Tag: AI

Pulp Brainstorming with WordPress AI

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Note: the following post contains affiliate links.  I receive a portion of any purchases made through these links, at no additional cost to you.  —TPP

On Saturday I wrote at length about my idea for a physical, portable, monthly (now, after some feedback, likely quarterly) publication packed with fast-paced, pulp-style fiction for readers who are hungry to read short stories but don’t want to do so on a screen.  I suspect there is a significant niche audience for this kind of publication, and it dovetails with my calls for conservatives to support like-minded authors.  In an age of AI and online publishing, there is a segment of the population that craves authenticity and good storytelling.

Paradoxically, I turned to AI to begin brainstorming this idea.  Regular readers will know that I am an AI-skeptic.  I believe some aspects of AI are corrosive to creativity, such as doing actual writing (and, therefore, thinking) for humans; however, AI is hugely useful as a sounding board to conceptualize an idea.  That is especially useful when an AI inspires real-world human creativity, and I think it can be powerful as an aid to human creativity, so long as we don’t make it a replacement for it.

That said, WordPress.com has their own AI-powered website builder, and I’ve been looking for an excuse to play around with it.  I was initially torn about the ethics of creating a website using WordPress AI, but the way I look at it is that WordPress is offering a series of text-based prompts to create a website using tools that are readily available to WordPress.com users; it’s just offering up choices to users that they might not realize are native to WordPress.com.

In essence, the AI isn’t creating the website instead of the user, but is responding to the user’s prompts to design a website with the user.  Ultimately, the final product is the result of substantial user input.

Read More »

Monday Morning Movie Review: Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025)

The Portly Politico8 Comments

Yours portly ventured to his local cinema last week.  One of the glories of summer vacation is that I can go see the movies at 11:40 AM on a Thursday morning, which is exactly what I did when I went to see Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025).

Why such an early showing?  Well, the movie—and this point is my chief complaint about it—is nearly three hours long.  Like every major film release these days, directors seem incapable of shooting and editing a film that is under two hours.  A small handful of super long films don’t feel long, and I welcome their three-hour runtimes, but those (like Goodfellas [1990]) are very much the exception to the rule.  What happened to the tight, 90-minute flick?

M:ITFR gets a bit of a pass because it is the final (allegedly) film in a franchise that dates back to 1996.  Think about that—this franchise pre-dates the birth of Dr. Fiancée by two years.  I was eleven when the first film released; I’m forty now.  It is a testament to Tom Cruise‘s longevity, dedication, and fitness that he was able to play Ethan Hunt for so nearly thirty years.  Cruise famously and frequently performs his own stunts; seeing a man of his age (he’s 62; he’ll turn 63 in July) perform them is impressive.

The flick was filmed back-to-back with its predecessor, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023), but the writers’ strike delayed production of M:ITFR until 2024.  That means Cruise played Ethan Hunt for twenty-eight years—dang!

But I digress.  Is the impossible length of this film worth accepting the mission?

Read More »

Monday Morning Movie Review: Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)

The Portly Politico44 Comments

In an era of declining box office receipts and regurgitated intellectual properties featuring race- and gender-swapped protagonists to appeal to “modern audiences,” it seems the only surefire way to make a smash hit is to attach Tom Cruise to the project.  Last summer’s smash blockbuster was Top Gun: Maverick (2022); one year later, it’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023).

Unwieldy title aside, Dead Reckoning Part One is an excellent film.  Cruise returns to portray super spy Ethan Hunt, the most resourceful asset of the mysterious Impossible Mission Force (IMF).  What makes the flick so compelling, and not just another rehash of past M:I films, is its antagonist:  a powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) called “The Entity,” an enemy that is “everywhere… and nowhere.”

Read More »