Bullshit redux

At one time, back in 2011, I wrote about a Bullshit Generator that once existed. And to be honest, I only sporadically have an interest in this subject. But I have known these BS Generators, which can spew deliberate BS on many subjects, to be hilarious in the way they poke fun at the subject areas covered, be it art criticism, postmodernism, new ageism, academe, cryptocurrency, woke-ism, corporate-speak, and web economy lingo.

Let us take an example of a cryptocurrency BS generator. Yes, a crypto bullshit generator: isn’t that the ultimate? A phrase it randomly uttered just now was: “chain linking air gapped protocol”. Let’s break that down: “chain linking” – essentially a verb; “air gapped” – essentially an adjective; and “protocol” – a noun.

We can construct our own BS generator quite simply: Let’s take three verbs in the present tense: “running”, “reading”, and “flying”. Then take three adjectives: “blue”, “soft”, “brittle”. Lastly, three plural nouns: “cars”, “kittens”, and “volleyballs”. I can come  up with some phrases such as: “running blue kittens”, or “reading soft cars”, or “flying brittle volleyballs”. All grammatically correct, but make absolutely no sense whatsoever.

But that in a nutshell is the idea behind BS generators generally, except that they generally use much longer lists of words in each part of speech. The general idea is that they have to use the parts of speech in a certain order, usually the same order. A more serious example I downloaded from GitHub, four lists of words: nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs of managerial gobbledygook that produce tortured cliches like: “initiate fungibly backward-compatible ideas”, or: “evisculate distinctively customized bandwidth”. Evisculate. Had to look that one up. Looks like the word only appears in bullshit generators. Probably to increase the “bafflegab” factor.

I have noted that the woke bullshit generators have “been removed from the internet”, because they don’t come up in search engines, and my old links to them no longer work. This is sad, because deception and emotional manipulation exists in many stripes and colours, and in light of corporations and Ivy League universities now taking on the mantle of woke activism, woke language deserves their place in the bullshit canon, and I hearby advocate for equal representation of that unique, special brand of tortrured words and phrases that only the woke and a committee working on a corporate board of a transnational company could come up with.

As an asside, a list of woke corporations is available if you enter the phrase in a search engine. Companies that stand out are Adobe, 3M, Amazon, Audi Volkswagen, Boeing, Capital One, Chase Bank, Chevron, Citigroup, Delta Airlines, Deutsche Bank, E-Bay, Facebook, Ford, GE, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Google (and its parent, Alphabet), Hilton, Hyatt, Intel, LinkedIn, Lockheed Martin, Merill Lynch, Microsoft, Mutual of Omaha, Paypal, Pfizer, Raymond James, Swiss Air, Tesla, Unilever, United Airlines, Wells Fargo, and Yahoo. Behold, the thin edge of  the wedge, where large corporations can cleanse their public image, and tell the public what to think and feel at the same time. I could have put Fox News on the list, but I didn’t think you’d believe me.

The websites for these BS generators come and go over the years. I think the idea is that they generate some actual interest for a while, then the sites are taken down after the traffic dies off. One such novelty wasn’t a BS generator, but used the same algorithm to generate Shakespearean insults.

But there may have been a better reason for the web traffic dying off other than just people tiring of novelty. AI chatbots do such a good job of spinning catch phrases of various topics into an unholy mess of incoherent blather, that they indeed are a formidable competitor for being crowned the “king of bullshit”. This is especially true for older AI bots like Chat-GPT2, and to a lesser extent, Chat-GPT3. Their reputation is unshakable and it probably contributed to the demise of bullshit generators, since they do the job of spewing bullshit so much more efficiently and convincingly.

This is time which AI has chosen to embrace competently resource-maximizing niches in order to impact rapidiously sustainable products and morph assertively extensible data into a level of bullshit the world has never known.

In case you are out of blogging ideas again …

I can’t seem to get enough of these automated blog idea generators. I have written about them before. These sites can easily be google’d, and I am not sure if it matters who they are. They are pretty much the same, and if you are that desparate for blog ideas, you are welcome to take advantage of these. I don’t much care for them.

