Speculation, Fact and Fiction

First task of the day has been finding my spare/previous prescription glasses in order to find the current glasses a cat knocked off the bedside table during the night, seemingly into an interdimensional rift.

Current glasses have been retrieved from the very narrow gap between the bedside table and the chest of drawers. I am now wondering how long the cat spent calculating the very precise angle needed to get the specs to fall down there...

The Green Man's War is an Amazon UK offer for 99p for the whole of March. For those trying to move away from shopping with US billionaires, Wizard's Tower Press has made the same deal available from Kobo (based in Canada, Japanese owners)

https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/the-green-man-s-war

"Jim Covello, Head of Global Equity Research at Goldman Sachs, argues that although AI looks like it’ll attract US$1 trillion in investment in the coming years, there really isn’t a US$1 trillion problem for it to solve. Someone’s going to lose a lot of money. "

https://thefutureeconomy.ca/op-eds/what-if-generative-ai-signals-decline-and-stagnation-not-a-productivity-boost/

So how about governments don't rip up copyright law to help out the chancers chasing this mirage, but pivot to defending and supporting the creative industries which make money for their economies.

Glancing at the calendar, I see Mothering Sunday in the UK this year is the day the clocks change and we lose an hour of sleep. That seems par for the course at the moment.

Beyond that? Social media is a maelstrom of ragebait and very serious,legitimate concerns. I don't want to amplify the former, and have nothing to add to the latter.

So I will carry on writing my book.

I am thoroughly out of patience with the Internet today for a variety of reasons, so it is good to come across this positive news in my final check before logging off.

"We took a hiatus during the second half of 2024 due to our lives becoming that much busier. But loving what we have built with the show over the almost 10 years we’ve been running (!) we wanted to find a way to continue with BtGS. To that end, we’re still here, feminist and queer, but we’ll be moving to a monthly instead of bi-monthly publishing schedule that we feel better able to manage.

Our first guest of the season is a returning favourite of ours, Grady Hendrix, whose latest book is set in a sinister house for “wayward girls” i.e. pregnant teenagers. We ask Grady what it’s like to write so intimately about the female body – something outside his direct experience – about why he chose this particular setting, and about the relationship between women and witchcraft."


https://www.breakingtheglassslipper.com/2025/02/27/women-on-trial-with-grady-hendrix/

Elsewhere online, a viewer commented to J Michael Straczynski thus:

"Rewatching B5 and as always appreciate the moles and fine hair fuzziness of the Centauri skull caps, especially on the fully bald female characters. The moles in particular lend such an air of realness."

His responses were:

In terms of the female bald Centauri, some of those were skull caps, and others weren't; we let it be known that we wanted to support women going through chemo or other treatments who had lost their hair by casting them here, money that could also help pay for medical bills.

And beauty was the benefit. In the outside world, they might feel awkward or different, but on set, with 10-15 other bald Centauri women in beautiful gowns and dresses, their characters were much admired and desired, and they weren't different any more.

and when he was congratulated:

No, I just approved it, it was the folks in casting and hair and makeup who had the idea.

Elsewhere online in AI idiocy this morning. Someone posts a Latin text, asking politely for an expert translation.

First response is 'Here, I ran it through ChatGPT for you. No idea if this is accurate'.

Would we call that more or less than useless? Either way, headdesk.

But presumably that person genuinely thought doing this would be helpful. I find that very worrying.

Right, back to my own work which is and will remain uncontaminated by any so-called AI

"Sikh History on the Streets of Oxford is a four-hour walking tour focusing on Sikh and related Indian stories that link to colleges and historic sites around the city's centre."

"We go to various colleges and museums and we just stop by and tell short stories of individuals from Sikh history or from the Punjab in India and their connections to Oxford in the spaces that these little histories took place," Mr Singh said.

He said Mr Barker's book The Flying Sikh: Hardit Singh Malik had served as "a centre" and more stories had been added since.

Hardit Singh Malik studied at Balliol College, becoming the first person to join the RAF as a non-British officer, and fought in World War One.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y6yqd4p0qo

Checking a reference for something, I've had occasion to reread Ursula K Le Guin's Foreword to 'Tales from Earthsea'. The following passage struck me forcefully in the light of current international events.

"Past events exist, after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination. The event is real now, but once it's then, its continuing reality is entirely up to us, dependent on our energy and honesty. If we let it drop from memory, only imagination can restore the least glimmer of it. If we lie about the past, forcing it to tell a story we want it to tell, to mean what we want it to mean, it loses its reality, becomes a fake. To bring the past along with us through time in the hold-alls of myth and history is a heavy undertaking but as Lao Tzu says, wise people march along with the baggage wagons."

For those wondering, the solution to yesterday's transition between episodes challenge turned up in the evening, as we were clearing the table and tidying the kitchen after dinner. So I'll crack on with the story today.