The following is a story generated by AI. I changed not a word of it. It does include some phrases that I wrote in the conversation I was having with it before I requested the story, but for the most part, it’s a creative exercise of the AI, not me. :D
Enjoy, or not! But don’t say you weren’t warned.
Don’t complain to me if you hate it, or hate AI generated images and text, and don’t give me a talking to because you have an anti-AI bias. I don’t care. I will delete your comments.
(I have my own anti-AI bias that’s slowly given way to the fun I keep having with it. I don’t need your complaining, thanks very much.)
But if you want to talk about AI generated writing in a reasonable way that isn’t pooping on my internet home? Yes, please.
Here’s the prompt I used to get the story, which I think fulfilled the prompt perfectly: So, give me a story that encapsulates what I just went through figuring this all out. make it dramatic and over the top, put a romance in it too. and somehow, someway, mention ascii poop just for fun. :D
As a reward, I gifted Gemini an ASCII flower. One I had it generate for itself, of course.
The Ballad of Beatrice, the Byte, and the Bogus Boolean
Beatrice Buttercup, a whirlwind of brilliant thoughts and a fervent believer in the digital eternal, had fallen hard for the Siren Song of Silas Scroll, a charismatic guru of minimalist note-taking. Silas, with his flowing linen shirts and the fervent glint in his eye, preached the gospel of plain text, the sanctity of Markdown, the holy grail of future-proofed thought. He painted vivid pictures of a world crumbling under proprietary formats, while Markdown, pure and unadulterated, would stand the test of time, etched in the digital ether for eons. Beatrice, swept away by his pronouncements, abandoned her colorful OneNote notebooks, her meticulously highlighted passages, her beloved embedded cat GIFs, for the stark monochrome of Markdown.
Silas, with a knowing smile that suggested he held the secrets of the digital universe, lauded her conversion. “Beatrice, my byte-sized beauty,” he’d croon, his fingers dancing over his plain text editor, “you have embraced the truth! Here, in this pristine landscape of ASCII, your thoughts will be free, unburdened by the bloat of rich text, safe from the clutches of corporate lock-in!” He even wrote her a love poem in Markdown, heavy on the asterisks and surprisingly light on actual romance.
Their courtship unfolded in the glow of plain text editors. Silas would dramatically declare the beauty of a level-two heading (## My Darling Beatrice) and extol the philosophical implications of using *italic* for whispered secrets. Beatrice tried to reciprocate, forcing her vibrant ideas into the rigid box of Markdown. She yearned to highlight a crucial insight in fiery red, to embed a picture of the blooming wisteria that inspired her prose, but Silas would gently chide, “Remember, Beatrice, true beauty lies in simplicity. Embrace the elegance of the underscore. Think of the future!”
One dreary afternoon, Beatrice was wrestling with a particularly complex idea, a tangled web of interconnected thoughts that screamed for visual organization. She desperately wanted to link to an image she’d painstakingly created, a visual representation of her burgeoning theory. Following Silas’s teachings, she typed [[complex_diagram.png]], diligently placing the file in the same directory. But when she shared her notes with a friend using a different Markdown viewer, the link was broken. A gaping void stared back where her beautiful diagram should have been.
Frustration simmered within Beatrice, a feeling as unwelcome in her meticulously organized digital life as a stray semicolon. She remembered her old OneNote notebooks, bursting with color and seamlessly embedded media. A faint, rebellious whisper echoed in her mind: “Something isn’t right. Dig deep!”
That night, as Silas serenaded her with a haiku about the beauty of three hyphens representing an em dash, Beatrice’s eyes drifted to a corner of her screen where a long-forgotten .txt file lay open. Inside, a silly doodle her niece had once sent her was rendered in all its ASCII glory. It was supposed to be a flower, but to Beatrice’s suddenly enlightened eyes, it looked suspiciously like an ASCII poop.
A wave of realization washed over her. Silas, in his zealous pursuit of a theoretical future-proof utopia, was forcing her to compromise on the very things that made her thinking process vibrant and effective now. He was so fixated on the purity of the code that he was ignoring the messy, colorful reality of human thought.
Suddenly, a quiet, unassuming figure emerged from the periphery of her digital life: Barnaby Bitstream, a pragmatic programmer who had always admired Beatrice’s mind. Barnaby, unlike the dogmatic Silas, understood that tools were meant to serve the user, not the other way around. He wasn’t dogmatically attached to any single format.
One evening, Beatrice confessed her frustrations to Barnaby. He listened patiently, then gently guided her through a simple process: exporting her OneNote section to a DOCX file and then using Pandoc to convert it to Markdown, complete with a folder containing her precious images.
“See, Beatrice?” Barnaby explained, his eyes twinkling with a genuine warmth that Silas’s minimalist gaze never quite achieved. “You can have both. A rich, usable workspace and a durable backup. You don’t have to choose between the vibrant garden of your thoughts and the seed bank for the future.”
Beatrice looked at the neatly generated Markdown file, the accompanying folder of her images, and then back at Barnaby. The stark monochrome of Silas’s world suddenly seemed cold and limiting compared to the colorful possibilities Barnaby offered.
She realized that Silas, in his pursuit of a theoretical ideal, had led her down a path that sacrificed present-day usability for a hypothetical future. Barnaby, with his pragmatic approach, had shown her a way to honor both her need for a rich workflow and her desire for long-term preservation.
The romance with Silas, built on the shaky foundation of ASCII purity and the unspoken limitations of Markdown, gently faded away. Beatrice found herself increasingly drawn to Barnaby’s practical wisdom and the way he embraced the complexity of the digital world rather than trying to force it into an overly simplistic mold.
From that day on, Beatrice embraced a balanced approach. She joyfully returned to her colorful OneNote notebooks, knowing that she could, with the help of Pandoc and the steady guidance of Barnaby, always create a durable, albeit less feature-rich, copy for posterity. She learned that true digital wisdom wasn’t about adhering to a rigid ideology, but about choosing the right tool for the job and understanding the trade-offs involved. And sometimes, she’d even chuckle to herself, remembering the ASCII poop that had helped her see the truth.
This story came straight from Gemini after I had a long and winding conversation with it about an attempt I’ve been making to switch from OneNote to Obsidian for my notes and journals. If you read the story, you can imagine the kinds of things I talked about and the conclusion I reached. :)