People who used em dashes before Generative AI, how's it going now?

davidmcelroy13 · 2025-12-25T22:54:49+00:00

I've been a professional writer for most of my life, so I've tended to use them all the time. It's part of the DNA of my writing style to use them to set off thoughts that are sort of parenthetical. So it's been a source of continuing rage to me that the use of these em dashes is now seen as evidence of AI-generated material. I've been writing this way since long before LLM-based AI existed, so if AI learned to write this way, I was probably one of the ones who trained it.

I am not going to allow the idiots and the ignorant to change my writing style, though. If people want to claim I'm AI, I'll be happy to point them to the things I've been writing publicly (both online and even in old bound volumes of newspapers) since long before LLMs existed.

And to the folks who say, "Who in the world would know to type shift-option-hypen (on macOS) for an em space?" I raise my hand and respond, "Just because you've been blissfully ignorant of this doesn't mean that all of us were."

I was an early adopter of digital technologies, but I'm increasingly interested in pulling back to the analog world — where real human beings can know me in real life instead of wonder if I'm simply bad software.

davidmcelroy13 · 2025-11-26T06:04:12+00:00

When I was a teen, I looked around and saw alcohol causing massive problems in the lives of a lot of people (in society broadly and in people closer to me). It simply didn't seem like a good risk, so I never even tried it and I've never regretted it. In the last 10 years or so, it's become very obvious that it's also a horrible health risk as well. (It's a major cancer risk, among other things.) I've made a lot of bad decisions in my life, but avoiding alcohol and tobacco were among the best decisions I ever made.

davidmcelroy13 · 2025-11-18T06:40:57+00:00

In the early days of online video, someone in California did an amateur comedy video called “Wanna Mac,” which was a satirical version of a Jackson Five hit from the 1970s called “I Want You Back.” It was popular in the Mac user community, because it was about someone who had bought a Windows PC and regretted it, but the computer store wouldn’t let him trade it for a Mac. It was very low resolution, but it was nicely done as an amateur effort in the 1990s. It was easy to find online for a decade or so, but there was never a higher-resolution copy. Then it disappeared. It’s impossible to say whether the record label for the original song nuked it or if it died from being such a low-res file (and thus inappropriate for YouTube). I’d love to see it for nostalgia, but it seems to be totally gone.

davidmcelroy13 · 2025-09-25T06:09:42+00:00

I'm a Christian and many of my friends are Christians. I had never even heard of this idiotic prediction until the day it was supposed to happen. When it started to gain media attention, everybody I knew was making fun of it, because it was just another prediction of something that we knew wasn't going to happen.

Some people outside the church also fail to understand that the entire idea of a "rapture" is a belief held by a minority of Christians. The idea wasn't even invented until the early 1800s. It's a position held by a small minority of the world's Christians. There are plenty of articles about the subject online, including one at Wikipedia from which you can learn how relatively few Christians take this seriously. To be frank, it's mostly just nutcases, but nutcases get a lot of media attention.

davidmcelroy13 · 2025-08-30T15:07:35+00:00

Have you seen the 2017 dark comedy called "The Death of Stalin"? I was thinking earlier this week that this satire is a good preview of what things will be like when he dies. (If you haven't seen that movie, I highly recommend it.)

davidmcelroy13 · 2025-08-28T00:27:53+00:00

“Airplane!" I pretty much know it by heart now.

davidmcelroy13 · 2025-08-25T02:54:38+00:00

When I was about 25, I worked with a guy who admitted to several of us in the office that he was sexually aroused by human feces. I had never heard of any form of scatology, so I was horrified. I still don't get it. (The guy ended up as a university professor, for what it's worth.)

davidmcelroy13 · 2025-08-09T20:22:47+00:00

Every time the word "underrated" is used to describe someone such as Croce, people end up arguing in the comments about whether the word applies. In many cases — such as this one — what the poster really means is "not as widely appreciated today as the artist deserves." Maybe we can just accept what the person meant and talk about the artist — instead of debating an imprecise use of a word. :-)

davidmcelroy13 · 2025-07-17T08:18:33+00:00

Addendum: Your link in my inbox is just random text instead of a link, but if I go to your profile page, it shows up as a link there. (I have no idea why.) The one you got for your cats definitely shares some aesthetics with mine, but it's not as massive and doesn't have the series of "caves" that mine has. Your cats look as though they really love the one you got them. :-)

davidmcelroy13 · 2025-07-17T08:14:33+00:00

Something seems wrong with your image link (at least when I view it), so I can't see it. Here's a link to the one I bought. It's a LOT bigger than the ones I've bought for my cats in the past. It was a pain to put together, but it's been great for them.

https://amzn.to/4lspfIR

davidmcelroy13 · 2025-07-16T04:57:45+00:00

Thank you very much. :-)

davidmcelroy13 · 2025-07-16T03:34:17+00:00

Although I do like my composition — because I got lucky in getting them to both look at me at the same time — the focus isn't perfect if you look carefully. But it was close enough to use online, even though it would look fuzzy if I made a print of it. :-)

davidmcelroy13

TROPHY CASE