Whetting your appetite

 To continue to build up the excitement for my upcoming book (Norman the Insurance Salesman and Other Stories), I asked AI to generate some front covers based on my story titles..... this is what I got from ChatGPT:

I personally quite like the third one...

Gemini meanwhile made this, which I really like the style of!

Meanwhile Nightcafe refused to generate an image for "child safety reasons"?!?

And finally Copilot came up with this:

I really like the style of Gemini but the third ChatGPT image feels like the best one overall - but of course I know the names of the characters! Thoughts welcomed :)

Writing a book

 So, I've been writing a book.

To be honest, I'm hoping it's kind of there.  I've printed out a couple of copies of first drafts for people to give their feedback on, and I'm sure there will be a bit of refinement but I hope it's somewhere near ready for me to work on.

Now, obviously, I have a vision, and that's me on a stage at a book festival (probably at Hay-on-Wye) being interviewed by someone, lots of people sat listening, while we take part in an interesting and funny discussion.  I love making people laugh.

I have tried over the years to write a book.  And I understand the formula for writing a successful book.

The successful book is a novel, with a twist, a good plot, relatable characters, all that good stuff, fascinating detail, maybe some excitement.  I understand that.

But I can't write that.

I lose my train of thought far too quickly, at most I write a chapter and then it peters out.  My Google Drive is full of abandoned stories.

Short stories don't sell.  Any website that advises people trying to make it as an author tells you that.  Especially not "flash fiction" which I thought was stories that were fifty words or so, but apparently stories as long as 750 words can be flash fiction, and that's what I tend to write, most of my stories are short.  They're a few pages.  To be honest, they're the right length for when you're on the toilet.

Also, my book isn't long enough.  Books should be over 60,000 words.  I'm not there. I'm around 17,500 words.

So, I know my book isn't going to sell.  Furthermore, it's in fairly bad taste.  A lot of the stories have a lot of death and/or sex in it, they're silly, and sensibilities are offended by them.

But I like them.

I have one qualification for the story to make it into the book - and that is that it should make me laugh.  If I'm not smiling when I read it back, it's not going in (and there's a stack of stories I wrote that haven't made it into the book because of that).

I've also been careful with some of the stories to try to ensure that there isn't gender bias or shit like that.  People can be great, nice, lovely, alright, annoying, and outright dicks.  And they can vary between these (I know I do).  Your race, gender, religion, whatever other qualities, don't matter.  They don't affect your behaviour. Your behaviour affects your behaviour.

Beyond that, there's few limits.  There's a story about a being from Norse mythology.  There's a story about Alan the Demon.  And there's a story about Norman the Insurance Salesman.

So anyway, the book is coming.  I expect that it will sell very few copies, mostly to my closest friends and family who feel like they ought to buy a copy. I'm sure that it won't get anywhere and that I won't be interviewed on a stage or win any prizes, but it's coming.

AI D&D experiments

 Having had the Christmas break to unwind, destress, and generally have space to think about other stuff than work, I found myself pondering D&D one afternoon.

I've never actually played proper D&D, although I have played other roleplaying systems (Cyberpunk RED notably which was great fun).  I did once go through the set up of a character for D&D, which seemed to take quite a while and at the time did make me worry that the game might require more time rolling dice or consulting rulebooks than having fun, but I've never actually tried it.  Of course, D&D - and any other similar roleplaying game, requires a number of elements, including people to play with, and a dungeonmaster to run an adventure for the players.

I was curious to see whether AI could be used to simulate D&D, and particularly to make an enjoyable experience.

Before I go further, I'll nail down this point to anyone reading this who has played D&D properly - it's not D&D, I know it's not D&D, AI could never replace the organic interaction between humans and a human dungeonmaster (I don't actually believe this, I think in time it might be able to, but I don't want this post to turn into a place where awesome people that I like rant about the purity of human D&D), I just want to talk about my experience trying it.

So, I fired up ChatGPT - free version - and typed...

hi chatgpt - can you play d&d with me?

ChatGPT replied "Absolutely, I can! Do you have a character ready, or would you like me to help you create one? Also, are you imagining a classic D&D setup (like swords, spells, and dungeons), or do you want to try something unique? Let’s dive in! 🐉✨"

I gave it a very brief summary - ie "my character is a human male bard called thog, equipped with a short sword, a lute, a backpack, and 100 gold. quite happy to play a classic D&D setup with you can be the dungeonmaster. Happy for you to be creative and don't feel like you need to stick too closely to the rules of D&D, just make it fun :)"

And promptly lost the next 24 hours.

