Mitch's Blog

Looks like there’s a TV series in the pipeline based on the 1993 novel “Manhattan Transfer,” by John Stith, who was active on GEnie back in the day. [imdb.com]

A massive alien ship rips Manhattan out of the ground and brings it on board, along with its 2 million inhabitants. Is this some sort of cosmic zoo exhibit, part of a scientific experiment, or perhaps fresh groceries for the aliens?

It was a fun book.

The cast list includes Casper Van Dien, who starred in “Starship Troopers” (1997), and is heavy with Star Trek alums: Doug Jones (Cmdr. Saru, “Discovery”), John Billingsley (Dr. Phlox, “Enterprise”), Tim Russ (Tuvok, “Voyager”), Walter Koenig (Chekov, the original series and movies).

I don’t see any mention of the series other than this page, so it’s anybody’s guess whether it actually comes to anybody’s screen anytime.

An app called Bless Every Home, backed by some of the biggest names in evangelical circles, is mapping the personal information of immigrants and non-Christians to conduct door-to-door religious conversions and “prayerwalking” rituals.[newrepublic.com]

Nerdy Saturday morning: I’m messing around with having ChatGPT write Drafts actions to automate formatting text for blog posts.

I’ve succeeded in having it create an action that formats link posts on mitchw.blog the way I like them, with the link at the end of a paragraph showing just the domain as the text of the link. For example

I’m now working on converting Markdown to a plain text format suitable for publishing on Facebook and other text-only platforms.

If I can get that working, the next thing I want to do is get ChatGPT to write a Drafts action that will suggest line breaks for Mastodon threads, and eventually BlueSky and Threads.

I wanted to be able to automatically update my daily note in the Obsidian app with a list of documents that I’ve updated that day. That list would be a good approximation of things I got done that day. I found this, which seems to do the job.

Can confirm Step 2. Still shudder at the memories.

I’ll stick with the beef with broccoli.

1920, The Coffee Cup Café, 8901 Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles, Ca.

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Here’s something groovy I saw while walking the dog.

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I’m getting spam text messages from the Easter Bunny.

Here’s something I saw while walking the dog

Ben Werdmuller:

I’m not bullish on squeezing long-form content into a microblogging platform, whether on Mastodon or X. Long-form content isn’t best consumed as part of a fast-moving stream of short updates.

Yes! This is an ongoing source of frustration for me. I often write posts that are 600-1,000 characters. That’s not long-form by real-world standards, but it’s slightly too long for Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky and the micro.blog timeline, and the resulting posts are ghastly.

Facebook doesn’t have those length limitations, but it also doesn’t permit simple hypertext like links, blockquotes, headers and boldface.

Tumblr is a full blogging platform, without length limitations and with great support for hypertext and embedded media. But it has user-interface and community conventions that seem to be offputting to most people. Also, Tumblr seems perpetually on the verge of shutting down.

I want to publish once, and allow anyone to read what I write on whatever platform they like. Dave Winer calls this “textcasting,”, and it’s a great idea, though he focuses on the needs of the writers and I’m focused on the needs of the readers. (I imagine Dave might say the needs are the same.)

Also, the Web doesn’t seem to have a universal standard for letting folks know you’ve replied to or mentioned them in an article — nothing like @mentions on Mastodon or Facebook tagging. So for this post,, I guess I’ll tag Ben Werdmuller and Dave Winer in Mastodon or Threads, as well as Manton Reece, who builds and runs micro.blog and whose post flagged Ben’s comments to me.

These limitations are frustrating! Why can’t everything be more fluid?