Thanks to WordPress’s horrible editor eating my schoolwork, I didn’t get to mention that yesterday evening, I showed myself the first Star Wars film (“Episode IV: A New Hope” is the official title). I have it in mind that when we get our promised new projector and screen, I will show the first three films. So I bought off eBay a set of those three in Ultra 4K Blu-Ray format. Turns out my DVD player can’t load the Ultra version, but it also came with a standard Blu-Ray version and that, on my new LG TV, looked absolutely great. I turned up the sound and watched the whole thing, I think for the first time since I saw it in a theater in London in 1978. What a great movie. And so many little bits of dialog have made their way into everyday use. Not just “Use the Force, Luke” but phrases like “These are not the Droids you are looking for,” and “Let the Wookie win.”
Wednesday 06/07/2023
Nothing on the calendar today. Took the Benchmark Walk in the morning, felt fine.
Paid a couple of bills and did the end-of-month entries in the Nest Egg spreadsheet. I’m down about 5% on the year. This is not an issue in any way, merely an observation.
Also did a little actual writing on the novel. Getting a little momentum, although there is a huge fog bank ahead that my plot runs into and I can’t see where it will come out.
I used ChatGPT4 for a little inspiration. I want to write some chatter among students on a schoolbus, to illustrate how excited people get about the sighting of what might be an alien ship entering the solar system, and also to illustrate wrong-headed or silly conceptions they might have. So I gave ChatGPT a paragraph on the situation and told it to pretend to be high school students and talk about this. It was very willing to do that, rambling on for pages. None of it will get in the book but there are some ideas in what it said.
Anyway, what I thought was remarkable came at the end. Just on a whim, I ended the conversation by typing,
ta mate
And it instantly responded, “You are very welcome. Ask any further questions you like.”
I find that remarkable. That wasn’t programmed in; it recognized that UK-ism for “thanks, buddy” and responded appropriately. I can totally see how it makes people think it’s sentient.