February in Books

~ Veselin ~ 3 Comments

February didn’t bring any particularly interesting books to my shelves. I was tempted to skip the monthly summary this month but it would break a long tradition. My alternative idea for a blog post was to write about 4-dimensional spheres. Unfortunately, that idea needs more research and lost. After all, have you seen a 4-dimensional sphere?

Best

  • Fleet of the Damned by Allan Cole and Chris Bunch – space opera that shot above its weight. I awarded it with 5*. Looking back, it’s probably a 4* that just looked so much nicer than the series of disappointments before it.
  • I, eater by Alex Kosh – a 5* ghost fantasy that starts and ends nowhere. Alex Kosh is talented and I hope he gets translated to English one day.

Worst

Now that I look at the list, it’s hard to distinguish any book as particularly worst of all. I read a book that had an average of 1* on Goodreads. Was it bad – yes! But was it worse than Children of Time that took me 2 months? Not at all. It was a quick read with an okay idea.

I owe myself some good books. Or a break from reading bad books. Even the best two above were not something you’d want to remember. Maybe I need to find myself something non-fiction to flush my brain.

Knee

~ Veselin ~ 4 Comments

I did my first true long walk since I bumped my knee into a concrete trash can a week ago. 10K steps in one go and the knee held well. I dodged a bullet this time. However, I lost my shape, feeling as if I did 20K, not 10K.

The bin is now out of the way, hopefully it doesn’t hurt anyone else.

And speaking of trash, a the gallery below shows a pigeon eating steak, Wartburg 1.3, and a cat, resting on a pillow. Sofia is not very clean under our current leadership, whose battle with the cleaning companies shows.

Criticism

~ Veselin ~ 11 Comments

In How to Win Friends & Influence People, Dale Carnegie argues that criticism is futile. Criticism opens the gates to hell, little devils fly back, criticize, gossip, and destroy morale.

Abilities wither under criticism; they blossom under encouragement.

And yet, walking around all day with your zipper open while your friends politely say nothing isn’t kindness either. So while we search for the middle were kindness wins without criticism, remember this cat.

This is the most critical cat in my recent catblogging history. I tried to blog about her several times and didn’t know what to say. I tried different crops, and neither worked.

I know she’s not really criticizing me for taking photos of her but she looks that way 🙂 and eventually inspired me to write a brief essay about criticism.

Rusty the cat

~ Veselin ~ 11 Comments

A story about the 33-year-old cat Rusty took Reddit by storm. Rusty passed away at the age of 33, making him into top 10 of the oldest cats in the recorder cat history. The poster submitted proof to the mods of r/cats that Rusty was real. People rushed to update Wikipedia’s list of oldest cats, expressed condolences, sent love and wishes. The post generated 134K likes and was probably viewed by most of the non-bot Redditors.

Unfortunately, Rusty was AI slop. Rusty:

The post and the bot that submitted it got deleted.

I think my attempt to restrict Reddit to a few essential subreddits like r/cats is not very successful and I still have exposure to something that I wouldn’t even call AI slop. More like farming for free human-generated text for the purpose of training LLMs. Rusty helps me understand why the sudden rush to gather personal IDs and verify humans on social media. All the social networks are vulnerable to slop and risk losing engagement if they don’t put it under some level of control.

Here’s a real orange cat for you, blissfully unaware about the decay of r/cats.

UPDATE: this is a male cat named Pesho, also known as The Son of a Mother. Likes cuddles and bites for no reason.