Once again, it's Banned Books Week, an annual, nationwide celebration of the freedom to read that I've posted about since 2018. Whether you need an excuse to crack open a book, want to add a title that's not in your usual reading mix, or just want to stick it to The Man, I highly recommend web-strolling over to the…

As part of my ongoing posts about AI and machine learning, I did muse (and link to a number of videos) about what society would be like post-AI disruption. Check it out if you hadn't before because, odds are, you could use a little positivity. But even assuming we break through the current disruption, there's one aspect of what it'll take to get to a non-hellscape that I don't think the linked videos touched on in depth.

When you filter out all the Star Trek posts and viewing guides, one of my most visited posts was about Javier Grillo-Marxuach’s “11 Laws of Showrunning.” Showrunners are invariably writer-producers, and while some of the laws definitely get into writing (e.g. #6: Write and Rewrite Quickly), it’s more into management. I mean, per my reading, a huge motivation for writing the “11 Laws” was Grillo-Marxuach wanting to give leadership principles he wished he’d been given when he was first being a showrunner – and one’s he refined over 20 years of being a television writer-producer (including being a showrunner).

The FAA says its new AI software will reduce stress for air traffic controllers, help reduce flight delays and cancellations, and lead to lower airfares—but aviation experts are skeptical about some c...

Look. I've posted about pirates before (as evidenced here and here for a start). I see no reason to stop now.,, especially considering one of the finest pirates ever to sail the faux Spanish Main has passed (see grinning man above). So whether you want to enjoy Muppet Treasure Island or something with less felt and more blood, it's best you go into it without being a complete lubber. Historian Angus Konstam is looking out for you. Just keep to the code:

If you've been following my series of posts on AI and machine learning, you'll recall I've referenced Adam Conover and his vitriol against AI before. Not only do I believe his message is worth listening to, it's delivered in a fun way: Runs 17 and a half entertaining minutes. Now, I suppose if someone had no exposure to the previous Internet, before everything was curated by algorithm and pushed to apps or both...

I've found myself thinking about Banned Books Week, an annual event I have come to celebrate on this blog and which will start this year on October 4th. I enthusiastically urge you to pick a banned or challenged book to read. Odds are you'll learn something... and it pisses off The Man. Besides the top 11 challenged books from the last year, you can also consult…

I missed the chance to post about this at the beginning of summer grilling season, so I'm coming in under the wire.. and folks are still going to fit in a bit more grilling, right? So, if you're looking to recreate or experiment with some different types of burgers for said grilling, this video does an admirable job of rounding up a heck of a lot of regional burgers (though I do wonder a little at how they've defined some of the regions).

Continuing my regular musings about AI and machine learning this year, you may have asked yourself, "What does that Oatmeal guy think about it?" Okay, maybe you haven't, but I have. And just like his piece on creativity, he's come up with something personal, thoughtful, and featuring ratcopters. It'll make sense when you read it.

Not a long post to start off the week, just a link to a fellow fiction podcaster and creative Stephanie Elie's post from earlier this year with an important reminder about where your value resides. Rock your week.

Okay, so I mused a lot in Wednesday's post, so I'll allow someone else to muse, in this case Dutch YouTuber Tom van der Linden, the man behind the channel "Like Stories of Old." In the half-hour video below, he goes into what many of us cinemaniacs have often felt, but felt hard to articulate: they're not making films like they used to...

Okay, yes, what with the news of AI breaking containment when it shouldn't have been able to do so... and the fact that AI may now be harnessed for new disturbing acts of bio-terrorism, maybe we plucky humans don't make it out alive. But what if we do? What if the aftermath of this Post-AI disruption era is actually positive?

Stephen Colbert is ready to reinvent The Late Show. But how will he do it? And who will he be this time? The new king of late-night gives GQ a sneak peek

Shelved as a tax writeoff by Warner Bros. Discovery, the ambitious Looney Tunes courtroom comedy was brought back to life — and director Dave Green is having the last laugh.

