Um, this isn’t a happy song, but it’s one of my favorites. It’s on the ROSECODE playlist, incidentally, if I can ever remember which YouTube account I stashed that link under. I remember hearing about Tupac’s death in 1996, but I don’t think back then I had ever listened to a single song or album of his.
“Ballad of a Dead Soldier,” by Tupac Shakur
Just want to say that today and every day, I am glad to be alive.
These can be benign, like re-creating a classic Star Trek episode.
They can also be used to assassinate someone’s character and reputation. They make it incredibly simple to create pornographic images and video about someone, based only on photos of their face.
Here is a story about to how to detect them in real life:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jan/13/what-are-deepfakes-and-how-can-you-spot-them
Full article at https://www.pdxlocal.net/bluetooth-vulnerability/
“…my cell phone locked up on me. Nobody ever touched it — I hadn’t installed any new apps. It just went dark, with a tiny bit of purple visible. Occasionally it would come back to life, but not reliably.”
“God is the only creature capable of loving everything.”
That is my definition, anyway. Even if it is only a personal theory, I find it comforting. It is so hard to love other people (friends, neighbors, family) sometimes. We often fall short.
If you are new to this blog, I will share a little bit about myself:
I am 45 years old, divorced and a contract employee at a large and well-known corporation. I was an English major in college and a journalist in my 20s. I wish I could write full-time, but content myself with amateur blogging and the occasional self-published work. Got to make a living, ya know?
Actually I love what I do (coding and design) nearly as much as writing. I am lucky that way, although perhaps not in every way. I recently survived a multi-year ordeal of severe fibroids with anemia. You can read more about that experience here. I am blessed that surgery was able to resolve the problem. It has been amazing to have enough energy to hike and exercise again. The unfortunate consequence of the surgery is that I am now unable to have children. It’s ok, in the long run. I could have had kids in my twenties, but instead I prioritized writing this book. My husband later left me for another woman. I blamed his betrayal, in part, upon my long absences and travel while researching the subject matter.
<HINT>The book is about Christianity.</HINT> So I guess you could say I have some issues with God as a result.
God and I are working through those, I hope. Kind of hard to love God when you know that God is only a construct in your head — a limited way to express a living force beyond our knowledge or comprehension.
That’s all for today, folks. Thanks for reading.
Full disclosure — I have a lot of blogs. Medium, Substack, WordPress.com… this site, my startup site. That’s probably not the complete list but it’s what I can think of offhand. These sites are separate for a number of different reasons, the two most important being:
(1) Branding/messaging
(2) Privacy
Why do I lump brand and message together? Because once you have established a brand (be it “the brand of you” or be it a new venture you hope to sell for somewhere at the fashionable end of the neighborhood of seven figures) you have to stay on-message.
For instance, I recently took down one of my earliest posts on lotusrose.substack.com. The reason was that it was an opinion piece masquerading as fact. It made a very broad (and in my view, plausible) assertion but provided no hard evidence to back it up. This doesn’t measure up to my own standards for objective, fact-based journalism.
Lotus Rose is a journalism site, focused on sustainable and socially responsible investing strategies for retail and day traders. The articles are based on my own experience and online research. I provide citations and believe that the work stands on its own merits. While future predictions (such as the value of the Dow at the end of 2023) cannot be evaluated as true or false, any other information cited should have a source, whether or not it is made public. My memory is crap so I make a lot of notes and copy-and-paste a lot of links. This served me well as a journalist for American City Business Journals in the early 2000s, when I published several hundred print and online articles for ACBJ and other publications (including numerous features and covers). I have clips on everything from banking to restaurant reviews. I don’t recall ever receiving a single complaint about the facts, much less any situation that required a retraction.
Writing will always be my first love. (Sorry BWT, you came along 13 years too late.) Too bad the work didn’t pay a little better, or that is what I would still be doing.
Objectivity may be hard to come by — a mythical island of truth, an invisible city shimmering on the horizon of an ocean of uninformed groupthink — but facts are as real as any other construct we can assemble from the abstract building blocks of language.
What is my definition of a fact? Something you can evaluate as a Boolean statement.
Anyway, it’s possible I will re-post that earlier article on this, or another, site. I haven’t really decided yet. I have this week off from my day job, because I am recovering from surgery. It went well.
I will be posting more about the outcome, but I want to wait until everything has healed and I am completely out of the woods. I do claim to be superstitious (and that is a fact). Looking back on the previous two decades, tempting fate seems to be something I excel at. In the meantime, I will be reposting a few other older blog posts that seem to fit better here than anywhere else.
Trigger Warning: One or two of these may address the topic of religion…