NPO #31: Blogger Links Are Bad Now

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Ticketmaster.

Most of what you will read here is from the Ticketmaster's Note in my Prehysteria!Prehysteria! review from last Friday. Sorry for leaving the doubled text in, but hopefully it will help illustrate my point by making this post as hard to read as it is infuriating to try to edit a long post with a lot of link insertions.

Except for the call to action, which I just copy in from other posts and add little puns and references to reflect the column or subject matter. So even if you don't like that I'm being a rhetorical pain in the ass, please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment a piece of your mind at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see, receive the latest news on my content, and let GoogleGoogle know what anti-retro scum waffles they're being to blooming and booming millennial content creators like myself.

First, a little rant about what I think might be the cause of the problem that I am about to re-explain to you all: AI-assisted writing on mobile devices. I don't have this problem on my phone (which I hate typing on and really hate doing link insertions on because the screen is so small) or my tablet (which has a Bluetooth keyboard so I can use it to draft blog posts on the go fairly quickly, but it's almost ten years old, so the input lag is pretty awful and I can't copy links straight from the Search bar anymore like I used to), but at around the same time that I started having the link insertion issue on my PC, I also began to see this little concave diamond show up in the body field of my post editing screen that says "Help me write." It's a Google GeminiGoogle Gemini feature that lets you (duh) get help writing. I've dabbled in AI a bit; using things like PerchancePerchance, ChatGPTChatGPT, Nerd AINerd AI, and KindroidKindroid to get a flavor for what these applications can do. But while some of these surprised me with how much context and detail they can remember, most are like doing improv with a soulless, reclusive goldfish who relies on an index card of set responses and direct lines to some of the least reliable sources of information imaginable (which is how, when I tried to get help writing my scathing review of 6565, ChatGPT thought it was about Adam DriverAdam Driver playing a racecar driver). I will never use AI-assisted writing for anything important because it will never be able to come up with cool similes like "doing improv with a soulless, reclusive goldfish...". The day that a computer can just be me is the day that I ask it to punch my ticket...providing "punch my ticket" is among its pre-programmed euphemisms for killing, and provided it knows its way around the Asimov CodeAsimov Code....

The OnionThe Onion Headline: "Nationwide Theatre Shutdown! AI Clerks Misinterpret Job Description, Killing Thousands." In unrelated news: "FNAFFNAF Revival Screening Kills Franchise, Audience."

So, yeah; all of that to say again that BloggerBlogger has changed how its editing interface on PC reacts to the "Insert or Edit Link" button when text is highlighted. Before, it would keep the text highlighted and replace it with a link when the work was done and you hit "OK." Now, it dumps the link out as duplicated text after the text you highlighted, like this: Prehysteria!Prehysteria!, meaning you have to go back through your draft and delete all of the non-linked text that's left before your link. And God forbid you have any apostrophes, quotation marks, or other random punctuation in your highlighted text (exclamation points are okay for some reason), because then, it will shove the link into a "null," like this: Austin O'Briennull, leaving you to copy the text you wanted your link to display as, re-edit your link, and then re-apply any formatting options to your link that you had on the text before.

It's almost like AI can be bad for things, isn't it?

Fix your shit, Google, or I may just have to painstakingly transfer my years of hard work to another blogging platform. Thanks in advance for being awesome....

And thanks to you Ticketholders out there for being actually, unironically, non-sarcastically, and perpetually awesome.

Please remember to officially Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment a piece of your mind at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see, receive the latest news on my content, and let Google know what anti-retro scum waffles they're being to blooming and booming millennial content creators like myself.

Tomorrow, the Grimm Fairy Tales Retrospective makes me wish I had done an Anime Spotlight on Goblin Slayer yesterday. Then the TBT Anniversary push has Jodie Foster and Rachel McAdams saying "I have had it with these muthaphukkin' thrillers on this muthaphukkin' plane!" And finally, Friday has more tiny dinosaur action...on a train! So Stay Tuned and Full Moon'd, and

Ticketmaster,

Out!