Volume & Velocity

From Valerie Bertinelli's IG @wolfiesmom

"Flashback 1981 I believe this was the White Winged Dove tour and I got to meet the incomparable Stevie Nicks because Ed was friendly with Waddy Wachtel who was touring with her. Here Stevie is telling me that she has a magazine with me on the cover in her bathroom."

I just want to catch spelling errors and accidental double spaces and repeated phrases and whenever I use the wrong too/to or affect/effect and shit. But no. They've shoved AI up the ass of every grammar checking software out there and now they all fucking suck and make the most random, obnoxious, nonsensical suggestions.

I get why people keep saying this (and other versions of it like "Use Adobe alternatives" and "Use Google product alternatives."). But here's the problem: I do not create in isolation. Even my own 100% personal projects are getting sent to other people whether it's editors or printers or beta readers and unless every single person in that train is using the same products, things can get wonky.

Libre Office and Word handle formatting differently on the back end, which can completely break documents if you move them back and forth between the two. So if I write in Libre Office but my beta readers are still using Word, when I send them a manuscript for review there's a good chance things won't look right and my beta reader will not actually be reviewing what I sent them.

:| :| :|

They are, I am certain, intentionally programmed that way because the user is supposed to see “errors” coming up every time they write anything and conclude that they Need the AI. That they CAN’T write without the AI. “Look how many things it fixed — I made so many mistakes — I never would have caught all this without the AI.” So they keep using it, because otherwise all their documents will be full of “errors” that they or their human proofreaders all “missed”.

I do a live “fuck Grammarly” demo near the beginning of each semester, where I give it a paragraph from a published work and point out all the mistakes it claims are there, very few if any of which are genuine mistakes of any kind. It also displays that “grammarly score”, which tends to be aggressively low, especially if the text is at all interesting or original — “let’s see what it thinks of some of the stuff you were assigned in high school English as examples of Great Works… ooh, Edgar Allan Poe gets a C, he should learn how to write.”

And, of course, any time you tell it to rewrite something, it can’t come back with “this is already good actually, you don’t need a subscription to Grammarly at all” — if given a text that is already perfectly fine, it will just randomly swap out various words for synonyms. Because it always has to Do Something. If the program makes no changes, you might decide you don’t need it. But if you’re not a confident writer, if Grammarly tells you this synonym is “better”, you’re likely to believe it.

TF Sport’s LM GT3 winning N°33 Chevrolet Corvette Z06 GT3.R in the 2026 FIAWEC 24 Heures du Mans, Le Mans FR. 14 June 2026.