Recent Blog Updates

7 August, 2024. 974 words.

It’s already noon on Wednesday, halfway through my week off, and I’ve accomplished almost nothing.

So for this seventh day of Blaugust I thought I’d write another “random thoughts” post, instead of doing any of the things I planned to do.

Tropical Storm Debby

Well, I mowed yesterday before all the forecasted rain (the path of ~~Hurricane~~ Tropical Storm Debby is expected to pass quite close to me on Friday), so I suppose that was an accomplishment.

This happens one or more times every year to those of us who live in the middle of the Eastern Seaboard. This one looks like a banal storm. The ones where it rains a lot, and the wind picks up for a day or two, and that’s about it.

UPDATE: There were bands of heavy rain Thursday evening and overnight into Friday, and even a tornado warning that I slept through, but little wind.

Elden Ring DLC Videos

I just started uploading Elden Ring DLC videos to my channel.

I technically haven’t finished the DLC yet, because I’m fully stuck on the final boss, which is, I’m sure, by design (based on how absurd it is). However there are about 60 videos, and I’m hoping to beat the last boss before the next 60 days have elapsed.

That first one is a bit special in that it’s the only video I’ve made so far where I took the time to meticulously edit the subtitles. I probably won’t do that again, because it took hours to edit them.

Incidentally, I’m uploading in 1440p now because I think YouTube uses better encoding settings for 2k videos than 1080p videos. I was getting pretty annoyed at how much YouTube was trashing my video quality.

Blog Changes

Blaugust has inspired to me make a number of small tweaks to the blog, as it usually does.

I added a half-hearted dark mode, which will only show up if your OS is set to dark mode. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing.
I tweaked the css for mobile so that the font is a little smaller.
I made a number of technical fixes so that the blog works with the latest version of Hugo. The main one was in the area of the audio front matter property. (It was supposed to be an array, but I was just using a string.)
I added a Videos page to point to all those super popular video index pages I’ve been doing that nobody ever looks at. (Actually I have no idea if anyone looks at them or not. I have very few statistics for my site.)
UPDATE: I forgot, I also added Related posts to the template because I saw Hugo had a thing for that.

Also, I previously lamented that my Next.js blog build wasn’t working, but I got that fixed. The useless alternate blog is now more up-to-date with content. The search feature is still broken, though, which is one of the main reasons I made it in the first place.

Time Blindness

Today I learned the term “time blindness” from Jaedia in the Blaugust Discord. I’d never heard that term before but I immediately knew exactly what it must mean, and after reading a bit about it, I definitely suffer from at least some aspects of that.

I’ve suspected for almost a decade now that I’ve been an undiagnosed neurodivergent my whole life and never known it, and this just adds more fuel to that fire.

(That’s a topic that might be interesting to write about, but I probably never will, because I feel like that’s on the list of topics that’s too private and too fraught with controversy. I don’t particularly want to identity as a neurodivergent, because at this later stage in my life I don’t see it helping me very much. I’ve already adapted to life as much as I probably ever will.)

I even started this post by saying “it’s noon already” and I feel like I just woke up. (But then I slept late this morning.)

But mainly, it manifests for me in that it’s impossible for me to consistently take daily medications, and it’s impossible for me to remember to put the trash out every Friday and the recycling out every other Monday. 100% impossible.

I’m also the dude who wakes up one day and thinks, “Oh hey it’s a holiday today. Who knew?”

I’m also the dude who gets really involved in working on something and then realizes it’s hours later, my muscles are cramping from sitting fixed in one place for so long, and I forgot to eat lunch.

Blaugust Controversy!

Belghast posted a curious entry today: Blaugust and Large Language Models - Tales of the Aggronaut.

I have no idea what that’s all about. My other brands of neurosis makes me automatically think, Was it me? I quoted some ChatGPT logs in yesterday’s post. But I thought I did a pretty good job of distinguishing AI-generated material from my writing. And I felt like I added enough original content to make the whole post worthwhile.

I probably don’t disclose this enough, but almost all of the images I use now for headers are generated by DALL-E. (Except today’s.) It’s just too convenient not to use, and I care little and less for the artwork on my blog. Without DALL-E, I probably wouldn’t have images at all, or more likely I’d write less posts, because every post needs an image if you want anyone to click on it.

Welp I can’t think of anything else to talk about, so let’s smash that publish button. (What I actually do is commit a text file to a git repository.) Also, I forgot to eat lunch and now I’m suddenly very hungry.

Archived Comments

Bhagpuss 2024-08-07T19:23:34Z
I used to put detailed credits and attributions at the bottom of my posts when I used AI images but I stopped a while ago. I thought we were past caring about that sort of thing but maybe not. As for text, I think it’s extremely unlikely anyone’s going to mistake something written by an AI for something written by a person unless that person has made so many changes it ought to count as having been written by them anyway.

If we’re going to say No AI At All, we might as well also ban spellcheckers and kick out everyone like me who just types in plain English and lets Blogger fill in the HTML. Lines are going to be drawn but where to draw them? It’s interesting that Bel chose to use “LLM” rather than AI…

Roger Edwards 2024-08-08T08:42:13Z I certainly think we can all become “time blind” to a degree. Whenever I am engrossed in something, I will lose track of everything else around me. Also my relationship with time and the unfolding of the week has changed since I retired and am no longer governed by work. I do remember bin days and to go shopping etc.

Endgame Viable 2024-08-08T12:30:25Z You’ve hit on the main reason I don’t want to write about neodivergency there… based on my reading, the terminology surrounding it is so broad that it feels like more of a voluntary identity than any kind of scientific or medical designation. Most people can probably claim some level of neurodivergency if you look through the various lists of possible symptoms, but I don’t think it’s very helpful to the public at large to talk about that.

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