Life in Kana-text (er… CONtext)
I've been playing. It was another blogger, The AI Grandad, whose post about "falling down the AI rabbit hole" led me to exploring MidJourney, an AI program that produces images from the written prompts you give it. This rabbit hole runs deep! For a start, I managed to create a pretty good approximation of Yoda-cat's … Continue reading In Which Kana is Delighted by a New Toy
We've been trying for weeks to capture a photograph of our cat, Yoda, when he goes into that crazed mode we refer to as "bonkers-ing." He gets the most unhinged expression on his face and goes tearing around the house, streaking from couch to chair to high shelving to cat-condo, pausing for a split second … Continue reading Big Reveal: What APPLE Actually Looks Like
"Pearls Before Swine" by Stephen Pastis I never realized that John Steinbeck was a biologist. It's not what he's known for, certainly, and it's not what he was educated for, but it's what he did, for a time. Actually, with regard to education, he left even his English degree incomplete... not that its lack held … Continue reading To Life, and Courage (and DuoLingo)
Baby green sea turtles hatch on the beaches of Baja California on the Sea of Cortez, hump their way toward the water, and vanish in the surf. They vanish for five years, before they return to those beaches to lay their own eggs. In his achingly lyrical Telling Our Way to the Sea, Aaron Hirsch … Continue reading The Turtle-Shell Autobiography
In the course of writing my whale-sized whaling novel, I've accumulated a long shelf's worth of books on whaling, and whales, and wooden sailing ships, and navigation---because for a nerd-brain like mine, at least half the fun is in the research and the details. the whaling "research library" For a nerd-brain like mine, having gone … Continue reading When the Journey IS the Journey
One of my favorite coffee mugs was a gift from my sister, covered all over with "famous first lines" of novels. I have a degree in English literature, and I still had to look a few of them up---I guess they can't all be "Call me Ishmael." But I do think there's one first line … Continue reading On Hobbits & Hobbit-Holes
The summer I was 17, my uncle took my younger sister and me for a live-aboard week sailing around Lake Michigan. It was the beginning of my love-affair. I was already on a course toward Marine Biology studies, didn't yet have "my" lighthouse tattooed on my arm, but was on that course too, captivated by … Continue reading What Dreams are Shaped Like
Kana's Chronicles 