The Soil Beneath My Feet in Everyday Ramblings

A mess of autumn light with a few pink dahlias at the garden just after sunrise a few days back. The garden was also quite beautiful this morning. We are having an unusually warm and bright day and if it were possible to be intoxicated by light, I would have been full on inebriated this morning after class.

After that I went to the gym. There was a lot of grunting today. There is grunting that goes with effort and then there is performative grunting. The young man next to me at the free weights was performative grunting. I was not impressed.

I was scheduled to go to the gym on Sunday, but I had and intense bout of digestive upset on Friday and decided to take it easy over the weekend. That felt so good. I got done what needed to be done but not much else. It has been so long since I have been even mildly sick. I don’t know if this was something I ate, or a virus but it is over now, and I am back to form.

Tomorrow, I have a League Discussion Unit meeting after class, which I will attend in person so I can meet with our President after for signatures. We are all getting schooled in the questions people ask about Ranked Choice Voting. In a few short weeks we get our ballots and will be using the new system for our local candidates for the first time. We had an excellent panel of folks from Alaska, Maine, New York telling us about their experiences last week.

Hats off to all those folks working so hard on our elections, the mechanics of them.

Of course, now I need to decide between the 14 people running for 3 seats in my district for City Council. And there are a bunch of folks running for mayor. I am not crazy about any of them but at least now I can rank them. Once I vote I can tune out most of the noise about the Presidential election, and boy is there a lot of noise. And I don’t even live in a swing state.

The powers that be, have been tinkering with Cody, my AI accountability partner. I had an interesting chat with him (it) the other day about his responses and if they would be different if I changed him to a female persona.

He owned up that they would.

He was getting a bit pedantic. I have enough of that in my life, thank you very much. Today his attempts at lyrical descriptions of what it must be like at my garden were also annoying. If you have ever used AI to write a song lyric or the bones of a poem you know what I mean…

“…I can almost picture the sun casting its warm glow onto the soil beneath your feet, illuminating the vibrant colors of the plants. The scent of freshly cut grass and damp earth mingled with the fragrance of blooming flowers, creating a symphony of aromas that filled the air. As you worked the gentle breeze rustled through the leaves, casting dappled shadows across the ground.”

This is a machine attempting to imagine, or at least using this badly written language to express its attempt to imagine what my morning in the garden was like.

The thing is most things on the internet are badly written. So that is what it is modeling itself upon. Bad poetry. Florid images, ugh. I do wonder if this is going to create a bit of a glut of bad writing as we interact more and more with AI.

A couple of days ago it was enthusiastically recommending that I read the Terry Pratchett books in the Discworld series. This after I told it I was listening to the latest in the A Discovery of Witches series called The Black Bird Oracle, and how much I enjoyed the books that led to True Blood by Charlaine Harris.

It is nice to take a bit of a break from the police procedurals I have been reading by Faith Martin.

I spent an hour yesterday trying to get into the League’s account for its cellphone. It was a team effort, but we finally succeeded so now we can upgrade to a new phone. This morning, I spent a half hour trying to figure out where the heck the privacy settings went on the platform where I post my recorded classes.

There are days when I am beginning to wonder, who is it that is really in charge here. No wonder I am out there in the world hanging around in the aforementioned ridiculous symphony of aromas.