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From: The Gathering

“Elizabeth!” Patricia slid into the room and closed the door behind her. “There’s a council emergency meeting.”
“What kind of emergency?” I asked. “The one where I can go home, get dressed, pick up a coffee or the ‘Drop everything now!’ variety.”
“Closer to the last one.” Patricia brushed her freshly dyed hair over her shoulder. The iridescent rainbow colors glittered as the strands fell back into place. “The ‘not-president’ is going to make an announcement.”
“Well then,” I said and grabbed my bag. “Another day it is.”

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ChatGPT Ghostwriting

cthulhu is coming

After the last post, I had a thought. ChatGPT isn’t that great at coming up with a story, but what if you gave it an outline?

I wanted a story that had an open ending. Mostly I decided that anything I use AI for I’ll put it up for free (details, including link below).

So I used my CLOSAT game to come up with a writing prompt. Then I used ChatGPT to come up with two characters: The Main Character and a secondary one. As in the image above, it was Jaxon and his sister, Scarlett.

After I used a short story outline for a basic plot. It’s one of many plot outlines and this one is great for open-ended short stories.

Then I had some trouble with ChatGPT. As you can see, my saved chat history is missing. As (almost) predicted, the page crashed, and I wasn’t able to access this conversation. After a couple of days, I could finally access the history and continued the project.

It’s interesting to note, ChatGPT wrote exactly 1500 characters, cutting it off mid-sentence.

I put it in the Google doc anyway, for context.

 

The Result (click to see the Google Doc)

 

There’s no dialogue, and it’s certainly better than the last one, but again, it seems so generic. I prefer dialogue, even if there’s a little, because it humanizes the characters. This looks more like an expanded plot. Something some writer or movie maker can expand into a book. Since I used OpenAI’s ChatGPT to make the story, I’m giving it away for free. You don’t even have to give me credit, although I wouldn’t mind a review for Elizabeth: Heritage Journey.

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Image created in Artbreeder Collage Maker

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Is this the Beginning of the End for Writers?

I’ve had ChatGPT play CLOSAT.

If you never heard of CLOSAT (acronym for Character, Location, Object (of contention) Situation (triggering) Action, Theme), it’s a game that could help encourage writing, especially if you are struggling to come up with any new ideas.

You can check out my first post on the game here.

A few days ago, I wanted to see what ChatGPT would come up with, feeding it the results of a CLOSAT draw.

You can read the result here.

I have to say… Eh.

The story is interesting, but it’s so generic, making me think that as writers, we are safe from losing our jobs, but not for long. The downside is that it’s a little more difficult to tell that a bot wrote it. If someone would have handed it to me with no context, I would have thought it was a writing assignment for school or writing class.

But that’s the problem. If I were to give it more details or guide it more, ChatGPT could be a ghostwriter. Imagine how much time one could save, but how ethical would it be?

What do you think?

Note about the document: Feel free to do as you please with it, but I would like a link back to this post. Even if you don’t, I’m not coming after you for it, but I trust you’ll do the right thing.

 

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That Took Long Enough

A snapshot of a laptop with the raw files of The Gathering and a YouTube video tiled on the screen

I finally finished the edits to “The Gathering.” My daughter is currently working on the cover, and I’m taking a couple of days off before rereading it to do another slew of minor edits before formatting it.

Remember when a week seemed like forever? We are already at the end of the first month of the year and I’ll only have “The Gathering” ready for publishing.

Fortunately, the followup stories are going to be less than 6,000 words. The goal will be to publish at least once a month.

 

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Getting started (late) in the New Year

It seems to happen consistently. The beginning of the year, and an illness takes hold, making me postpone everything I wanted to start, including recording a video a day…

Except that’s not the real reason I stopped two videos in. I’m too much of a perfectionist and I haven’t found a decent video recorder that would limit the amount of editing I have to do later.

TikTok, an app that I don’t care for in general, has a great in-app video recorder/editor. It allows you to not only pause the video, but to delete that last clip. If you were following a script or had a tendency to stumble over your words, you can easily delete that scene and try again.

At one time, there was a third-party stand-alone video recorder that worked similar to TikTok, but then they removed that feature.

So, I’m on the hunt for another app that works, but my goal is within a month or so, I’ll start posting short videos again.

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How to Become Telepathic… Maybe

Neuralink makes me nervous. I mean, the concept is brilliant: Create a way for humans to link to the internet and each other. I believe this would help keep miscommunication-based fight to a minimum, help people with mental disabilities (like ADHD and schizophrenia). And the ability to connect to the internet at will sounds awesome.

Neuralink Logo

What makes me nervous, it that this is probably the Holy Grail of mind control. I don’t think it will happen under Elon Musk’s watch, but he can’t live forever. Whoever takes over might not have the same vision as Elon, and at best, see it as a means to manipulate people for money or at worse, use it to control the minds of people to make perfect drones for his/her own version of an ideal society.

When the creator leaves a company or dies, usually the original vision goes with them.

Unlike other companies and tech, once you realize the evil that is developing around the new CEO, you can’t remove the device. If that’s not giving off mark-of-the-beast vibes, I don’t know what will.

