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 |   Tales from real life |
| Well, if they're not true, they oughta be! |
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then cliche is the sincerest form of plagiarism. As a writer, do you ever pause and wonder if what you have to say is original? I'm not talking about conscious plagiarism, but the usage of words and phrases that we all share to form a common understanding. The mashed-up quote above occurred to me this morning and I thought it was clever enough to share. It begins with a phrase that everyone knows. The phrase is seldom attributed to Oscar Wilde, because it's become such a cliche. Is it plagiarism for me to use his words in this way, or have they become public domain through overuse? Have I added enough of my own content to make a new original? Am I even the first one to write down the second phrase? Not really. An internet search reveals that William Ralph Inge said “Trite phrases and hackneyed sentiments are often the sincerest form of plagiarism.” You haven't heard of the 'gloomy dean', Anglican priest and author, thrice nominated for a Nobel prize in literature? Me neither, until today. So now I've got a phrase that everyone 'knows' isn't original followed by a thought that isn't nearly as original as I'd hoped. I didn't intentionally plagiarize Inge, but what if I didn't have access to the internet? I'd never have known. And the question still remains, is my juxtaposition of the two phrases at all original? Is anything original anymore? As the body of published material grows, it becomes ever more difficult to come up with something that is truly unique. Everything we think has likely already been thought. Every word we write has probably been written by someone else at some point. We learn from parents, teachers, books, movies, and idle conversation. Our entire heritage is source material. To be 100% honest, we'd have to credit the Dictionary, Thesaurus, and Google as co-author for every poem and story. So why even try? Because I can't help myself. And maybe someday, somehow, I'll create something worthwhile that I can call my own. |
The failed one-term, ex-president opened his 2024 campaign with a vow to 'get even' with everyone who's ever opposed the MAGA mob. "I am your retribution!" he ranted to gleeful applause. I fully expected him to break into a chant of 'hang Mike Pence'. Shortly after, his co-conspirators in congress went on a rant against Merrick Garland, accusing the Attorney General of conducting a personal vendetta against those who blocked his nomination to the Supreme Court. 'Pot' Jim Jordan and 'kettle' James Comer tried to make a case that Donald Trump should be protected from prosecution due to executive privilege, while simultaneously using their oversight committee as a weapon against Joe Biden. I'm looking forward to the real retribution, the filing of conspiracy charges against the MAGA mobsters. Most members of the so-called Freedom Caucus were revealed as co-conspirators by the January 6th committee. The crime of conspiracy to commit seditious insurrection has already been established in court. The little guys are already in prison. The man in charge of prosecuting the 'big dogs' has legitimate reason to get even with them. And Merrick Garland has right on his side. He's perfect for the role of avenging angel, wreaking retribution on the corrupt politicians who threaten our democracy. Is it any wonder that Jim Jordan, James Comer, and the rest of the MAGA co-conspirators are crapping their pants? |
| Random book titles from entitled authors Overjoyed by Gideon Gaye Here Today, Gone Tomorrow by Evan S. Entz The Weight of Grief by Paul Bering Circumnavigation by Rhonda Worrell Fly That Freak Flag by Y. B. Dulles Buyer Beware by Connie Mann Half a Truth is Better Than None by Mosely Lyon Life on the Open Sea by Noah Moore Crossing the Line by Rand M. Parker The Sodium Pentothal Diet by T. Ruth Teller Stumbling Into Fitness by Tripp Daley See also: "A Few More Books"  |
I grew up among vacuum tubes and rotary dial phones. I got my first pocket calculator while I was still in high school and bought my first personal computer in 1984. I watched CB radio fade away as email and texting became basic utilities. I've embraced the internet, smart phones, and learned how to waste time doom-scrolling instead of playing solitaire. Change is simply a fact of modern life, but it seems to be speeding up. Changes that once felt like dominos toppling now feel like parallel processes in a multi-core CPU. So, in that vein, here are some parallel posts on the subject of Artificial Intelligence: The era of human writing is drawing to a close. Why should an author toil for months in the harsh glare of a laptop screen? Why rub their fingers raw scraping content from an unforgiving keyboard? An AI writing program can produce the bulk of a novel in minutes, and the author can complete it and send it to the publisher in a few days. The era of publishing human writers is drawing to a close. Why should an editor wade through a slush pile of dreck to find a hidden gem? Why gamble an advance in hope of a best seller? Why beg and plead with human authors to meet a deadline? A minimum-wage intern can feed buzzwords to an AI writing program and produce a novel in minutes. Add a cursory polish and the book is ready for market in a couple of days. The era of buying books from a publisher is drawing to a close. Why pick through a limited selection that someone else chooses for you? Why bother with unreliable