Category: Random Mutterings

The default category.

Summer Update: A Graduation, A Trip to Iceland, and Helping Our Daughter Move

What, August already? Rosie and I were looking forward to getting back into the swing of our weekly hikes, but somehow half the summer is gone and I’ve barely gone on any. Part of the issue was that we went almost straight from my son’s high school graduation to an amazing two-week trip to Iceland, where we rented a car and drove almost all of Route 1, what they also call the “Ring Road,” circling the island and staying in thirteen different hotels in fifteen days. I was originally skeptical there would be enough to justify a two-week trip, but boy was I wrong. Bathing in natural hot springs, seeing puffins at the Látrabjarg cliffs, touring caves inside the Katla glacier, beholding the awesome power of Dynjandi and many, many other waterfalls … Once you get outside Reykjavik (which is a great little cosmopolitan city), this is a land of awesome yet primitive beauty.

We were there over the summer solstice, and as close as Iceland is to the Arctic Circle, we never experienced any true darkness. There’s only a few hours of technical darkness, but even then it’s sort of a grainy twilight. It certainly gave us more time to be outdoors! Of course, in the winter it’s pretty much the opposite.

Here are just a few pictures:

Barely a week after we returned, we hopped back in the car to celebrate my in-law’s 50th anniversary, spending a fun few days in the River Meadows/Sunriver area in central Oregon, bicycling, river rafting, and just hanging out. Now that our kids are both adults, I know these times when all four of us are together are going to get increasingly rare, so I treasure them. Not long after, our daughter was moving out of her apartment into a house she’s sharing with two of her friends, so she finally needed much of her furniture here at our house. It’d been a while since I’d rented a U-Haul. I forgot how exhausting moving can be.

And here we are. For those of you who missed it, I have a new Garrison Gage book out. I’m pleased to say A Kiss of Sand and Sorrow has been well-received. In fact, some of my readers have been calling it the best Gage book yet. Is it true? Well, those are subjective judgments, of course, but I’d rather hear more of that than the opposite. What really drives me, whether it’s as a writer or as a cartoonist, is the drive to keep getting better. That’s what I find most rewarding about the arts.

In addition to continuing to publish two Run of the House cartoons a week, I’ve been working on a shorter standalone novel and some short stories. I’m in the process of putting together a new short story collection that I’m pretty happy with. Hopefully get that one out soon. Productivity has only been so-so this summer, partly because of all the life-related happenings I mentioned above, and partly due to allowing myself to get a bit too obsessed about the political turmoil here in the United States, but such is life. Yet even as I slowly get back up to speed, there never seems enough time to do everything.

Then again, as the comedian Stephen Wright once said: “You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?“

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Why I Won’t Use A.I. to Write

Just in case any of my readers were wondering, no, I won’t be using artificial intelligence to write, create cartoons, or really, to do anything creative. I don’t want there to be any doubt about that, and I thought this post could serve as my general statement on the matter. I’ve done enough reading about how these LLM (large language model) tools work (pattern recognition on a massive, massive scale), as well playing around with ChatGPT, Bard, Dall-E, and some of the others to appreciate their possible uses, but for me … it’s a big fat nope.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t use them the way I occasionally use a dictionary, an encyclopedia, or the Chicago Manual of Style (and they’re a long ways away from being accurate or trustworthy enough to be useful even in that regard), but I won’t be using them to create. You see, it wouldn’t be me, and the point of fiction, cartoons, or any art or entertainment is to communicate a voice and a point of view. As Stephen King has said on more than one occasion, writing is a form of telepathy, a way of transmitting my thoughts and emotions to you.

What would be the point of using an A.I. to do that?

I think some people are fooled by these things just as there are people who are fooled by master illusionists. If anything, they’ve proven how far from A.G.I. (artificial general intelligence) we really are. They don’t know anything. It’s very doubtful they’ll ever develop a theory of mind. They’re just stochastic parrots, regurgitating patterns to please you. And while I don’t quite agree with Noam Chomsky that they essentially amount to high-tech plagiarism, I think you can definitely make a convincing argument that’s the case. Sure, humans copy and borrow all the time, and almost all art is derivative in some fashion, building on the works of others, but this is something different. I do agree with Chomsky and Gary Marcus that what these LLMs have done is prove just how remarkable the human mind really is.

Right now, most of what they create is just boring, which is no surprise considering how they work. It’s like taking all the ingredients of a delicious beef stew and putting them into a blender. Yes, all the same overall contents may be there, but I can assure you it’s not going to taste nearly as good.

Even if they could do it “better,” however you define “better,” it wouldn’t matter. It still wouldn’t be me. It wouldn’t be my voice, my point of view, and my decisions. What if it made my life easier? That’s another common rejoinder. And to that, I say this: I don’t write because it’s easy. I write because I enjoy it—even when it’s hard, maybe especially when it’s hard—because when it goes well there is a kind of magic that happens, a beautiful transmission from my mind to yours. It can happen across vast distances of time and space. You may be reading this post five minutes after I wrote it in a house just down the street from me me. Or you may be reading it five hundred years from now in your dome on a moon colony around Jupiter. Who knows.

