Author: Michael Hawkes
Like a kid in a candy store
Now that I have more free time, I’ve been getting back into Second Life again. I also want to get back into Open Simulator, but it’s sort of hard to know where to start. A few years ago I tried a few different Hypergrid instances, and they were okay, but not mind blowing, so I’m…
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Hacking AI News
Having recently graduated, it seemed like a good time to try new things. Among the new things I’ve recently tried out is a WordPress theme called AI News. It’s an open source theme intended for sites that want to incorporate a ChatGPT plugin to write blog posts. I have no intention of using that plugin…
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MSEd
As of 12:00 AM on May 5, 2023, I officially graduated with a Master of Science in Education degree in Instructional Systems Technology, or MSEd in IST for the sake of brevity. I began working on the degree at the height of the pandemic lockdowns in August 2020, and by taking two classes a semester…
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Taking notes with Obsidian
For a few years now, I’ve been using Obsidian to keep a daily journal, and it’s been great. It has a lot of options that I’ve never explored or needed but something came up recently and I wanted to find out how to connect Obsidian to Zotero. An online search using DuckDuckGo returned an unexpected…
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Business continuity planning
For the past 20+ years I’ve worked at a large public university in the American Midwest, and over the years I’ve picked up “other duties as assigned.” These are duties that don’t take up all of my time, but are good to work on when things are slow. One of these duties is business continuity…
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Writing prompt: New stories of the gods
Thinking about all the gods, deities, and cultural icons that people have created over the millennia, the stories we’ve been told are very dramatic and memorable, but what was left out? What haven’t we been told? What are the banalities of their lives that the bards and chroniclers failed to mention? The writing prompt for…
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Writing prompt: 200 years from now
Since work and grad school will probably keep me busy this November, it’s unlikely I’ll be doing NaNoWriMo this year, but that doesn’t mean the ideas stop. I’ll try posting a few writing prompts over the next few weeks if anyone wants to use them. On the walk into work this morning, listening to The…
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Halloween names in Second Life
In honor of the spooky season, Second Life just announced a new set of last names that premium members can choose from. They are: Addams Bitey Boo Demonpaws Macabre Vorhees A few times a year, Second Life offers a new set of last names that are available for a limited time, and they usually have…
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The Peripheral
Author William Gibson is probably best known for his early novels, which not only spawned the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction, they heavily influenced The Matrix series of films, as well as countless other cultural works. After writing in other genres for awhile, The Peripheral sees Gibson once again plumbing the depths of cyberpunk, although…
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Ready Player One
When the book Ready Player One first came out in 2011, I remember reading lots of favorable reviews for the book. Much was made about how the book seemed to reference every bit of 1980s pop culture and how they were cleverly added into the story. I skipped the book because my to-be-read pile was…
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Chonburi International Hotel & Butterfly Club
Chonburi International Hotel & Butterfly Club is another Audible Original, but this time it is based on a play. From what I gather, it played at the 2020 Williamstown Theatre Festival (charmingly known as WTF). Since 2020 was the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the play was created virtually, though I don’t know all…
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Convolution
I’m not sure how long they’ve been doing this, but Audible also produces some of its own content in addition to selling the content produced by others. Convolution is an an “Audible Original” audio drama and as far as I can tell, it’s not based on an actual book. That’s a shame because the story…
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