I've been interested in ChatGPT as people have been talking about it more and more lately, but I didn't have any ideas about what I might want to use it for - until I thought about using it for language practice.
It's terrible for providing factual information - ChatGPT doesn't know what's true and what's false, and it makes stuff up all the time.
However, what it's good at - what it primarily does - is recognize and mimic existing language patterns.
I've been reading the classic comic strip Cul de Sac lately, and I've been loving it - and also being struck by all the artistry that went into the drawings.
I've read a bit about cartoonist Richard Thompson and watched some short videos, and several people pointed out how deceptively simple his work appears - the visual style of Cul de Sac is suggestive of children's drawings, while still being surprisingly precise.
The Cul de Sac from September 17, 2008 has some wonderful illustrations of his skillful drawing:
I've been reading easy (extremely easy) Japanese books at tadoku.org, which has a large selection of extremely easy books for people learning Japanese.
Recently I read one about a man from America who had gone to Japan to build houses to replace a few of the homes destroyed when the US dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The man was Floyd Schmoe.
I thoroughly enjoyed the Japanese book, and after I finished it, I wanted to learn more about Schmoe. Wikipedia was most helpful, of course, and I found some photos and articles online that filled in more details.
I first learned about The Scale Omnibus in spring of 2021 when the author, Francesco Balena, was giving away for free.
There's a new version out, and it still has hundreds of scales in dizzying quantity of variations, but now Balena has added more information about similar scales.
It's a bargain at 9 euros. If you'd like to get a sense of how it works, you can download a free excerpt.