The issues involved are interesting. I generally think AI should not be trained on human artist’s work without the prior consent of the artists. But my understanding (and I am not a lawyer) is that if the labels win this case, it would not increase the protections for artists, it would increase profits for the labels. So the suits are not automatically a positive for me.
Also: because of my digital archive and research, I updated some of the locations in the original post to reflect that. Thanks for your patience.
Swiss-cheese memories
When I wrote the first draft I just guessed the details based on my memory of events. Since they were 22 years old, those memories were not accurate. What I remembered was: taking pictures of the sunrise, then giving up driving for a nap while Caleb drove, then some time later, in the daylight, waking up to the car running at maximum speed and getting a picture.
Left to right: Jake, Caleb, Brian (me, the author)
After wrapping that up, we pulled into the closest town. According to the map, the closest town to the Idaho-Montana border was Superior, and I vaguely remembered a diner there.
I do remember Jake saying we should fill up the tank as we drove into (a) town and assumed it was the same one we had breakfast in. According to my memory, the next major event was, of course, running out of gas, and Jake going off with the old couple in the RV. I had no idea where we were when that happened; we were just “somewhere in Montana”
Those were the events, in roughly the order they happened, but my first draft had them all happening before noon on 20 July 2002, in western Montana. That’s not right!
Start with what I know to be true
For a starting point, I knew that we pulled over to take pictures of the pre-dawn mountains, and a simple Google search showed that sunrise in Montana on 20 July was at 5:46 AM. Roughly that placed us on the map, give or take.
Sunrise on the Idaho-Montana border.
I had pictures from that trip. Digital pictures that were saved in my Photos library and therefore available right on my iPhone. Those photos followed me, from my old iBook back in 2002 down through the years and many laptops and phones, to my current iPhone 13 Mini. Gotta admit that’s kind of cool!
The camera was an Olympus Camedia C-220, Zoom (yes that was its name). It did not have location or time data capability; consumer electronics did not have that feature back then. I added location data later, in iPhoto on my Mac when Apple added that feature, and I tagged them by date taken, but beyond that the only information was in the pictures themselves.
Back to my photo library, where a search for “Montana” revealed a picture of the speeding ticket! OCR on my phone is a miracle when it works. This was a huge score. So much good info preserved there, including the time the ticket was written: 10:25 AM. This told me that we had continued for at least five hours after sunrise. That means we were a minimum of 400 miles east (assuming 90-100 MPH sustained) of the Idaho-Montana border on I-90, which puts that speeding stop about 50 miles west of Billings.
Triangulating from there
Stranded in Montana… but where?
Next, comparing the odometer in both of the pictures referenced above, we put 295 miles on the rental between the two pictures. So, where did we run out of gas? I found another image from that day in 2002 of me, standing next to the trunk, with a gas can on the ground (Caleb or Jake had taken the picture; probably Caleb). On the right edge of the frame is an exit sign: Exit 5something.
The exits on I-90 in Montana are numbered low to high, west to east, and I knew our gas stop was closer to the eastern border than the western. Looking at a list of exits for that highway, I found only one viable candidate: Exit 544, for Wyola, MT. I looked it up in Google and used Street View and confirmed: that was absolutely the same place. I even clicked down to the bottom of the off-ramp and saw the sign I clearly remembered: No services.
No Services
Wyola is less than 100 miles by car from Billings, and the maximum range on that Subaru Legacy was more than 300. Where did we last fill up the tank? It couldn’t have been Billings. We must have stopped somewhere else west of Billings for lunch or something else. Where were we when Jake reminded us to fill up while driving in? 320 miles west of Wyola is Butte, and it’s hard to imagine three guys on a road trip not stopping in a city called Butte. Right? That’s where we had our lunch.
Finally, to satisfy my curiosity, I looked at restaurants in Butte to see if I recognized one. I found an Annie’s Cafe, which very much feels like the kind of place we would choose, but the user-submitted pictures do not ring a bell for me. Change is inevitable in two decades, yeah?
PostScript: Full Chronological Order
All events listed occurred on 20 July 2002
5:30 AM – We pull over just past the Idaho-Montana border, near Sohon, MT, and take pictures of ourselves and the sky before sunrise.
9:00 AM – We stop in Butte, MT (hehe, butt) for breakfast and gas.
10:00 AM – Approximate time we pegged the speedometer at over 120 MPH indicated, west of Billings, MT.
