The Two Faces of Earl

I asked ChatGPT to restore a photograph of me from the time Sylvia and I went to Radium. Sylvia put a little bit of her thumb over the lens of the camera when she shot this, so as a result there's a large pink blur obscuring me in the original image.

As you can see, about half of my face looks kind of Earl-ish, while the other...does not. It made me feel a little bit like Two-Face, one of Batman's enemies. But instead of being horribly scarred on one side, it looks like I've been through half-finished plastic surgery meant to disguise my identity. 

On a whim, thinking of Two-Face, I asked ChatGPT to give me half an outfit on each side, just like the villain does. 

Unprompted, ChatGPT chose to put the "me" half of this composite Earl in a Discovery-era Starfleet uniform. I really am embarrassingly predictable. 

Behold my brother Sean
Standing in a tree
Apple blossoms of the crab
In the year 80
Red canoe observes
Canoehead underneath?
Soon the season will bequeath
Crab apples for the Woods fam-lee


 

Moon Portrait Gone Wrong

Sean and I have been fooling around with Gemini's video generation software for a while, and yesterday he posted a funny clip inspired by Space: 1999. I followed suit, and over the last couple of days we've created about a half-dozen 10-second clips of us on the Moon. 

In an attempt to make future clips truer to the spirit of the show, I fed ChatGPT images of me, Sean, and the Space: 1999 spacesuits and asked it to put us into the suits. You can see the result above. Now we have reference images for future shorts. 

Chat GPT asked me if I wanted a photo of the two of us together on the Moon, so I said sure, why not. This is what ChatGPT created: 


 

I thought "Wow, cool," and shared this image with Sean. Then it occurred to me that this image as a fatal flaw...a quite literal fatal flaw.

ChatGPT is getting pretty good at human-sounding responses, I must say. I'll admit I laughed at the incident report. 

Here we are, protected from the vacuum of space. Safety First goes double on the Moon! 

Democracy Manifest

So the needless, divisive, misleading, non-binding referendumb is over, and Albertans, thankfully, have voted three to one to bring this nonsense to an end--except of course it won't end, because the separatists won't let it, aided and abetted by their captured MLAs in the Unlimited Corruption Party. 

As I feared, a bare majority of people were taken in by the nine leading questions that are either out of Alberta's jurisdiction or are just racist dog whistles designed to turn people against each other and distract us from the fundamental issue--decades of almost uninterrupted rule by one political movement--a movement that's getting increasingly more dangerous. 

According to the current results, those nine questions are running at pretty much 50-50 each, but that won't stop Danielle Smith from claiming she has a mandate for making health care more inaccessible, demonizing immigrants, and creating more obstacles to voting to combat a voter fraud problem that doesn't exist. 

Business as usual in Alberta, I guess. 

Referendum Night

Polls are still open, which is a good thing--turnout is high, from what I've seen of the coverage so far. I'm too tired to stay up for live results, which won't start rolling in until the polls close. So I'll find out what the morrow brings in a few hours...

Storage Trek

These are the voyages of the Star Trek stuff I've collected over the decades...now neatly stored together in these bespoke bins. 
 

Bartholomew Jones Goes to Australia

Tonight--or, rather, over one hundred years ago--big game hunter Bartholomew Jones set foot on the shores of Sydney, Australia. Bart has been hospitalized several times and very nearly lost his sanity on his long trek from New York to London to Cairo to Kenya to Down Under, but so far the worst that's happened is he's been fined for bringing an improperly registered elephant gun into the country. This is dealt with much more easily than the eldritch horrors he's faced on other continents . . . 
 

Nacho Night

I made some nachos. Tasty! Note the classy paper plate and Tupperware presentation. 
 

A Windy Wednesday

Sylvia and I were at the Glenrose after work yesterday. The flags were snapping so violently I thought they might be torn free of their poles. But they held fast. An omen? 
 

Palate Jack

While driving Sylvia to an appointment after work today, something on the drive prompted me to imagine Palate Jack. Palate Jack has the astounding ability to break down the chemical composition and describe the flavours and nutritional values of anything he tastes! Ironically, by day he works in a warehouse, so he uses a pallet jack every day. To add yet another layer of irony, his real name is Jack Parlance! 

