Norma’s Morning
Believing in Magic
When I refer to magic here, I mean it literally. Like, in the Hogwarts sense.
I believe that creativity is a force of enchantment—not entirely human in its origins.
I heard a respected neurologist say in an interview, “The creative process may seem magical, but it is not magic.” With all due respect, I disagree. I believe the creative process is both magical and magic.
– Gilbert, Elizabeth. Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
Liz Gilbert believes in magic. Literally.
I support her in her beliefs — not because I think they’re true, I do not — but because beliefs exist for important reasons, even if we don’t all agree on what is and is not true.
You can guess which way mom’s coming from
Why I Rarely Donate to Political Candidates
- Spam. Donate even once and the flood begins.
- Increasing
demands/requests. Donate even once and it’s almost like a catphishing campaign: increasingly urgent demands for increasingly larger donations. - If they lose, I’ve thrown away my money.
- If they win, but they’re in the minority, I might as well have thrown away my money, at least for important issues.
- If they win, it seems they inevitably transition from representing the people to representing only the people and companies that gave them exorbitant amounts of money.
It’s a cynical point of view, I get it.
I choose instead to support organizations like the EFF, ACLU, and others actually taking action, boots on the ground.
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There’s a rash of popular social media publications that seem to be getting suppressed. Whether it’s intentional, accidentally on purpose, or truly a mistake of some sort is irrelevant. You cannot trust social media to show you what you’ve asked to be shown. (Some are better/worse than others, but still.)
Many of these popular authors have email newsletters. Find them. Subscribe to them. Support them if you can. And in doing so, side-step whatever the frak is happening on social media.
Last Man Standing
Racing to the far end of the bell curve.
I’m only 67 as I write this, but I’m more and more finding myself the oldest person in the room. (I almost put the “only” in quotes, since of course perspectives on whether that’s “old” or not vary fairly dramatically. 
)
It’s pretty easy to rationalize this. After all, younger people are being created at a pretty decent clip every day, and, as harsh as it might sound to say it, older people are dropping at a similar (technically slightly slower) rate. It’s only logical, it’s only math, that I might be traveling to the far right of the curve.
And yet.
Every Day is an Experiment – Blog Edition
Every post is an experiment
I’m experimenting a little with my personal blog. The TL;DR: is that:
- I’m adding social media posts to my blog, where they’ll be auto-posted on a few social media sites.
- Normal posts (longer form essays like this one) will be auto-posted to the socials as well.
- Normal posts will trigger emailed notifications to those who’ve signed up, social media posts will not.
If you’re curious about the why, and perhaps even the how, keep reading.
Is spending this little at Costco even legal?
Rituals
These aren’t your parents rituals. Or maybe they are.
The word “ritual” has interesting overtones.
I know for many it has very specific religious meanings. For example, having grown up Catholic, I get that. I’ve lived it. Catholicism is full of rituals.
But I love when people expand their view on what it means, particularly in a more secular direction.
ChatGPT and Images
With ChatGPT’s new image generation capabilities, I decided to play. Specifically, I wanted to see how weill it would take this image:
from the Ask Leo! home page, and re-render it in different styles. (Click on any for larger, if you dare.)
The Threshold of Intelligence
Does the source matter?
AI is a simulation of intelligence. It’s right there in the name: artificial — not real — intelligence.
AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence is “a type of highly autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) intended to match or surpass human capabilities across most or all economically valuable cognitive work.”
A good way to think of it is that AI tends to be single task or limited in task focus, whereas AGI is, again by its very name, general purpose, where “general purpose” translates to “anything humans could choose to do”. I’m not sure I concur with Wikipedia’s inclusion of “economically valuable”, though.
But when questioning whether it’s actually intelligent, that pesky “A” is still there.
The real question should be: does it matter?
The Biggest Lesson From TikTok
Whether it comes back or not.
(This seems like something I’d more commonly post on Ask Leo!, but it feels a tad off-target for my audience there, so here it is in my personal blog. Enjoy. 
)
As I first wrote this, the TikTok platform was no longer accessible in the United States. It’s since returned, at least temporarily. For how long we don’t know. 90 days? Longer? Permanently? Who knows?
TikTok allowed for the rise of what I’ll call the “accidental entrepreneur”. These are folks who began posting for fun, and then gained popularity to the point of generating enough revenue to be a small business. Several even quit their day jobs in favor of content creation on TikTok. It’s an awesome story.
Unfortunately, though, some of them are learning a hard lesson today. It’s a lesson every online business person needs to learn, and be periodically reminded of.
What’s the Worst That Could Happen?
It’s rarely as dire as we imagine
When I was approaching sixteen, it was still important, and even “cool,” to get your driver’s license as soon as possible. In my case, it was extra important, since we were about to move, and I’d need to drive to continue going to the same high school.
No pressure.
Looking back, I’m surprised by the approach I took. It’s an approach that has served me well throughout life.
Where Do Friends Go?
It’s easy to believe that friendships, once established, will last forever, or at least a very long time. Particularly when we’re young, there’s little evidence to the contrary.
And then we grow up.
“Ok Boomer” and the Generational Divide
One thing I dislike about the phrase “OK, boomer”, besides its incredible condescension, is that it pretends all individuals of a certain generation are alike.
Trust me when I tell you we are not.
The Flag and the Flag
It was time to replace our well worn U.S. flag, but I was hesitant.
I’d planned on raising the new flag the day after the election, with the assumption that Harris would win. Needless to say that didn’t happen.
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“Traditional media” is broken. It’s an echo chamber for singular perspectives that are driven by business and other interests. Examples abound, but the perhaps the most clear was Washington Post’s recent failure to endorse any presidential candidate. It’s a billionaire owner making a decision not because it’s good for the public or the press, but to protect his interests from a certain outcome. It appears to have paid off, perhaps at the cost of the country.
“Social media” is broken. Algorithms control what we see, and what we see is an attention bubble full of engagement bait. Most social media platforms exist only to show us more of what we’ll engage with, rather than what we actually ask for. Platforms that don’t are struggling because people end up finding their feeds, while exactly what they asked for, boring in comparison.
So, what’s the solution?
Wordsmithing: My Personal Perspective on Writing and AI
Writing well matters, regardless of the tools you use.
(Be sure to check out the work-in-progress snapshots at the end of this essay.)
I write a lot.
A lot.
I write in so many places, it may not look like it.