Printer-buying advice

At The Verge, Nilay Patel offers printer-buying advice:

Here’s the best printer in 2023: the Brother laser printer that everyone has. Stop thinking about it and just buy one. It will be fine!

Our household recently acquired a Brother HL-L2395DW, which replaces the HL-2270DW that we used for twelve or thirteen years. We chose to buy a new printer when the old one began to leave a grainy track on the right margins of pages and we realized that for the price of a toner cartridge and a new drum we could buy a new printer.

Searching my blog, I see that I don’t have a single post mentioning our Brother printers. There’s not much to say about them: they work, and they’re far cheaper to operate than ink-jet printers. And while settting up a printer in 2023 is still a bit of a pain, it makes the set-up of years past seem comically convoluted.

And speaking of comically: Patel includes (for a laugh) a ChatGPT-generated guide to buying a printer. Enjoy.

Parts going their own way

The elusive Eleanor Schumann:

Steven Millhauser, Portrait of a Romantic (1977).

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Chomsky et al. on ChatGPT

In The New York Times, Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts, and Jeffrey Watumull consider (with examples) “the false promise of ChatGPT”:

ChatGPT and its brethren are constitutionally unable to balance creativity with constraint. They either overgenerate (producing both truths and falsehoods, endorsing ethical and unethical decisions alike) or undergenerate (exhibiting noncommitment to any decisions and indifference to consequences). Given the amorality, faux science and linguistic incompetence of these systems, we can only laugh or cry at their popularity.

All OCA ChatGPT posts
A 100-word blog post generated by ChatGPT : I’m sorry too, ChatGPT : Spot the bot : Teachers and chatbots : Imaginary lines from real poems : ChatGPT writes about Lillian Mountweazel : Rob Zseleczky on computer-generated poetry : ChatGPT’s twenty-line poems : ChatGPT on Edwin Mullhouse : A reporter’s “conversation” with ChatGPT

“Home Run”

“Bottom of the ninth, two out, game tied, runners at the corners, the count full on McCluskey, the fans on their feet, this place is going wild”: so begins “Home Run,” a sentence-long story by Steven Millhauser. You won’t be disappointed.

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

“And behold!”

Steven Millhauser, Portrait of a Romantic (1977).

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard) : A library slip: 1941, 1992

“And a bottle of blueblack ink”

Summer ending, as the future reaches into the present:

Steven Millhauser, Portrait of a Romantic (1977).

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Black inks

From Jet Pens: a guide to black inks for fountain pens.

For me, Aurora Black rules.

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

Even knowing she was in the movie, I had to consult the IMDb to figure out which character she played. But if you recognize her, or think you do, leave her name in the comments.

*

A hint: She knows the downtown scene.

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Anyone who’d like to guess is still welome to, but I’ve put the name in the comments.

More mystery actors
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“Like a sky”

Meet William Mainwaring:

Steven Millhauser, Portrait of a Romantic (1977).

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Giving up the whole game

In the latest installment of Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson addresses the assertion of CPAC speaker Michael Knowles that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.” Richardson points out that Knowles’s statement is not just an attack on transgender people. She makes a connection to Hungarian autocrat’s Victor Orbán’s efforts to end liberal democracy:

Tapping into the anti-LGBTQ sentiment that Orbán and those like him have used to win voters, the statement was a crucial salvo in the attempt to destroy American democracy and replace it with Christian nationalism.

But there is a very simple answer to the radical right’s attack on LGBTQ people that also answers their rejection of democracy. It is an answer that history has proved again and again. Once you give up the principle of equality, you have given up the whole game. You have admitted the principle that people are unequal, and that some people are better than others. Once you have replaced the principle of equality with the idea that humans are unequal, you have stamped your approval on the idea of rulers and subjects. At that point, all you can do is to hope that no one in power decides that you belong in the lesser group.

A useful supplement, from Samuel Perry, professor of sociology: How can we spot #ChristianNationalism in the wild? And a related post: Mary Miller and trans rights.