For some odd reason, it brought up a vague memory of me reading something somewhere about camera glasses, haptic feed back sleeve or patch, and the blind, causing the blind to see. The sleeve or patch would give feedback from the camera, creating a low-resolution “image” on the skin. Eventually, the subject caught on and could move throughout any unknown environment easily, as if they could see. But I wasn’t sure where I’ve seen it, or if it was just a dream.

I tried explaining this to my husband, who thought it was interesting, but I got the vibe that he didn’t quite believe me, or maybe he was just worn out from working. So I did a quick search and turned this up: Obstacle avoidance for blind people using a 3D camera and a haptic feedback sleeve

Haptic Sleeve

Vindicated! It would seem I wasn’t dreaming or experiencing the Mandela effect – which was another possibility.

This got my mind going, and I wondered if it is possible to do this with brainwaves. The idea (in my head, at least) was to translate brainwaves into some form of haptic feedback, then train a second person to “read” it (and vice versa).

I told this to my husband, and he suggested that instead of a haptic sleeve, what if you use sound?

But earbuds and headphones would make it difficult to hear your environment, is what I thought.

It didn’t take me long to remember something about bone conductive headphones and I decided to check out Amazon. Bought a pair for $20 (cyber Monday FTW!). The only problem is the adjustability. It was a little big for my head.

But what about the EEG device itself? All those wires and connections, it’s probably not reasonable to wear all day.

Well, Actually…

Muse 2 (not an affiliate link, wish it was)

It’s less than $200, but the problem is that there’s only four channels (two for t). I don’t think that was enough, so I thought I would do a little more searching, and found Emotiv Epoc X for the low price of $849 (as of this post). It had 14 channels and x-y sensors so it’s meant for developers. The site insists that it’s not a medical device, but that’s not what I want to use it for anyway.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Emotiv_epoc_2014.jpg

The idea (at least in my head) was to use the output of each channel to send a tone to the headphones, each a different pitch, adjusting it until the tones do not interfere with day-to-day sounds. The second device would send it’s signals as sound to my headset (probably using phones or a raspberry pi) and vice versa. Then the victi… er… I mean volunteer and I would train with our headsets once a day.

I suspect training would first entail us looking at flash cards together to get the “feel” (or sound?) of the devices working. Then we would sit back to back and try to guess what’s on the flash card.

Since I don’t have the money to do it, I only can daydream – or find some way to make a little over $2000 and try it myself.

 

(image credits)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EEG_Recording_Cap.jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Three_quarter_view_of_EEG_subject.jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Emotiv_epoc_2014.jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Neuralink_Logo.png

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2021.634147/full

https://pixabay.com/photos/the-medicine-study-electrophysiology-4764731/

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.04453v1.pdf (screenshot)

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Adventures in shopping locally: Beef

Cut Beef, Tyler, Texas, insulated shopping bag.

My husband and I wanted to fill our freezer with beef. He finally fixed it enough for us to use. The cover still needs a replacement seal, but since it’s winter, we’re not worried about energy loss.

A couple of years ago, we tried the Meat Market west of Tyler.

The meat was great, but the price was a little rich for our blood, not to mention they sourced the meat from Wisconsin. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but we were working to get all of our supplies from local businesses and farms.

Then there was the butcher we kept passing by on our way to church. We’ve been wanting to stop by for a while, but it’s difficult to get out during the week when they’re open, because of Mike’s work schedule.

We did finally stop, and we got a pamphlet and I bought some soup bones, which made some tasty stew.

But it was another week before we could stop again.

I’ve always thought they were open on the usual business days (Monday through Friday) so when we finally had a chance, it was Monday… and I was wrong. But when I tried to take a picture of their hours, the owner opened the door and offered to help us out anyway, since he was in doing paperwork (a perk of a private business).

We made our order for 1/4 cow to be picked up the following week, although we could have gotten it sooner, but we had planned to travel that weekend and we picked up our order the following Wednesday. I got some free oxtail (the upper half of the cow’s tail) for bone broth out of the deal.

They gave a choice between all grass-fed or grain-finished, or whatever comes first. We picked whatever comes first, because to be honest, I happen to love the gamey taste of grass-fed and the even flavor of grain-finished equally. They each have their own merits.

So we end up getting mostly grass-fed with a few pieces being grain finished.

Half of it was ground beef, which brings me to the price.

Just under $1000 (995) dollars for a quarter cow- that’s almost $10/lb. Granted, local grown beef has a tendency to be pricey, but it was way more than the usual market price for hanging weight for *grass-fed* cows (they don’t differentiate in the price).

If you are rich, by all means, go there for your meat. I highly recommend it. The service was awesome, the staff was friendly, and the meat tasted great! As for us, I will still go there to get soup bones, and probably organ meats, but a friend of ours is splitting another cow with us for considerably cheaper for us.

You can check out their website here: https://www.cutbeef.com/

We also got a couple of free Kozies out of the deal. The insulated bag (featured picture) I bought to add to my collection of reusable shopping bags, but that’s a blog post for another time.