I finally lost my shit about so-called AIs, LLMs, enshittification & everything fucking evil that @officialgrammarly.bsky.social is doing. I'm fucking furious, and not just about what 1 company has done. An open letter to Grammarly & the rest of the LLM hype machine www.moryan.com/an-open-lett...
Post your favourite Lord of the Rings character. Wrong answers only.
"Can you count to ten?"
I think the book is more about the protagonist outgrowing Miss Brodie's influence... so, on balance, no. Miss Brodie is a complicated and multi-faceted character, and there are admirable things about her, but her politics are decidedly not among them.
The title character's politics are - well, not so much dodgy as flat-out fascist. Not sure the story's sympathies are with her on that, though.
"Emergency Skin" by N.K. Jemisin has a similar sort of premise.
Good morning Womble. I'm on Scandi Noir, with "Cold as Hell", the first in Lilja Sigurðardóttir's Áróra Investigations series.
Pfft. *I* don't need a BBC website to remember what those words median.
Hmm. I think Liz Shaw's intelligence and pragmatism would do a lot to counterbalance the Eleventh Doctor's madcap tendencies. (And I just wish we'd seen more of Liz Shaw.)
And Amy Pond would work well as a counterbalance to the Seventh Doctor in his more Machiavellian moods.
Oat beer is, apparently, a thing. Seems more common to use a mixture of oats and wheat, though.
Well, you'll never be President of the USA with *that* attitude....
A lot of them don't read the Bible, they just rely on the interpretation given by Pastor Dingbat in 1905.
I'm not allowed to judge whether they're bad Christians (though I have my opinions), but they are very definitely bad Protestants.
Ah, yes, William Windom doing the Captain Ahab bit that Ricardo Montalban would do years later in "Wrath of Khan". I love the way he nibbles on one of the floppy-disc things when he's in the captain's chair. You don't often see actors *literally* chewing the scenery these days.
I kept a count of how many Norman soldiers got twatted in "Robin of Sherwood" (because that's the kind of wild and crazy guy I am). Working for the Sheriff of Nottingham turned out to be 14 times more dangerous than being a Star Trek redshirt. Make of that what you will.
According to Spike Milligan, "the only way to stop a British soldier feeling randy is to load Bromide into a 300 lb. shell and fire it at him from the waist down."
Iran transitioned from one Supreme Leader (Khomeini) to the next (Khameini) with nothing much in the way of speed bumps. And considering Khameini was 86 and in poor health, I'd suspect succession planning was pretty well advanced anyway.
I have read "Fifth Business" (and others) and I do not doubt you even one little bit.
🧵I find the recent "political" rhetoric about churches being “repurposed” into mosques both misleading and disingenuous. The number of such cases is small, and they have largely involved former Nonconformist chapels already redundant within their denominations. To present this as a widespread
Also among the oldies, Flanders and Swann with "Twenty Tons of TNT".
www.youtube.com/watch?v=hj15...
Deathdream
Just for laughs, I calculated the Gunning Fog Index for this. I made it 62. My worst ever was only 33, and I wasn't well that day. (I was feeling even worse when the time came to edit it.)
Someone grab that man and transplant a backbone into him, please.
My guess? Avengers, issue #1. They've *always* been a bunch of massive drama queens.
Good morning Womble. Just started "After the Child" by @russincheshire.bsky.social - am hoping to finish it before the next one comes out. (The Erin Callahan books are, to be fair, very readable. Also, it seems, very writeable.)
Email from WordPress yesterday: "Upgrade to unlock the WordPress AI Assistant".
I'm trying to think of a less appealling offer, but it's not easy.
Has anyone considered calling in an exorcist, to deal with whatever the curse is that transforms every Home Secretary into a soulless slavering ghoul?
I hate Dyson with every fibre of my being & will never ever buy anything made by him.
He’s a piece of shit who treats people like meat.
It was always obvious why he put his money & mouth behind Brexit.
More people in this country need to be aware of his Machiavellian ways & boycott the bastard.
I continue to be fascinated by the phenomenon whereby an expert engages with any of the LLMs on their field of expertise and is instantly horrified by the wrong answers, and then goes on to use it for things they are not experts in as though it won’t be just as bad for those.
... turned out to be a damp squib, mostly because of Tory sabotage. Clegg was forgetting a basic principle of UK politics - never trust a Tory.
The Lib Dems have 72 MPs. Reform has 8, half of them defectors from the Tories. You wouldn't know it from UK media, though.
I think Clegg went in to the coalition because it gave him a shot at getting proportional representation in elections. Of course, the Alternative Voting referendum....
