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Shane (1953)
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Film
- Hits: 172
So, in my quest to see all the great westerns, this, yeah, no, more cheese than I could bear.
I mean, really cheesy.
2 hours of movie leading up to an entirely predictable 3 minute gunfight.
It would be curious to take an audience from the day - 1953, specifically, and show them something a little more contemporary, say "John Wick", which has roughly the same level of emotional involvement but breaks it all up with a bit of action.
On the plus side I recognized Jack Palance, whom I remember as the stock villain from every childhood movie. Not "Every", but enough. Which made me laugh, he does it well. But all that means is I'm getting old. And the scenery from the Grand Tetons, which I had to Google to confirm, but, yep, that's where it all was shot.
Otherwise, well, you win some, you lose some.
A Desk
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Blog
- Hits: 147
A Desk...
Small, but it holds all the books I've read the past couple of years.
Which leads to some choices, and I begin the cull today:
Mark Twain, letters...gone
Anais Nin....gone
Henry Miller...gone...
Nabokov...gone
Now, my removing books is not necessarily an indication of quality, it's indicative of whether I will possibly in time return to them.
These are books I have no need to revisit.
And so, all in all, at the end about 30 books, culled from the shelf. The bookstore takes all but three: "6 Fictional Walks in the Woods" - Eco, "Republic of Whores" - Czech, and "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck" which I never read but probably picked up for someone at work and failed to give to them. Clearly I didn't give a f*ck.
And this, the lightest of purges, I could go again, go deeper, I mean, there is not enough life left to revisit every book I've read, and while there are those I want to keep - eg: Bernal Diaz - "The Conquest of New Spain", and I have a copy already, but damn, as sideways as my adventures go I've got nothing on him.
And there are others, and I can see a slight unconscious process at work, clear the debris of my learning and the path becomes clear, this is where I am, this is where I'm going, the shelves are due a few more scourings, but it's a start.
Otherwise, the desk, it lends a nice wooden tone to an apartment completely lacking in character. Oak, small, but suited to the space, it lights the fire under my ass to get rid of the rocks cluttering the living room and make the space "livable", after a fashion, it would help a great deal to make some commitment towards entertaining...
As for my writing, it's taking a bit of a hit, I'm out of internet for the month, a week to go before the new plan kicks in, so as time and the library permit...
Playing with Openart.ai
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Images
- Hits: 140
Trying to get it to generate pictures in the style of Edward Gorey. It's mastered (?? - somewhat) the style, but is having difficulty reading my prompts. For example, all images were generated from variations on the prompt: "A group of police officers chasing a masked bandit down the street at night, in the Style of Edward Gorey." I added a cat to one image. Results as follows:
Anyways, interesting, but not quite what I'm looking for...
More AI Nonsense
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Rants
- Hits: 188
On Facebook, perpetually trying to engage me with groups it thinks I'd like.
Like "Owl Lovers".
Captioned "Great Photograph", which it would be, if there were some subspecies of 6 legged owl in the Sahara Desert.
Pretty sure there isn't.
But you see this more and more, "Dream Homes" - which don't exist, or "Archeological Mysteries" that aren't, and AI is proving a remarkable tool at generating photo-realistic documentation of non-events. And who has time to fact-check everything?
This is where we're heading, where the past, present, and future are all one big confabulation, impossible given the bots writing the content, the increasing gullibility of people that are too busy and distracted to care, the inability to process and sort the increasingly huge volumes of information, of which only a diminishing fraction is true...
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