Wuthering Heights

After mentioning it in a previous post, I have finally completed my dire slog through Wuthering Heights.

All I will say about it right now (because I'm pecking this out into my phone rather using a proper keyboard, and it's already becoming vastly tedious) is that it may as well have been titled Darkness Induced Audience Apathy/Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The Book. Or, at least, the first 95% of it was that. The last 5% of it was, at least for me, a bit of "Yeah, fuck you, Heathcliff! Eat shit and die!" catharsis, via Gothic horror.

I started this book because I wanted to, and I finished it out of "trainwreck, can't look away" morbid fascination. I feel the utmost sympathy and pity for any high school or college students who may have been in the past or may be in the future forced to endure having to read this book by some sadistic English teacher.

(I might edit/add to this later, when I'm back at my computer proper.)

(EDIT, back on my comp now)

There were no likeable characters in this story, as far as I'm concerned. Even the supposedly more sympathetic characters (e.g. Lockwood, Nelly Dean, Isabella Linton, Catherine Linton [the daughter, I mean, not the original Catherine Earnshaw]) too often acted like complete morons and gullible dupes, and, in some ways, could be just as hateful and duplicitous as the more outright villainous or, at least, incredibly assholish characters (e.g. Heathcliff, Joseph, Hindley, the original Catherine).

I'll just mention one other thing. At some point as I was reading, I just started envisioning Heathcliff as looking like BOB from Twin Peaks. I'm not sure when it happened. Probably after he came back from having run away for several years and started being a true dickhole to everyone within a hundred mile radius.

(/EDIT)

"The success of AI music creators sparks debate on future of music industry"

On the one hand, yeah, this shit sucks.

On the other hand, as mentioned in the article, auto-tune also sucks[1], and, not mentioned in the article, sampling also sucks (just to show that music "artists" were stealing from other, better music artists way before AI ever became a thing). I'm not saying that the prior existence of auto-tune or sampling excuses the use of AI (which is kind of like the worst of both auto-tune and sampling, in a way), because it doesn't. I'm just saying that AI isn't the origin of shitty musicians being "enhanced" by technology or shitty musicians stealing from their betters. In my opinion, AI music doesn't de facto suck just because it's made by an AI. However, AI music does suck (regardless of perceived quality of the music itself) because, like all modern AI shit such as writing or visual art, anything created with LLM/AI is only possible via unauthorized use of assets created by actual humans that was used to train it.

[1] - Except in the rare cases when it doesn't (the latter case being because Andy Samberg was supposed to sound like a weird space alien in that song).

"CSotD: Welcome to the World"

A post on The Daily Cartoonist.