I discovered recently that the Roald Dahl Story Company has officially started commissioning new books “inspired by” Dahl’s characters. I guess there are only so many ways you can repackage the few books he wrote, and the next logical step is to start churning out official fanfic. It’s just another of their decisions in recent years that I find a bit disappointing…
Category: Roald Dahl
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Evil.
“There is No Safe Word” – How the best-selling fantasy author Neil Gaiman hid the darkest parts of himself for decades
I read the whole thing, even though I hated it after the first section. It’s terrible. Those poor women. I don’t know how to separate this from my previous feelings about his art. I feel like so many things I enjoyed are now tainted and gross. We saw The Ocean at the End of the Lane in London in 2021, and I wept at how beautiful it was. It’s all corrupted now. Time to toss my last few remaining books of his.
And yeah, I do feel some hypocrisy at tossing my Gaiman and Rowling books but keeping a shelf of Dahl. He was an awful person too, who said and did some pretty terrible things. Somehow it feels different, like he’s historical evil rather than today evil. He’s not actively hurting people walking around the world today in the way the others are. That’s what I tell myself, anyway. 😕
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ChatGPT Did Not Write This Talk
Yesterday I was invited to give the final talk of the year for the Tech Leader Chats meetup group, which is run by Multitudes from NZ. I had a righteous rant about generative AI and creativity, and I think I did a pretty good job with it! My references are below, and you can watch the talk online here:
I also wanted to share the list of references and news stories that I mentioned during the talk:
- “The Great Automatic Grammatizator” by Roald Dahl
- Google’s “Dear Sydney” commercial that ran during the Olympics
- Alexandra Petri’s response in The Washington Post to Google’s ad
- Forbes‘s article suggesting you use ChatGPT at the Thanksgiving table
- The Verge‘s review of Google’s Pixel 9 phone
- The Guardian’s story about LJ Hooker’s hallucination-filled home listings
- The Harvard Misinformation Review‘s article about GPT-fabricated scientific papers on Google Scholar
- The Atlantic‘s exposé revealing that AI systems have been trained on TV and film writers’ work
- The Verge‘s article about OpenAI engineers accidentally erasing critical evidence from a lawsuit
- Study in Nature about how AI generates covertly racist decisions about people based on their dialect
- Bruce Sterling’s blog post about “Delvish”
- Wired‘s story about the prevalence of AI-generated text on LinkedIn
- International Business Times story about the environment crisis the AI industry is exacerbating
- Dr. Linda McIver’s keynote from PyconAU 2024
- Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon
- Ted Chiang’s essay on why AI isn’t going to make art, from The New Yorker
- Slate article about this year’s NaNoWriMo AI controversy
- The Bookseller article about new startup Spines aiming to disrupt publishing
- Issue #218 from Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files
- The Economist article about the AI investment bubble
- Procreate’s AI statement
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Photo Post
Tomorrow is my birthday, and in lieu of a cake I jokingly suggested that Rodd could make me the meat pie from Danny the Champion of the World. He just sent me a photo… ❤️
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The Roald Dahl rewrite kerfuffle
Over at RoaldDahlFans.com, I finally wrote down my thoughts about the whole rewrite controversy over the past couple weeks. I was quoted in the Telegraph article that broke the story, and it was honestly a little scary to get pulled into a culture war. For the record, I don’t support the changes, but only because they let Dahl off the hook for his indefensible and wrong attitudes. Dude wasn’t a saint, and if society has evolved past his racism and misogyny, let’s leave his books in the past where they belong.
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“The Amazing Eyes of Kuda Bux” – Roald Dahl Fans
It’s not often I get to read a story by Roald Dahl that I’ve never read before! Recently I had that wonderful thrill though when I finally managed to track down a copy of Dahl’s 1952 essay “The Amazing Eyes of Kuda Bux” in an old magazine on eBay. Head over to Roald Dahl Fans to read the rest… -
WordCamp Sydney 2016
I’m giving a talk at WordCamp Sydney today about my Roald Dahl site called “My Website is Old Enough to Vote.” It’s about the evolution of the site over the years; the challenges of dealing with 20-year-old HTML; and how I recently migrated the entire site to WordPress over a period of five months.
Slides:
Plugins that I mentioned:
- Advanced Custom Fields
- Add Categories to Pages
- WP Gallery Custom Links
- Breadcrumb NavXT
- My Calendar
- Riddle
- WP-Polls
- Relevanssi
Other plugins I use but didn’t mention:
