August 2023

This month I finished the short story about the photographer and ran it through ChatGPT for a test edit. One because it was easy and two because I wanted to see what it came back with. I violated the content policy right off because its a horror story, and the AI doesn't want anything to do with that. 

Then I read it.

It's ok... but that is it. It made it dull and flattened out the dialog. Maybe made it 'Better,' but I didn't like how it read. Generally, I use a tool like Grammarly to work through a story and it forces you to agree to the change. It is a suggestion. A lot of the time, I fix the spelling or the placement of a comma, but I ignore the parts where it suggests a way to make a sentence more readable because most of the time it doesn't. It just sort of flattens out the dialogue or how I wanted the sentence to sound. 

With ChatGPT, it just rewrote it, said you're welcome, and have a nice day. 

I also ran parts of the original and parts of the ChatGPT rewrite through a validator and it picked up on the AI Rewrite every time. It had homogenized the human stuff enough that really stood out.

So I had to edit it human style by reading it, reading it again and fixing stuff, and again fixing more stuff, and again until I was tired of reading it. I'm sure if I go back to it there will be more to edit. 

Aside from that finished reading The Once Yellow House by Gemma Amor and wow. So culty and horrific and fun. 

I started the new Brandon Sanderson novel Yumi and the nightmare painter but I was not ready for that and put it aside.

So I'm reading What Happened Was Impossible by E. F. Schraeder and that's going well. 

I also organized the pile of books I'm reading (11) and the pile of books I'm waiting to read (25) and I am going to try to hold off on buying any new books for a minute.

Speaking of new books; I saw the Deer Lady in the show Reservation Dogs reading a book at a cafe. The cover stood out, and the episode was great, so I bought it. It's called I Remember by Joe Brainard and it came out in the 70s. I guess it was very popular. Every paragraph starts with I remember followed by something he remembers and its pretty great.

I also picked up Sadie "Mother Horror" Hartman's new book 101 Horror Books to Read Before You're Murdered. It's a great collection of her picks and recommendations broken out by style and horror. This is not going to help me not buy new books. 

For movies this month, I went to see the new A24 Horror Talk To Me and it was good and scary and worth the trip to the theatre. 

That's it for this month. Here's a story and some pictures. 

Back in the early days of social media. MySpace was still the leader, Facebook was for students, and Twitter only existed on a private server somewhere. YouTube had some wild stuff already, though. 

It was 2006, February, and I was walking the cold salty slush filled cobblestone streets of Portland, Maine, with my wife and maybe someone else. I can't remember, though. There is a good chance we were leaving a small restaurant called Federal Spice after eating the Thai Tofu wrap thing and a side of the best sweet and salty, sweet potato fries. They closed in 2018 and the space was empty for a while. It's a donut shop now. Here's a link to the Federal Spice Yelp page - (https://www.yelp.com/biz/federal-spice-portland?start=10). 

We usually went to Portland for lunch, then Bull Moose Music (the location on Middle Street is closed), and then Longfellow Books (still open - https://www.longfellowbooks.com/). Before leaving, we would hit up Arabica Coffee before driving home (still open - https://www.arabicacoffee.me/). 

I took two pictures that would eventually go a little viral after the blog post was reposted on the popular blog site BoingBoing (still active - https://boingboing.net/)

So here's the first picture I took. It's of a car with a broken windshield and so many parking tickets. 

    Then, I noticed something strange about the inspection sticker on the bottom right corner. Someone added theirs craftily. 

 They made their own inspection sticker on blue paper and black marker, glued to their window. The barcode was from the Portland Public Library,

Well, the internet took over and folks figured out that the barcode was from a copy of the NewYorker. I don't remember what month. 

That blog post from an old site is long gone, but it had over 50,000 hits and hundreds of comments. No Diet Coke and Mentos or Star Wars Kid numbers, but I thought it was cool. 

Until next month.