Posted on

Where Are the Deaf Children at Aladdin?

Yesterday I sat in the New Amsterdam Theatre for the interpreted performance of Disney’s Aladdin. The show was fine. The interpreting was fine. Neither held my attention the way the audience did. It was Scouts Day. The hearing children came dressed as princes and princesses, sashes weighed down with badges, parents fussing over phones and snacks. The aisles filled with the small chaos that always attends a children’s matinee. Within all of that, in a designated seating block to the side, sat the Deaf audience. I counted, roughly, sixty of us. The youngest among us looked sixty herself. Most of those sixty people were between sixty and eighty-five years old. A handful of hearing family members translated stage business in side conversations. Deaf children were absent from the section. Deaf teenagers, if any were present, were too few for me to identify in a careful sweep.

Continue reading → Where Are the Deaf Children at Aladdin?

Posted on

The Consciousness Trilogy: Reading Three Wagers on the Question We Cannot Settle

This page exists for readers who want a map of the consciousness sequence published on BolesBlogs in the spring of 2026. Three articles, taken together, cover the contemporary terrain on the deepest question philosophy still asks. Each can be read alone. Read in sequence, they form a coordinated treatment of the consciousness problem that points beyond any single solution toward what the field as a whole has and has not accomplished.

Continue reading → The Consciousness Trilogy: Reading Three Wagers on the Question We Cannot Settle

Posted on

Memory in the Meme

We live in an age of disposable context. We scroll through the infinite ribbon of the glass screen, pausing only for a microsecond to register a flicker of recognition before sliding our thumb upward, condemning the moment to the digital abyss. We have been trained by the Technocrats, those right-brained architects of our algorithmic prisons, to view this behavior as consumption. They tell us we are “consuming content.” But they are wrong. When we pause on a meme, that pixelated artifact of cultural shorthand, we are not consuming. We are remembering.

Continue reading → Memory in the Meme

Posted on

The Weight of the Digital Attic

Sorting through a box of family photos in Nebraska last year, the physical weight of them stopped me. It wasn’t just the heavy cardboard. It was the specific gravity of each print. I held a single, fading photograph of folks I did not know, captured on their wedding day. Just one. It wasn’t one of twenty-seven burst-mode variations kept “just in case.”

Continue reading → The Weight of the Digital Attic

Posted on

Gemini Invents a New Language

As a Boles.ai experiment, I asked three AI Bots — Claude.ai and Gemini and ChatGPT — to create a language and then I asked them if the language was actually created by them or not. Because of the length of the responses, I created three separate articles demonstrating the language invention capabilities of each Bot. You can decide which language Bot was most effective and inventive. I used the same prompts for all three attempts.

Continue reading → Gemini Invents a New Language

Posted on

Claude.ai Invents a New Language

As a Boles.ai experiment, I asked three AI Bots — Claude.ai and Gemini and ChatGPT — to create a language and then I asked them if the language was actually created by them or not. Because of the length of the responses, I created three separate articles demonstrating the language invention capabilities of each Bot. You can decide which language Bot was most effective and inventive. I used the same prompts for all three attempts.

Continue reading → Claude.ai Invents a New Language

Posted on

This Is Not the World I Wanted to Leave for You: Reflections on Legacy, Loss, and the Future We Shape

I have been thinking a great deal lately about living and dying, and about the strange, stubborn human hunger to leave something meaningful behind. The faces of those I have known who have already passed return to me in quiet moments, and I find myself watching those who are, even now, nearing the end of their own stories. I also include my final braided prairie knot in that wondering. In the background of these thoughts runs a deeper worry, a shadow that lengthens each day: the growing political instability that presses in on the goodness of life and threatens the fragile hope we carry in our personal lives. I wonder, in darker hours, if all the labor, all the love, all the sacrifice we invest in this world will ever prove to be worth it. And then, as if called back from the edge of despair, I remember what my friend, mentor, and teacher, Dr. Howard Stein, told me as he lay dying at age 91.

Continue reading → This Is Not the World I Wanted to Leave for You: Reflections on Legacy, Loss, and the Future We Shape

Posted on

AI INTJ

I use some form of AI every day! I use it for fun, for images, for music, for research, for creative writing: FOR EVERYTHING! Having that sort of deep, ongoing, conversation with AI can lead one into many forests and discover a plethora of “tapestry” while “delving” into this “journey.” That familiarity with AI can breed contempt — always — or, perhaps, even insight… if only frequently, and on spec. OpenAI’s ChatGPT Bot has the ability to “remember” your previous interactions and here is a conversation I recently had with the “ChatGPT o3-mini-high” Bot from OpenAI.

Continue reading → AI INTJ

Posted on

Cathedrals of Chalk: 55 Years Later!

I believe I was three or four years old when I took my first visit to the Chalk Mine near North Loup, Nebraska. Growing up there each summer, and with each subsequent visit to the mine, the experience of being surrounded by a cooling white chalk was both effervescent and full of young wonder. Heading back into the mine last summer as an old man, after a break of about 40 years, proved yet another interesting example of how sometimes things change beyond the fateful recollection of the shared memory.

Continue reading → Cathedrals of Chalk: 55 Years Later!

Posted on

Elon Musk and the Mechanical Mask

In a recent interview, SuperGenius Elon Musk warned the future is coming for us, and we better be prepared to fight A.I. drones, and we will become the machine, and we will be able to “download” other people, and their personalities, and their memories, to become them. Our faces become the death mask upon the artificial life façade. Want to become Abraham Lincoln? Check. Adolf Hitler? Check. Elon Musk? You’re gonna have to write a check!

Continue reading → Elon Musk and the Mechanical Mask