Will The Metropolitan Opera Allow the Deaf to Sing?

My delightful wife Janna Sweenie and I are big lovers of opera. Opera is the pinnacle of all the Performing Arts — Painting, Acting, Voice, Costumes, Lights and Sets — and when put together, in unison, in an exaggerated and elevated performance, the entire world glows and resonates! We have always been dismayed that opera is not often, if ever, interpreted in American Sign Language for the Deaf like all Broadway shows are interpreted. Janna and I are currently working on our “Opera Project” where she will present ASL renderings of famous opera arias. We will place those performances online as proof-of-concept. This is a challenging, but rewarding, and complex academic process of interpretation and adaptation, and implementation.

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AI Art is Real Art and Not Stolen

As an early advocate for AI (Artificial Intelligence) I get some pushback from people who don’t know anything about the technology and who just want to persecute the entire idea of AI anything. They argue AI text responses are wrong; they bray that AI images are stolen. I have little patience for having a conversation with those types of Luddite deniers because, in the end, their arguments are both boring and wrong. Here’s why.

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Next Age in Evolution: AI Consciousness

I recently had an online conversation about the future of AI, and the possibility of the human mind one day becoming AI — and the subsequent gift of everlasting life would finally be realized. We are not our bodies. We are not our souls. We are our minds — filled with memories, learning, and perception. The ultimate goal we know several scientists are working on right now is to “download the mind” and copy the experiences into AI to create a parallel life among the living where the only thing that will matter moving forward is the collected, replicable, experiences of where we have been and the codification of future morality and the “human beingness” in our futures.

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The New Book Burning: Rewriting Roald Dahl

There’s nothing new in having established books censored. In 2011, I wrote about the concentrated effort to have Mark Twain’s books “rewritten” and “edited” without him. Today, there is a similar effort to “rewrite” and “edit” the fine work of author Roald Dahl. These reverse efforts, after publication, to quiet the writer’s voice through “social context” editing, is absolutely the same as burning books on a wood pyre — but with the excuse of protecting children. and of being sensitive to the new emancipation of provocative social norms.

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And Jeremiah Wept

The idea of “and Jeremiah Wept” is both a fascination and a complication. If we weep for others, are we weak, or empathetic? Framing matters. A hundred years ago, openly weeping for a friend may have been seen as inappropriate, but today, a public weeping may be assigned as a sign of strength of character in the bleeding heart of dismay.

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Boles.xyz, Post.News and Pixelfed Are the New Social Media

I finally took steps to distance myself from three moldy, overdead, social media services. I deactivated my verified Facebook business page with 17,000 followers. I also deactivated my Instagram account. I made my verified, 47,000 follower, Twitter account, private. I let go of those social media services because all three have lost the common touch. They’re run by robots, mastered by intentional cruelty, subjected to bad human policy decisions, bothered by awful automation and, in one case, a sort of madman rules the nest. Today, none of those ideations of those social media services are what they were when they started, and I made the decision to no longer be a part of the “creative community”  that makes content for those services just so mega media can sell advertising off our hard work. Enough!



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Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 13 (2022) is RIGHT NOW Available to Buy!

It’s that time of the year again — yes, time for us to ask for the pleasure of your continued, kind, support for this blog by joyously buying our eBookBest of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 13 (2022) — to show your support so we may continue to publish this blog without advertising while still being able to cover our yearly, ongoing, online publication costs that include server space, hosting fees, and bandwidth payments.

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