Fighting Against AI Copyright Theft

Posted on by
2

I join the class action suit against Anthropic for the use of text in 16 of my books to train their AI without permission or compensation.

I didn’t expect to spend part of my morning filling in a form on a lawyer’s website to provide information about myself and the books Anthropic apparently used to train their AI. After all, I haven’t written much in the past 10 years and all of what I’d written before then was about using computers. Surely all of those books were so sorely out of date that even an AI wouldn’t be interested in them.

But here I am.

Continue reading →

American Airlines Misadventures

Posted on by
5

I experience a grueling travel day thanks to automated systems and basic ineptitude at American Airlines.

I’ll try to make this short, mostly because I’m exhausted and don’t want to spend too much time writing about it. But it was such a crazy experience that I want to record it for posterity.

The Backstory

I just finished a two week delivery/training boat captain gig in Florida. The owner of the boat, a 2024 Beneteau Antares 11, needed to move the boat from Niceville on the Florida panhandle to Jacksonville on the northeastern Florida coast, a distance of more than 800 nautical miles. John had zero boating experience and his insurance company required an experienced training captain on board. John found me through my YouTube Great Loop videos. We had 2 weeks to do the trip and we managed with a day to spare.

There’s a lot more to this story, but I’ll cover the highlights in my Great Loop blog. All I can say is that I don’t know how people can live with the heat and humidity in Florida in August.

Continue reading →

Getting Back to Writing

Posted on by
3

I ease back into writing for hire.

One of the things I’ve been working on part-time for past few years is getting back into writing articles for publication.

Waterway Guide

Although I thought I had a working relationship with Waterway Guide, that fizzled out pretty quickly. The publisher was initially excited about working with me and made some suggestions about how much money I might earn writing for them. I did my part to help build content on their site with a never-ending stream of marina and anchorage reviews. (I still get the occasional compliment for my reviews.)

But after months on the Loop, I just got one article assignment — and I never got paid for it. I was very interested in helping to update the Skipper Bob books — especially the one for the Erie Canal — but was told other people were doing it. No other work was forthcoming. So I stopped writing reviews. I’m a professional writer, after all, and I’m not going to go out of my way to build content for a for-profit publication without getting compensation for my work.

Continue reading →

Why I’m Not Blogging as Regularly as I Used To

Posted on by
3

I think there are two reasons this time, one familiar and one new.

Let’s face it: I’ve been blogging at An Eclectic Mind since long before it had that name. My first blog post was way back in 2003. The blog had my name back then, Maria Langer, and it could be found at MariaLanger.com — where it can still be found; try it! I wrote about the things that were on my mind. For a while, I wrote computer-related how-to content, but I eventually broke that out and put it into a site called Maria’s Guides which I’ve since allowed to die. I wrote a lot about politics. I wrote a lot about my work and my play. I wrote a lot about my crazy divorce. I wrote a lot about social media. I wrote a lot about building a new life in Washington State.

Heck, I just wrote a lot about anything that was on my mind.

And that’s what I personally think a blog is for. At least this blog.

There are no ads here. No tracking. No annoying pop-ups begging you to subscribe or send me money. It’s just the blog of a writer — a person who has always written — sharing what’s on her mind.

If you come here often to read my latest and actually like a lot of what you read, great! I’m thrilled to have you here!

But if you stumbled in here unknowingly and have concluded that this blog is crap and a total waste of your time, well, just go away and don’t come back. It doesn’t bother me.

And if you think that’s harsh, well blame social media. (Also understand that “go away” is not what I originally wrote.)

Continue reading →

Doing the Math on Art Shows (and Other Ways to Sell My Silversmithing Work)

Posted on by
Comment

I take an objective, dollars and cents look at the various ways I can sell my jewelry to see how they stack up financially.

Last weekend, I made the nearly 5-hour drive to Sequim, WA to attend a 3-day Lavender Festival that featured, among other things, artists and vendors selling their wares. I was one of those artists.

Malachite and Azurite Pendant
I was very pleased that this double pendant sold for $229 at the Lavender Festival, along with the $99 sterling silver and emerald necklace I’d paired it with. (Those beads were expensive!)

I’ve done plenty of art shows before. I’ve done a handful here in Washington State and a handful down in Arizona. I’ve had mixed results, mostly depending on the stage I was in in my silversmithing journey and the kind of show I was attending. Some shows are good for low-end items, other shows are good for fine art items. My work straddles those two worlds, for a variety of reasons.

But rather than talk about the evolution of my work, I want to talk about something I know well: the finance end of things. After all, I do have a BBA in Accounting with Highest Honors from Hofstra University. (LOL.) And even though I don’t use that degree in my daily work, I haven’t forgotten a lot of what I learned along the way, including marketing and finance. It is, after all, what makes it possible for me to handle the financial records and do the marketing for all of the businesses I operate, even if I can never really count how many there are.

And here’s what I learned about the various ways I sell my work.

Continue reading →