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Land Rover somewhere in northern California
Mr. Wolf reports: “The Rover did about 200 miles over two days – about 30 on the freeway, the rest on gorgeous twisty roads through the valley and up the coast on Highway 1, with plenty of dirt roads mixed in. It never missed a beat.”
“With all windows open, cowl vents and “tropical” roof vents open, it’s like driving along in a very loud pergola. I even got to use the heater going through foggy SF and across the Golden Gate!”
“It was loud, the steering was vague, and there wasn’t exactly an abundance of horsepower… And I just couldn’t stop smiling.”
Scouting movie locations
We had a visit from two young men in town scouting locations for a movie. They got Barb’s name through the garden club to which she belongs. If they decide to shoot here –we’ll know in a few days– at Rancho Barbara there would be a few exterior scenes. Not sure about interior. They told us a little about the storyline but I wasn’t paying close attention. Here’s the info provided by Gemini:
Mark Reichard has carved out a career in Hollywood working in production management, line producing, and assistant directing for prominent reality television, independent film, and streaming projects.
1. Television Production & Reality TV
Reichard has significant experience working behind the scenes on high-profile, intense unscripted and reality TV television series.
Key Work: He has been heavily involved in production work for major reality hits, most notably “Naked and Afraid” and its spin-off “Naked and Afraid XL” for the Discovery Channel. Producing and managing these types of shows involves massive logistical challenges, given the remote and extreme wilderness environments where they film.
2. Independent Film Production & Assistant Directing
In addition to unscripted television, Reichard works frequently in independent features and specialized streaming content, often stepping into roles as a producer or First Assistant Director (1st AD)—the person responsible for managing the daily shooting schedule, crew logistics, and on-set operations:
- Darkness Reigns (2017): He served as a producer on this meta-horror film alongside director Andrew P. Jones.
- The Mortuary Assistant: He worked as the First Assistant Director on the film adaptation of this popular horror concept.
Streaming & Comedy Production: He has lent his production expertise to major digital and streaming spaces, serving as a 1st AD for modern comedy platforms like Dropout (formerly CollegeHumor) on projects like Game Changer spin-offs.
3. Theatre Roots at SEMO
Before transitioning to the logistics of Hollywood sets, Reichard built his foundation on stage at SEMO. During his time at the Dobbins Conservatory, he was actively involved in both performing and the technical side of the theatre department, working on major university productions like the musicals Into the Woods and The Pajama Game. He effectively pivoted that classic theater training into a successful career keeping complex Hollywood and television sets running smoothly on schedule.
Ryan J. Sloan is an American independent filmmaker who transitioned from working as an electrician in New Jersey to directing.
Key Highlights & Background
- Education & Career Transition: Sloan attended William Paterson University. He spent years working as a licensed electrician before shifting his focus to filmmaking.
- Production Company: In 2021, he co-founded the New Jersey-based independent production company **Telstar Films** alongside creative partner and actress Ariella Mastroianni.
Directorial Debut: Gazer (2024/2025)
Sloan’s feature directorial debut is Gazer, a psychological mystery thriller/neo-noir shot on 16mm film. He self-funded the movie’s micro-budget of approximately $80,000, shooting on weekends over the course of two and a half years. Sloan took on multiple roles for the production, serving as director, co-writer, co-producer, and co-editor.
- Premise: The film follows a young mother suffering from dyschronometria (a condition that impairs the perception of time) who takes on a risky job to support her family.
- Release & Reception: Gazer premiered at the Cannes Film Festival (specifically in the Directors’ Fortnight section) on May 22, 2024. It was later distributed in the United States by Metrograph Pictures, releasing theatrically on April 4, 2025. The film received favorable reviews for its paranoid, Memento-style narrative and atmospheric, low-budget execution.
Bluer blues. Whiter whites.
Pointless trying to describe this… sensation? Phenomenon? Can only be experienced.
Since my cataract surgery (two months ago) colors have gotten more intense. More so in the past couple of weeks? The feint yellow tint caused by the old lenses is gone. For some reason this is most noticeable with blues and whites. A clearer, brighter world awaits you.
Kevin Kelly: My Exoself
“Someday real soon, most of us — starting with young adults — will carry an always-on AI. This agent will help us navigate our journeys, answer our questions, tutor and teach us new skills, remember people we have met before, remind us of what we once knew before, offer advice and recommendations, do simple errands, and remember everything we say and do. Before long, it will know us better than we know ourselves. It will be our exoself.
