs to be a different color, have enough contrast to the rest of the page, and be-fucking-underlined. Likewise, I learned about green websites — sites that use less energy to serve up a page. And page design that uses less energy. I think Minutes to Midnight is where I learned to stop being obsessed with analytics and to not spy on my readers (or help Google spy on them).

I was surprised to find that the host of this site, dreamhost.com, seems to use a green amount of energy. I’ve tested the pages here. I was very surprised to see that my micro.blog sites aren’t as green as my dreamhost sites. I am not stressing about it, because honestly my sites over there get so little traffic. I’m working on getting all my sites nice and accessible. The biggest issue on micro.blog is that I tend to change themes on some of them a lot, and it takes to put the link underlines back in. This site could be greener. It runs on WordPress. Honestly, I’d rather it be static pages, but at this point I’m not going to convert over 1000 posts and pages. In the future, however, who knows?

One thing I’ve become more aware of is the effect of images and video on my pages. I’m trying to be more aware of not using images or video unless they are really the point of a post. If words will get the job done I just type the words.

October 6 will be the 20-year anniversary of this blog.

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Retirement and Science Fiction

Been thinking about things I want to do after I retire at the end of the year. For the last few years I’ve returned to one of my favorite pastime’s, reading science fiction. I’ve been keeping a blog about my reading over on micro.blog, called ReadingSF.Micro.blog.

micro.blog has an excellent bookshelves function. It is one of the oldest features of that system, and makes it very convenient to blog and/or podcast about books. It helps that the developer, Manton, likes to read and that his wife is a trained librarian (and an old grad school friend of mine).

One thing I’m going to do even more during retirement is read. I’m going to spend 1-2 hours a day reading. I’m thinking about really make that reading blog a more in-depth kind of thing. While I’m not planning to go back to school and become an academic, I’m thinking I’ll make that blog and my interest in SF into a “real project.”

So are this years I’ve not read as much as I’d like. For the last 2 years I’ve put a lot of energy into running and playing tabletop roleplaying games, which is a time-intensive hobby. But next year I will have time to relax, without any screens, and read very day. I’m really looking forward to that. I’m not sure why I feel compelled to write about everything I do, but that’s how I’m wired.

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In Shreveport

I’m in Shreveport, Louisiana, tonight. Drove over because some cousins were flying in to see family. It’s only about 3.5 hours from Dallas.

I have a lot of family here. Our ancestral spawning ground is about 20 miles south in Mansfield.

Shreveport is the city where Frank Sutton, the actor who played Sergeant Carter on Gomer Pyle, died. I’ve been coming here since I was a child. The city seems like it struggles and apparently has a declining population. In recent years there has been a lot of violent crime. Still, I have a lot of good memories of Shreveport. I love my family here. Having lived in Dallas for most of my life it would be hard to live here in such a smaller city. I’m used to having all that Dallas has to offer at my disposal. I mean – we went to see Rush twice in the last week.

I wish my family all lived in the same place. I hate how geographically dispersed families are now. It seems like life was better when families were close and could really support each other. Simultaneously I am glad my parents left Louisiana and moved to Texas in 1969, when I was 5. Growing up in a more cosmopolitan and diverse place was a gift. I really appreciate it now.

Driving around Shreveport that are streets and buildings I remember for my childhood. I remember riding bikes with my cousin Stewart from his house to a hobby shop and other places. When I was over here with Stewart I had a freedom I didn’t have at home, mostly because he just went wherever he wanted. Like so many cities, those old familiar places have changed. A lot of them replaced by the same boring chain stores and restaurants as everywhere else in Commodified America.

Our hotel is is in Downtown Shreveport, near the river. There are a lot of cool old buildings. So many small cities in the United State have these great old downtowns that have fallen into disrepair and non-use. There’s great old architecture, cool bridges…here in Shreveport there were once streetcars. My mom and her family used to ride the bus from their town up here to Shreveport and they would take the streetcars around shopping.

Not sure where I’m going with all this. Just getting it on “paper.”

These small cities could be so much more, and they are all over the country. We could do so much better.