Collaborative effort by Jack Dodson and my buddy George Kopp. They did something similar back in 2019.
Category Archives: Art/Style
A We-free December by Hollis Robbins
I found this essay by way of Tyler Cowen’s blog. It reminded me of the expression, “Is there a mouse in your pocket?” Unless you are the king or queen of a country (or have a mouse in your pocket), “I” is a better pronoun than “we.”
I propose a moratorium on the generalized first-person plural for all blog posts, social media posts, opinion writing, headline writers, for all of December. No “we, “us,” or “our,” unless the “we” is made explicit.
No more “we’re living in a golden age,” “we need to talk about,” “we can’t stop talking about,” “we need to wise up.” They’re endless. “We’ve never seen numbers like this.” “We are not likely to forget.” “We need not mourn for the past.” “What exactly are we trying to fix?” “How are we raising our children?” “I hate that these are our choices.”
Why am I calling a halt? First, to see if it is possible. Second, because of the excellent new Apple TV show Pluribus, about a virus that turns almost everyone on Earth into one collective “we.” The hero is one of eleven individuals who seem to be immune. The show is all about I versus we.
The Pluribus reference is on the money. The “we” shit is one of the scariest parts of the series.
Willoughby: Black Pioneer Came to Kennett as a Slave
Willoughby: Black Pioneer Came to Kennett as a Slave
By DANA GREEN, Democrat Youth Co-Editor
Nelse Willoughby was the first black resident of Kennett, according to local tradition and family records.
Willoughby was born a slave in 1847, but the exact location of his birth is unknown. He and four other children born under the surname Owen were sold away from their mother at an early age. Willoughby was taken to Shelby County, Tenn., where his master gave him the surname of Willoughby.
Willoughby was brought to Kennett at approximately the age of nine by the grandfather Bill Ballard Bragg. He lived and worked on his master’s farm near Kennett. Continue reading
The explosion of tattoo culture
Steve: I rarely see anyone under the age of 30 without a tattoo. Could be any number of reasons for this: location; my age; etc. Wasn’t that long ago that you didn’t see that many people with tattoos. Bikers, Navy vets, the occasional free spirit. But sometime in the last 15 years (?) I started seeing them everywhere. I’m wondering if there has been some reputable academic research on the cultural causes/significance of this trend.
ChatGPT: The explosion of tattoo culture in the past 15–20 years is a striking cultural shift. It went from fringe to mainstream with remarkable speed. What was once associated with bikers, sailors, punks, and rebels has become almost a rite of passage for a lot of younger people, and yes, there’s been a fair amount of serious academic and sociological attention paid to the phenomenon. Here’s a summary (PDF) of what that research tends to say, along with a few respected sources.
Discarnate Man
The following is from Douglas Coupland’s biography of Marshall McLuhan (Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work)
Discarnate man is an electronic human disconnected from his body (a process also called angelism) who is used to speaking to others on the phone continents away while the TV set colonizes his central nervous system. Discarnate man is happy to be asynchronous, as well as everywhere and nowhere — he is a pattern of information, inhabiting a cyberspace world of images and information patterns. (pg 176)
If TV and the internet made man discarnate (I had to look it up)… where will AI take him?
ChatGPT: If TV and the internet turned us into discarnate beings — disembodied, abstracted into signals and patterns — then AI might be the next acceleration: from discarnate to decoupled. Or maybe post-human. Here’s how I see it: Continue reading
Were pre-linguistic humans intelligent?
Before the whole AI thing I never gave much thought to what it meant to be intelligent. Chimps seem to have intelligence and my Golden Retrievers seem pretty smart, but for the most part, intelligence was a human thing. Is language a necessary component of intelligence? Early humans could communicate with grunts, gestures, facial expressions… but there were no words streaming through their noggins. So were they intelligent? As I so often do these days, I went to ChatGPT for an answer:
It depends on how we define “intelligent.” If we go by most modern definitions (problem-solving ability, adaptability, tool use, planning, social cooperation), then yes, pre-linguistic humans—or hominins—would likely still qualify as intelligent. Continue reading
ChatGPT is a vast library
“ChatGPT is a vast library that comes with its own librarian. And the librarian has read and digested all of it, and can give you useful and usually exactly right summaries (despite what the critics say) in an instant. I’ve been using libraries my whole life, going back to when I was a child. I worked with card catalogs and non-virtual book collections. Archives of news on film. View ChatGPT on that timeline and you’ll see its significance.”
