A. I. Yay or nay?

[MauEvig]

Well, the ones with the house are spookier. They do look a bit run down, and the windows.are dark. The smoke makes you wonder if some squatter or homeless person has taken up residence there. You start to spin a story when you look at them.

The autumnal cemeteries are more pleasant by contrast. They suggest a sunny autumn afternoon to me. The colorful trees are also pretty. A person might be visiting those cemeteries to put flowers on a grave, or maybe do some genealogical research, then go for a pumpkin spice latte or some hot chocolate.

I figured the ghost probably got cold which adds to the haunt effect of the house. "Booooo buurrrrrr..." "That sir is a cooooold afterlife."

And I suppose depending on the lore, ghosts are cold right? I mean, there's cold spots, and then I think in Casper the ghosts were cold...

Personally, I'm not a fan of AI. Sure there's a lot of good "AI art" out there, but as someone who does art for a hobby...well. I'm sure you can understand my mixed feelings on that issue.

Also, apologizing for "ghosting" y'all...(pun intended for sure!) I've just been busy lately. Work has been exhausting.

And we lost yet another cat...right on New Year's Eve. It was a rough holiday season to say the least. On Christmas day we took him to an emergency vet since everything was closed and that was the first Christmas we brought home Subway for Christmas dinner. After driving an hour and a half out of the way, who felt like cooking? So I made Christmas dinner on Boxing day instead.

We took my cat to get bloodwork at the local vet, as per recommendation from the emergency vet. And...turned out he had kidney failure. Kind of like Domino did. Except this time it was Talos. He lived a good long life but...it was hard to say goodbye. I just wanted 5 more years with him at least.

To add insult to injury, the bill added up to over $500. Yikes!

So that was rough to go through. We have two cats now, and I hope they continue to live happy, healthy lives.

I was talking about holidays with some other online friends, and thought I'd pop in to say hello.

[Andybev01]

Sorry to hear about your cat, it's always rough to lose a pet.

It is, however, good to hear from you.

[Murfreesboro]

Yes, it sounds as if you didn't have a good holiday season. I'm so sorry. We are having to dispose of a stray calico who was killed in the street. We'd seen her around last year, but not since then, until we found her body. It has depressed us all. She was very pretty and deserved a better fate. We just have so many already (five) that we were unable to take in another. It has made me more tender toward all of them, especially our own calico, who is in my lap as I type.

It's funny, i never owned a cat until I was about 44. I was always a dog person. And I do miss having a dog. But there are no stray dogs around here, only cats, and we take in as many as we can because we hate to find them dead in the street like this.

Re AI, my daughter, who majored in theater, dreads its potential to undermine the.arts, particularly film and TV acting. She believes live performance will always have its place, but dreads the possibility that AI generated performers may come to dominate the other media. She was disconcerted to hear that AI had been used to modify Adrian Brody's accent in The Brutalist, for which he recently won the Oscar. Even though she read it had been used only in those scenes where he speaks Hungarian, she thinks it's a slippery slope and should have been disqualifying.

[Andybev01]

One would think that it would have disqualified him from the running, since he truly wasn't acting at that point.

[Murfreesboro]

I haven't seen the film and probably won't, though I know it's very long. I think the scenes where he was speaking Hungarian were probably minimal, since the movie was made for an English-speaking audience.

I think, if they want to keep the awards free of this influence, they're going to have to make some statement to that effect. Obviously any statement made now cannot be retroactive.

Cillian Murphy had a scene in Oppenheimer last year where he spoke Dutch. I'm not aware that they used AI with him. But the thing is, the character in Oppenheimer was an American who learned Dutch in six weeks to deliver his lecture. If the accent wasn't perfect, that would be believable. Brody's character was supposed to be a native Hungarian speaker. I guess the actor wasn't able to sound like a native.

I studied a number of languages when I was in college and grad school. Back then, the belief was that anyone could learn to speak a foreign language at any age if sufficiently motivated. However, if you learned the language after puberty, you'd always have a recognizably foreign accent. At that time, people were theorizing that something happened in your brain chemistry that made your accent less malleable than it was in childhood.

[Andybev01]

Speaking of language, When I was in the sixth grade, we had a Australian PH. D. Candidate come in to teach us the meanings of prefixes and suffixes, and how they relate to words, and it was perhaps the most useful lesson that I ever had in understanding language.

Sadly , I do not remember his name or if he had received his doctorate, but I'd be interested in finding out.

[Murfreesboro]

It must have been a pretty impressive presentation if you remember it from the 6th grade!