Nope, just made of wool! The artist is @yast.anna on Instagram. She does felted animals and birds.

A lady standing on my neighbor’s back porch smoking a cigarette cussed me out when I let the dog out. Except my neighbor had moved out last week (I had helped) and I knew it hadn’t sold yet. A girlfriend of one of the guys up the block was having a episode of some kind and had decided to squat in my neighbor’s home. I locked the door, waiting for the next morning.

I decided to call the Emergency Line to see if they would send mental health first but they sent the cops anyway. Our local cops are really delicate with mental patients so they got her back to her boyfriend and left the homeowner to cleanup.

Could it be that these guys are going to “Where are we going, Papa EA?” them in a few years?

(Can’t find a link to the referenced comic on my phone but basically EA is known for buying up smaller studios and then closing them only a few years later after sucking them dry. This led to a comic of them taking little unsuspecting companies into the dark woods to end them.)

It’s authored by the guy who coined the term originally; so however he’s using it, that’s the way it’s used.

This was true even in the 90s I’m sad to say. It’s one of the reason I didn’t pursue fiction writing as a career 30 years ago. I don’t think AI will replace any working authors because poorly written slop and computer generated text are both a lot older than today’s LLMs craze.

The field of authorship has been in a slow decline for a long, long time. It has a lot to do with the way the book Publishing industry was run in the middle and later half of the 20th century. We stopped valuing authority and authors and it became a less valuable occupation. This happened to teachers and a lot of other thought-based fields too.

The reality is that statistically you are more likely to win $1 million in the lottery than to become an author in the US who can live on their income from writing fiction. It does still happen but the people who’s work leads them to become full time authors are extraordinarily lucky, talented, hard working, AND again, lucky.

So you have to write for the joy of writing and expect to have a day job. And if that writing makes money, that’s great and you should keep doing as much of it as you can. But please accept that it’s not going to be your income driver for the foreseeable future.

Yeah they are called experts and they used to be employed by Universities and Research groups. But Americans decided they didn’t care or want people who actually had credentials, talent, or acclaim somewhere around 2016 and have spent all their time tearing down everything that made people credible experts in their field.

In information literacy circles we called this “the death of authority”, which basically means nob one cares who wrote or said something any longer. The person providing the opinion no longer has enough weight on the thing being said to keep absolute yahoos from being considered as good as experts.

Information and media literacy tells people to look at 4 things about a source

Currency (when it was published) Authority (who wrote it) Relevancy (how does it relate to what you are doing) Purpose (why did the author want you to know this)

And all of these are being eroded away. News articles pushed at you with no date, Opinions and Editorials disguised as regular news articles, etc.