Latest News

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…

Read More

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…

Read More

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…

Read More

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…

Read More

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…

Read More

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…

Read More

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…

Read More

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…

Read More

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…

Read More

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…

Read More

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…

Read More

Rumpole: The Age of Mysteries & other stories

A few years ago, one of my aunts sent my mother a few omnibus volumes of Rumpole stories, who later gave them to me. Each of the omnibus volumes contains multiple short stories from the fictional memoirs of Horace Rumpole, the renowned barrister sometimes referred to as “Rumpole of the Bailey”. Although the stories are…

Read More