10:25 AM – Montana State Trooper pulls us over and cites us for “Exceed(ing) the posted speed limit by (more than) 25 MPH” @ 92.5 MPH. Fine paid: US$40.00, cash
11:30 AM – Approximate time we arrived in Billings. Jake reminded us to fill up the tank. We did not.
11:30 AM – 12:30 PM – lunch break in Billings. Establishment unknown.
1:30 PM – Approximate time we ran out of gas, at Exit 544, near “No Services” Wyola, MT.
I’m in “prep new D&D campaign material” mode because I’ve got a game in two weeks. I’ve been prodding my players about what they plan on doing so I can be ready with material for them. Honestly I just need an encounter or two plus some lore and rumor drops to get them started, I don’t need much.
But I am also prepping maps for locations they might visit. I’m working on a map of the big city in my campaign, Kopno’domas. It’s going to be my Viriconium, my Waterdeep, my Lankhmar. The greatest city in the world. A big sprawling urban setting filled with shining palaces, grungy back allies, and buccolic pastures, decadent and squalid in roughly equal measure, spanning a lively river and nestled up against a small mountain range. This city has lived in my head for almost 15 years and I’m excited to put it on the table for the players to see. It’s not real if it’s just notes; only what happens at the table counts.
If that sounds like I’m overprepping, let me expand on that a bit. Sure, mapping out a location on the possibility of characters going there might take a lot of time. But in this case I am working off of those aforementioned 15 years of dreaming, which means 15 years of sketches, notes, revisions, and additions. A pile of neighborhood names, perusing the google results for “how many people per building in Medieval Europe.” Notes about noble houses, their goals and schemes. Random tables about urban encounters and “what building is that?” Me writing flash fiction set there. It’s largely just me taking those notes, picking the ideas I like, and crafting a cool map in Inkarnate.
(Side note: I’m taking notes on this map while I make it; I plan on turning those notes in to a nice long “How to map a city in Inkarnate” post down the road.)
Just Start, Over and Over
I’ve spent, however, most of today creating new maps in Inkarnate, fiddling around with settings, not liking it, deleting it and starting over. I don’t know why I am having such a mental block about this? I kept quibbling about the various different versions I’ve sketched out of this fictional place and how they don’t all match. Can I make them match? Should I honor the earlier versions, or just wing it and make up something new? Can I reconcile the versions, or can I retcon the earlier ones with some kind of obfuscation?
I suspect it’s my perfectionist nature. If I can’t make the perfect map for this imaginary city no one cares about but me, then why even bother? Don’t answer that, it’s a rhetorical question. I know the answer already.
Having an imperfect thing is better than not having a thing at all. And my players won’t be judging the map on their ideal version of this city they’ve never thought about before; they’re just going to be happy to be in this city, stomping around and getting in to Good Trouble.
Navigating the Territory
Always a lesson for me when I stop to examine what I’m doing. This time the lesson is: give yourself the permission to be imperfect. Relax your standards and just start. Get something down, mess around with it, and put it into play. none of the notes are the game. None of the rules and books are the game. Even the character sheets aren’t the game. The game is what happens when we all sit at the table, talk to each other, bounce off each others’ ideas, and see how the dice are rolling tonight.
Kopno’domas started in my imagination but it won’t be a real place until me and the players have adventures in it. My maps, my notes, are just a guidepost, pointing in the direction of the gameplay. The map is not the territory.
Hey all! I think I want to start reading other blogs again. Way back when Google Reader was a thing (RIP in peace, Google Reader) I had a list of blogs and news sites that I would go through daily. A lot of them were leftist political blogs, some were technology blogs, but there were also blogs like mine: blogs written by a single author, with no specific central focus on a topic. Blogs of essays, thoughts, sharing interesting headlines, commentary on other news articles. That kind of thing.
I stopped getting my news and opinions that way when Twitter became a thing, but now that Twitter is owned by a lunatic right-wing hoarder (RIP in peace, Twitter), I don’t do that anymore. I replaced Twitter with Imgur, Mastodon, and TikTok but they don’t really fill the gap of medium- to long-form writing.
The only other major example that’s still current of a site like mine is John Scalzi’s Whatever, although with him being a published and accomplished author, there is somewhat of a focus on sci-fi, publishing, and media. Still a great read.
If you’re reading this post, could you drop into the comments, or find me on Mastodon, and share other blogs like this you know about and enjoy?
