Robot Jazz

  I'm back! After a two-week break, I have returned to blogging. The cause of my disappearance is the usual suspect: real life.  In addition to that, I just needed a break as fitting in a blog entry every few days started to feel less like a hobby and more like a job. It helped that politics quieted down a bit.  I mean, this admin was as nuts as ever, but the last few weeks were more about Trump and his minions embarrassing themselves than it was about actively destroying the nation.   But now, with the help of a rainy day (writing weather!), I am back at it.   🔻🔻🔻🔻🔻 We have a new pope! And he is American! I was stunned when we learned he was an American because I agreed with the mindset that America, being a superpower, would never be given even more power by having 1.4 billion Catholics come under the sway of an American pope.  So much for that logic! The reasons why an American pope was picked are still much debated. Of course, there has b...

  ("Cyber Dreams" - created by StarryAI and named by ChatGPT. How cyberpunk is that!) Sci-fi novelist Jack Womack referred to the term 'cyberpunk' as "a facile adjective for the working vocabulary of lazy journalists and unimaginative blurb-writers" and I couldn't agree more.  I love cyberpunk not because it is some sub-genre of sci-fi, but simply because it is just another face of the "hard-boiled" or "noir" genre of literature and film.  Don't believe me?  Okay, here's proof: go watch the classic noir, "The Asphalt Jungle. " The plot of that classic 1950 film noir has everything that most cyberpunk stories have, specifically, a cadre of criminals hired by a shady "fixer" to pull off a heist that, inevitably, goes wrong.  Heck, I just described Act I of CD Projekt RED's Cyberpunk 2077 !  Sure, hacking and transhumanism are missing from that movie due to the, er, limited nature of that decade's tec...