Day: February 19, 2023

Cellpic Sunday — 2/19/23

Fandango14 Comments

John Steiner, the blogger behind Journeys With Johnbo, has this prompt he calls Cellpic Sunday in which he asks us to post a photo that was taken with a cellphone, tablet, or another mobile device. I thought this might be fun so I decided to join in.

I know it’s late on Sunday — and yes, it’s still Sunday where I live. I’m late because I wasn’t sure if I was going post a cellpic today because I just don’t get out much these days due to the fact that I’m still recuperating from a fractured left hip and a fractured right humerus at the shoulder. Thus, I’m very much a homebody.

Well, it’s now 10:00 at night and I’m in bed perusing my photo library archives and came across this photo from February 3, 2013, just over ten years ago, that I thought I’d like to share. My wife and I were at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach with our previous dog, who passed in November 2020, enjoying a sunny day at the beach. She was such a great dog and loved frolicking in the waves and playing fetch with her yellow tennis ball.

In contrast, fast forward to today and let me share this photo of our current dog, who just tonight pranced in front of us with a toilet paper roll in her mouth that she got out of one of the bathrooms. She plays this game a number of times, where she has something in her mouth that she knows she shouldn’t, like a shoe or a roll of toilet paper. When she’s sure we see her with it, she’ll drop whatever it is at our feet and wait for us to give her a proper treat for brining us the roll of toilet paper, shoe, or whatever. Cute, isn’t she?

If you wish to participate in this fun cellphone photo prompt, please click on the link to John’s post at the top of my post to see his photo and to read his instructions.

AI Art — To Be or Not To Be

Fandango32 Comments

Sometimes I spend as much time searching for the perfect image for a post as I do writing the post from scratch. So I wondered if some of the new AI Art generation apps might be helpful. The other day I used a chatbot to write a post and then used a text to art AI bot to generate a piece of art that showed a robot writing a blog post. Here’s what it generated.

Not too shabby, huh? So then I decided to ask a text to art generator to produce an image of a man sitting in a chair with a perplexed look on his face as he was trying to make an important decision. Here are the results using a few different AI Art apps:

Thoughts?

Then I posed this question to the AI Art apps: “The sound of the pouring rain outside was like a steady drumbeat in the background as the woman curled up in her favorite chair and opened the old leather-bound book.” Here are the results:

Actually, three of these are AI-generated art. One is an image I grabbed off of Pinterest. Can you guess which one?

Anyway, bottom line question: should I stick with searching for photos/images on the internet or do text to art AI generators hold any promise?

Spam Comment of the Week — Week 7 2023

Fandango14 Comments

I get some interesting spam comments on my blog, most of which are captured by Akismet, WordPress’ spam blocker. I generally do a mass delete of all of my spam comments after checking to see if any legitimate comments got caught up in Akismet’s spam-catching net.

I thought it might be fun to select a particularly interesting or unique or outrageous spam comment and highlight it each week.

This week’s featured spam comment was from Carey Shupe and was in response to my “Adding Insult to Injury” post.

That is a very good tip particularly to those new to the blogosphere. Brief but very accurate information….. Thank you for sharing this one. A must read article!

Carey, I’m glad you found my plan to get out of jury duty to be such a good tip for new bloggers. Falling off a ladder, fracturing a hip, and having hip replacement surgery is, indeed, a good, albeit possibly a little extreme, way to get excused from jury service.

I am adding a second spam comment this week that I’d like to share. This comment was made on an earlier Spam of the Week post and was from Chris Goveny. I’m not sure if Chris is a he or a she, but he/she seems to have his/her bases covered.

When someone writes an post he/she retains the idea of a user in his/her mindthat how a user can understand it. Thus that’s why thispiece of writing is perfect. Thanks!

Anyway, have you read some catchy spam comments that you’d like to share with us? If so, put them in the comments or create your own post and tag it #FSCW.

FOWC with Fandango — Height

Fandango14 Comments
FOWC

It’s February 19, 2023. Welcome to Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (aka, FOWC). I will be posting each day’s word just after midnight Pacific Time (U.S.).

Today’s word is “height.”

Write a post using that word. It can be prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction. It can be any length. It can be just a picture or a drawing if you want. No holds barred, so to speak.

Once you are done, tag your post with #FOWC and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Please check to confirm that your pingback is there. If not, please manually add your link in the comments.

And be sure to read the posts of other bloggers who respond to this prompt. Show them some love.