Most of us have heard about psychotic killers, or at least criminals, who did violent crime because they deemed a voice from some thing, some creature, maybe even some person via TV or such, being a manifest of the devil or demon or some other supernatural evil being, urged them to. With people interacting more with apps and devices that can talk and/or text to us back, how long will it be before one of these “voices” be cited as that of the devil, demons, or maybe even evil artificial intelligence, for the psychotic to commit crimes? And what then?
Writing
To Read or Not to Read, for Learning Writing
Early in my writing journey, I’ve come to my first dilemma for which I don’t have a clear answer, and not one I don’t think anyone can provide me with an answer, either. That dilemma is how much should I be reading to learn about writing styles? A lot? A little? Somewhere in between? What I like? What I don’t like? A mix of both? And what else?
How Do You Define Romantic Love or Relationship?
Some words are superficially adequate to define, but are much hard in reality. Two of those words are love and relationship, as in the romantic kind and not familial, professional, friendship, etc. I’ve known this for a long time, and didn’t have any sort of good answer, even, but I didn’t really try, having had an intuitive sense of how challenging it would be to even get an adequate definition, never mind a good definition. I have some quotes about some aspects of what I think they are, like love is the ultimate lottery, or true love is made, not found, but they are not really, or full, descriptions of what they are. The two words are attached here because, in many ways, to me, a good definition for a relationship is just a manifestation of a good definition of romantic love, that if I had a good definition for one or the other, I could probably have a good one for both. Well, today I heard of one. But before you read on, maybe see if you could give an adequate or good definition of (romantic) love or relationship for yourself.
Facebook Blocks News Content in Australia – Consequences & Workarounds
As of Thursday morning in Australia, Facebook has blocked all news content from around the world to be shared on its social media platform! There was an Australian law set to go into effect where Facebook, and other social media platforms, would have to pay fees to news publishers for news content shared on their platforms, either in deals directly with the publishers, or directly to the Australian government. Google has complied, as described in this BBC article with Robert Murdoch’s News Corporation, among others. Facebook, meanwhile, has opted to go the other way, which, as far as I’m concerned, is bad news for Facebook unless it changes because I don’t think it’s going to win this one… and this could be the first step in likely many, to Facebook’s demise. I’m not saying that demise will happen fast or anything, as they’ll go down fighting, but if they stick to this mentality, they’ll be going down because unlike other big tech giants, they don’t have a lot of other revenue sources than advertising. That was partly why I proposed Apple build its own privacy-enhanced social media platform, because they have other revenue streams and can “starve out” Facebook. But beyond all that, here are some other consequences to Facebook’s decision.
The Saved Writing That’s Not Here
These writing posts from 2021 are meant to be my warm-up writing for the more serious stuff I am doing, and saving for writing contests, potential submissions for publication, and so on, where I can’t have them published online first. These posts have also served habit formation, where I incentivize myself to do something, and get some reward for it to want to do it again until I do it without thinking, for about six weeks as typical habit formation takes. Finally, they serve as practice writing fodder. In development from a poor level to start, there are going to be a lot of “garbage” that will have to be produced on the way to improvement. There has to be. You can’t gradually improve from 1 to 10 without putting out pieces of quality level 1, 2, 3, etc. before you get to 9 and 10. Well, it’s been six weeks, so how are things coming along?
Digital Citizen 