It dropped my character into a bustling town called Evermere, and sent me a chap in a leather apron - who I assumed was a butcher, although I don't think it was ever actually said - in need of an adventurer to find his daughter.  It happily handled my responses, allowed me to build up a party over time, and handled my sometimes unusual responses - when confronted with a snarling and possibly magical wolf, I told ChatGPT that I would "play a tune on my lute softly while kneeling down and singing "doggy woo, who's a good doggy woo". I offer it a few of my rations and try not to look the wolf in the eyes as it can cause aggression in canines" - ChatGPT happily went with it, and continued to describe what happened.

Through experimentation, I found that I could ask it to make the adventure more challenging and to incorporate more dice rolls - without them it felt a little bit on the easy side - but fundamentally it made it a really enjoyable experience.  Over time my character got the ability to read minds, and on asking it to read the minds of my party it was interesting to see that not all of my party was wholly on board with the actions my character was making, although it seemed that as long as I was being successful, they were happy to come along for the ride.

Was it perfect?

No. Absolutely not. I found that it had a tendency to forget details - one of my party members, Elira, I didn't interact with as much as the others and it seemed as a result that it wasn't always clear whether she was actually still there or not. My inventory also didn't always align, with items that I hadn't used recently strangely vanishing.

I also found that I ended up upgrading to the paid version of ChatGPT to get a sufficient amount of what it called "advanced data analysis" - aka dice rolls - to make it interesting, along with more access to the GPT-4o model (although I would say that the GPT-4o mini model did a good job too).  Also ChatGPT learns things about you to customise its responses, and pretty soon this memory was filled with ephemera as "Thog decided to go east", and once full the game fell over.

Another annoying issue is that as the ChatGPT log gets longer, it takes longer and longer for responses to come through on the web browser.  I found that this was the case on any web browser, or on the Microsoft app, however when using the Android ChatGPT app on my phone, it didn't suffer with this delay.  And of course, there's no way (that I could find) of running the Android app on my PC.

And currently you can add to the list that the current chat of ChatGPT which has my adventure in has lost the ability to do dice rolls - it is specifically that chat, if I open up another instance of ChatGPT it happily does dice rolls as needed, but the chat where I want the dice rolls to happen it just reports bugs.

But putting all this to one side, it was definitely sufficiently fun and entertaining to keep me gripped for a day, and I'm happily continuing to play as and when I see fit.  Figuring out workarounds for issues was a lot of fun - I resolved ChatGPT's memory issue and slowdown on the web browser by having it export a data file (a JSON file apparently!) all about my party, including their equipment, class, level, relationships with each other, personality and background, which I could tweak as I saw fit and then import into another ChatGPT instance to start again.  I do like this as part of the thrill for me is being able to take a character and play them through multiple adventures

For completeness, I did also try other AIs, in particular Google Gemini (Gemini 1.5 Flash) and Microsoft Copilot.  Gemini outright told me "I can't play D&D with you in the traditional sense" but then when I clarified what I wanted it to do, it did respond well and while I'm not sure it was quite as good as ChatGPT, did a reasonable attempt of being my dungeonmaster and again rolled with me making unusual choices and roleplayed them adequately. Copilot I found made it more like a "choose your own adventure" book, where your choices were clearly set - again though, it wasn't unpleasant to play, and when I did want to reject its options and propose something else to do it handled it well.

So I would say if you're needing a D&D fix but you don't for whatever reason have people handy, you could do a lot worse than giving your friendly AI a shot.

Thog the Bard according to ChatGPT

Travelling and trying to create a buzz by dancing

 

So, I've just come back from a week in Bordeaux in France, and it was lovely.

But hot.

Now, for those who aren't aware, I'm from the UK, and not even the southern bit.  I'm from the north, where twenty degrees Celsius (68 in Fahrenheit) is getting hot.  So me choosing a place where it was regularly in the thirties - and on the day of us leaving, was due to hit 41 - wasn't the best idea.  Nor was it booking a hotel without air conditioning, fortunately I rectified that on arrival and got upgraded, otherwise sleep would have been a faint hope.

But France was great, the people were great, and we saw so much cool stuff, like the Museum of Illusions, which is full of optical illusions, allowing for photos like this:

It's interesting though what things you take for granted which turn out to just not be a thing in different countries.  Getting fresh, not UHT milk from a supermarket or a corner shop was seemingly impossible.  And the amazing french bread that was provided along with meals never came with butter unless you asked for it (which seems like an oversight bearing in mind how much french butter is).

