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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| A few years ago, I drove through Nebraska, and stayed in a hotel there overnight. This may not seem important to anyone. It was certainly boring for me. Nebraska isn't exactly the most exciting state in the US. It's primarily known for two things: corn and insurance. The only significance to my visit was that it checked #48 off of the list of US states I've visited. The only ones left now are Alaska, for the obvious reason that it's cold and far away; and Michigan, which can also be cold, but isn't so far away. The thing about Michigan is that it's not on the way to anywhere, at least not for me. That's the only reason I ever visited Nebraska: it was on the way to elsewhere (in this case, visiting a friend in Utah). And it's not like the state doesn't have reasons to visit. For me, those reasons are breweries. I simply haven't gotten around to it yet. Alaska's a different story. On maps that focus on the US, like the one in today's prompt (which you should be able to see if you expand the "Notes" below), it's never in the right place and rarely the right size. Based on that map, an uninformed person might believe that it's an island off the southwestern corner of the country, and that it's smaller than Texas. Of course, we all know better, but that sort of thing confused me as a kid. That's what parents and teachers are for. But every once in a while, I'll see something on the internet about someone thinking Alaska's a big island somewhere, one that just happens to possess, in part, a long, straight coastline (where, in consensus reality, the state borders Canada). Some people are unteachable, I suppose. Or there are a lot of trolls. Or both. Point is, though, there's almost nothing in Alaska that interests me. I'm sure there are breweries, which is reason enough to go even if I didn't have all 50 states on my fuck-it list. I have this vague idea that at some point in the relatively near future, I'll drive across the country again, this time looping up into Michigan for the hell of it (that's a pun, see, because there's an actual place in Michigan called Hell and, yes, it periodically freezes over). But the plan is to end up in Seattle, get on one of those cruise ships that I've never been on, and let it take me to Alaska. One day in Juneau or Anchorage (Fairbanks is way too far inland), and I can say I've been there. Maybe see some whales from the ship; I don't know. That way, I can also tick "cruise ship" off my list, something I want to do but have been avoiding, because they're basically giant Petri dishes, perfect breeding grounds for microscopic pests of many varieties. I'd better get started actually planning that, though. If the most optimistic of my friends are right, there won't be a 50-state union after the next year or so, rendering my list largely moot. If the least optimistic are right, I'll have to dodge radioactive craters on the way, because of the coming inevitable global apocalypse. Notes: ▼ |
| As we acknowledge Writing.com's 25 years of existence this week, I'll be blogging about that instead of the usual stuff I find. Today's prompt has to do with AI. Artifical Intelligence: bane or blessing? Yes. But first of all, I'd like to clear something up: AI isn't really artificial intelligence. Certainly the argument can be made that what we call AI is artificial, but I subscribe to the philosophy that, since we are part of nature, anything we create or modify is natural, including food dyes, nuclear weapons, microplastics, and computers with their programs. This isn't a very useful philosophy, though, except insofar as it reminds me that not everything we make is "bad" and not everything we find in the wild is "good." So I'll continue to use "artificial" to refer to something some human made. It's the "intelligence" part I have a real problem with. It's hard enough to define that for humans. It's even harder to define it for nonhuman animals, such as dogs or housecats, neither of which would exist in their current form without human intervention, and can thus be considered "artificial" in a way. Since we don't know what intelligence really is, labeling a complex computer program thus is questionable at best. And I should also note that AI has been around in some form since the early days of computing. We gamers have dealt with various levels of AI in the form of game NPCs, and let's not forget they programmed computers to play chess, a game that used to be considered to be something only an intelligent entity could win. I'm splitting hairs, probably. But what we call something matters. You can call your dictatorship a "Peoples' Republic," or your fascist political party "socialist," but that's just propaganda. A lot of the hype surrounding AI is propaganda of another sort. Many of us have been using AI as writers for a while, now. Spellcheck is a rudimentary AI; grammar