Jason F.C. Clarke's Personal Website
June 29, 2025 (1)
Visited the Boston Museum of Fine Arts today with the fam. As usual the ancient art wing is my favorite. Also I’m pretty sure Batman went back in time to ancient Urartu.
June 27, 2025 (2)
In less depressing news, I completed not one, but two flash fiction pieces today (though one is just a chopping-down of an older, long story). I'll be submitting them to a couple of publications sometime soon.
June 27, 2025 (1)
Another year, another late-June drop of incredibly depressing and alarming Supreme Court decisions. Seriously, any time I see the words "Supreme Court" in a news context, my stomach turns.
So this latest Supreme Court ruling means that until either the Supreme Court decides birthright citizenship on the merits OR we get a new president who rescinds the order, babies born in 28 states to undocumented parents are not citizens and can be deported.
And frankly, I have to assume this means the SC is going to rule against birthright citizenship. We're going to be a situation where one's citizenship could be determined by who was president and WHICH JUDICIAL DISTRICT they were in when they were born for at least a year or more. Allowing that chaos to go on instead of just issuing a decision on the merits gives the game away, I think. (Obliterating birth citizenship on the merits right now would be a bit too blatant - they need to go through the posturing of a case to give themselves some level of ass-covering.)
As New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie noted,
I also think that it is only a matter of time before this court rewrites section 1 of the 14th to effectively end birthright citizenship. the 14th amendment is the chief obstacle to a legal regime of tiered citizenship and subordinate castes, and they will not let it stand.
The only solution to this crisis is Supreme Court reform. My personal preference would be to introduce 20-year term limits, effectively immediately for all current judges. I think that passes the common-sense test for most people (even though the conservatives will howl). I also think the ability of the Senate to review SC judge appointments should be ignored - it's not in the Constitution, and all it means right now is that we only get new SC judges when the same party controls the Senate and the Presidency. Like the filibuster, we should just get rid of it.
In any event, I can only hope the next Democratic president takes full advantage of this new power to right some of the many, many wrongs being executed under this, the worst presidential administration of my lifetime and possibly of all time.
June 20, 2025 (3)
Happy fiftieth anniversary to my favorite movie,
June 20, 2025 (2)
So, an important disclosure: I used ChatGPT to create this website. I'm way out of the game on working in HTML, but I really didn't want to fight with Wordpress or any CMS either. I also had a very specific design in mind that I wanted to create, and ChatGPT was able to help me get there.
Would I say this counts as using AI to create art? I guess I can understand that perspective. If there's a Web designer out there who would have preferred I spend the time figuring out exactly how to ensure the text of these paragraphs was a little smaller than the heading (as I said, I had a very specific design in mind), I think that's a valid claim. But I'm glad I didn't have to spend hours fiddling with this when ChatGPT was able to figure it out for me. It still took me about two hours to get all of this done, and in the course of doing so I learned a bit about how to better work with AI, so I do think it was time well-spent.
I think the question comes down to what you consider the act of creating art, and what you consider "using a tool" to create that art. Figuring out HTML was relatively easy when HTML was pretty simple, back when I was messing with it in 1998. I do remember trying out a "WYSIWYG" software program around that time that let me create a website by placing text and images - is that substantially different than using AI to assist me in coding this website the way I want it to look? Because I'm pretty sure no one would have gotten mad at me for using that program back in 1998.
While I'm realizing now this does seem defensive—and it is, a little!—I'm more interested in that question. Is using AI to create this website like using a paintbrush, paint, and an easel to create a painting—or is the AI taking the place of my own brain in that creative process?
June 20, 2025 (1)
So I've decided to create this website as a way to plant my flag here on my tiny plot of digital real estate—and give me a place to publish my random thoughts without those thoughts being on a social media platform owned by a third party. This website is incredibly basic—something I might have created in college back in the late 1990s. But it appeals strongly to my minimalist inclinations and so there's a decent chance I may actually update it on something resembling a frequent basis.