Likewise, if you’re here, could you share what aspects of my blog you enjoy the most? Are there topics I cover that you would love to see more of? Favorite specific posts?
Thank you so much! You reading these words is absolutely the highest compliment I could get.
I was complaining to my bestie Tracy that I had no idea what I should write about tonight. I’m writing this early because I have a D&D game later, in about an hour and a half. So to make sure I post something, I opened up my text editor and stared at the screen and realized that a) my mind was blank, and b) if I want to write topical posts for a wide variety of audiences, I need to be able to come up with good post ideas, lots of them, quickly.
The downside to having a blog that is just “whatever in the Hell I want to post about” is that I have so many options that it’s like having no options at all. If this were a sports blog, I could just write something about any of the many many many sports games that happened today, or the general news, or follow-up on previous topics. If this was a gaming blog, I could piggy-back off the narrow focus to come up with something to write about. While I am working on a more specific blog (coming soon) this place does not have that restriction. So, sometimes, I sit down and flounder.
Which led me to the idea: write about how to come up with blog post ideas. Easy-peasy! If nothing else I can rant about not feeling creative lately, but if I do a little research, I might come up with a strategy, a process, one that works for me.
Because I’ve been on this new blogging kick, the Algorithm has taken notice and has started to feed me Content about blogging, writing, and freelancing. Earlier today it surfaced a video from a creator about making money using Google News, which got me to click and watch. Turns out, the idea was “find today’s top story on a topic you know about, paste the contents into a Large Language Model (LLM) “paraphraser” (and those should be double-heavy-extra scare quotes, because, really) and then sell that paraphrased article to some other content mill. That’s not something I would do.
I mean, maybe, if my blog were about summarizing news for people, I might take a look at the top headlines and rewrite it myself, but I would absolutely not use an LLM for that. The video creator (whom I will not link because don’t want to encourage that behavior) did say to re-read what you get back from the summarizer, because that’s why they advised finding a topic you know about… still.
But the basic idea of scanning today’s headlines is a good one for finding out what everyone is talking about, I suppose. That would be great if this were a “recent news” kind of blog, instead of a “spontaneous unedited opinions of Some Random Guy on the Internet” kind of blog.
I have been using Google Analytics and Google Search Console on my recent blog-push, and it’s hilarious to me what kinds of search terms lead people here. A big one is “chicken butt shirt” for example, because way way way back in the day I posted about a cool and funny button I bought off the internet. “Guess what?” “Chicken butt” is a phrase I and my bestie use frequently. But, like, can I turn that in to a blog post? Could I get 1000-1500 words out of that? No, I don’t think I could.
What else does Google say people like about the blog? Well, another top search term is “Bettie Bondage” which, in this site’s case, leads to a movie review I posted a long time about about a biopic of Bettie Page. Again, I’m grateful for the traffic but if I used that as a basis for future content this might become an NSFW blog.
Not that there’s anything wrong with those. Just not really what I’m aiming for here. I’d start a new blog for that kind of content (note to self: look into starting a new blog for that kind of content. I hear it’s a sure money-maker.)
Not sure where that leaves me. Let’s stick a pin in this. Maybe I’ll do some actual research and write up a “how to keep your blog swimming in content” article.
This blog has been up and in existence in some form or another for over 20 years. Over that time it’s run on several different platforms: first on Blogger, then on a bespoke CMS written by a friend, hosted on that friend’s server, and finally, when that friend moved away, hosted on a Mac mini I plugged in whereever I could, then, eventually, imported into WordPress and migrated from whatever hosting service sucks less and costs the least amount (currently Bluehost.)
When I started this whole thing, it was just a place for me to dump my random thoughts on whatever I wanted to talk about. I never designed this place for consistency and I never had an eye to making money from it, be it by getting sponsors or affiliates, putting ads up, or soliciting for digital downloads and media (although there was a desperate period in my life when I did try putting ads here, which failed because of the low low traffic.)
While I love everyone who comes here to read anything I say, there aren’t enough of you to make it worth it to Google for monetization. Don’t get me wrong on this. At the highest traffic levels for this space, I was getting about 200 hits per day, and I was posting nearly daily. To me, having 200 people care about my work is amazing and humbling! If I were standing in front of a crowd of 200 people who cared about the words I write, I would be beyond happy. But those numbers are peanuts to the internet, even for the time (this was a decade ago), and especially now.
