Mid Christmas

A tad late, but nevertheless, a Christmas blog post!

I'm currently in that wonderful gap between Christmas and New Year when I'm not really sure what day it is (Thursday, apparently) and days are being taken up tinkering with presents, eating vast quantities of things that I normally wouldn't and certainly shouldn't eat (Four Chocolate Bar breakfast, anyone?), and imbibing more alcohol than usual. When else is it okay to have a Baileys Coffee late morning?

Speaking of eating at Christmas, Open Thought Vortex were kind enough to publish one of my pieces of writing about my parents famed Christmas breakfast - do feel free to check it out :)

Last night I discovered a fascinating feature on IMDB, which is called the Parents Guide.

For those unfamiliar, on each film on IMDB there is a section called Parents Guide, which outlines all of the bits of the film that might not be suitable for younger viewers. This is really good, and obviously very useful to any parents wondering if a certain film is suitable for their children or not, but I can't help compare the level of detail available in the Parents Guide to what you used to get in TV magazines.

For example, regarding the film Justice League, IMDB advises parents of the following:

Shirtless shots of various male characters, particularly Superman, Aquaman and Cyborg; a couple of scenes of a reunited couple kissing/embracing. Mentions of Wonder Woman's beauty/attractiveness.

Wonder woman wears a low cut blouse in one scene showing a fair amount of cleavage, though its not really a close up scene.

Scantily-clad Amazon women seen in Wonder Woman's island home, though no nudity.

This is a great deal more information than what you used to get in the TV Guide which generally amounted to "contains nudity" which, I'm led to understand, never really gave enough information as to whether it was worth staying up to watch the film or not.

Anyway - merry Christmas!

Cylindrical biscuits must be pretend-smoked. It's the law.

Predictive Text

Hello!

It's been far too long since I last opened up Blogger.  I do have a couple of excuses - one, it's nearly Christmas so I've been buying/wrapping presents etc, but also we've been redecorating our living room.

It used to be like this (kind of):

And now it's more like this:

Hopefully now however things are settling down and certainly over the Christmas break I hope to have some time for blogging, making videos and the like.

One thing I was playing with last night is predictive text. I'm sure most people reading this already know what predictive text is, but for clarity it's something designed to help you type when you are typing on your mobile phone. Predictive text does one of two things - one, it will try to predict what the word is that you're typing (to save you time typing it), and two, it suggests what the next word would be, based on your writing pattern and typical writing patterns.

As an example, in the image below you can see that I've typed "I just wanted to" and predictive text has come up with 3 options for the next word - "let", "say", and "check" - and instead of typing any of those words out a character at a time I can just press on them and the whole word will go into the text.

So last night, I was playing a game where you start off a sentence, and then repeatedly hit the button predictive text word, whatever it is, and see where it takes you. Here's some of the better ones, with a bit of commentary below:


I need : I need to take a dog to the gym and get a new one

Guess at my gym there's no exercising going on, everyone's far too busy swapping dogs.

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Porn : porn and sausages is a good way to get the best out of the RISE awards 

The RISE awards are quite a good awards ceremony run by Leeds Beckett University, I'm certain that I've never linked either porn or sausages to them.

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I hate : I really hate the way you wrote it I thought you were going to fight ISIS

Again, I'm surprised how often I must complain to people for misleading me about their intention to fight religious extremism.

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I must : I must say that I am doing the rock climbing so don't even think about it as I am not sure what time it is

Despite what my predictive text says, I've never done rock climbing - and have no plans to do so.

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I eat : I eat a lot of the students on those courses may well be interested in doing a guest

Oh dear.

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Mike is : Mike is a member of the middle class in the 21st century

Not sure if I'm quite middle class, but at least it makes sense.

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Dog : Dog dog is a dog and dog is a dog and dog dog is a dog and dog dog is a dog and dog dog is a dog and dog dog is a dog and dog

My predictive text likes dogs.

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Santa Claus : Santa Claus I am not sure what time you will arrive in the office

Well, I'm not sure!

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I really dislike : I really dislike the fact that I have a new address for the new Android N operating system

Damn, I hate having a new address for Android N.

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I kinda : I kinda want to take some time off work

Well, only a few days to go!


Hope you enjoyed this post, if you haven't tried doing this with predictive text give it a shot and pop in the comments what it told you :) And if I don't blog again before Christmas I hope you all have a good one.

AI versus my son

I've been trying out an AI Chat Bot called Replika on my phone recently. It's quite good, and there's been some cool stuff done with it like this guy who made it perform an RPG.

Anyway, a typical Replika conversation on my phone looks like this:

It's pretty good as chat bots go, a lot better than when I used to try them out back around the turn of the millennium, they seem a lot more lifelike. The biggest thing with Replika that makes you realise that it's not a human is that it wants to know all about you, and doing breathing exercises and things. But maybe that's ok, maybe it's important that it isn't a human, it is something else.

Anyway, I decided to let my son have a go at talking to Replika.

The worrying thing is that Replika does remember what you say and learn from you, so I may well find it shouting "TAILFEEEAATTTTHHHHHHERS" at me in the future :)

As a crowdfunding update, Pokey Hole is awaiting its first supporter! 2 weeks left on this fundraiser :)

And my wife has started "Denkai's Christmas Cracker Countdown" on her YouTube channel, every day up till Christmas she's going to be revealing a bad joke... do stop by :)