No story of questionable merit today. Did some cleaning, worked on notes, played video games. Kind of worn out. Still, not a bad day.
Category: Site Information
[SITE] 26-0105
Nothing for today, as I got busy. However! Tomorrow? I have an idea…
Should I tell you the header is AI generated? Sure, why not?
[SITE RELATED] Happy New Year!
With the start of 2026, I’m hoping to make changes with my life. Starting with this blog. I’m shooting for a post a day, or, failing that, once a week. I’m trying to get a backlog of reviews over at the sister site. I’d like to finish the second draft of my novel, as well as improving my writing career in some fashion.
I make a lot of plans, only to fall short. Here’s hoping for the future, though.
[The header above was done by AI on this site. Policy is, if I know it’s done my computer, I say it is.]
[SITE RELATED] Yay Milestone?
So WordPress tells me today I’ve hit a milestone: I’ve past 10,000 all-time views for my main blog. That means, I assume 10,000 people have visited my site.
That’s a nice number… if I was starting out.
See, I’ve been doing this for twenty years. Now assume the number shows individual people and not the same person coming again and again, okay? Had at least one new person visiting this site every day since it’s creation, I would have reached this milestone earlier.
Say sometime before my tenth anniversary.
By this point I’d be at 21,900 views.
Not enough zeros, me thinks.
I’m glad I blog for my own personal pleasure, and not for money. Otherwise, I’d be seriously depressed right now.
Now as I was posting this, I did my usual checking what the AI thought about things. What title it thought I should have, how the post flow and so on. Nothing I planned on using, just curious.
Everything it did made this post more… upbeat. Like it was ignoring the sarcasm.
Best of all, I asked for a possible header image and got this:
I adored this. Not that it in anyway matched what I was saying, but still.
Being me, I thought I could do better. WordPress gave the prompt it used to create the above. And, with a few minor tweaks, I made this header, which I used:
Now to be fully transparent, the AI had two Views written on that sign before I altered it. But I think this suits the post more.
How about you?
[SISTER SITE] Can’t Stop Meddling in Coder’s Domain
So I’m reformating the Sister Site. Again.
In fairness to me, I’m closer to being finished with the last reboot than last time. And the work involves looking at every GOD DAMN REVIEW I’VE WRITTEN to not only change formatting to the new style, but also correct and clarify the texts.
Get this. I somehow managed to transpose opening paragraphs. How? I dunno.
Oh! And the next review is unfinished. No image captures. I have them, just haven’t uploaded.
And that’s my post for the month!
[SITE INFORMATION] Twenty
I have been blogging for twenty years.
It’s hard to think I’m still doing this.
In some ways I’ve stopped. This site, which I pay good money for every year, doesn’t get updated more than sporadically.
The sister site hasn’t missed an update for over a year. I’ve come close, and will no doubt come close again now that my buffer is gone. But it’s doing well.
No one reads it, but it’s doing well.
I don’t think anyone reads this. Maybe Mom every now and then. Maybe the occasional passersby. But regulars?
Not anymore.
Too niche, I’m afraid.
Google has becoming an AI nightmare. The chance for success as a blogger has no doubt dropped to nil. Wise man would quit and move on. Focusing more on the other site, or other things.
I’m not wise.
This was more about improving my craft. And my craft has improved because of it.
It is a tool I don’t use as often as I should.
I find what I said on my tenth anniversary to be a germane now as it was then. Alas, it’s in the archives and not on this site, but that’s an easy fix. I’ll make it a page an put it here.
Rereading that, I find little I disagree with. What I said then, holds now. I’m older than those two Past Cullens. Not wiser, as I just said. But it’s possible I’ve learned a little since then.
It makes me a little sad, even though it shouldn’t.
I have a friend now I didn’t have then. One I talk with every week. It could be more than that. It could be just what it is. But its more than I had.
That’s enough.
I have a novel now. An honest to God novel. One that I’m trying (and failing) to rewrite. It might not come to more than that.
That’s enough.
I write more now than I did. I finish little, but when I finish, I finish strong. I like what I write still. I am my own number one fan.
That’s enough.
Twenty years. Things have changed so much since then. I have driven 15 hours straight, by myself, and survived intact. I have seen Texas, the Gulf of Mexico. I have met famous people, even eaten at their house.
That’s enough.
I don’t know if there’s another ten years of blogging, in this blog or in me. But I suspected it would die, completely die, long, long ago.
It hasn’t.
God willing and the creek don’t rise, it won’t.