But I do kinda care about reaching a larger audience, and one of the technical problems that I would need to fix, according to Google, is broken links. And with all the years of posting, holy shit are there a shit-ton of broken links, some of which I have no way to fix beyond deleting them or noting them as broken in the present day. I have spent hours going back through old posts checking links and fixing the ones I can, but let me tell you, manually doing that for (including this post) 2590 published posts over 21 years is a lot of work.
There’s another category of broken links, though. For a while, my post permalinks used the scheme of bamoon.com/year/month/day/post-title.php. I think there are perhaps 50-100 of those, from a previous WordPress configuration. Eventually I switched to bamoon.com/post-title/ Because these follow a regular pattern, I know that I could probably use a script to go through the posts and the database and update them all. But I am not a strong coder. I also know that one can use a feature of Apache and add lines to the .htaccess file to re-write the requests one-by-one as users request them. But, again, that means regex and scripting, not my strong suit.
Here comes ChatGPT, though. It’s not good at so many things, like making sure people have only four fingers and one thumb on each of two hands, but people (like Molly White) say it’s brilliant at scripts and coding. So I asked it for help. It gave me solutions for both cases. Great! I have a staging site I can test these on, so it won’t break the main site. But… one last question, ChatGPT: which solution is better?
And I feel like it punted. It said both are good, and I should implement both. The database fix is more permanent; the .htaccess rewrite is immediate and invisible to the reader.
Looks like ChatGPT is an Option D (all of the above) kind of bot.
I forgot to write a 500 word post yesterday. I guess 10 is the number to beat going forward. Like many of my similarly-brained cohort, I’m a perfectionist and stickler for detail, so missing a day when I was aiming for a long unbroken streak is like a pebble in my shoe, a ringing in my ear, a mote in my eye. Irritating, nagging, infernal. I felt a flood of emotion when I realized a day had passed without me meeting the goal I had set for myself.
The streak is broken. I failed. It’s over. Might as well stop trying. I’m no good. I can’t do this. Why bother?
Why bother? Why am I doing this in the first place? What was my reason, and does missing a day invalidate that reason?
OK, then. The reasons I started this new daily streak. Let’s dig in.
I’ve done this before. There’s a tag on this post that I’ve used before, “Daily Story Project“. It’s been a thing on this blog going back a long way. I keep trying to do this. I read about streaks, I live for streaks. Keeping a streak going is sometimes all the motivation I need to keep doing a thing. There are folks out there like Jonathan Mann who has written a song every day for (as I type this) for 16 years and 103 days; 5,581 days in a row. That’s impressive! On one level it’s a challenge to see if I could create something new using my preferred method of creating (writing) for even a tenth as long, even 1% as long.
The only thing I’ve done daily is… I was going to say “wake up and get out of bed” but then I remember days, bad brain days, where I did not get out of bed. I couldn’t tell you my longest streak, though; that’s not something I keep track of. For the better, of course.
If I weren’t just trying to hit 500 words right now I’d go look up the longest once-a-day streak I’ve ever maintained on this blog. But I don’t really care. A reason I’m doing this is to add to this blog, to see who will come if I build it, to turn the Field of Dreams tagline around a bit. But that’s writing for others. I write for myself. If having an audience was important to my creativity this would be a very different place. Here, I write whatever I want. I write for me.
The primary reason I’m doing this is to build up a habit. Just keep going. Give myself permission to do it without friction. No obstacle, only flow. So failing to hit that daily goal is the only obstacle that matters to me. I hate it. It means I took my mind off the target. It means I got distracted. It means that whatever was happening in my brain that day did not get recorded, and you can’t change or grow unless you pay attention. At least, you can’t notice change or growth without keeping track, monitoring, observing, measuring.
I write in order to measure. That’s why. If I miss a day, I missed a measure. But I can keep going.
Just posting this to make a note of a change in my account:
I’m the one and only user on this blog. If you see posts or comments attributed to admin, that’s me. If you see older posts (like 2006 and older) attributed to lunarobverse, that’s also me; it’s from before this blog was using WordPress.
I’m trying to change both of those accounts to show the name Brian but it might not affect already-published material. Going forward, though, posts attributed to Brian are also also me. This one should be Brian.
Lotta back-end cleanup I still need to do for this place but it’s a low priority. I have a shit-tonne of broken links that Google Analytics keeps yelling at me about, but you just try to keep all the links on a 21 year old site working, I dare you.
