33 Comments

Cue "Irony".

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😃

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What do your nighttime bathroom habits have to do with this Trump indictment leak?

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😂 Well said, a great riposte!

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Terry, you lost me at "In the [redacted]" :). I mean that in the most constructive way.

But you know what? The fact you have so many people commenting on this gives me hope in humanity, in the throes of the mind-numbing blandness of the text people are creating with the help of generative AI.

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I was thinking of you recently, Brigitte. There is hope indeed. [Comment created by ChatGPT]

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Ooh, so ChatGPT does know my name?? That can only mean one thing. They've trained the damned thing on my work!! :)

Hello Terry! I've been heads down on biz dev and work on the latest article which I've finally pulled out of the oven. Would love to know what you think of it. https://themuse.substack.com/p/death-by-a-thousand-edge-cases

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Nice one, Birgitte😂 Thanks, will have a look.

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You may have said this in a previous installment of Experiments in style, but is this series a nod to Raymond Quineaux?

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Indeed, squire. All explained here: https://terryfreedman.substack.com/p/experimenting-with-styles

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Lovely!

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:-)

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Sorry Terry: Boring

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I am surrounded by Philistines.

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Intriguing! I found myself filling in the gaps in several different ways - a great exercise!

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Great! You should put some of your ideas in a comment, Rebecca, if you have the time.

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Like a Mad libs story? The game for children where you ask for a noun, an adjective, a verb, etc then put them into a story for silly results.

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Nice, Jeanne......That's what I came to, and was looking for someone to say it before I did (or felt I needed to)! Make a future one shorter just a tad, Terry, and have folks insert the nouns/verbs/etc of their choice to fashion a whole new adventure for you! The mind boggles (and the thesaurus shudders).

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Thanks, Brad. I will think on't. Like I said, I've been working on a cloze exercise, but I think maybe I'll add more options, and do some oulipian twiddling. Watch this space, well not precisely THIS one, but you know what I mean. Thanks to u and Jeanne

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😆 I have been working on a cloze exercise, in which you have to select the correct words for the blanks. But I think I like the idea of having silly options as well, to see what people come up with. Thanks!

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I'll wait for FOI to kick in and let you know how I found it. ;)

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😆 I was wondering when someone was going to bring that up!

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Another way to read it:

In the depths of the alien spacecraft, I tried to escape (if you can call mindless running in any direction "trying to escape") and knocked myself out.

The reason was that in the twin states of fear and being drugged up with alien concoctions, I was facing in a different direction from the one I thought I was facing. As a result, instead of escaping through the air vent in a storeroom, I tried to run through the weird plasmic barrier set up on another wall.

The next few days brought strange dreams and wriggling sensations under my skin. After much prevarication I went to the alien medical bay, where I waited petrified among bizarre beings for whom "waiting room entertainment" means "playing Jenga with torn off human limbs in front of you", and who wore their entrails as a hat.

An hour and a half later I emerged into the peaceful courtyard, secure in the knowledge that I had nothing and nobody but myself to blame as the aliens were wonderful creatures who had my best interests at heart. I failed to do much escape planning, but I was pleased to have memorised a further 10% of my English to Glafnivek dictionary.

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Love it! Except that the black rectangles were designed to give some indication of the length of the redacted bits 😆

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Wow, epic!!!

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I've always thought that biographers reveal far more about themselves than do autobiographers.

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Ha ha! I was looking for Oscar Wilde's observation that art reflects the viewer rather than the artist, and I came across thi,s, which I think is even more apposite to your comment:

Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography.

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Heavily redacted - like our existence currently.

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Quite possibly.

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It is a pertinent comment on the ludicrousness of the ‘sharing’ economy.

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Indeed. I know some people who share EVERYTHING about their personal lives, including medical stuff and everything about their children. It's ridiculous.

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Agreed

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