“I can’t do that, Dave”: How artificial stupidity almost killed Kibbles ‘n’ Bits

You may have noticed that I haven’t written a Kibbles’n’ Bits column since April – it’s a round-up of shorter news items, quotes and links that aren’t enough for an article of their own but should be “put on the record,” as I like to think of it. I know the column has some fans, but its biggest fan is undoubtedly me: I have a blast writing it, and connecting all kinds of dots in this thing we call Comics Culture. 

So why the long silence? It isn’t by my choice, and I really miss writing it. But over the long 21 year history of me writing the Beat, some of my writing techniques have evolved around the technology, and unfortunately, technology doesn’t want me to write Kibbles’n’ Bits any more. 

Back in the Golden Era of Blogging, i.e. the late Aughts, “linkblogging” as we used to call things like K’n’B, was quite popular. And there were many software options to facilitate the gathering and writing. Including several WordPress “clients” that allowed you to write and post in a more convenient environment with more text and image processing features. One of them was called Scribefire and I think it may have lasted longer than the rest. Instead of being a separate program, this was a blogging extension that lived inside Chrome itself. 

If I was surfing the web and saw something I wanted to savefor for potential inclusion in K’n’B, I would just (now pay attention because this is highly technical) highlight the text I wanted to clip, and Scribefire would save it along with the html link in a scratchpad-like window, keeping a running collection of all my clips. I could hit save to keep it safe in a separate WordPress installation, but every week or two weeks or whatever I would just call up the document, cut and paste the relevant parts to WordPress and off I’d go! Everything was ready and waiting. 

Scribefire was last updated in 2019, but, incredibly, it kept working! It was such a simple, transparent script that there was nothing to break! 

And then, back in April, Google decided it wasn’t secure enough any more, because it hadn’t been updated in so long, and nuked it. I had an idea this was coming, so I’d backed up my last few posts, but, sadly, my entire archive was lost inside the guts of Chrome somewhere. 

And then I looked for a replacement. 

There is none. 

Yes, there are lots and lots of ways to clip text and links in your browser, but I haven’t been able to find a single one that saves them all to a single document. They will save them to separate documents, or separate links, or notes, that you have to open individually to collate. It’s a big hassle. 

Believe me, I kept trying to find a replacement, but kept hitting dead ends. Finally, I decided to ask ChatGPT what I could use, since it has all the answers. 

Sounds good right? ChatGPT’s first suggestion was that I just cut and paste what I wanted to a Google doc. I did not need an $8.3 billion investment to tell me how to cut and paste. ChatGPT then suggested I try some software: 

Apps like Notion, Obsidian, Evernote, OneNote let you:

• Paste text with the URL (many automatically include the link if you use the “copy link to highlight” feature in Chrome/Edge). 
• Keep everything in one running document. 
• Search and organize later. 

For example:

• In Chrome/Edge → right-click → “Copy link to highlight.” 
• Paste into Notion/Obsidian → you’ll get the quote plus the URL.

You’ll notice that this is a fancy way of saying ”Cut and paste.”

The problem with cut and paste is that it interrupts the workflow I developed for my note taking. I know it doesn’t sound like much but when you have as many tabs open as I do, finding the right document or program was one more step than I wanted. But maybe the combined might of all those note taking apps would have a solution. They had to! 

First I tried OneNote. Which has an AI helper. So I asked it how to do what I was trying to do:

ME: I would like to save clippings in OneNote web clipper but save them all to a single page not as individual notes in a notebook

OneNote: That’s a smart way to keep things tidy—but unfortunately, the OneNote Web Clipper doesn’t currently support saving multiple clippings to a single page automatically. Each clip is saved as a separate note within the section you choose.

That said, here’s a workaround you might find useful:

1. Create a dedicated page in OneNote where you want all your clippings to go.
2. Use the Web Clipper to save content to a specific section (notebook > section).
3. Then, manually copy and paste the clipped content from each individual note into your dedicated page.

It’s a bit of extra effort, but it gives you full control over how your clippings are organized. If you’re doing a lot of research or collecting ideas, this method can help you build a curated, scrollable archive.

Would you like help setting up a template page for this kind of collection? I can whip one up for you.

YEP. OneNote was telling me to CUT AND PASTE AGAIN. I decided to try whining – and OneNote AI was sympathetic! 

Me: Doing it manually seems like a lot of effort but I’ll try.

OneNote: Totally fair—it’s a bit of a grind when you’re aiming for a streamlined setup. If it helps, you could treat that dedicated page like an evolving scrapbook: drop in the clippings when you get a chance, add a quick note or tag for context, and over time you’ll have this really rich resource, all in one place.

Want a shortcut? I could help you create a reusable layout or section headers for that page—so at least you’re not starting from scratch every time. That way, copy-pasting starts to feel more like curating than slogging. What kind of content are you clipping most often—articles, images, quotes, something else?

The obsequious and eager-to-please AI was trying its best, but I don’t need a section header. I just want one running tabulation of things that interest me. 

Frustrated, I asked ChatGPT what to do: 

Saving Links and Text in a Document:

You can manually copy and paste the text you want to save into a document (e.g., a Word document, Google Doc).

Then, you can manually insert hyperlinks to the original websites alongside the text clippings. In most word processing applications, you can do this by highlighting the text you want to link, right-clicking, and selecting “Link” or “Add Link”. 

Did you see the word “manually” in the above?  Manually is what I am trying to AVOID. 

I confess, I did save all my legwork for this post by cutting and pasting to a Google doc and now I was searching so much that I was getting ads for what Google thought I wanted to do, like this. 

As I dug around I wondered: am I the ONLY PERSON IN THE WHOLE FUCKING UNIVERSE WHO WANTS TO SAVE CLIPS TO ONE DOCUMENT? On Reddit I found several people with the same deeply held desire – undoubtedly Stephen Schwartz is working on a song about it as we type – but no one had found a solution.

I decided to move on to Notion, a wide-ranging app that can be do project management, notes, Calendars, you name it. A regular Swiss Army Knife. And now with AI! As it happens Notion also had an AI helper, and I began a new conversation. It turns out that you can clip and save a running log in Notion but………IT SAVES THE ENTIRE PAGE NOT THE CLIPPING. I asked AI what was up with that. 

There may be a dedicated Notion user there who is reading this and thinking “My god, she’s an idiot.” I will allow that Notion is a very powerful and useful program and I do know folks who use it a lot, and I’m sure it could be very useful in my note taking and research. However it was not transparent and simple in showing me how to do what I needed. In fact I kept badgering the Notion AI about it until I ran out of free AI help, and would have had to get a paid sub to get more info. By then I was ready for something else. 

Time passed. I was at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con and was talking to my pal Ronan Huggard, who owns the Inky Pen digital comics platform. We got to talking about software and I brought up my problem. He said it was probably a very simple script that would probably be easy to program. 

More time passed, but I started reading about how ChatGPT made a lot of mistakes but it was a genius at CODING. Maybe I had been going around this the wrong way. Was there a way to write a script to do this, I asked? Sure thing, said my good buddy ChatGPT.