Rhino Puzzlings

I was doomed from the start to love words. I remember visiting Colonial Willliamsburg a few times as a child, one of those "living museum" reconstructions of the actual, original site. For a bookish child, it offered plenty of sensory wonders (hot cookies! hedge maze! cannon firing!) and scholarly interest (archeology! period materials! hot cookies!) One of my favorite locations, besides the bakery, was the print shop , with its actual functioning press. I was in love with the marbled paper they produced and sold, because a marbled endpaper in a book to me meant it was Classy and Important. Also, it just looked cool. How did they do it without it looking muddy and mixed-up? Magic, that's how. I was the kid that brought home a souvenir copy of the Bill of Rights, printed on "authentic-feeling"  material. So, I was a little strange, I'll admit, but there was something inherently magical about the ritual and dance of the printers moving around the great machine...

I took a long social media hiatus, starting around 2016 and really doubling down in 2020. I'd been quite active for a while, but personal and world events happened, as events do, and I decided to refocus my limited energies. Events kept happening without me, and that was fine.  No thanks, I'm good. I'm over here doing my own thing. Platforms come and go, and the pace of their arrivals-and-departures has always been rapid. Yesterday's Geocities begat MySpace begat Tumblr begat Facebook begat Instagram begat SnapChat begat TikTok, to trace one lineage. One advantage to having seen these rises and falls is the luxury to recognize the cycles, and know they'll come again. It's autumn now where I live, and our rainy season has begun, and the trees are being stripped of their last determined leaves. I know in the spring they will bud again. At some point, there will be a new begetting  in the platform ecosystem as well. "Too big to fail" doesn't apply to ...

I grew up in coal-mining country—see the forthcoming Trouble for a fictional variant—so perhaps that influenced the Americana we were taught in school. "John Henry versus the Steam Drill" was pretty well-known to me and my contemporaries from childhood onward, the battle of man versus machine. This legend doesn't end joyfully, unlike most American stories of Great Men Doing Great Things. John Henry would have been smarter to not go up against such an opponent, but then we wouldn't have the (tragic) tale of a man facing an impossible task, and the promise of a machine that could ease all the troubles away... for the tunnel's owner, anyway. It's bad luck for the hired help. I don't think we were being prepared for this particular world of LLMs and content-at-a-finger-press, but here we are. On reflection, there's a number of grim, accidental lessons of that story like "work hard, die anyway" or more bluntly, "capitalism kills." This ...

Q: Why the theme? What's all this  rhinoceros business? A: Way back in the before times, I narrated one of my old blog entries into the computer. Either the technology wasn't solid or my diction was ragged, but "NaNoWriMo" became "Nano Rhino" and thus my wee spirit animal sprung into being. The Nano Rhino served many as a mascot, cheerleader, coach, goad, comic foil, and general all-around muse-for-hire for the Typewriter Brigade, and all Wrimos feeling particularly rebellious in embracing old school over new cool. Not even the prescient powers of my tiny accidental companion could have predicted the sea change in how us silly, giant humans create new content. AI is here, it's not going away, and each of us needs to decide where we stand on it. For my personal creative efforts, I'm in camp No Thank You. The joy is in the creating, and in using our imperfect, slow, difficult brains. I've yet to see a prompt that brings lasting gratification. I p...

 I have absolutely no pretense of being an artistic wizard. I'm barely a crayon totin' acolyte, still attempting to color (approximately) within the lines. Since I'm self-publishing on basically a negative budget, I'm making the usual self-pub tradeoffs. Writing the book, it turns out, is the relatively easy part. Making it lovely is something that I'm grappling with, and having to dust off the underused corners of my brain to manage. I have just enough vocabulary to know what the basics are that I'm trying to accomplish, and at least have a vision to know what to aim for. Execution is where it's falling a little, let's say, flat. At this point, with one book out the door, my expectations are low. What I'm trying to remember is that the bar to failure is actually quite high. I've self-published before... once... over a decade ago. There are numerous problems with that first book, but, as was the case then and even more now, it was a drop in the c...