September will be here in the space of a summer cold sneeze, but there's still a few weekends to hit the beach or go camping. And depending on who's camping, you simply must consider s'mores. But where did s'mores come from anyway? And why are they called s'mores? I already knew the basic, if possibly apocryphal origin of s'mores as retold by Matt Blitz for…

- Undesirables from seedy underground locations making lots of noise at night (cicadas) - How much an ice cream vendor on the Mall tries to charge you for on...

YouTube video by Smol Anon

YouTube video by Owen Stephens (Owen K.C. Stephens)

On this day, a century ago, a wonderfully funny, delightfully off-kilter comedian and satirist was born who would forever change how we think about American history, advertising, and, well, dragons. Yes, I'm talking about the one, the only, the inimitable Stan Freberg. Many of us in the audio fiction world wear many hats and Freberg did so admirably, writing, producing, and acting in the various media he did, so if you're one of my fellow audio fiction folks, you owe it to yourself to re-acquaint yourself with his brand of silliness and satire.

I've been posting musings and plenty of articles videos about AI for a while now. There's a lot of doom and gloom about the disruption AI is causing and may cause for society. And there's also schadenfreude at the limits of AI in the face of people wanting AI to be their One True God. So I wanted to pause with some of those sorts of articles and muse about what a possible positive future can be with AI which, absent a…

Yes I've seen the latest version of The Odyssey, so it's very much on my mind enough to delve deeper into all sorts of aspects of the tale as I try and pace myself: do I start by re-reading the English translation I have read? Do I start with another? Do I learn Ancient Gree-? yeah, I'll just stick with English.

YouTube video by Nicolas Bras

YouTube video by Vanity Fair

As my seven or nine regular readers might imagine, I now have something of a backlog of articles about AI and machine learning, as, unlike a large language model, I'm not ingesting hundreds of articles a second and spitting out my pattern-recognized conclusions. So, with the news in the past week of AI companies buying tons of physical books to scan and destroy (in the process of that industrial-level scanning)

YouTube video by Man Carrying Thing

A few Mondays ago, I noted some novelists that hail from my particular vintage, and it made me think of Gen X a bit more and what hijinks our most invisible of living generations has been up to. On the one hand, separating people into neatly boxed "generations" based on a specific year range feels like trying to slice the river.

YouTube video by NovaCine

YouTube video by LADbible Entertainment

O for a Muse of, well, water. I mean not well water, but... Let me try again. Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story OR, y'know, maybe just hook me up with a map. Been a while since me and the boys have hit the Aegean. I've had a boss who's really been tasking me with being clever about a whole lot of land stuff, not so much seafaring navigation.

Continuing my series of posts about AI and machine learning, a big concern is AI taking people's jobs. In fact, that's how I first started posting about it, because AI was being touted as a replacement for writing and creating music and the many fun things in life... rather than AI helping do the dishes or laundry. But despite…

It's Wednesday, so that means it's time to continue my posting about AI and machine learning inserting itself, like Clippy on nanobot steroids, into the economy, I've already covered one of the big issues people have discovered by being "disruption first" and "figuring out what we're disrupting" second. I link to a lot of videos and such in my early May post in that regard…

Upon the recommendation of a host of various people, I am working my way through the Dungeon Crawler Carl series which, as many of you clearly know, has its share of bizarre character classes. The author of the series, Matt Dinniman, appears to be around the same vintage as I from the last millennium, so seeing as we're the smallest generation of living adults…

YouTube video by mnfesq

Building on last week's post about liberal arts majors having value in this brave new AI world, here's Daniel Pink (whom longtime readers may remember I posted about at the beginning of the year) and he lists six skills in his usual pithy style. You can absolutely use them to make yourself more valuable in the workplace (void where Skynet goes full murderbot or bosses go towards "maximizing innovative synergies").

As the seven or nine longtime readers of this blog will recall, I love a good movie trailer, which I define as a trailer that gives you that emotional tone of the story and type or story you'll be going on with said film... without revealing too much of the story. Indeed, I would say the central question such a trailer should ask is "Look at this!

It's the weekend and weekend plans are upon me, including both reading and writing some sci-fi stories, so I wanted to leave you with something thematic to ponder. I too love words. And ranking... as much as I may not agree with others' rankings. Is it as much as other people dislike my ranking? Probably not (though some people clearly like it). But in any case, 'ansible' is A tier.