Category: reflection
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Find the joy
My PSA: Earlier this month, I had one of those weeks where I was scheduled from sun-up past sun-down every single day. It exhausted me. And we all know better, but sometimes this kind of week is unavoidable. For me, it happened because my annual medical appointments happen in September,…
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Lawsuits involving AI & the importance of copyright
In the car this morning, I listened to a Wall Street Journal podcast about the recent lawsuit between authors and Anthropic AI. A judge recently ruled that Anthropic could use authors’ work to train its AI model under fair use if the works were acquired in such a way that compensated the author. Originally,…
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Drag Culture and Existentialism
Now, if Existentialist explores the meaninglessness of existence, (I talked about Existentialism yesterday) I would propose that drag culture celebrates our existence in every form and every nuance. Both Existentialism and Drag Culture force us to explore and critique society’s values, but wheres Existentialists are rather sullen about their conclusions, drag culture…
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Frosties and Existentialism
In my childhood, Frosties came in chocolate. Then, in my 21-year-old daughter’s lifetime, they added vanilla. But now, it seems they have this list of flavors that sound like a DQ married a Starbucks: This led to a household discussion of decision fatigue, and the comment of one of our friends, in…
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Angel Ackerman experiments with ChatGPT
ChatGPT came up in conversation several times last week and I expressed my usual concerns that (1) people need to fact check ChatGPT because it relies on generic scanning of the Internet and we all know how accurate the Internet-at-large is, and (2) we don’t know how/where ChatGPT sources its…
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A rant on finding a writing craft book…
I have four physical writing craft books on my desk and a to-be-read pile of 10-15 books in every room of my house. And this month, I am reading my unsolicited submission pile while overseeing a ridiculous amount of summer releases from my brand. (But as I see the first…
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When the satire feels real
We are all familiar with that old cliché about life imitating art. The recent political and legal controversy about the president’s deployment of the National Guard in California eerily echoes the constitutional crisis depicted in my novel, Splintered River. In the novel, the ambiguities in the Constitution about command of…
