About the use of pictures in these Logs: The idea is to replicate the way the links used to appear on Twitter, when Twitter was a functional way for private people to share content with everyone who chose to see it. If there's a graphic on a linked page, Twitter normally tries to gank it, though Twitter does not always succeed with the pictures people want to tweet and often does gank useless headings. I'm a little more selective. I try to pick one good clear original picture if the link is to a photo blog. I've given up trying to paste in the computer-generated mock-up pictures of Zazzle designs, because they snag in so many browsers. Untraceable memes and AI pictures...y'know. On Twitter I just retweeted the ones that made me chortle. Here I use Google Lens and usually don't find a source that clearly posted the meme first. It's all fair use, since the Link Logs aren't sponsored. The goal is to publicize other people's content not steal it, but if the content goes viral, well, that's the Internet for you.
Animals
Roads End Naturalist, still on road trip, sees bears and other dangerous wildlife:
East Sussex Wanderer has collected several British dragonflies.
Painting by Franz Dvorak, ganked by Angry Rapscallion...If you carry birdseed around, this can happen. You will of course be feeding pigeons, English sparrows, and starlings, and thus helping them displace native songbirds...
Books
Three shiny new Western States history books for the middle grades. I've not seen them; Beth Ann Chiles has convinced me that I want to look inside if I see them in a library or bookstore:
Music
Christian content:
Three guitarists who were normally marketed to different audiences, caught jamming:
Technology
To this admirably apolitical rant (below the images of stone sculpture in progress) I'll add: A writing client, whose native language is not English, wanted to paste some ChatGPT-generated passages into a manuscript. They stuck out like sore thumbs, partly because they're grammatically correct but wordy, and partly because they switch the fundamental political assumptions underlying the approach to a nonpartisan factual topic. ChatGPT is a left-wing plagiarist. Like that speech writer President Biden blamed, back in the early 1980s.
But somehow I don't think real writers have much to fear. ChatGPT generates endless wordage but it does not read like the work of an author one would want to follow. It's like a very bright, studious twelve-year-old with a computer. Reading ChatGPT's prose makes me think "Very nice, Timmy. Now go back and edit it down to half the current word count. See if you can get rid of the unnecessary words that add bulk but not value to what you're trying to say."
Sort of like the way we know this is a computer-simulated picture, not a painting, because Craiyon and similar art generators don't match the eyes and fingers from the different pictures they're mixing together.
Real people can have extra fingers, though I've not read before about that mutation occurring in Neanderthal. It seems to have started further south. And computer keyboards do seem to be built to make an extra pinky an asset! But on close consideration some of Polydactyl Man's digits appear to be claws not fingers.
Town, Not Going Into
Some person or persons have just worked their way through Bible verses, hymnals, prayer books, and lately a collection of Christian memes, in Spanish at this Blogspot:
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