It’s a beautiful thing, when it works. I’m always chasing that outcome. It’s worth the struggle to get better at it.

I suspect most people agree with me on this, which is why I’m not all that worried about losing all of my readers, but I thought it worth stating my opinion on the matter. If I put my name on something, I created it.  Simple as that.

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Fall Update, Pictures of Mendocino

First, an update on the current book in progress, especially since many of my readers have asked: Yes, I’m working on the next Garrison Gage book. I hope to have it out this year. That’s pretty much all I can say about it at this point, since I’m always hesitant to talk about works in progress, but the book is coming.

In the meantime, I hope many of you are enjoying the third book in the Karen Pantelli series, Dead-Eyed Drifter, where Karen faces off against a serial killer. Some wicked twists and surprises in that one.

In Oregon’s Willamette Valley, we’re definitely transitioning to fall. Although we’ve just entered a rainy stretch, we had some wonderful late summer days lately, which is pretty common in September here, but the days are getting shorter, the nights cooler. The leaves are just starting to turn on many of the oaks, maples, and other trees. It’s one of my favorite times of the year.

Hard to believe summer’s almost gone. In early August, Heidi and I spent a fun week down in Mendocino, California, which is on the rugged and beautiful Highway 1, about a three hour drive north of San Francisco. We drove down from Oregon over two days, staying in the same Cape Sebastian area we stayed in last year. Here are some shots from the Oregon part of our trip.

  • Near Coos Bay
  • Bandon, Oregon
  • Cape Sebastian
  • Chetco Point (Brookings)
  • Brookings
  • Sunset view from our Airbnb in Cape Sebastian Area

While I’ve been down to the California Redwoods many times, this was mostly in the areas around Crescent City, so it was fun to finally drive through the Humboldt Redwoods and the Avenue of the Giants. The place we stayed in was just across Mendocino Bay and had a spectacular view of the city perched on its rocky coastline.

Why Mendocino? It started with Murder She Wrote, of all things. We’d been watching it occasionally in the evening, as something light and fun that wouldn’t engage our minds too much, and we wondered where the “Cabot Cove” episodes had been filmed. The answer was Mendocino, California, which, after admiring its beauty online, eventually led to our latest road trip. Some of the other highlights of the trip included visiting Mendocino Coast Botanical Garden in Fort Bragg, riding the Skunk Train, and of course exploring Mendocino. I’ll end this with some shots from the California part of our adventure.

  • Avenue of the Giants
  • Mendocino Bay
  • Mendocino, in the fog
  • Our Airbnb
  • From the deck
  • Jessica Fletcher’s house
  • Rosie at the Botanical Garden
  • The Skunk Train in Fort Bragg
  • Otter Point

Summer Update

That’s a shot of Mission Bay in San Diego, where Heidi and I spent a lovely five days a couple months ago. We went there partly to celebrate my fiftieth birthday (yikes!), but mostly because neither of us had spent more than a day there. San Diego Zoo, Balboa Park, Coronado Island . . . We had a great time. It was also a nice break from weeks of gray and drizzle here in Oregon.

Not that it’s raining now! The weather has been spectacular as of late, which is pretty much the norm this time of year in the Willamette Valley. These are the months when I couldn’t even imagine living anywhere else. I once told a waiter in Istanbul (now there’s a way start to a sentence) that God created the Earth in six days, and on the seventh day . . .  he realized he hadn’t got it quite right, so he created Oregon. I was only partly joking. I love this place. I’m not the only one either. Here’s a shot of Rosie on a recent hike at Pheasant Creek Falls:

Is that the face of pure joy, or what?

The third Karen Pantelli book will soon be entering production, due out in six weeks or so, and the next Garrison Gage book (I’ve got about a third written) shouldn’t be too far behind. I’ve continued to publish two Run of the House comics a week via email and at www.runofthehouse.net. You can see one of the latest at the bottom of this post. If you’d like to subscribe, Mondays are free. Wednesdays are for paying subscribers, but the annual subscription is currently 50% off.

Astute readers will notice that the website has gotten a makeover. That took more time than I would have liked, but it was necessary. The old one was getting more vulnerable to cyberattacks (the age we live in, alas, even for small fry like me). I wanted a cleaner, simpler look, anyway, especially since I’ve even more fully embraced being an Internet Minimalist. Speaking of that, I’m still off social media. I don’t miss it. That’s not to say I won’t use it again at some point, but for right now, at least, I’m much happier without it in my life. We’ll see what the future brings. I still think the best use of my time is to channel it into my creative work.

And the best way to never miss one of my books, of course, remains my “New Release Newsletter.” I generally only email when I have something new out (there are no chatty posts like this one), so please do sign up. No spam and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Back before too long. Meanwhile, I’ll see you in the funny pages:

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