Author: Fred Rothganger
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Which AI image generator is best?
I recently took the plunge into generative AI. My goal was to make a cover image for the short story “Sofi”. This YA fantasy involves three main characters: a boy and two goddesses who are fighting over his soul. There is one magic battle in the story, which naturally lends itself to an intriguing cover.…
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What went wrong with the Alchemy of Souls season 1 finale
Alchemy of Souls (AoS) is an awesome fantasy K-drama on Netflix. If you haven’t seen it yet, do that first before reading the rest of this article. I really like the writing in AoS. Characters and setting are epic. In each episode, important things happen which move the plot forward, and subsequent episodes keep building…
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Lie Lay
This is the single most screwed up verb in the English language. Everyone struggles with it, not because we are stupid, but because the language itself is broken. Definition Present Past PresentParticiple PastParticiple to place on a surface (transitive) lay laid laying laid to recline (intransitive) lie lay lying lain to deceive lie lied lying…
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Data bandwidth of sex
When you strip away everything, sex is really about moving information from one body to another. In fact, data connectors for computers were originally named after sexual roles. The genders have gotten a bit ambiguous recently, but you can still call the USB port on the bottom of your phone “female”, and the thing that…
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Confessions of Faith
The biggest lesson my parents taught me was the love of truth. They were Christian missionaries, in the business of convincing other people to change their most fundamental beliefs about the world. They offered the one true Truth that stood above all others. There is such a thing as absolute reality. It’s worth knowing, even…
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The Stupidity of Daylight Saving Time
It’s that time again, at least here in the US. I rant about DST because there is something fundamentally wrong with how we do it. And proposed solutions are even worse. Nothing infuriates me quite like the stupidity of fixing a mistake with an even bigger mistake. In order to make the choices more clear,…
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Eulogy for Mom
Going through mom’s pictures, flipping through her pristinely-organized file drawers, I think, “Wow, mom was really smart … and pretty.” I’ve never seen her this way before. I wonder about that little girl growing up in Indonesia, who would jump into the ocean and swim out to arriving boats. Or the young woman standing there,…
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Information Death
My mother died this morning. She was on life-support for hours as we agonized about when to let her go. Was her brain already dead, or was there a chance she could wake? We decided that if her heart stopped again, they should not do another CPR. Then her EKG line gradually faded away. Did…
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Foundation
Apple TV recently put out a show loosely inspired by Asimov’s Foundation books. I was really excited and subscribed for a few months specifically to watch it. In general it is interesting TV, but it does not follow the original material, nor even respect the underlying philosophy of Asimov’s work. We’ll get to that later.…