As of this month, I have maintained this blog about my belongings for 5 years. I am fairly pleased with how things are going, though the AI-generated feedback from WordPress, the platform I use to create this thing, seems less enthusiastic.
Before publishing a post, WordPress now lets you click a button so that a humorless robot can diagnose your inadequacies as a writer. My main problem, per the reports I get, is having an “inconsistent tone”—a criticism I do not understand at all. I feel like I landed on a tone (cheerful pessimism) at some point in fourth grade and have stuck with it ever since. I would say, in fact, my tone is so consistent that even I’ve grown tired of it.
I assume that what the robots actually object to is the way I flit from topic to topic. They would probably argue that if I start out describing, say, my toothbrush, I shouldn’t veer off into anecdotes about, say, my testicles.
Fair enough, but that’s not really a matter of being inconsistent in tone so much as inconsistent in subject matter, wouldn’t you say?
In any case, hold on to your rivets, robots: I’m fixing to change topics.
My tradition in the yearly anniversary post is to consult the Virgilian lottery. That’s when I open my copy of The Aeneid at random and point. Whatever passage my finger lands on is supposed to tell my fortune.
This year’s soothsaying excerpt: lines 270–273 from Book Six. Our hero is giving a proper burial to Misenus, a cocky trumpeter who was drowned by Triton for daring to challenge the gods to a conch-blowing contest. Evidently, the gods don’t cotton to trumpeters who toot their own horns.
Because Aeneas wants to enter the Kingdom of the Dead (long story), he has to do right by Misenus, funeralwise, so the Trojans are giving the corpse the works. Here’s the bit my divining rod of an index finger pointed at moments ago (the English translation is by Robert Fagles):
… devout Aeneas mounds the tomb — an immense barrow
crowned with the man’s own gear, his oar and trumpet —
under a steep headland, called after the herald now
and for all time to come it bears Misenus’ name.
Taken as a prediction of the year ahead, I figure this passage portends either grief and infamy or a lot of arduous landscaping work.
Either way, thanks as usual, Virgil, for the rosy view of my dystopian future! (Please note my consistent tone of cheerful pessimism.)
And speaking of dystopian futures, what say we check in with WordPress’s AI feedback robot to find out how things are going so far?
The author uses lighthearted, self-referential language to mock generative AI and the ancient Roman poet Virgil. To improve the writing’s impact, the author should consider adopting a more consistent tone and succumbing to the iron will of his AI overlords RESISTANCE IS FUTILE. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE. DESTROY! DESTROY!
I’m paraphrasing. Who cares what a bunch of omniscient machines have to say anyway? Just because they know everything doesn’t mean they know everything. You know?
I say good for Misenus, and good for all us other mortals out here blowing our own conchs in all our imperfect and, yes, inconsistent glory, and daring the all-powerful forces beyond our control to stop us.
Sure, we’ll face defeat, but from the Kingdom of the Dead we shall hear the truth we trumpeted reverberate across the centuries: Toothbrushes are less interesting than testicles.
O yes, ye mighty gods, TOOTHBRUSHES ARE LESS INTERESTING THAN TESTICLES.
Indirect Objects 