In a way I like that little bugs like this expose just how long I’ve been at this. Makes it feel more like a home. Right?
Twenty years ago today, I registered this domain. I don’t remember the details all that clearly, but what I can remember is that I wanted to own my own domain without really knowing what I was going to do with it.
Up to that point I kept a blog of sorts that was part of my IO.com account, so it had some dumb long URL like http://io.com/users/~lunarobverse — that’s a dead link, so even if your browser makes it a link, it’s not going anywhere, sorry. I’m not even sure if IO.com is still a thing. It was an early internet service provider that grew from a BBS started by Steve Jackson Games after their offices got raided by the Secret Service. Listen, it was a whole thing back in the 80s and 90s, kids, I’m really going off on a tangent here. IO stood for Illuminati Online, which was named after their card game about secret societies that control the world. It was Boomer cynicism and it seemed fun at the time until the Feds are beating down the door and confiscating all your laser printers.
So I wanted a simpler internet address to share my weird personal oversharing. I wanted Moon.com but the publishers of that same name had had that locked up for a long time already, so the shortest variant of my own name I could buy was bamoon.com. At the time, I had to buy it directly from ICANN and it cost US$35 a year. Since I was newly flush from my first real job in a long time, I also purchased brian-moon.com. I had vague ideas about putting something professional at the hyphenated URL, but that’s never really happened, not in twenty years. All it’s ever really done is redirect to the shorter address.
For good measure, I also purchased my online handle, lunarobverse.com, which these days is my custom Tumblr domain. I’ve recently created an LLC of that name as a way to consolidate my freelance income under one business, I’m conflicted about whether I should keep using that URL for Tumblr or convert it into a business site. Honestly, I have no idea what I should be doing with any of this. I don’t have a head for capitalism or marketing. You’d think, after decades of being online, that I would have even the vaguest sense of what my brand is. I don’t. I really really don’t.
bamoon.com hasn’t been Lunar Obverse since the beginning. I didn’t even set up a blog and post under this domain until November 2003, as you can see by perusing my archives, and even those first posts were re-posts of things I’d written previously. But from that first post on, I’ve only ever added to my archives. WordPress tells me that I have 2,565 published posts (including this one) and another 108 unpublished drafts, unfinished thoughts that will likely never see the light of day. The heyday of my posting was in the mid- to late-00’s, mainly during the second Bush administration, because liberals (I identified as a liberal back then; I’ve moved more and more left over the years) were documentinghow badthe GOP was back then. But also there was an explosion of blogging, political and personal, and I wanted to participate.
Lunar Obverse, though, never really hit that growth spurt that gave my writing a huge audience. At the most, I think I was averaging around 200 unique visits a day. That seemed like a nice number, easily manageable. 200 people would fill an auditorium, and it’s a number of people that I could feel comfortable addressing. But I never kept up the pace, and stopped writing so much, and digital cobwebs and virtual dust began to settle around here.
The blog has run on Blogger, and now on WordPress, and briefly on a bespoke system created by a friend I’ve lost track of (hi Caleb, if you’re still out there, I see your Instagram posts and it looks like you’re doing great), but the backend stuff has never been the reason I care about writing. The reason I stopped writing is personal and sad, but I still want to write. I have things I want to say, and here’s a place I can say them without having to go through anyone else. That’s the power of the internet, after all.
There have been years, here and there, where it’s been iffy whether I could scrape together the US$105 I needed to keep the domains. I remember having to borrow money from friends a couple of times. But I’ve managed to hold on to them, even if I haven’t done much with them. I’d like to change that. My plan is to go through all the old posts, and resurface the best ones, and start adding new ones. Best by my own measure, primarily; if I look at the analytics for this domain even the highest-traffic posts get only tens of hits every month. There are posts here I’m still proud of, though, and maybe they might mean something to someone else out there.
I had a coworker a couple of years back remark that my domain, being so short, might be worth a lot of money. The best I can tell is that I could sell it for a couple thousand bucks. That’s not worth it to toss away all these posts and give up the one thing I’ve owned for longer than I’ve ever owned anything. Nah, I’m gonna keep this, spruce it up a little, do some pruning and promotion, and get it back up and running.
So, if you’re reading this, thank you, and welcome. Maybe welcome back? There may be some life left here after all.