Nevertheless, it was a great experience.

Onto my second subject of the post, which is that I need to rebuild an audience.  Not that I ever had a huge one, but letting my blog and YouTube channel atrophy for several years didn't help.  And you see, I'm writing a book that I want to release by the end of the year.

It's not a clever book, or a sensible book.  It's a bunch of short silly stories that make me laugh, and hopefully if you share my sense of humour, will do the same for you.

But if I'm to make my fortune selling a book, I need several hundred thousand willing fans waiting to buy it.

I thought that I might hop onto social media trends to build my audience - now, if you're not aware, Deadpool & Wolverine is in cinemas at the moment, and one of the dances, to NSync's Bye Bye Bye, is quite popular on TikTok right now.

Oh god no.  I'm not posting that video for people to see.

Anyone want a cheap Deadpool mask? Barely used?

It was suggested to me, that as Ryan Reynolds had a body double do the dance in the film for him, that I perhaps need the same.  Applicants do feel free to reach out.

Do People Still Blog?

Unrelated dog pic

 As part of bringing my blog back to life, I've been going through various settings and things (universal analytics is out, welcome Google Analytics 4!).

One thing I had on my blog was a long list of other blogs that I particularly liked - as a blogger you're encouraged to find other blogs, make connections, network, all that good stuff.  Which I enjoyed, and I found some really good blogs at the time.

Sadly, the vast majority of them have ceased blogging (as I had!) for several years.  A few remain - most notably my friend Tim Clark, who pops up on various places on the internet, including on The Wild Word.

So, do I look and find new blogs?  I always love to read blogs, provided that they've got a bit of personality - far too many blogs are written in purely professional speak (and possibly nowadays AI generated) with no hint of the person that wrote them.

So, if you have any suggestions of good blogs to visit, please do let me know in the comments :)

Where has my website address gone?

 Once upon a time, I had a blog.

I enjoyed blogging, and after a while decided to splash out on a website name.

I won't hyperlink it, but it was www.mikeraven.co.uk

But when I took a break from blogging, I decided to cancel the web name.  I wasn't doing the blog any more, so why keep paying for the domain name?  It wasn't as though any income from the blog was paying for the domain name.

Now, of course, when I try to get the domain back, it's owned by someone else.  Not that they're doing anything with it, there's a few general adverts if you go to that address. But I can't find a way to buy it back.

So - relaunched website calls for a new web domain!

Welcome to thog.uk :)

And welcome to the chocolate digarinut!

The Relaunch of the blog

Hello!

I vaguely remember doing this blogging thing. I used to do it quite a lot, in fact.  Good for stretching the writing muscles.

Why did I stop?  I''m struggling to remember, to be honest.  I think I was finding that I didn't really have anything to write about, and neither did I have the urge.

That is changing!

I'm working on a book.  Now ideally, what I would like is for an agent to contact me out of the blue (via email, no one wants a phone call), tell me how amazing I am, and to set me up with a huge publisher who would give me a six-figure advance for a book of whatever length and quality I decide to churn out.  Unbelievably, this has not happened to date!

I'm working on a collection of short stories.  The stories vary in length and topic, but have one common element.

Immature humour.  Crude, you could call it.  And again, no matter how hard I search on literary agents websites, none of them seem to be looking for this.  Nevertheless, the success of games such as Cards Against Humanity and Joking Hazard (both of which I love) makes me feel that there is an audience out there somewhere.

So, I'm going to try to bring this old blog back to life with the shameless aim of building an audience of bloodythirsty billionaires desperate for a book stuffed full of with stories such as "Charles, the dog that couldn't stop licking" and "Chantelle the Juicy Sausage".

Hopefully it'll become a stocking filler for that relative with questionable taste you have (and if you don't have a relative with questionable taste, it's you)

The Cat in the Car Park

 I drove into the works car park today, circling as I looked for a decent space (ideally a space with adjacent spaces empty, and somewhere that would be sheltered from the non-seasonal sun we are experiencing in the UK at the moment), and glimpsed what appeared to be a cat in a car looking at me.

I was so taken back that I had to circle around the car park again, even though I risked losing my cherished spot.

This is what I saw:

That would be the buttons on a black coat.

In other news, I've started writing a series of short silly stories that I'm going to post on here and on YouTube / TikTok (yes I know) - they're going to be strange, and not safe for kids!

Have a good Monday :)

Time Travel, at a speed of 1440 minutes per day!

Past Mike left Current Mike a pack of four mince pies in his car as a nice surprise for when he got in it!  I love me :D