checkers, a more advanced one. I never want to be dependent on either, because I'd rather internalize rules and styles for myself, but I've used them. I've also, obviously, used what we call AI for graphics (notably above in this blog), mostly because I have no artistic talent whatsoever. What I've never done is have a Large Language Model write for me. I mean, sure, I've played with them a bit, but only to satisfy my curiosity; none of their output has made it into my writing here. As for whether it's a good thing or not, well, we hardly ever get to see things in black and white, ones and zeros, all or nothing. What we call AI is technology, and like almost all technology (and a lot of "natural" things), it can be used for good or evil or anything in between. You know, like nuclear fission can produce relatively clean energy, but it can also be used to blow shit up real good. I don't trust any report on it that sings its praises. I also don't trust any report on it that concentrates solely on the downsides. It has its problems, absolutely. Like any tool, it depends on how we use it. You can use a hammer to build, or smash someone's head. Since its current form is pretty new, though, and people don't like change, you get a lot of fear surrounding it. It's like how in the early days of civilian GPS, people freaked out about it getting them lost, as if no one had ever gotten turned around following a paper map. Thing is, like it or not, it's here, and it's not going anywhere until the power goes out in the coming inevitable global apocalypse. What I'd urge everyone to remember is that you have no control over what other people do with it; you can only control what you do with it. Notes: ▼ |
| As we acknowledge Writing.com's 25 years of existence this week, I'll be blogging about that instead of the usual stuff I find. Back in 2004, when I joined, the internet was a very different place. Social media wasn't really a thing; we used IRC and other platforms to chat and meet people. Not everything was measured, tracked, monetized, optimized, advertised, capitalized, and homogenized. I've been a writer for most of my life. While my fellow students groaned and rolled their eyes at having to write 500 words for this or that class, I was puzzled: 500 words is easy, except for how in the hell can I say everything I want to say in such a short piece? Didn't matter whether it was fiction or nonfiction. Then I went into engineering school, which didn't emphasize writing as much. Which is unfortunate, because engineers have to write things like technical documents and reports, and for those, it's important to have some skill in putting words together good. Not what you'd call creative writing, though. Engineers get creative in other ways. So it was that, when I joined here, I finally felt like I had a chance to share my more fictional and expressive side. So I did. Joining four years after the platform's origin, I did feel like an upstart and an outsider, and in some ways, going on 21 years later, I still do. That's right, next week, my account will be old enough to order drinks in the US. I have this worldview that life runs in 7-year cycles. I don't talk about it much, but the idea is always there, lurking in the background like someone tapping on my shoulder to get my attention. While my 21 years here don't neatly overlap the 7-year cycles in my life, it's made a kind of sub-cycle. For the first seven years, I was pretty active here, writing mostly stories and some poems, though I took advantage of blogging from nearly the beginning. After that, I was less active for seven years. I still did the two newsletters I've been editing since 2007 or so: Comedy and Fantasy. And I remained an active judge at Writer's Cramp, and did Moderator stuff. But I didn't blog much, or even some years at all, for those seven years. This was largely the result of me shifting my focus from writing and community to dealing with some personal issues: my father had died (my mother passed before I joined), I retired, I traveled quite a bit, and processed my divorce. Never did an actual hiatus, but I certainly wasn't as much of a presence here as I'd been in the beginning. Around seven years ago, then, I started to become more active again. My current daily blogging streak is going on six years, between the previous blog and this one, but even before then, I'd started writing stuff again. I also got more into activities here, notably the October Novel Prep Challenge. So things are different now, I'm different now, but sometimes, I look back at an older item and marvel at how great it was. If the seven-year cycle thing holds, I don't know what the next group of years will bring. But I'm pretty sure I'm here until I die, or the site goes away, or the internet is destroyed in the coming inevitable global apocalypse. Notes: ▼ |
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Alaska is a state? Oh, right, you can see Russia from there. 