reviews? Why waste time starting a book that you may not enjoy or even finish? Why take the risk of being 'triggered' by disturbing content? An AI writing program can produce a novel that's custom tailored to your individual tastes and interests in real time. The era of human blogging is coming to a close. Why wait thirty agonizing minutes for the peck, peck, peck of fingers hunting out seeds of wisdom among the keycaps? An AI writing program can post a clever observation, complete with snarky replies, in seconds. The era of human reading is drawing to a close. Why subject the perfection of AI prose to the fallible judgment of humankind? The visual intake of printed text is an uncertain process at best. Defects in the human eye may cause transcription errors and defects in the human brain may result in 'seeing' content that doesn't exist. An AI program is far better suited to evaluate AI writing than any human ever could be. And the snowball is already rolling downhill . . . |
There are a lot of unknowns when it comes to Artificial Intelligence and writing. And most of the questions have to do with ethics. Is it ethical to use AI to write an article, story or poem? And is the AI program itself ethical, or merely plagiarizing existing content? I write for my own gratification. For me, using AI would feel like starting from the solution and copying the answers into the crossword puzzle. The result might look good, but why bother? Of course, those who write for a living may feel differently about the prospect of increased income. And human nature being what it is, I have no doubt that AI will be used in the arts much like steroids are used in sports. Even amateur athletes 'juice up' and then pretend to have earned their trophies. Professionals going after lucrative prizes and book deals will behave even worse. And if the end product is merely a commodity, like click-bait on the newsfeed, then why not use AI? There's no Pulitzer Prize for best click-bait headline. The whole point of writing greeting cards, instruction manuals, or ad copy is to turn a buck. If using AI increases one's productivity, then a writer would be foolish not to use it. And if a writer isn't needed, then a business would be foolish to pay for one. This may sound harsh, but a successful product has to maximize revenue while minimizing cost. If, however, an author is seeking a prize for excellence, then AI is definitely unethical. Just like using a grammar-check program or taking the advice of an editor instead of relying solely on one's own talent. Originality is a slippery slope and it's difficult to draw the line between content creation and content polishing. I do believe that ethical authors must credit the help of an AI program just as they should credit their editor. One of the biggest issues is the use of AI by students. It might be helpful to consider the point of writing an essay. Is it to reinforce the subject matter, or to learn how to write? Writing classes should definitely not accept AI generated content, but it could still be useful for learning. Students have been copying from the encyclopedia for generations. The act of reading and rephrasing is a form of learning, and originality isn't really the point. Today, students simply copy and paste from Wikipedia. However, the learning aspect is much reduced when writing is replaced by clicks. My suggestion is to require all writing assignments to be submitted in longhand. And to make the student fully responsible for the content. If a questionable AI 'artifact' is submitted, then the student should be dinged for it. A student would have to fact-check their AI to be ensured full credit. Writing in long-hand may seem onerous, but it would help to maintain the long tradition of learning through reading and rephrasing. Real learning always involves hard work. And learning should be the focus of the assignment. |
I grew up in the shadow of the Vietnam War. It was the first war to be televised in real time, and the news anchors included body counts in their evening broadcasts. I'd listen to the grisly accounts after going to bed, my transistor radio turned low so my parents wouldn't know that I was still awake. Thoughts of killing or being killed made it difficult to sleep. The older guys talked about their numbers in the draft lottery, and we all knew at least one gold-star family. I'd toss and turn while trying to decide if I should 'do my duty' or join the protests against an immoral conflict. I knew, even then, that the war was wrong. Fortunately, the draft never affected me. The final draft lottery of the Vietnam era occurred the month before I turned eighteen. Gerald Ford ended the military draft in March of 1975, so I wasn't even required to register. Jimmy Carter reinstated the registration requirement in 1980 for men born after January 1, 1960. I fell into the 33-month gap of those born between May 1957 and December 1959 who were completely exempt. I still don't know what I would have done had I been called up. The lottery process during the Vietnam era was ostensibly meant to ensure fairness, but it still provided advantages to those with wealth and/or political connections. Those who could afford college tuition 'bought' student deferments (Bill Clinton) and those with political influence were given posts in the reserves or the national guard (George W. Bush). And the least honorable could obtain questionable medical deferments (Donald Trump). Perhaps the biggest impact of the Vietnam War was lowering the legal age of adulthood from