explicate: verb. to examine or analyze and explain, usually in a literary context. -ing as gerund: turns a verb into a noun, as in the Elle who Explicates...
This morning while I laid in bed relaxing on my day off, I opened up my RSS feed app to play catch-up after having not read anything in almost a month. There was a lot, and I skimmed or skipped most of it (which tells me I need to thin out my feed a bit), but I saw an interesting couple of posts about AI and people's relationships with fictional AI "characters" changing because of what's happening…
(It's been a long time since I posted. Moving apartments and the awful heat threw all my habits off the rails and it's taken me a while to get back into the swing of things.) 1 When I was a teenager, I read a book called The Gospel According to Larry by Janet Tashjian. It's a YA book published in 2001 about a very smart teenager who anonymously runs a website and blogs about anti-consumerism and…
For the last two weeks I've been (very) slowly moving into a new apartment. I received the keys for New Place on the 1st, and my lease for Old Place isn't up until the end of August, so I have plenty of time to be leisurely about this. The two places are also only two blocks apart, which means for the little stuff I can just walk. So of course, it's hotter than the depths of hell and more humid…
My favorite genre to read and write is urban fantasy. Many people have differing definitions of what that is, meaning sometimes Harry Potter ends up on urban fantasy lists, despite it being children's fantasy. But to me, urban fantasy is fantasy and mystery genres mixed together, usually set in a big city. Example series include October Daye by Seanan McGuire, Alex Verus by Benedict Jacka, Iron…
It's the end of the first half of the year, can you believe it? It feels like just yesterday we were all amazed we had made it to 2025, and now we're half way through 2026! And it's Tuesday, which means it's Top Ten Tuesday. Quick reminder about what this is: The Atsy Reader Girl's Top Ten Tuesday has a prompt every week to share books. In honor of the end of 2026 half number 1, the prompt today…
After work today I watched a mediocre Mark Wahlberg action flick called Infinite . It was released in 2021, and stars, as I said, Mark Wahlberg and Chiwetel Ejiofor on opposite sides of a philosophical (and real) war between two factions of people who remember their past lives. As an action movie, it's just fine. Nothing special going on. Wahlberg is more hit than miss usually with his acting, and…
To start, I am 100% against large language model AI(LLM/AI). In art, in music, in writing, in coding, in chatbots, in everything. I am in the middle of transitioning from Google to DuckDuckGo because of the recent change to Google's search, because I do not want LLM/AI answers or to even see an "Ask AI" button anywhere. I have done some research, when I have the time and energy, and everything I…
This week, the The Atsy Reader Girl's Top Ten Tuesday prompt was to create a wishlist of books and post it so that blog readers could (theoretically) purchase them for you, a bit like a wedding or baby registry. I don't feel comfortable with that, so instead I'm going to list off books I've read that I don't own (either because I got it from the library or I got rid of it in one of my…
Fifteen minutes from my apartment is a stretch of rural highway like a green corridor. It runs between a forested hill and the winding river weaving in and out of view, with the occasional farmhouse and dirt road branching off. The speed limit is 50, but when I drive along this five mile stretch I go somewhere between 40 and 45, because it's so pretty and I want to drive slow enough to see…
When I was a child, one of my favorite authors was Bruce Coville 1 . I didn't read everything of his, as I was at the mercy of the public library (and this was before interlibrary loans were easy), but I had Into the Land of the Unicorns and Song of the Wanderer 2 and would read them over and over again. But the topic of this post is actually a different book of Coville's. This one was an…