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Breaking writer's block by letting the computer and artificial intelligence work for you.

TLDR

The Poem.
Editorial.
About Newslettering
Audio Drama News.

When Google Becomes the Poet

Inspired by Morning at the Window, by T.S. Eliot

They shuffled the breakfast plates in the kitchen,
And all along the sidewalk.
The line did not wait at the west gate.

Waiting for clouds, while the
Surface is not continuous.

The tears of a man, going through a joke,
Die down in exceptional weather,
And move around the ceiling.

Editorial

Ross T. Sutherland is not only a master of words, but also an inventive trickster when it comes to beating the oh-so-well known problem of writer's block. In his podcast Imaginary Advice, he sometimes talks about techniques and methods to try out in order to battle writer's block. In this poem, I tried one of his methods: Taking a short poem by a known poet and push it through Google Translator. My initial poem was Morning at the Window, by T.S. Eliot, and you can find it here. After a dozen repetitions, I settled with the results, edited them briefly and voila, a totally new poem, devoid of the original meaning. Read more about Ross Sutherland and listen to his podcast by searching for Imaginary Advice or visiting his website.

About Newslettering

"Blogs offer the potential to broadcast, but not too broadly. We might even see a breakdown where newsletters begin to focus more on individual personal stories and daily digests (...). It’s pleasant to scroll through the archives of various newsletters, too. Such spaces are escape hatches from the horse-race election cycle: People are looking for those escape hatches, and they’re looking to create them too."
At least that is what the Nieman Lab for Journalism in the form of Joanne McNeil wrote in the beginning of the year.
For me, this is very much true and also why I chose a newsletter as a way to try out new things and keep the audience and friends alike up to date and engaged. Twitter is still the most used platform when it comes to political and personal discourse, but it doesn't come with the choice to plan and supervise the discourse. This is why newsletters, for me as well, often feel like "escape hatches from the horse-race election cycle".

Audio Drama News

I'm slowly building an online community over at Instagram and Twitter. More very soon!

Post Note

Finally, I figured out a way to enable a custom reply to - email address, so you can always write me. So if there is anything you want me to know, send it my way! If not, I wish you the very best of weekends and a productive week ahead :)