It never was, but unlike the current batch of LLM assistants that are now dominating the tops of “search” results, it never claimed to be. It was more, “here’s what triggered our algorithm as “relevant.” Figure out your life, human.”

Now, instead, you have a paragraph of natural text that will literally tell you all about cities that don’t exist and confidently assert that bestiality is celebrated in Washington DC because someone wrote popular werewolf slash fanfic set in Washington state. Teach the LLMs some fucking equivocation and this problem is immediately reduced, but then it makes it obvious that these things aren’t Majel Barrett in Star Trek and they’ve been pushed out much too quickly.

…Revolt is the FOSS alternate for discord right?

Yes, or for a more limited feature set, Matrix.

I recently had a dream that involved a suburb of Green Bay, Wisconsin. I have never been to Green Bay Wisconsin. I know it as a rather small city that is the home to the Green Bay Packers, an administratively anachronistic NFL team that draws a large plurality of its fan base from the greater Milwaukee area. Off the top of my head, I don’t know if Green Bay has “suburbs” in the usual American sense at all.

I googled the name of this completely nonexistent community, along with the words “Green Bay,” and the AI very confidently hallucinated it into existence, describing it as a lovely shopping and residential area just over the bridge of the same name.

You say “looming data apocalypse.”

I say, “free high quality neodymium magnets!”

Honestly, even as a kid, it just underlined that this is a guy who exists in a dangerous world, a wretched hive of scum and villainy, if you will. He’s coded as friendlier than the average Mos Eisley denizen, and he didn’t shoot until he was threatened, but we are to infer the threat was serious. That Han still counts as “close enough” to a good guy just lets us know how dire Ben and Luke’s situation is. It was a nice bit of show-don’t-tell storytelling and the SE made it less so, in addition to being visual garbage.

Indeed, but the ones who do probably don’t see much need to boast about it.

I think we definitely want the same thing, at least.

I’m just backing up the (now absent, LOL) person you originally replied to. I think you can – and in Marvel’s case maybe you should, since they are no longer drawing on zeitgeisty, recognizable versions of their comics characters – think about what you want the story to mean at least as early as you do the events that happen in it. King is a talented writer, no two ways about it, but I don’t think you necessarily doom a script to be bad by starting with something like, “I want to tell a story about dealing with the conflict between who we wish we were and what life made us into.”

I reckon that for King, setting events into motion and figuring out the right traits to get characters through them (or to their natural stopping place), or what themes give those particular events meaning, that works for him. If they want to have him write the next Avengers movie, I’d be all for it, LOL. I just don’t think his approach is the only way to go about it.

Maybe the themes in a Marvel movie will be more universal and rather broadly drawn, but to avoid overstaying their welcome with a rote and repetitive “peril-catharis” cycle, the action needs to be in service to something compelling. Otherwise, it just sort of sputters to the finish line because ultimately we’ve seen the stories before. To the extent he’s not just talking out of his ass, King’s describing a workflow, not a philosophy.

Beyond anything else, this is also what infected the Star Wars franchise, except there it was even worse because so much of the connective tissue was relegated to novels and comics. At least with Marvel you can keep up just via TV and movies.

Dumped into a new series of films that rehashes the first? Explain it in a bunch of mediocre books! Sequel that thinks that setup was boring (and tbf, it was)? Build up to it in a crappy comic! Petulant manchild takes the worst possible lessons from the first two? Set it up in a video game, lift the plot from old comics, and then tell your animation wunderkind that his entire live-action career will now be to “fix it.”

Disney owns the lion’s share of the blame for both franchises malaise, but fan culture enabled it by obsessing over everything, not insisting on tight storytelling (the number of online people who believe that no deleted scene is too awkward to be edited back in is… disconcerting), and whizzing their pants in glee with every easter egg or end-credits stinger. Honorable mention to Peter Jackson with the LOTR extended editions and ROTK’s eleventy-billion endings that (LOL) still somehow omitted the Scouring of the Shire.

How to write okayish page-turners that are far from the only valid way to approach literature?

I poked around a few other articles. A few are identical. Most are slight variations. Few are as different as these two. My guess would be that the original submission from the author or initial editor locks in a headline for the tab/title bar, but then the CMS lets them edit what appears in the main body of the webpage.

I am glad to see us respect our link-aggregation heritage of ignoring the article and starting heated discussions based on what we infer from the headline. 😂

It also seems that the headline currently on the article is different and switches out clickbait tactics from misleading omission to absurd pearl-clutching: “Are noise-cancelling headphones to blame for young people’s hearing problems?” If you combine them, you get something closer to actual content of the article.

I had a “Diamond Mako,” aka a Psion Revo Plus. Neat device, but I just wasn’t “on the go” enough to really need it. It was slightly smaller than the 5, IIRC, and it definitely wasn’t as good for typing as even a Netbook (another good candidate for a “writerDeck” btw), but it was very slick, and the word processor in particular I remember being very good. IIRC it had NiCAD or NiMH AAA batteries hard-wired into it.

Riiiight!

So probably still about Beatty then.

That song was clearly written about Jack Donaghy.

Partly true, but as we’ve seen from the Steamboat Willie thing, the specific aesthetics of the Beatty movie, and even elements like the two-way wrist radio (introduced 1946) or any villains who came along later than 1932 will still be protected for a while.

no one is going to want to see an 87-year-old Dick Tracy

I think he knows that as well as anybody. That’s why it’s so delightfully stupid and petty.

Strolls nervously through room with RX 580…

I’ll use this to drop a link to one of my favorite podcasts, which is where I first learned about these horns. The host is a Kiwi who either just defended his PhD or is about to, so he’s an actual Egyptologist. He’s also a dork and a gamer.

It probably helps that it was modern horn players playing a fanfare that sounded more or less “right” to them, but ultimately, as has been said elsewhere, it’s a metal tube you make a fart noise into.