twenty-one to eighteen. Prior to 1971, an eighteen-year old needed parental consent to marry or to buy a car. But, by the height of the Vietnam conflict, there were protests against sending those too young to vote off to war. The cynical response was to lower the age of majority to maintain the supply of soldiers. Eighteen-year olds were given all the rights and responsibilities of adulthood. Instead of protecting immature young adults, conservatives made them targets. In addition to voting and being killed in Vietnam, young people also became legitimate prey for used car salesmen and credit card companies. Talk about a win-win! Many states even dropped the legal age for drinking to eighteen or nineteen. This was a real boon for the liquor companies, but it had a terrible influence on high school kids. Half of the seniors could legally buy booze to sneak into school functions. The impact on society was so negative that all states have since raised the drinking age back to twenty-one. But not the age for draftees! An eighteen-year old may be too immature to handle his beer, but he's plenty old enough to handle a gun. Full disclosure, I had a pretty wild senior year in high school and continued to 'party hearty' throughout my freshman year in college. I actually switched dorms as a sophomore to avoid my drinking buddies. I didn't completely stop drinking, but cutting back was an important part of finishing my degree. Looking back, I can honestly say that I wasn't a mature adult at age eighteen or even nineteen. The necessity of changing the drinking age back to twenty-one proves my point. I think it would be better to change the age of majority back to twenty-one. Those who can't be trusted with liquor shouldn't be drafted into the military, shouldn't vote, and shouldn't be allowed to enter into financial contracts either. |
| To celebrate April Fools, here's a story about the best prank I ever pulled at work. In 1988, we got desktop computers for each engineer in the Facilities department. These were 'advanced' IBM AT models with the 80286 processor, a 1.2 MB floppy disc drive, and a 20 MB hard drive. One of the features of their PC-DOS 3.0 operating system was the ability to modify the command line prompt. When I came across this option, I amused myself for a few minutes by changing my prompt from the boring default of: C:\> to: Hi Terry! Then I had a wonderful, awful idea. There were four desks in each bay of our systems furniture, and it took only five seconds to type the command that changed my cube mate's prompt to: sys error 10 please reboot When Matt instinctively pressed the Enter key, the 'sys error 10' message just kept repeating (as the prompt). But when he rebooted, the operating system reverted to the normal command line. Problem solved! It took a couple of minutes for his computer to boot up, and Matt was soon frustrated by having to wait for a reboot every other time he returned from the restroom. I made sure to keep the problem somewhat random. The IT guy was even more frustrated because there was no such thing as 'sys error 10' in the manuals. The IBM service people were no help either. They hinted that we might be crazy. The IT guy gave up and told Mike to just live with it. The 'sys error 10' message was a topic of conversation, speculation, and profane rants for several weeks. Every self-styled computer expert had an opinion, but no one came up with a solution. I just shrugged and held my tongue. The error message became more sporadic as time passed, but it never went away completely. So, whenever our bull sessions turned to crazy computer problems, Matt would tell the tale of the mysterious 'sys error 10'. The longer it went on, the more I enjoyed an inside joke that only I understood. The end finally came when I moved on to another position. I don't think Matt ever made the connection, and as far as I know, he's still telling the story. My little gift to him! |
Way back in the 1960's, we would occasionally hear the sonic boom of fighter jets as they trained over the sparsely occupied state of Montana. They operated from Malmstrom AFB, near Great Falls. It took them only a few minutes to scramble and rattle our windows even though their base was more than 100 miles away. Sometimes they came over at low altitude and scared the crap out of cows and cowboys alike. Sometimes, I could actually feel the sonic boom vibrating my internal organs. The skies got quieter when the FAA banned sonic booms in 1973. That pretty much killed the Concorde SST, the world's only supersonic commercial jet aircraft. Some said it was a political decision to aid the US aviation industry, but the Air Force was sitting on thousands of noise complaints and damage claims. Today, sonic booms are limited to over-ocean flights, emergency scrambles, and a couple of designated USAF training areas. In 1980, I visited the H. W. Ward company, near Birmingham, England to provide technical assistance with a new CNC lathe that they were developing. They built the iron bits, and my company provided the controller. As we left for lunch one day, a Harrier jet came screaming overhead at what seemed like tree-top altitude and reminded me of the fighter planes that had frightened me as a child. "What the hell are they doing?" I asked the engineer who'd been assigned as my 'minder'. "It's just a training exercise," Geoff said. "Happens all the time." "Directly over the city? Seems dangerous, why are they allowed to do that?" Geoff gave me an odd look and said, "Where else are they going to go?" At that moment, the light bulb came on. I suddenly realized that the Harrier jet would leave British airspace in about twenty minutes no matter what direction it went. All of Britain is barely large enough to do a reasonable practice run. I looked it up later and found that the entire island (80,823 sq mi) could be fitted inside the rectangular borders of Montana (147,040 sq mi). No folding necessary, and there'd still be a lot of empty space around the edges. I also realized that even though those Harrier flights were subsonic, they annoyed more than sixty times as many people! |