I entered: author, election, fraud, coffee, and keyboard to one blog topic engine that asked for 5 words.

The results, once again, were mildly amusing, and a constant reminder to follow my own creative muse rather than rely on a bot to tell me what to write:

  • Author: Expectations versus reality
  • Will election ever rule the world?
  • The next big thing in keyboard
  • Coffee explained in 140 characters
  • 8 things your competitors don’t want you to know about fraud

Facepalm Newsoids XXI: Old for high school

Facepalmbook. Click on graphic to go to the source of this week’s graphic.

Re-living High School. Former social worker, 32 year-old Shelby Hewitt forged documents to enroll in three different high schools in the Boston area. A woman shrouded in mystery, the New York Times was not able to get officials from the Massachusetts Department of Families where Shelby worked from 2016 to this year, to say why she was no longer employed. She was charged with three counts of forging sets of documents for three different high schools. According to the Times, “At English High School, she went by Ellie. At Jeremiah E. Burke High School, she introduced herself as Daniella.” She had also registered at Brighton High School, also in the Boston area. The police have not been able to determine a motive. Of concern to administrators and superintendents is that, by being in high-school, she would be in many age-inappropriate settings with cohorts some decades her junior. WCVB News in Boston spoke to her father, and he mentioned that Shelby is working through some mental health issues. Investigations and interviews of staff and students by administrators are on-going. (29 June)

Mom Influencers in the News. Instagram “Mom Influencer” Katie Sorenson, age 30, reported to Sonoma County Police about how a couple tried to kidnap her two kids while at a store in Petaluma, California, back in 2020; and then later, making a “vlog” about it on Instagram. The whole story was a fabrication. She was convicted at Sonoma county court yesterday on a misdemeanour of making a false report. She gets 90 days in jail, but must refrain from social media for 12 months, and must submit to warantless search and seizure of her electronic devices. The video in question has since been deleted. (30 June)

The Cage Match of the Year Week Moment. In the spirit of getting in a fight after school, Zuck and Musk have agreed to duke it out in a cage match, possibly in Las Vegas. Mark Zuckerberg, head of Facebook, is 39 years old; while Elon Musk is age 52 and who is not known for his interest in sports or regular training. The two tech billionaires are in different weight classes, as well, with Musk being about 70 pounds heavier than his rival Zuck. Some in both organizations had felt that this wouldn’t exactly be the best use of their time. (1 July)

Blogging about blogging: Using the Block Editor

WordPress, written in PHP, is the lingua franca of the blogging world

This is a mini-review about the new block editor in WordPress. The block editor is a new feature with this full-version upgrade in the WordPress blogging environment. Block editing is thought of in such grand terms by the WordPress programmers, that they have called it Gutenberg, after the first printing press. It replaces a more conventional editor, which has not posed me a problem in the past, and thus I see this editor as an attempt to fix things that were never broken.

When I write a blog article, my subject matter takes clear precedence over the tools I use. I do not wish to spend hours learning new ways of creating articles (which were already being created with the “old” tools and posing no problem) when really I ought to be concentrating on my writing. I am sure my audience, and most audiences, don’t care about what tools I used to edit an article; they just want to do a bit of reading and browsing.

My use of the editor caused many things to break from its first use. I had lengthy articles turn into a pea soup of words and images where the structure was broken. This, apparently, is due to a broken plugin I have somewhere, or something like that, I was told by a forum moderator. I disabled some plugins, and tried to get in with the “new mindset” that this new block editor is supposed to encourage. I look on with suspicion things which cause features to break which were not previously a problem.

