Each month begins with anxiety that it either won't be as good as last month or needs to be better. The final days before print day are sublime/terrifying in equal measure as those ads get signed off one by one. The distribution side is a well oiled machine, mix of supermarkets and community venues

Selling ads is like being a pop star: you're only as good as your last release. We've been doing local papers for over a decade now but I've only been working on the ads side for about a year. First terror is always 'we've not got enough ads' followed by 'shit, that's a lot of ads to get signed off'

Well, lots of people it seems. I sometimes feel like the Doctor Who wilderness years battle between fanwank and story is the most instructive story about story ever.

I do wonder if the 'factification' of stories told about characters who appear in multiple stories runs counter to the desire for good stories. As kids we love fact files and consistent details and yer bloody narrative arc runs head on into that because who cares if James Bond wears consistent socks

There's nowt more fascinating than looking on at the new takes and new explorations that writers, actors, film makers etc build from the toolkit of an established character. Because a character can feel real in a story without the need to be real in the sense of having a continuous 'real' life

Stories aren't gossip about imaginary people etc etc. Alf Tupper was still the same age running cross country and eating chips when I was a kid as when my Dad was. Soap adds always the same always different as mode which repays long viewership while always paying off episode to episode.

I'm fascinated by this sort of thing. I'm not quite sure how we jumped from 'this is a story about James Bond' to 'this the story of James Bond'. I think in part it's because soap opera is one of the great inventions of the 20th century and people who say they hate it love it without realising

I'm not sure I am cherishing a future where I have to write plain information based emails for two different readers in the same email. But crikey, there seems like an opportunity someone is going to exploit!

This AI summary missing stuff suggests a tantalising future where sending information based text will require something akin to SEO copy writing so that the summary emphasises the correct information in the intended form. Which I am sure LLM writing assistence is currently attempting.

I have a very specific example of this. If I say 'I have sent on your invoice under seperate email' I get replies that say 'you forgot to attach the invoice', leading me to believe the summary says 'Mark sent the invoice'. I imagine there are far more obvious examples in your lives

This isn't a 'how dare anyone TL;DR my magnificent prose' problem, but an actual specific communication one, and one that is actually boomeranging cognitive work back to the sender, rather than saving cognitive work for the receiver

I send a lot of emails for work, which contain specific information about services we provide and the steps involved in purchasing them. I have noticed an increase in people asking for the information that is included clearly in the email but which I assume summaries omit or represent incorrectly

I can see how only ever voting for brexit and nothing else made that vote more meaningful for *them* but I'm less certain that this gave the result a sacred status. Though I also get why it is a massive thing, but no one spoke about the 1975 vote in the same way. Or did they?

Consumer AI is really fascinating in its attempts to keep all the wheels turning fast enough to keep the machinery running while admitting that humans alone do not always have the necessary pace or attention to do so alone and unaugmented.

It's all a bit 'Time Enough At Last'. Infinite possibility limited by human frailty en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_En...

It's genuinely fascinating to me there is more stuff than there is human time for it, with entire industries depending on interaction with stuff as their main source of income. I suppose each era of capitalism invents the people it needs to make that era function and sells aids to help that happen

It's been fascinating watching my dad realise the world I live in through the experience of getting his first smart phone about six years ago, finding himself plugged into a flow of 'stuff'. Like the a lot of us, my working life has changed as technology has changed and that had missed him

I mean, many of us send more emails in a week than an individual would have written letters in their lives. I know I keep mentioning Eurema's Dam by R. A. Lafferty, but we're there: inventing machines to take part in things on our behalf because other machines make things to take part in