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…
Bulbs left out by a neighbor. I’ll find out next year what color these are.
I was clearing out rosemary from the garden plot next to my apartment and trying to give it away online when, on Saturday evening, walking to the local supermarket, I chanced upon a bin half-full of gladioli bulbs. A stalk with withered blooms that had lost all color was the only clue for identification.
Some neighbor’s excess made a perfect match for the space my pruning had opened up. I didn’t take all of the bulbs, just five or six. They were in the ground by nightfall.
This would be a perfect little homily about how the universe provides — sharing and caring — except that later that evening I remembered that a cat had shit in my garden, several months earlier.
Instead of moving it, the cat’s owner had tried halfheartedly to cover up the poop — whether out of ignorance or malice I do not know. Thanks to the Internet (which is really great for questions like this) I learned that when a domestic animal has defecated in your soil, you should wait a full year before eating anything from the garden. That was kind of a bummer, especially because I had just planted a bunch of seeds a few weeks earlier.
But… oh well. They call it permaculture for a reason. I had forgotten all about those events. Just kind of got in the habit of container gardening.
The rosemary is at the far other end of the garden plot and it’s been almost six months. The herb only rarely comes in contact with the soil. Nevertheless, we had a lot of rain this spring and the plot slopes downhill.
Infinitesimally low risk is not no risk, particularly not when other people are involved. I was faced with the awkward task of messaging back the three people who had asked for some of my rosemary and explaining that they couldn’t have it after all.
When you have chronic anemia you pretty much always feel fatigued and sickly, so I was able to beg off for health reasons while still being perfectly truthful.
Still don’t know what I’ll do to fill the remaining space. I was thinking of maybe putting in some chrysanthemums or another fall annual.
It occurs to me that this is what we as women do. When nothing else is attainable we at least try to make things pretty. This, for me, is the essence of femininity.
Maybe it’s also why I make my living as a graphic designer. It’s hard to say.
This statue was placed in my garden about a year after I moved in, I don’t know by who. She presides over all of it. Beauty and ugliness, flowers and cat shit. I feel lucky to have a home and garden. Wish I could give more back.