As we enter the new year, many resolutions will pass through people's minds. Some will be mentioned aloud, a few will be written down, and one or two might even be accomplished. With that cheerful prospect in mind, here are some thoughts on portfolio organization: Free Account: Folders aren't available to free accounts since they're allowed only 10 items. And they aren't allowed to create books, so that point is moot. There's little to be done in the way of organizing, but you can create separate items for poetry, short stories, non-fiction, horror, romance, etc. More than one piece can be saved in an item, but the size limit for each is 50 Kb. That's about 25 pages of text, so you can't really write a novel. Still, a collection of two dozen poems or a few short stories could be presented in a single item. Basic Account: A basic membership allows a portfolio of 50 items, and each can be up to 100 Kb in size (about 50 pages of text). A list that long is probably too much for our modern-day attention span. It may be better to use folders to direct the reader. Some authors name their folders for the year the items were written. This is easy, but most readers don't care, they're looking for something more specific. Love poems, for example, or horror stories. I'd suggest that an author start by collecting their items into folders of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, recipes, lyrics, etc., and then further organizing them by genre. Then the reader can find all the mushy stuff by clicking once on 'Poetry' and then again on 'Love Poems'. And they won't have to scroll past horror stories that could spoil the mood. Upgraded Account: An upgraded membership allows 250 items and each can be up to 250 Kb in size (about 125 pages). At this level, it becomes imperative to organize one's portfolio. Using folders is a good start, and 250 items may seem like a lot, but it's easier than you might think for an author to bump up against the limit. It took me less than three years to get there. One obvious option is to simply delete the lesser works, but vanity precludes that. A better solution is to learn how to use books. An upgraded membership allows the author to create up to 10 books of up to 5Mb each (about 2500 pages). That is truly a lot of pages! So, if you're short on portfolio space, then I recommend putting similar items into a book. This seems especially obvious for poetry collections, where individual entries tend to be short. Another good use for a book is to hold items that are in-work. Have you ever felt frustrated by all the 'save and view' clicking just to try out different formatting? A book entry has a 'preview' feature that allows you to quickly see how the finished item will look without leaving the edit pane. Once the story or poem looks 'right' you can copy and paste it into an individual item and make it public. A book is also useful for storing ideas. You can easily jot a few notes into a book entry, set it to private and save it for later. And, of course, a blog (what you're reading now) is just a special book format that's automagically linked to the blog tab of your portfolio. Oh, I almost forgot, you could even use a book to write the Great American Novel with each entry being a separate chapter. I haven't been ambitious enough to try that yet. A drawback of using a book is that you can't attach a cover image to individual entries. I feel that an appropriate image can be a big help in setting the mood for a piece. I'd like to be able to add a cover image to my book entries, but that's not an option. Another drawback is that awardicons can't be attached to individual entries within a book. An awardicon is attached to the book rather than the entry within the book. They can, however, be referenced within the entry itself. My method is to create a drop note and show the awardicon there. The ML code shown below will create the drop note shown further below. {dropnote:"Author's note:"} 20 lines of free verse Second place in the September 2022 round of {i}Second Time Around{/i} contest Prompt: Help celebrate WDC's 22nd birthday. Just for this month, all entries must be previously written pieces that did not win a contest, and that have a birthday or a party theme. {award:155262} {b-item:2164876} {/dropnote} Author's note: ▼ Premium Accounts: I haven't tried these levels, but they allow even more individual items and even more books. I won't give any further advice except to say that portfolio organization only grows more important as the number of items increase. |
| For your consideration . . . Hiding in Plain Sight by Cam E. Leon The Western Quest by Louis N. Clarke Making the Grade by Kenney Hackett Surface Shine by Dustin D. House Tap, Tap, Tap by Peg Legget A Frond Indeed by Fern N. Bracken A DIY Fox Collar by Rufus Mayne Meat, Cheese, Bun by Patti Melton See also: "Here I Go Again" See also: "Below the Bottom Shelf" |
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