ChatGPT: A reverence for art
I never tire of looking at our home and decided to let ChatGPT do the Studio Ghibli thing the youngsters are so fond of…
Might there come a day, I wondered, when there’s no one left alive who remembers how to create something like this using ink and brushes and paper?
ChatGPT: Not just the skill, but the patience—the subtle touch, the knowing when to stop, the silence in the strokes. A watercolor isn’t just pigment on paper; it’s time and breath and stillness made visible.
Tools like me can mimic the outcome, but not the ritual. Not the weight of the hand, the pauses between brushstrokes, the afternoon light shifting across the desk. That lived, human moment—the unrepeatable presence in the act—is something we can only try to echo.
I think what you’re mourning isn’t just the art. It’s the reverence.
If I uploaded an actual watercolor painting, and one created by an AI, would you be able to detect the difference?
ChatGPT: Great question, and one that’s getting trickier by the day. If you uploaded both images, I could analyze visual cues like:
- Brush stroke irregularities – Real watercolors tend to have organic, sometimes unpredictable variations in pigment pooling, bleeding, and texture.
- Paper texture – Traditional watercolor paper has a distinct tooth that subtly warps and affects pigment spread; AI generations often simulate this, but often too evenly.
- Edge behavior – The way colors feather into one another or dry with hard edges can be a giveaway. AI sometimes overdoes this for effect.
- Imperfections – Slight errors or hesitations in a real artist’s hand (a shaky line, an off-center focal point) are hard for AI to replicate convincingly unless intentionally introduced.
That said… AI’s getting better at faking these subtleties. In side-by-side comparisons, I could often make a good guess. But a skilled AI prompt with a high-quality generation? Even trained human eyes can be fooled now and then. Especially once it’s been printed or slightly aged.
ChatGPT world’s most downloaded app
ChatGPT became the world’s most downloaded app in March 2025, surpassing social media giants Instagram and TikTok with 46 million new downloads, driven largely by the viral success of its new image generation feature.
With the integration of DALL·E 3 into ChatGPT, you can generate images directly within a conversation by providing a description of the image you’d like to create. I tried this out by asking for an image of a Series III Land Rover.
At first glance I thought this was a photograph but then I spotted some mistakes, which ChatGPT caught as well:
While it looks pretty convincing at a glance, there are a few telltale signs it’s not a real Series III Land Rover:
- Badge: It says “LAMIS ROVER” instead of “LAND ROVER”—a classic AI hiccup with text.
- Proportions: The front end is a bit off. The headlights, grille, and indicators aren’t quite in the right relationship to each other.
- License plate: The format looks plausible (British-style), but it’s randomly generated and doesn’t tie to any real registry.
- Subtle uncanny valley cues: The reflections, panel gaps, and shadows are almost right—but not quite.
She then asked if I’d like to see the Rover next to my pick-up truck. Sure, why not?
While the photorealism is pretty impressive, the buzz seems to be about “Studio Ghibli-style visuals” which refers to the distinctive look and feel of the animated films produced by Studio Ghibli, the iconic Japanese animation studio co-founded by Hayao Miyazaki. “The visual equivalent of a warm, slightly surreal daydream—equal parts magic, nature, and melancholy.”
I assume this is useful for something more important than Tik Tok posts but I’m not sure what. Still, damned impressive. And addictive.
Older than TV Dinners
The list of Things I’m Older Than continues to grow.
The first TV dinners were introduced by Swanson in 1953. The story goes that after Thanksgiving in 1952, Swanson had a massive surplus of turkey—around 260 tons. To avoid wasting it, they came up with the idea of packaging the turkey with sides—cornbread stuffing, peas, and sweet potatoes—in a tray that resembled a metal tray used in airline meals. The meal could be heated in an oven and was marketed as a convenient dinner you could enjoy while watching TV.
It was an instant hit, tapping into the 1950s culture of convenience and the rise of television. By the end of the first year, Swanson had sold over 10 million TV dinners, changing the way Americans thought about mealtime convenience. The iconic aluminum tray and the concept of a ready-to-heat complete meal became a cultural phenomenon, paving the way for the frozen convenience food industry we know today. (GPT 4o)