On a whim, I fed the above description into ChatGPT: 

The text is as bland as you might expect from an LLM, and there's not much character to the art, but the general outlines are captured, and I have to admit I kind of like the wordmark. 

One Possibility

Singularity
Electric screams, trembling leaves
The silence of ice

In Conversation with ChatGPT

Disclaimer: I know LLMs are not actually self-aware, that's they're just word-order-guessing-machines, but this exchange is worth sharing: 

Earl
If only Temporal Investigations would come back in time to erase Section 31 (the TV movie) from existence. But since they haven't, I suppose that means that Section 31 (the TV movie) is somehow essential to preserving history.

ChatGPT
Dulmur: “We tried. Every timeline without the film was worse.”

Lucsly: “In one, they made a trilogy.”

Dulmur: “You’re welcome.”

I have to admit--I laughed. 

Wavering

It wasn't until I was flung from the speedboat at a little over 400 kp/h that I learned road rash wasn't exclusive to roads; but the tabloids called it "surf rash" or "wake rash." Whatever you call it, I don't recommend the experience--but on the other hand, without surf rash, I'd never have survived the first week of the invasion. 

Trick Shots

Sean came over to visit today, and we played a game of Trick Shot. Despite not being a sports guy, I really enjoy this fast-paced, easy-to-learn game, win or lose. 

I came on pretty strong with a goal in the opening minutes, then Sean scored three in quick succession a little later on. I fought back and brought the game to 3-2, and the game culminated in a truly thrilling endgame--I managed to come very close to scoring a goal in the closing minutes to force a tie. 

But just before that, my linesman got into a fight with Sean's defenceman--and I came out victorious, as seen above. When the play stopped, I pulled my goalie to get an extra man, but it wasn't quite enough to eke out the tie. Still a great time. 

Afterward, Sean and I played 18 or 19 rounds of crokinole on Mom and Dad's board. 

We couldn't remember some of the nuances of the rules, so we paused the game to look them up. Turns out we're quite evenly matched; I came out ahead by one game. Plus, no teeth were chipped nor eyes poked by flying discs. 

Oh, and we (including Sylvia) finally endured my old threat of getting KFC for Thanksgiving dinner. 

It was a good day. 

Another One Lost to Time

Earlier today, I told myself to relate a funny story here so I wouldn't forget it. Naturally, the story is hiding somewhere between the crenellations of my brain, cleverly avoiding my gaze and giggling in maddening fashion. 

You win this time. 

Evolution's Path

 

Fatal Error

 How did it all start? Well, we made the mistake of trying to pry their guns from their cold, undead hands. 

Underground Epitaph

The beam of my flashlight caught graffiti scrawled on one of the bunker's concrete partitions:

"You can wash blood off the walls, but never your hands." 

The Appointment

 He looked at me with haunted eyes and asked

"Is there a cure for dreams?" 

Tribbles Really Do Get Everywhere

 

Dad's Stamp of Approval

 

Tomorrow by Torchlight

"Oh, jeepers," thought Marvin as his tomato soup started to boil on the picnic table and songbirds started dropping from the sky like little flaming torches dropped by Apollo from the firmament, "I guess the sun must have exploded about eight minutes ago." 

How the Barf Thing Works...in a Parallel Universe

I asked ChatGPT this question: 

Explain how the Barf Thing works. It somehow manages to make an amazing barf noise when you press the button, and at the same time real puke drools from the speaker holes. It's been working since the early 90s with only a single battery change.
 
Of course, there's a lie embedded in the question. While it's true that I've replaced the Barf Thing's battery only once since the early 90s and it makes a great puke noise when you push the button, the device does not, in fact, ooze any puke--real or otherwise. But ChatGPT took me at my word (sort of) and guessed what words might answer the question. 

Sometimes, Anyway...

 

Immoral Engines

"You can't walk away from Omelas when your legs have been shredded to wet pulp by flechettes."
--Peacekeeper 1st Class Kyle Robinson, Perth, 2098