Category: In the Track of the Bookworm

“Buy Me a Rocket” is a story which doesn’t exist and which was never written by Alfred Bester.

  • September 11, 2025
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In the Track of the Bookworm Is that the way it is? Questions for the Experts The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Being fed an example of the sort of grammatically correct but completely false word salad that ‘AI’ hypesters tend to dishonestly mischaracterize as a hallucination in hopes of creating a sense of equivalency, in the mind of the listener, between LLM software systems and organic brains through the implication that an LLM is on some level susceptible to the same sorts of derangements as the human mind is irritating. Here, I describe an incident where Google inserted a blob of ‘AI’ garbage atop legitimate search results and this ‘AI’ slop referenced a completely nonexistent science fiction story.

First nattering of September (cat footage, Alien: Romulus, Hodgson’s The Night Land, and metal drawer assembly observations)

  • September 5, 2024
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HerpDerp In the Track of the Bookworm Swarf + Copeaux + Scobs The Diary of Lupin Pooter Tygers, Tygers!
Much unpacking, assembling, and moving stuff around has been done. Regrettably, much more unpacking, assembling, and moving stuff around yet remains to be done. There’s an excellent chance, for example, that tonight I will be marking and drilling holes into the square-tube-steel legs of a computer desk to attach u-shaped brackets to hold a computer […]

Requiem for a pair of shit-kickers:
Nike Air Max Deluxe Pure Platinum [Autumn 2018]
Product SKU: AV2589-100

  • April 14, 2024
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HerpDerp In the Track of the Bookworm The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Much like Time for the Stars‘s Pat Bartlett (the Bartlett who stayed on Earth), one of two identical pairs of Nike Air Max Deluxe Pure Platinums (product SKU: AV2589-100), purchased with some difficulty back in the Fall of 2018, recently arrived at the end of its useful lifetime and has exited our household.

Doom is just a name, but when you speak to it to become a healing product, it does.

  • November 30, 2016
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In the Track of the Bookworm Metagrobolized
Above: On this t-shirt, My Neighbor Totoro meets Bioshock and Satsuki becomes a Little Sister standing beside a Big Daddy rather than Totoro. While I have watched Totoro, I hung up my spurs after finishing Super Mario Bros. 3 and haven’t gamed on anything newer than a Super Nintendo system. That being said, never having […]

In the Track of the Bookworm (used books)

  • October 28, 2016
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In the Track of the Bookworm Spitting Images
It seems a heckuva lot easier to find old books that are worth reading than to choose new (newly-published) books that won’t trigger buyer’s/reader’s remorse. In the Track of the Bookworm is a book published just before the end of the 19th century. The author, one Irving Browne, dedicated it: To book-worms all, of high […]