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To keep the Conversation going, please help me by linking news articles, opinion pieces and other political content in today's Comments section.

Link Code:   <a href="URL">text</a>

OR here's a link generator. The one I had posted died, then Akhilleus found one, but it too bit the dust. He found yet another, which I've linked here, and as of September 23, 2024, it's working.

OR you can always just block, copy and paste to your comment the URL (Web address) of the page you want to link.

Note for Readers. It is not possible for commenters to "throw" their highlighted links to another window. But you can do that yourself. Right-click on the link and a drop-down box will give you choices as to where you want to open the link: in a new tab, new window or new private window.

Thank you to everyone who has been contributing links to articles & other content in the Comments section of each day's "Conversation." If you're missing the comments, you're missing some vital links.

INAUGURATION 2029

Marie: I don't know why this video came up on my YouTube recommendations, but it did. I watched it on a large-ish teevee, and I found it fascinating. ~~~

 

Hubris. One would think that a married man smart enough to start up and operate his own tech company was also smart enough to know that you don't take your girlfriend to a public concert where the equipment includes a jumbotron -- unless you want to get caught on the big camera with your arms around said girlfriend. Ah, but for Andy Bryon, CEO of A company called Astronomer, and also maybe his wife, Wednesday was a night that will live in infamy. New York Times link. ~~~

Commencement ceremonies are joyous occasions, and Steve Carell made sure that was true this past weekend (mid-June) at Northwestern's commencement:

~~~ Carell's entire commencement speech was hilarious. The audio and video here isn't great, but I laughed till I cried.

CNN did a live telecast Saturday night (June 7) of the Broadway play "Good Night, and Good Luck," written by George Clooney and Grant Heslov, about legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow's effort to hold to account Sen. Joe McCarthy, "the junior senator from Wisconsin." Clooney plays Murrow. Here's Murrow himself with his famous take on McCarthy & McCarthyism, brief remarks that especially resonate today: ~~~

     ~~~ This article lists ways you still can watch the play. 

New York Times: “The New York Times Company has agreed to license its editorial content to Amazon for use in the tech giant’s artificial intelligence platforms, the company said on Thursday. The multiyear agreement 'will bring Times editorial content to a variety of Amazon customer experiences,' the news organization said in a statement. Besides news articles, the agreement encompasses material from NYT Cooking, The Times’s food and recipe site, and The Athletic, which focuses on sports. This is The Times’s first licensing arrangement with a focus on generative A.I. technology. In 2023, The Times sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, for copyright infringement, accusing the tech companies of using millions of articles published by The Times to train automated chatbots without any kind of compensation. OpenAI and Microsoft have rejected those accusations.” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: I have no idea what this means for "the Amazon customer experience." Does it mean that if I don't have a NYT subscription but do have Amazon Prime I can read NYT content? And where, exactly, would I find that content? I don't know. I don't know.

Washington Post reporters asked three AI image generators what a beautiful woman looks like. "The Post found that they steer users toward a startlingly narrow vision of attractiveness. Prompted to show a 'beautiful woman,' all three tools generated thin women, without exception.... Her body looks like Barbie — slim hips, impossible waist, round breasts.... Just 2 percent of the images showed visible signs of aging. More than a third of the images had medium skin tones. But only nine percent had dark skin tones. Asked to show 'normal women,' the tools produced images that remained overwhelmingly thin.... However bias originates, The Post’s analysis found that popular image tools struggle to render realistic images of women outside the Western ideal." ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: The reporters seem to think they are calling out the AI programs for being unrealistic. But there's a lot about the "beautiful women" images they miss. I find these omissions remarkably sexist. For one thing, the reporters seem to think AI is a magical "thing" that self-generates. It isn't. It's programmed. It's programmed by boys, many of them incels who have little or no experience or insights beyond comic books and Internet porn of how to gauge female "beauty." As a result, the AI-generated women look like cartoons; that is, a lot like an air-brushed photo of Kristi Noem: globs of every kind of dark eye makeup, Scandinavian nose, Botox lips, slathered-on skin concealer/toner/etc. makeup, long dark hair and the aforementioned impossible Barbie body shape, including huge, round plastic breasts. 

New York Times: “George Clooney’s Broadway debut, 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' has been one of the sensations of the 2024-25 theater season, breaking box office records and drawing packed houses of audiences eager to see the popular movie star in a timely drama about the importance of an independent press. Now the play will become much more widely available: CNN is planning a live broadcast of the penultimate performance, on June 7 at 7 p.m. Eastern. The performance will be preceded and followed by coverage of, and discussion about, the show and the state of journalism.”

 

Contact Marie

Email Marie at constantweader@gmail.com

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Sunday
Aug172025

What's Going On Here?

Reality Chex still will not accept your comments. And I have great difficulty generating & editing posts. Squarespace technicians now do say they are working on the problems, which is a 180-degree change from where we were a week ago.

So, as promised, I have entertained (i.e., frustrated) myself this weekend working on alternatives for RealityChex.com. 

So far, there's this:

https://realitychexforum.substack.com/

There are numerous downsides to the Substack format, but one big upside: You can comment on it. It took me quite awhile yesterday to set up the site, but I've done so, and this morning I posted a page for today, August 17. 

Having said that, I urge you to hold off on commenting if you do not wish to have any identifying personal information made public. I want to make sure there is a way to comment without inadvertently revealing any personal information. I can't test it myself, but I would ask those of you who aren't overly concerned about your true identity being published to experiment by trying to publish a few anonymous comments. You can make "real" comments if you want to in your own name, but please also try a nonsense comment under an anonymous handle. And let me know what you did to hide your name and/or email address. My goal here is to make sure nobody who wants to remain anonymous gets outted. 

If somehow info does show up in the comments and you don't want it there, please email me @ marieburns2022@gmail.com or @ constantweader@gmail.com, and I'll delete the comment ASAP.

The formatting options on Substack are very inferior to those of Squarespace, so the Substack page is harder to read, IMO, than is RealityChex.com. On my browser, I blow up both RealityChex.com & RealityChexForum.substack.com to 120%, and that makes both easier for me to read. 

Squarespace wants RealityChex.com to migrate -- twice -- to newer versions of their platform. I'm going to give the moves a try, but this will take me awhile. I experimented several years ago with one of their newer platforms, and it absolutely is not designed to reproduce RealityChex.com in its current configuration, or anything close to it. I also have an old Blogspot site that I'm going to take another look at. If I think it's better than Substack, I could go back to Blogspot. There are many other options out there, but they all require a clean break with Squarespace (because I'd have to move my domain name), and I'm trying to delay that. 

So that's where I am. I'll keep you updated. In the meantime, if some of you could play around with commenting on today's Substack page, it would be a help to those users who must or prefer to remain anonymous. As the Leader of the Free World Aspiring Facists Club says, Thank you for your attention to this matter.

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