Author Archives: Steve Mays

“He’d never wanted kids”

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“He’d never wanted kids. Outside of priority boarding on an airline, he couldn’t see the upside to them. They took over your life and filled you with terror and weariness and people acted like having one was a blessed event and talked about them in the reverent tones they once reserved for gods. When it came down to it, though, you had to remember that all those assholes cutting you off in traffic and walking the streets and shouting in bars and turning their music up too loud and mugging you and raping you and selling you lemon cars—-all those assholes were just children who’d aged. No miracle. Nothing sacred in that.”

—Mystic River (Dennis Lehane)

My brother went to Hanoi and all I got was this T-shirt

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My younger brother Blane lives only five hours away but somehow we let five years pass since seeing each other. COVID was responsible for a couple of those, his schedule and inertia accounted for the rest.

When he sat down in “Barb’s chair,” Riley immediately crawled up in his lap. She does this whenever Barb sits down but –try as I might– I’ve never been able to coax her up in my lap. Sigh.

Robison Family Photos

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My friend John’s brother Jim passed away earlier this year and left a number of flash drives with family photos that Jim had scanned (ScanCafe) from family photos lovingly maintained by their mother, Betty Jane. There are 851 photos in this first album (with several more to come)

The screenshot below is an example of this treasure trove. I made John listen to my spiel on get-them-in-the-cloud-and-let-the-Universe-take-it-from-there. I find these fascinating as-is, with no information about the photos.

“A record of the dialogue”

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In the two-plus years I’ve been playing with ChatGPT I’ve found many of my “conversations” interesting enough to share 127 of them here. It’s a tedious process involving copying and pasting and re-formatting. What I’d really like is a one-button solution that would publish the chat. I can already share a link to a chat (or part of one) but posting to some public space on my ChatGPT account seems like an easy next step.

I brought this up to ChatGPT and it “thought” it was a splendid idea. I even exported the 127 conversations so it could analyze what I’d been doing. And just for fun, I prompted it to use these to create an interoffice memo to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, pitching the idea for a new feature. I was also curious to get ChatGPT’s take on these blog posts: Continue reading →

ChatGPT blog analysis: Time

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This is the latest in what is shaping up to be a series of analyses of my blog posts by ChatGPT. Some bonus links in the comment below. 

ChatGPT: I’ve been through your 44 posts tagged TIME, and I have to say: this collection feels like a personal meditation-in-slow-motion. Where memory had you circling the persistence of self, and awareness leaned toward the immediacy of being, your reflections on time are more like a spiral — looping between philosophy, science, novels, and your own lived texture. Let me walk you through the main threads I see.

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