Dave's Fiction Warehouse

I hate AI, but I asked it to crap out this image anyway. I f there were an app that tracked my personal use of the F-word (and there may be; I haven’t checked) it would doubtless show a dramatic increase over the past 10 years. Every day I look at the news and “fuck” is the first word that comes to mind. Often the second and third words too. Feels like I’m approaching singularity: One day, every word that comes out of my mouth will  be some permutation of what used to be the mother of all profanities. When that day comes, I will convey meaning only by subtle variations of volume and tone.  Fuck. I’ve always been proud of my vocabulary, and now it too is going, along with strength, agility, and the ability to instantly identify film stars appearing in other roles.   I blame Trump, of course. And popular culture, which has embraced profanity even more enthusiastically than I. Dialog on streaming services is now about 38 percent “fuck” and “fuck”-related. I know it mak...

J anuary is named for the two-faced Roman god Janus, who looks into the future with one face and into the past with the other. That's kind of where I'm at, too. On these dark days following the winter solstice, I look at the year ahead and resolve to be better in some small way, even as I look at the year past and realize how unlikely that is. Was it just 12 months ago I was standing in front of this same mirror, vowing to hit the gym, cut down on the fatty foods and take it easy on the wine? I think it was.  Those vows are too easy to make after the excesses of the holiday season. Suddenly the waistband is a little too snug and you've got some acid reflux going on, and a little headache just behind the eyes, and you realize that in a whole year all you've achieved is another trip around the sun with everybody else. It really is time to make a change, you think, and this time the change will extend beyond the first week of February.  Which no doubt why the Romans invent...

W e got around to streaming “ Spinal Tap II: The End Continues ” the other night. Probably not the best timing, so soon after the murder of Rob Reiner. It tended to mute the laughter every time he was on screen as his character Marty diBergi. Still, it was funny. Not as funny as the original; sequels never are. But there was at least one laugh in every scene. And the appearance of various real-life stars — including Paul McCartney and Elton John — seemed like a fitting if unintentional tribute to Reiner’s career now that he’s gone. You had to chuckle at Sir Paul praising the lyrics of “Big Bottom,” and Sir Elton being asked to tone down his piano playing. Reiner seemed like one of the good guys in an industry where good people are rare. You could infer that from his sense of humor and the nuance he brought to every script and genre. You could also infer it from the malevolent glee his death elicited from dotard-in-chief Donald Trump. Being hated by a hateful dolt is its own kind of tri...

W here fiction is concerned, I like history, love time-travel and loathe romance. So at two out of three, Kaliane Bradley’s “ The Ministry of Time ” seemed worth a look.  And I guess it was. In a near-future Britain, a pretty young civil servant joins the title agency to help repatriate people scooped from the various eras in the past. Somehow the government  has stumbled on a way to do this, and now wishes to test the effects on both the “expats” and that pesky space-time continuum (which you’ll recall from the “Back to the Future” movies). Since each of the abductees is presumed to have died in their own era, the bureaucrats think there’s little risk to the timeline. Maybe a bit more to the expats themselves. A few develop subtle symptoms, such as becoming slowly invisible to CCTV cameras and biometric sensors. It’s as though something in the timeline is trying to erase the anomaly they represent. The ministry assigns each expat a “bridge” to help them assimilate into modern...

Apparently not complicated enough for Gemini. F unny story about AI: a few days ago I was building a crude little cabinet with two sliding drawers. I was fiddling with the measurements and grew tired of adding and subtracting fractions each time I decided to change a dimension. Hey, I thought: I bet AI can do this faster. And it did. I typed in the prompt and in seconds it crapped out a cut list for each piece of plywood I’d need. Just one problem: I noticed that one of the pieces was off by a full inch.  I mentioned this to Gemini, and a couple seconds later got this response: “You are correct. My original calculation was in error. Here is the corrected version of the cut list.” Thank you so much, Gemini! You’re a real lifesaver! But you have raised a haunting question: If you botch a relatively simple math problem, might you also shit the bed in other, more important areas? I t took the Internet about 20 years to evolve from miraculous tool to utter shit. It’s only taken AI — whi...