tl;dr I started this blog 20 years ago today. I used it to learn to write. Why? This blog started 20 years ago today (March 9, 2003) thus: I have too many blogs already – Advogato, the Nuke Beat, my ABQJournal musings. Starting another seems a bit of overkill. They all have their roots elsewhere …
Like everyone else of a certain sort (on line and writerly), I’ve been playing with ChatGPT. It’s a “large language model”, trained on a monstrous corpus of text, that basically projects (based on stuff people have said before) what might come next given a sequence of text. It doesn’t really “understand” it in a way …
Continue reading ‘Large language models, Homer (Simpson) and my writer’s brain’ »
The game is to ride everywhere, where “everywhere” involves dividing our world into squares ~300 yards on a side and visiting them all, and “riding” sometimes involves what one might call “walk-a-bike”. Sooner or later, you end up in places like this. It’s a pretty fun game.
Welcome new readers! With the current attention on the Colorado River’s crisis, I’ve had a great many people sign up for my blog feed in recent weeks. I’m so happy to have you join our Inkstain community! But an up front apology may be in order, as this might not be what you expected. I’m …
The only thing better than a tailwind on the bike ride home up the hill from the Rio Grande is an air conditioned bus on a hot afternoon. Tailwinds are great, but stories happen on buses. Riding my bike to a meeting with folks trying to figure out how to cope with climate change seemed …
Continue reading ‘The Bird Watches Over a Drying Rio Grande’ »
Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity. Kilgore Trout, in Lingo-Three, as quoted in Vonnegut 1973
Reader Christian Kuehnke writes: Did you know that “fleck” in German means “stain” (like in inkstain) in English and “inkstain” would translate to “Tintenfleck” in German ? 😉
Dude bought me breakfast this morning. Said I was gonna bring him gambling luck. Being an early riser on the Las Vegas strip is weird. I don’t claim any “healthy, wealthy, and wise” virtue here. My money came from privilege, and my early rising is a side-effect of the drugs I take to manage my …
The caption of the picture above is a bit of a fib, but it was true when I wrote it. I had to click through on the picture’s geotag to figure out that it was taken where the Sausal Drain connects to the Jaral Lateral near Belen in Valencia County, New Mexico. Not exactly lost, …