Category Archives: Stories

Owl & rabbit – a 21st century fable

Musings, Stories, , , ,

[Draft 3-21-2025 – teaser]

Owl & rabbit – a 21st century fable

(a matter of fidelity)

Part 1

For a village with little complaint, the night was sprinkled with screams. Those nights. These were not timbres of terror. These were shouts at someone, shrieks about one’s situation.

The unrest reached the nearby forest, to the ears of a particular animal, attentive to nightly things. An owl, Dr. Nolan, for whom those sounds signaled “I’m not going to take it anymore!” With an undertone of banging doors, rending of hearts. Would there be more business at his door, “Wise Wellness Therapy” …

Yet … those days … the animals were a scene of industry, of busy purpose, aspiring agency.

And in the day, another animal, a rabbit, was attentive to that scene. Rising from his deep burrow, sheltered from the nights, he only felt hints, fading dreamlike haunts, that something was amiss. And business was brisk at Dr. Larry’s “Cuddly Bunny Counseling” office.

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Fox and the ants – a 21st century fable

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Fox & the ants

(interdependency)

It was a lean season in the valley. Even an abandoned scarecrow had been stripped of its straw, ripped to rags moving in a dry breeze. Faceless.

A solitary, scrawny fox had slowly descended into the plain. Hunger gnawed at Jasper, but also the pain of separation from his skulk in another valley. He’d been banished, called a “veggie vore” for eating mostly fruit (especially grapes) and vegetables, and for spending hours every day listening to bird chatter rather than learning to hunt.

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Freemium 2.0 (ambrosia) – a 21st century fable

Musings, Stories, ,

Pondering the 21st century freemium 2.0 landscape …

Terms of the Tree

(resistance is futile)

imagine …

A splendid mythological garden … light glints marvelously from the surface of a tranquil creek nearby … on a mild rise, a magnificent tree festooned with fabulous, colorful fruit fills the air with a seductive scent … a snake rests in the sun on top of a rock at the base of the tree.

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Ditbit’s Guide to Blending in with AIs

Musings, Stories, ,   1 comment  

I’ve had some long conversations with an aspiring screenwriter about a collection of short stories, with a working title of The Ditbit’s Guide to Blending in with AIs. An evolving landscape:

The great realignment of humans and AIs left a landscape littered with un-, sub-, semi- and supernatural agency. – The New AI Ecology

in which, while many just try to survive, there are:

humans aspiring to magi
magi aspiring to AIs
AIs aspiring to humanity [1]

Evidently, as discussed in the article below, I’m not the only one wondering about our cognitive world.

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Sour grapes – blame-shifting folklore

Mediation, Musings, Stories, , ,

This article (below) is an interesting take on a classic fable, one of Aesop’s. Like the fable The Ant and the Grasshopper, The Fox & the Grapes [1] is part of the moral fabric of the American psyche (and elsewhere).

The oft-quoted moral of the fable is: There are many who pretend to despise and belittle that which is beyond their reach. The sour grape effect has become synonymous with being dismissive and disparaging about goals we’ve failed to achieve.

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‘Politics is about sacredness’ – overlapping moral orbits

Mediation, Musings, Stories, , , ,   2 comments  

Fables were part of the moral fabric when I was growing up. Perhaps yours as well. Especially some of Aesop’s Fables. (Yet, I was suprised that this was not the case for many of my middle school students, when a public school teacher.)

There’s one fable, in particular, which social psychologist Jonathan Haidt discussed in a 2012 interview (noted below) about his latest book (at that time): Aesop’s The Ant and the Grasshopper.

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Gut justice – what could possibly go

Musings, Stories, ,   1 comment  

Gut justice

[Draft 7-1-2021]

Jared awoke to silence. That was odd. His mempories were clouded, but he felt that noise was a more common experience. And he felt calm. Which also seemed odd.

He was in a sparsely furnished but clean room. Styled with calm colors. Daylight filtered through drapes on a nearby window. A comfortable place. But where?

He heard a door open. A female voice asked, “Jared, how are you feeling? Do you remember our last chat?”

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