Troy

I don't know any off the top of my head. I guess Neets and I travel in different circles. Wait, what? You're an anti-vaccer too? Surely I knew this, and you fit the profile, but I guess I just forgot. I don't know about that. The NEET lifestyle -- the dependency of an able-bodied-adult on someone else -- requires a child-like mentality. Mature adults can support themselves and take pride in doing it. Adults are not going to just opt into the NEET mentality because the government is passing out checks. It will be used for temporary support for whatever reason, illness, education...

Great story. "...prettiest girl that had ever spoken to me." I love that line in this context 70 years later. Glad it was not followed up with something like. "...and we've been married 65 years." "Thus fortified, I joined the Marines a year later." was a surprising follow-up :-)

What?! I step away for a few days... It seems to me women benefit the most from marriage, as the man is expected to pay for everything and usually dies years before the wife as a result. Sure, the woman may be expected to handle the house and the kids, but often these activities are outsourced, with the man paying for that too. Of course, when the marriage ends--legally or otherwise--the woman usually makes out better than the man. I definitely understand that, but I was financially far less well off. The regular Brothers I know who are most well off are those who were (1) never married; and (2) married and never divorced. Of course it would. If a woman initiates eye contact and smiles, that is the universal signal to come approach me; I'm interested. Period. LOL! Oh no, don't go down this road with @Pioneer1 he does not believe any of the science on this subject--he has done his own research. Here too, a belief in a caucasian "race" would lead to flawed conclusions like this. Sure, there are groups of people: the Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, German, etc who have exhibited a level of violence in pursuit of land and resources that is quite remarkable, but we are talking about a relatively short period of time. Most of the cultures have been neutered and are shells of their former colonial selves. Did the French, for example, become dumb in the last 100 years?

That is a BIG deal! You may have had an impact on white readers that a Black writer would not have had the opportunity to make.

Hi Phil, I'm sorry but we are not going to do the free book review for The Short Happy Life of Wyatt Outlaw, despite the fact that I believe it deserves to be reviewed. The challenge for use is that "free" reviews,, like commissioned reviews, take resources. Reviewers are all paid for their work and of course there is my time. Free reviews are not really "free." So, like many other platforms, we are very selective when it comes to deciding which books we will review at no cost to the author. I trust you understand. In any case you've made me and many other aware of your book and Wyatt Outlaw, so the request was certainly not in vain 🙂 I know that is why I'm trying to raise awareness. With AI it takes very little effort to do this kind of thing. My problem is that I post a 1,000+ word article on an indie website. All the literature today says this is too long an article, as people do not read things this long. More than 1,000 people clicked on the article and if 10% read it that is great. Most of the feedback I've received has been positive but most of that can in via email. RE: Black Twitter everyone I talk to about if from the perspective of what happened to it, does not buy into my premise. The presumption is that my premise is wrong; Twitter is where journalists go for news. ☹️

Would you blow somebody for a billion dollars? It was a rhetorical question, but I know the answer given your other statements. Everybody has their price I guess. Pulp fiction was one of my favorite movies. I’ve probably watched it five or six times. Samuel L Jackson makes Tarantino‘s films, if you took him out of Django unchained it would just be an OK movie to me.

@Pioneer1 unlike the airport, Denver is a very white city the Black population is in the single-digit percentage, but it feels lower. Still the only Black-owned bookstore in the mountain time zone is usually in Denver. Denver is a liberal leaning city.

Yeah, one of my kids lives and works in NYC. Her company handed out masks for people to wear outside. The air quality is categorized as unhealthy, and people are encouraged not to go outside! I lived in NYC most of my life and have never seen anything like this. Here in central Florida, we are experiencing the effects of Saharan dust similar to Harmattan. Man made climate change has exacerbated both of these conditions.

OK Maybe I'm the only one who did not know this (a publicist told me over the course of a conversation). Here's how Ashley Allison is reimagining it @Pioneer1 put you tongue back in your mouth. I hope she gets rid of those crazy ads on the website--it is painful to visit the site with them the type, numbers, and the intrusiveness of them.

There are plenty of Writers who are getting noticed that are not active on social media. Many of the things that people did before social media was invented still work. Why didn’t you post a link to your book? You have a profile here in AALBC why not share it? If you’re gonna take the time to ask people to read your work, make it easy for folks :-) Email me the first chapter and I’ll post it on the site. You can share that too..

The Chat GPT and Gemini allow you to do that too. Google calls the feature Gems. The difference is you can have many of these things across a broad spectrum of domains not just text editing. Again, it is just a matter to time for Grammarly they can only get away with this consumer knowledge gap for so long... Sure, mediocre educators will, because change is hard, requires work and a willingness to grow by challenging old idea. That and the fact the education infrastructure is slow moving and rigid. I presume you mean a "small" fraction. You may be underestimating what one learns in school. Many of the lessons are outside the classroom. I use AI as a search engine. The only time I use a search engine nowadays is if I'm looking for a website as a primary source, say an author's official website. Finding websites should really be the only function of a search engine. Providing answers scrapped from websites, is how Google helped screw up the web. Sure, AI screwing up the webs in the same way, but AI provides answers more efficiently. Yeah, I usually bail once I detect a video is AI. The reason is these videos are so easy to manipulate you can't tell when something has been changed. I'm already very wary of sources I do not recognize, so I always look sideways at an AI generated video by an unknown source. This makes books from reputable publishers a very important source of information. Yeah, this has been done for some time. I know someone who was paid for her image to be sold to be as an avatar in video advertisements. Del pointed a cloned Feynman video in which he had a British accent. I came across that video myself. Since I know what his voice sounds like I could not watch that video without question what else has been changed... deliberately or otherwise.

I guess being "broke" is in the eye of the beholder.

The free version of ChatGPT does that too. I just tell it to proof my text according to Chicago and just tell me what the edits are so that I can input them myself. I'll check that out now. Absolutely! The false positives that an AI raises for original writing is not a good thing. The type of writing you described is not peculiar to AI. The really bizarre thing, in school today, we now have students generating papers with AI and professors scoring them with AI. Educators should consider whether writing papers, outside of class is an effective pedagogical tool.

Well enjoy your vacation @Pioneer1

@Mel Hopkins at the bottom of the edit screen simply click the area shown below, and you’ll be able to upload an image. Alternatively, you can copy an image to the clipboard and simply paste it directly into the Editing window. It’s pretty much the same procedure as before.