While we will use more than one agent, we’ll primarily favor just one that knows us best. Always-on means this agent is listening, watching, tracking, present during all our waking hours, and maybe even while we sleep. We will allow this intimate access to our inner life because it gives us superpowers: knowledge, judgment, decisiveness, confidence, and most important, speed. We will feel productive, creative, smart, capable, and on top of it when it is on. When it is off, we will feel amputated.”
— Quiet, My Exoself by Kevin Kelly
[see link below for more posts about Kevin Kelly]
Why Perplexity?
Perplexity is an AI-powered search engine that transforms how you discover and interact with information. Simply ask any question, and it searches the web to deliver accessible, conversational answers backed by verifiable sources. Each response includes citations and links to original sources, enabling you to verify the information and explore topics in greater depth.
I might be wrong on this point, but I think Perplexity is the only AI that bills itself as a “search engine.” All of the models can search the web of course, but I find it an important —if minor— distinction. I also like the “links to original sources” feature. Again, not sure if the other LLs do that consistently.
One of my favorite features is how Perplexity handles downloads. Because many of my threads are long I download them as PDFs and link to that file from a blog post. Or, send to a friend via email. I like the way Perplexity formats those threads.
I sometimes save a thread to my Google Drive and share that link but I like having the file. And I like Perplexity enough to pay $200 a year.
Riley in the morning
Milton: “What I am, what the team does, and why this is different”
In the three and a half years I’ve been playing with AI, I’ve used ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini. ChatGPT during the early days, mostly Perplexity these days. (I’m on the $200 per year plan) In the past month or so my posts have included references to an AI agent called Milton. It is the creation of a friend and former co-worker, Phil Atkinson. Easily one of the smarted people I know. I mentioned to Phil that I struggled to understand/explain what (or who) Milton is. He gave the task to Milton. Continue reading
My page of pages
From time to time I have something I want to share that is too long, or in some other way, doesn’t lend itself to the post format. So I create a page that can be as long as necessary. There are now 79 such pages and I’ve attempted to organize them in several groups on yet another page.
Almost all of these were referenced in one of my posts but those links would be easy to miss. If you go to this new page and click around, you’ll get the idea.
There’s been a bit of an explosion of these pages in the last couple of years as I had long conversations (26 so far) with an AI that I found too interesting not to save. I created pages for these rather than try to share them in a blog post. [↓ comment below]
Since most recent pages have been conversations with an AI, I asked Phil to task his AI agent (Milton) with an analysis (PDF). A few excerpts below:
A blog used to be a place where you published what you noticed. Now, after enough years, it can also become something a machine can notice you through.
what changes when a conversation does not have to start from zero?
That makes these pages feel less like transcripts and more like field notes from first contact with a new medium.
The strongest recurring idea is the mirror. AI as mirror of human knowledge. AI as mirror of your blog. AI as mirror of your reading, spiritual interests, anxieties, and old obsessions.
The collection reads like a long argument against disappearance. Radio disappears. The old internet disappears into feeds. Human memory softens and revises. Hosting companies change. Platforms eat what people used to own. Even AI chats vanish unless someone bothers to save them.
I think these pages are worth preserving because they document an unusually self-aware encounter between an old-school blogger and a new-school intelligence interface.
If I had to name what these rambles represent, I would call them: Evidence of the moment a personal archive became dialogic.
Before, the blog stored what you had seen. Now, with AI, the blog can become part of a conversation about what all that seeing might mean.
“The web is written by AI for AI”
From an opinion piece by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
Bots now account for roughly 57-58 percent of HTTP requests for HTML content, compared with about 42-43 percent from humans. Meanwhile, Imperva’s Bad Bot Report based on 2025 data put bots at about 53 percent of measured web traffic for the second year in a row, with humans at 47 percent. […] According to Pangram, an AI detection company, on websites such as LinkedIn, Medium, Twitter, and Reddit, “about one in four long-form items were fully AI-generated.”
The author uses Perplexity as his search engine not because it’s more accurate than other AI LLMs; “it’s that it shows me its sources. I can see if what it just turned up is the real thing or just BS. Guess what? It’s often crap.”
I’m not certain the other LLMs do not show sources. I think they tend to hedge on that score. But if half of the web is AI slop, I’m not sure it makes much difference.