That’s enough.
Now let’s see if something fun happens.
A Month of Horror (III): Portal
[The Feature Image above is AI generated and has only the barest connections with reality. And is in fact scarier than this film.]
In brief, a team of ghost hunters enter the wrong haunted house and do the wrong things.
Its been said before that the hardest thing to review is a mediocre flick. You can rave about a great flick, you can rant about a bad one. The mediocre, though… you got nothing.
Portal‘s a little worse than that.
There’s nothing wrong with the acting, only it’s not really good. There’s nothing wrong with the story, except it feels like it could have used another draft. There’s nothing wrong with the directing, except there’s no scares. No fission.
The movie is okay. Like I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, it’s very much in it’s subgenre. The night footage is achieved with a bright light shining into the house through windows. The special effects work… ish.
It takes a while to get to the haunted house, but it’s not boring. It’s not anything. It just is.
I’m not sure I dislike it, but I can’t justify liking it.
There are short films so much better than this. Maybe it would have worked better as a found footage flick.
Dunno. Dunno, dunno, dunno.
I feel kind of bad with this review. The filmmakers tried. Hopeful the next try is better than this.
And yet, despite all that, not sorry I watched the film.
Makes no damn sense. But using the two score system of the sister site, this is two mehs (1.0 point each) for a total of 2.0 points.
[SITE] AI Generated Headers (I)
When I wasn’t looking, WordPress added new features. This is more AI stuff, including a writing program that mimics my Hemmingway app. As I don’t always write direct into the blog, not sure how much use that is, but it’s a good tool. For instance, as I’m writing this it just told me the previous sentence was a long one. It also flagged the word “previous” as a complex word. If I cared, changing those sentences would be a simple thing.
I don’t care.
As you no doubt guessed.
Another new tool, and this one is giving me troubles, is called AI Feature Image. I guess what it does is “read” the post and then create an image based on what it finds. Below is one created based on one of my Spider-man essays.
Now that’s nice. I question were the assets it’s using comes from. In fact, this is one of my basic problem with AI, stealing other people’s hard work. The other problem is that I didn’t make this myself and it feels lazy and wrong.
To a point.
Oh, and because I’m who I am, I did one for Power Girl and Gamera. The former is from a post on this site, the latter my Giant Monster Gamera review on the sister site.
Very interesting. The Gamera, of course, is the least accurate of the three, and that’s the problem. You can’t count on the AI to do the job.
Of course, I didn’t plan on using any of these as feature images. The limit is grist for a blog post.
It’s when I get a knuckleheaded idea into my head about new main headers that I get into problems.
Which, heh heh, has been a bit of a time sink. But that’s the next post.
Oh, and for the curious, this is the feature image it created for this post:
Am I wrong, or isn’t that a little creepy?
[SITE] Heh heh heh
Boy, am I doing a great job up updating the site. Heh heh.
Apparently WordPress AI agrees with me. When I asked for an “Improved Title”, these possibilities popped up:
Man, how did we live before AI?
I’m working on new possible headers for the site. Watch this space tomorrow for more.
Until then, have an alien. In fact, have two.
[SITE RELATED] That Feeling You Get When Some Stranger Posts On Your Site
So I’m woken up at 3am to the news, from my mother no less, that I’ve had strange posts on this site. My first thought was that this was from the Sister Site, as she’s due to post another review. Only Mom says Welltun Cares Presents, and I know that can’t be right. So I go check it out.
I find three posts with the following titles: How to get the perfect milf live chat partner?, The best unicorn dating site for finding real love, and How to get going with anal only dating.
None of those titles even sound like me.
Well, maybe the unicorn one.
[FUTURE CULLEN sez:] I mean because of the fantasy connotation. Having finally found out what the term means, I want to make that clear.
So I’ve taken them off site and put it into trash. I haven’t even read them more than the first few lines, which looks a lot like AI writing. I’ve also worked to improve security on the site. Fun!
I’ve tried contacting WordPress, but that’s a bust. I get a helpful AI bot who read what I had to say, then tried to pass me off to someone else. This failed for reason or reasons unknown.
So, yeah, not a happy camper right now. Bad enough if this was a freebie account. It isn’t. I’m paying money here.
Anyways, long story short, sorry about any weird emails. If the titles aren’t in the current format, they ain’t mine. I’ll keep you posted on any further developments.
Unicorn dating site? [FUTURE CULLEN sez:] Oh Past Cullen you don’t want to know.
WELLTUN CARES PRESENTS 