In this new environment, all articles are thought of in terms of entities called “blocks”. As I understand it, a paragraph, a section of text, an image and a video, can all be separate blocks. Each block can be moved about, and edited separately. This is not well-implemented, as I had encountered toolbars pushing text out of the way, changing the visual quality from the way that it would end up when you read it. Toolbars would also have buttons turn up in strange places, and sometimes, I was not given the option to edit the code to add such formatting as text color, since the button allowing it was missing. In other cases, I would get multiple toolbars (toolbars would not disappear when I left a block), some HTML code would not be properly parsed, and instead bare HTML code would be shown in visual mode. Sometimes it would correct itself after some jiggery-pokery with the mouse and some buttons on the toolbar, but overall I found it tiresome, and symptomatic of a system that has not been well thought-out.

As a result, I have done what many bloggers have done, and disabled Gutenberg and gone back to the conventional editor that was there before. This feature, however, is a plugin, rather than part of the codebase. The plugin has a simple enough name: “Disable Gutenberg”.

I have never considered other blogging platforms, since Worpdress does the job so well, but I have heard more than once that other platforms have arisen that have newfangled ways to put a blog article together, such as Medium and Ghost. This apparently caused the world’s largest blogging platform (WordPress) to fear for its dominanace, and, consequently they needed to cobble together some new tools that would make it relevant to new bloggers deciding on what platform to use. The bug in the old code is not rooted in the code itself, but in the insecurity of the coders who program the platform. To anyone who is already blogging using WordPress, this is irrelevant. We don’t care about Medium or Ghost, we only care about writing our articles. It also on principle, should be irrelevant to most of the coders, who are largely volunteers on a huge open source project, and are mostly unpaid. I believe WordPress makes their money from owners of web servers who act as host to WordPress blogging environments such as GoDaddy, and I would imagine they don’t want to lose those accounts. So the rest of us who chose WordPress are made to suffer for a conflict that does not really involve us.

If you are out of topic ideas …

People who need a quick idea or have writers block and have to write a blog article (maybe they do it for a living) and are in need of topic ideas, would probably consult another blog where the wrter provides some slightly-inspired-but-okay ideas where you can make the most of the suggested topic, or change it into something the writer wants.

I was not aware of some websites which do one better. Some websites run a page that is nothing more than a blog topic generator. I was intrigued. Some websites generate these short lists for a fee. A free sample at one website (who will remain nameless to prevent embarrassment, since they are one of those places that charge a fee) allowed me to enter three keywords. OK. So, I went to a news site, and chose three keywords that caught my eye: Brexit, flap, and death. The results were hilarious: “10 things your competitors don’t want you to know about death” was one topic that stood out in my mind. Another was: “10 Signs you should invest in death”; or what about: “8 Best blog articles about Flap”? There was one good one in 10 suggested — perhaps someone can write: “The Ultimate Cheat Sheet on Brexit”.

I have never been all that great a fan of blog topic suggestions by others or of blog topic generators. I tend to write when I think I have an idea. I then write and see where it takes me. Something about these generators go against the grain for me.

In Memoriam: Gene Wilder, at 83

wilder_no_meme
The much-memed image of Gene Wilder in his role as Willy Wonka in the 1971 film.

Today, it was reported that actor and meme victim Gene Wilder died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease at age 83.

I’ve looked up some things about the meme from “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”. Turns out that the image is from a scene where he reveals a little bit of his chocolate manufactouring process to some enthusiastic children. A few years ago, social media made a meme of this image, attaching condescending statements on all possible topics, in what became known as the “Creepy Wonka” or “Condescending Wonka” meme. A “Condescending Wonka” twitter account garnered half a million followers, even though the account had little else going for it but its name.

Don’t forget however, that Wilder had appeared in some of the biggest comedy movies in the 1970s, many produced by Mel Brooks, such as Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein; and he also appeared in the Woody Allen comedy Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, but Were Afriad to Ask.

Mel Brooks, Jim Carrey, Ricky Gervais, and Russell Crowe, among others, each sent their regards within minutes of the sad news, via Twitter.

Sounding off on the end of CanCon and the CRTC

I guess with the recent decision to axe all cancon requirements for daytime programming in Canada, the CRTC is crawling toward its own irrelevance. Let’s not be naive, Canadian culture is that much more weakened without the protection it partially enjoyed from American influence. With much less Canadian culture left to protect, and with Canadian voices now playing a smaller role in Canadian media, the CRTC really has less of a job to do these days.

