Further Comics Buyer’s Guide issues added to the search engine

I thought I’d take a look at archive.org again, and sure enough, a dozen and a half issues of CBG had been added since I did the initial import.

Which isn’t a lot, but what the hey.

You can now search them at kwakk.info, too. So if you’ve ever wondered whether Pacific licensed titles for overseas publication:

You can now find the answer!

(And while I was at it, I “audited” the other magazines to see whether any issues got lost when I was doing the major imports last year, and indeed — there was a smattering of issues here and there that were missing. Now fixed.)

And as always, if you have access to a scanned archive of magazines/fanzines about comics and want to add them to the kwakk.info search engine, drop me a note. There are 26 titles indexed currently, but the more magazines that are available, the easier it is to do comics research.

August Music

Music I’ve bought in August.

Let’s see… any trends in this month’s purchases? Yes, I bought a lot of albums from concerts I attended.

Arooj Aftab: Tiny Desk (Home) Concert

Arooj Aftab was amazing in concert. And funny.

IDLES - DANCER (Official Video)

Idles were a lot of fun.

Nia Archives - Forbidden Feelingz (Official Video)

Nia Archives was totally ON during the show. And who knew that good old-fashioned jungle is back?

Hm… and I also bought a bunch of improv/free jazz CDs at various shows. So the usual.

LLMs Are Still Useless

Over on the movie blog I’m still trying to answer the question whether 80s arthouse movies suck or not.

And I knew from that dataset that Querelle had one single vote in the Sight & Sound 2022 poll, but I wondered who had voted for it.

I tried googling, and I tried binging, and both came up short. So I thought: The advertised use case for LLMs is that they’re supposed to be able to use more context to answer queries. The search engines aren’t able to find solution possibly because there’s no single web page that says both “querelle” and “sight and sound 2022 poll”?

So I tried ChatGPT:

Huh! Really? The data set was wrong? There were two people who voted for Querelle in the Critic’s poll — Michael Koresky and Mark Cousins?

OK, let’s look at Mark Cousin’s response:

Err… No Querelle.

Er… Nothing in Michael Koresky’s list either.

So ChatGPT was just doing it’s usual thing — straight up lying when it didn’t know the answer.

When these “hallucinations” come up, people often recommend using Perplexity instead:

Bla bla bla that’s a long way to say “fuck off; I have no idea”. Which is a better response for sure, but it’s not actually useful.

But restricting the google to this, however: site:https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-time/all-voters/ querelle

Yes!

It was Bing Wang! (And I have to say that that’s a quite bad top 10 list — two of those movies are awful, and a couple is about the worst movies that director did. But I digress!)

In conclusion: LLMs still suck. And waste our time. Sure, LLMs are just spicy autocomplete — if there’s a clear answer to anything, a simple search will give you the result (i.e., the Wikipedia page where the topic is discussed). If it’s an obscure question, the LLMs will either lie to you or tell you to fuck off.

You’d think that these plagiarism machines would be better by now… but I guess they work well enough for their primary purpose: Generating essays for college students. But as somebody wise once said: “this is only possible to argue if you are foolish enough to believe that the purpose of assigning essays to students is to increase the number of essays in the world”.

My New Horticultural Blog

I’ve never had one of these plants grow this tall. It’s an agave, I guess? Or possibly an aloe? I dunno. I’ve tried propping it up against the window, but today, it fell over. Twice! But without shattering into twenty pieces, so it’s more hardy than I thought — succulents like these have a tendency to shatter when falling over.

So here goes: I’m replanting in a bigger pot so that I can put proper supports in. (The root system doesn’t seem to be extensive… I had a peek. So no reason to replant because of crowded roots.)

At the Daycare For Men Store (i.e., the hardware gigastore), I was looking for something likely to use, but I couldn’t find anything… until I saw these flags! Perfect length! Got three of them.

And look! It survived replanting! Without breaking! (It was nerve-wracking — I should have had seven hands.) And it looks like the longer sticks are gonna support it better?

Now I just have to dispose of these flags… is there a proper desecration routine? I mean, deconsecration.

Eh, whatevs. In the trash you go.

Who says that nationalism isn’t good? My plant thanks you.

Mysterious Mail

I got this in the mail yesterday, and I’ve been scratching my head ever since. And not just because of the fleas, either!

It was in a padded envelope, but no invoice or anything. Now, I buy quite a lot of what are technically called “thingamabobs” on the web, and sometimes they take a long time to arrive, so…

Inside is something that looks like… er… Well, it’s one HDMI and one mini-HDMI, I think. But meant for… surface mounting or something? And what’s the black plastic strip?

Very odd.

But then I had a thought: Perhaps I could just check whether I’ve ordered something like this? Like, on the computer?

Oooh! It’s just an HDMI cable! Well, HDMI to mini HDMI, because I was going to use a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W for a project!

And the black plastic strip is actually the cable… it’s just very… thin.

I can understand why they sent this disassembled, because it feels very fragile indeed. But it would have been perfect for my Pi Zero project, if I were going ahead with that, but I decided that it was too underpowered, so I’m using a bigger Raspberry…

So there you go. I’m not sure what the moral here is.