Posts

Holding pattern

Image
  I was irritated to received a couple of emails from the AI systems  which are now patrolling blogs. So much for no-robot declarations, which seem to get ignored.  ROBOTS.TXT insert: User-agent: *   # any robot Disallow: /                # disallow all directories They got me though.  I'd used a picture of a well-known slightly wooden movie star in 2014, which I'd retrieved from a commons PR site. It turned out to be under some copyright restriction, so the patrollers ignored ROBOTS.TXT and managed to scrape me (20-plus years of blog) and claim rights. Their bill/invoice was around £5,000, which must have been nice work if you can get it. I reverse-searched for the picture and found about 20 copies of it scattered around the internet, including some using the picture to pretend to be someone else - including a cage fighter.  So I appealed to the equivalent of a parking fines system, which ha...
Post a Comment
Read more

Clara Whiskers reviews Muffin the robocat...

Image
From Ed Adams ‘Peacekeeping’ an ARC review of a single chapter. Okay, I need to be very clear up front: I am a lifelong cat person. I have had aloof cats, clingy cats, slightly evil cats, one that lived inside a laundry basket for six months, and one that only loved me when I was crying. So when this scene started with: “They’ve removed everything that makes it a cat” …I was ready to be offended. And yet. Why did I fall for Muffin? Somewhere between: “Not exploring. Arriving.” and “The response came immediately.” …I was gone. What this book gets (and this is rare, even in books with real animals) is that cats are not just “cute” — they are about presence . And Muffin has that. Almost too perfectly. It doesn’t beg It doesn’t perform It doesn’t need It just… is there in exactly the right way And as a reader, you feel the same thing Jennifer feels: “No decision required… It simply… worked.” Which is honestly a bit terrifying when you stop to think about it. The little details that go...
Post a Comment
Read more