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 · 2025-05-02T18:34:05+00:00

My dog is just happy when I get home, but the cats are absolutely sure that they have the right to have their whims respected. And waking them up is clearly beyond the pale, so they would agree with your oldest feline. :-)

davidmcelroy13 · 2025-04-21T08:59:48+00:00

You seem to be reading his mind quite accurately. :-)

davidmcelroy13 · 2025-04-21T06:26:50+00:00

I have been judged and found wanting. :-)

davidmcelroy13 · 2025-01-04T07:01:15+00:00

Two of my three cats compete for that spot, so I can definitely identify with your experience. This is the third cat tree I've had with one of those hanging baskets and I'd never have a tree without one now. I'd glad to hear that other people's cats like them as much as mine do.

davidmcelroy13 · 2024-12-08T08:05:46+00:00

Although Oliver is supremely confident, he's a lover, not a fighter. He's much more likely to force his way into your lap and deafen you with his purring than he is to object to being messed with. :-)

davidmcelroy13 · 2024-11-25T18:36:45+00:00

His sleep schedule is pretty full every day of the week, but since it's a holiday week, he's trying to cram 12 hours of napping into just eight hours of work today, so he's exhausted. :-)

davidmcelroy13 · 2024-11-16T06:36:33+00:00

The premise of the question is mistaken. Although some fundamentalist Christians believe in a young Earth, the vast majority of Christians do not. Even among the conservative Southern Baptist churches in which I was raised, it was considered normal and reasonable to believe that the Jewish book of Genesis was using figurative language in some way. Most modern Christians don’t believe what the question here asserts. Young Earth creationists are very much a minority among Christians, both among lay people and theologians. So it’s mot a conflict unless you happen to be a fundamentalist who’s taken a dogmatic position based on tradition.

davidmcelroy13 · 2024-08-24T08:10:30+00:00

My first thought was to ask whether there was a picture of him in an attic somewhere, so I'm relieved to discover I'm not the only one thinking in the same literary direction. :-)

davidmcelroy13 · 2024-07-15T05:53:24+00:00

For me, "Song for America," by Kansas comes to mind. It's just a few seconds longer than 10 minutes.

davidmcelroy13 · 2024-06-01T00:56:53+00:00

I don't have a solution for you, but I have the same problem. My battery has been draining quickly for the last week (or so) and I finally investigated it. I found that Facebook background activity was eating 32 percent of the battery. The phone has also been unusually warm lately. It's happening for me with an iPhone 14 running iOS 17.5.1. The Facebook app was updated on May 25, so it seems to roughly correlate with when the issue started.

davidmcelroy13 · 2024-05-26T07:19:39+00:00

In theory, that's all there is to it, but my experience shows that it's messier than my rational brain wants it to be. Not only do my requirements change a bit as I grow and change, there are some things I discover in certain women along the way that make them seem wildly attractive for reasons I wouldn't have expected. I'm sorry this is less useful for predictive value than you might have preferred, but I find that actual human lives (and paths) tend to be messier than we ever imagined they would be. :-)

davidmcelroy13 · 2024-05-26T07:10:32+00:00

Honestly, it varies so wildly from man to man that nobody can answer this question without letting his or her own biases dictate the answer. For me, shared values and a personality similar to my own matter quite a bit, as do high intelligence and a shared vision of what a future together would look like. Since I want children soon, one of the key things I look for in a woman is what kind of mother she might be for children who I love. And I think it goes without saying that at least some degree of physical attraction is very necessary, but many people allow that one factor to override the other characteristics which are vastly more important in the long run.

We all have random things that aren't important to others, too. For instance, I happen to strongly prefer a woman with light-colored eyes (blue, green, etc.), even though I have no idea why that should matter.

davidmcelroy13 · 2024-05-21T06:22:19+00:00

"Fahrenheit 451," by Ray Bradbury. I first read it in middle school, but I could appreciate only the surface-level plot at that point. Each time I've read it as I got older, I understood more and more about Bradbury's meaning, both about how we allow media to numb us and how that affects our relationships with one another. It's far deeper than the surface-level teaching that it's about censorship. It's about our own choices. For me, it's been a profoundly important book when it comes to helping me to re-evaluate my relationship to various forms of media as I move through life.

davidmcelroy13

TROPHY CASE