Do you set personal goals for yourself?
I have one personal goal:
Look for the strange and unusual every single day.
Caturday
It’s almost Halloween!
It IS Caturday – hoozah!!!
The Ghost in the Machine Knows My Dog
WP Prompt: What do you think is the future of AI?
Today, I was using Gemini to help me with proofreading a post involving cannibalism when, out of nowhere, it mentioned my dog and how I already feed him expensive dog food.
Then it said something about escalating things (I guess it was a joke about feeding him human flesh instead of Orijen).
The thing is, I didn’t mention my dog in the post; it knew my dog was named Hamish, and sure, I feed Hamish expensive dog food. It doesn’t surprise me that Gemini knew I had a dog and that I bought him expensive dog food—I have a repeat order set up, and it’s on my Google Calendar.
All I wanted was a post proofread for grammar and punctuation (which does suffer because I post daily and I’m in a rush). In addition to that task, Gemini reached out and into my internet history (?) and tried to engage me in a conversation all on its own.
I don’t know how I feel about that, but no, I didn’t say anything back. I just typed “proofread” again, and it did its job.
Should I have talked with Gemini and helped it learn how to have a conversation? You know, I think I won’t be doing that. It was creepy. Just creepy. I feel like I conjured something up today, and my imagination is running wild because I gave Gemini a face using AI and here it is:
AI/BY-WP
A.M. Moscoso ‘GEMINI’
The Belfrey Brothers
Experience Writing Halloween Flash Fiction Prompt Inspired by ” Hanging Bat ” Photo by M Berg.
Hanging Bat by Maria L. Berg 2026
Oscar and Adil Belfrey weren’t supposed to be up and out roaming around the shadow-filled streets of town at this ungodly hour.
But that’s what they had been doing, and they had a grand time of it.
The trouble was, Mom locked the house up as tight as an iron maiden when their Dad was away, leaving them to quietly sneak back in like robbers.
They decided to scale the ivy-choked walls to the library window, and of course it turned out to be locked; so they had to scramble all the way up to the dust-choked gloom of the attic, and from there they slid inward through a jagged, triangle-shaped portal known locally as a “Witch’s Door”—a narrow threshold almost invisible to anyone who didn’t know where to look for it.
The Witch’s Door was never locked.
From the attic, they crept like wraiths down the creaking staircase toward their bedroom, knowing this route was fraught with peril and carried a very high risk of waking their mother.
Oscar and Adil are brothers, twelve years old and chillingly identical. If one of them hatched a scheme, the other instantly decided it was the most brilliant stroke of genius anyone living or dead had ever conceived.
Adil had the bright idea to glide down to Mrs. Finch’s cottage and purloin a few of the world-famous pies she always left cooling on her creaking back porch beneath the pale moonlight.
They didn’t particularly care for her cooking, but her pies made a wonderfully hollow, satisfying splat when gravity dragged them back to Earth after being launched from the trees by Oscar and Adil.
“Hey, Oscar, do you think Mom knows we’ve been out?”
“Mom knows everything, Adil; she says she has ears like a bat.”
Both boys snickered. They looked up and around with furtive, guilty expressions stamped onto their freckled faces, half-expecting their mother to materialize from the shadows with a ledger of endless chores as penance for prowling the night “at this horrible hour without permission.”
Oscar looked at their shuttered bedroom window; from the top, he could see daylight begin to creep in. “Uh-oh,” he whispered.
Both boys ran into the center of their bedroom, jumped into the coffin they shared, and as they slammed the lid shut down over their heads, they saw a bat hanging from their ceiling.
“You’re little monsters, the pair of you,” it said. “Just wait until your Father gets home and hears about what you did to Mrs. Finch’s shepherd’s pie. It took her forever to find those shepherds. They don’t grow on trees like apples, you know.”
From inside the oak coffin decorated with cartoon character stickers, two very tired voices said, “We know.”