Nows
[5 January update] For some reason, this set of posts I wrote last Saturday appeared on 20 November of last year. Dunno why. Anyway, right now I am in San Marino, California, where it is finally sunny and paradisal, after monsoons soaked the holidays. Tomorrow I’ll be back in Bloomington, Indiana, which (seriously) moved half its population to the Rose Bowl for the Hoosier football team’s victory over Alabama. There is no snow on the ground right now in Indiana, but it’s Winter, so there will be. That’s my excuse for the photo above.
Feel and Look
First, Ethan Mollick’s latest on AI is thoughtful and informative. It also introduced me to Nano Banana Pro, Google’s Gemini-based image creator/editor. This comes at a time when I have sworn off using AI-generated art, because all of it looks like AI-generated art. My own arc with AI-generated art has gone like this: interested—>fascinated—>practiced—>expert-ish—>tired—>avoidant. That last stage is easy for me, because I have a library of half a million photos of my own to choose from, and I’d rather raid that for an image that works.
I’ll try NBP. (Is it called that yet?) But not soon. I’m too busy looking for ways a personal AI can help me find exactly what I’m looking for inside those half-million photos. And yes, I know Apple has “intelligence” for that. But I think it sucks, and I want an extra brain that’s all mine.
It’s earlier than it appears.
One of my readers tells me another reader (they’re social!) told him she liked it when this blog was all long posts, rather than almost-daily sets of tweet-like ones, such as I posted yesterday and the day before.
My original blog was a mix of both. But my writing streams branched when I started blogging here using WordPress in 2007. Social media was taking off, and writers began using Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and other social media platforms for publishing short stuff. In the midst, tweet became a verb. So I wrote long stuff here, and tweeted the short stuff elsewhere.
What I’m doing now with Wordland is shifting my short-burst bloggings from social media platforms that are not mine to this blog, which is mine: going from dependence to independence. Dave, father of Wordland and much else, is leading that shift, and I advise paying attention to what he’s writing and doing.
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