To be more level here, one needs to be reminded that the CRTC kept the Cancon requirements for prime time. In addition, the CRTC cites the fact that television must now compete alongside streaming video, and the world-wide web for quite possibly the same viewers who listen and view “content” from just about anywhere and everywhere.

If I watch a video on YouTube, I am usually not aware whether or not the video is Canadian content or not. Sometimes there are clues, and sometimes the video is so famous that its country of origin is unmistakeable (Gangam Style, anyone?). There is a certain amount of reality to the CRTC’s concerns. My viewing habits have made much of what the CRTC is doing to make me more part of Canadian culture, irrelevant. But then, I don’t really know for sure, because to be honest, I don’t really check whether the video is CanCon before I see it. Same for websites.

We feared the encroachment of American culture when we set up the CRTC. Back then, radio and TV were the only games in town. Now we have the Internet, and the prospect of entertainment and information being viewed on all household and personal devices. Not all of that is American. I would say most of it is. After all, the USA is the heart of Google, YouTube, Yahoo, NetFlix, and AOL. The other players are not quite so big. Also, the USA accounts for an outsized proportion of the Internet traffic in the world. While 43% of a country’s citizens on average use the Internet, in the US, it is more like 87%.

I would like to think that I get “world” culture when I go online, but I watch British, American and Canadian documentaries, and usually British or American-produced videos on YouTube regarding phenomena in science or math. My online mailing lists consist of Candians and Americans mostly. I wonder now if having a “Canadian voice” can be said to mean anything these days? It used to mean a way to air “my” concerns with “my” voice. Others living in my country would do the same thing. And in sum, it would turn out that our concerns would be distinctively different from concerns across the border. It is healthy to know our common concerns as a culture.

The CRTC needs to be reminded that we must hear ourselves or be lost in the cacophony of other voices that are not our own. That is the only way we can have more confidence sharing our dialogue with the rest of the world, taking pride in our identity.

SJ: New, improved and updated

This blog has been flaky since an incident happened which caused this blog to be relocated to another server. However, After about two solid days of work trying to fix much of its brokenness (especially the audio/video), things are pretty much all fixed. There are still problems whenever a link to a video for streaming doesn’t work, and I need to fix those. But most of the A/V files seem to display and be heard. Other blog plugins are also being fixed and improved upon, to enhance your reading experience.

Here is a video to test the “Add Media” functions in the editor:

The questions of our ‘net denizens

From time to time one gets curious about the most popular questions on the minds of people on the ‘net.

If I enter “why” in the Google search, depending on the letter that comes after, I get, through autocomplete:

  • Why be happy when you could be normal
  • Why does Facebook suck
  • Why fighting should stay in hockey
  • Why? For the glory of Satan, of course!
  • Why girls like bad boys
  • Why hashtag
  • Why hipsters are annoying
  • Why jailbreak Apple TV
  • Why Jesus
  • Why Jimi Hendrix is the best
  • Why Justin Bieber sucks
  • Why Kakashi killed Rin
  • Why Kanye West is a Genius
  • Why Lululemon
  • Why men cheat
  • Why married men cheat
  • Why milk is bad for you
  • Why Mio is bad for you
  • Why not both
  • Why nice guys finish last
  • Why Nintendo power is ending
  • Why Nunu Why
  • Why Pepsi is better than Coke
  • Why powerful men cheat
  • Why pixar movies are all secretly about the apocalypse
  • Why stop now
  • Where is Chuck Norris
  • Where is my mind
  • Where do bad kids go
  • Where are your gibes now
  • Where is bigfoot
  • Where can I buy cards against humanity
  • Where do cool things happen
  • Where did God leave his shoes
  • Where was Justin Bieber born
  • Where does Kate Middleton shop
  • Where does Kylie Jenner shop
  • Where is my droid
  • Where was Micheal Jackson born