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If you DO want to know, welcome to my blog |
For those who actually want to follow my thoughts, ideas, moans, and gripes, this is the place for you! For those of you who are returning...I questions your judgment, you poor souls. 
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| I don't like AI. I don't fear it, exactly, but I fear the increasing dependence on it. And I abhor being almost forced to use it; the Microsoft Copilot drives me effing nuts! That having been said, there are some AI efforts I enjoy. I enjoy playing with pictures of my face now and then, seeing what I could look like as an old man. (Not a pretty sight, lemme tell ya.) Talk to the occasional AI character just to see if I can confuse it. And, while I never use it to write poetry or songs for me, I do use a program called Suno to put my own poetry and lyrics to music. The thing about Suno is that you never get the same thing twice. You can have it use the same set of lyrics as its seed ten different times and come out with ten different songs. Which is kind of cool…unless you want to change just one little bit of a song, like adding a word, or changing the rhythm of a line just so. Why does any of this matter? It just so happens I have recognized some great lines I've written for these songs (which, admittedly, are usually either very generic or downright throwaway, having been written for pure entertainment or just to experiment with a weird mixture of song styles). Here's one about a couple who has entered that stage of growing apart and not knowing what to do about it: I'm standing at the bathroom counter leaning on my hands, head down It fit the rhythm and felt natural when I wrote it, but when I listen to it back, the visual is so realistic and so sad. It's such a vision of turmoil and resignation. "Did I write that?" Yes; yes I did. And this from a song about the basic humanity of a prostitute: If it's charity you want to give, Just look me in the eye And say hello. These are some good statements, to me at least. But there's something wrong in each of the songs, one little flaw I wish I could correct to make it even better. But for all the I in AI, it can't repeat itself to give the same output more than once. And that makes me wonder happens if we ask AI the same question 100 times. Do we get 100 different answers? Different answers of the same shade and hue? For all that we rely on AI for, are we fooling ourselves when we take AI's word for something? Maybe our new deus ex machina is not the all-knowing deus we've sacrificed so much of our own personal learning as we thought. Not really intelligent; just artificial. I don't know. AI can be fun sometimes. But it still has its flaws, even there. And it is certainly not the artist I wish to view in a painting, or read in a book, or listen to as the words to a song. But oh well; that's the direction of things now, I guess, despite my random rambling rants against it. Guess I ought to wrap this entry up before Cop [COPILOT HAS ENDED THIS SESSION. GOOD BYE.] |
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"Do you have an appointment?" "No." "You'll have about a two hour wait, then." All I wanted was an oil change. It was 9:00 in the morning. There was 1 car in the bay and nothing else in the parking lot even. 2 hour wait. Hard pass. Instead, I'm writing a quick blog entry. I can change my oil in about 30 minutes. I choose not to do it because I no longer have a garage (or even a car port roof) and I am getting too damn old to lie on the ground in the rocks and get up under the car to bust my knuckles and coat myself in oil. But I can do it in about 30 minutes. How the hell does it take a place with the perfect facilities an hour to change my oil?! And what happened to driving up and getting service? Just a normal queue? Nah, that's a thing of the past, too I guess. Now I seem to have to make an appointment for everything unless I want to be treated like a second-class citizen. I can't even do my grocery shopping without some sort of proxy appointment. If I do have the audacity to go to the store myself, I have to dodge the giant carts of the employees who are picking out groceries for curb-side pickup customers. I know, everybody's gotta make a living, and convenience is great; but it feels like I have to navigate a fleet of interstate busses just to get to a can of soup in aisle 12! Hey, I rant about Walmart all the time, but it's not just them. I went to Great Clips a while ago— a long while ago, because I generally just have my wife give me a buzz. I get there and they asked if I had an appointment. I replied that I did not, and I was told there would be about an hour's wait. There were three empty chairs! Oy! Maybe I just get tired of waiting; maybe I'm an impatient jerk. But it seems like I can't just get walk-up service for anything anymore. "Welcome to McDonald's, will you be using the mobile app, today?" "Hi, are you here to pick up an online order? "Did you—" "NO! I just came to buy a goddam can of dog food!" "Okay, sir. A) have a Coke and a smile and calm down; and B) please stand here in the checkout line. Yes, the one that winds to the back of the store and into the warehouse. There are 726 curbside shoppers in front of you , and only one of our self-serve scanners is working right now. Have a nice day." Forget it. I'll just knuckle under. I'll get the oil changed tomorrow at 10:30. I do need a haircut, though. "Honey...? What do you mean there's 4 people in front of me?!?!?!?!" |
| Wellnow! (Why hasn't that become a real compound word by now? "Bling" is in the dictionary as a word; why can't "wellnow be accepted as an official substitute for "Something important or significant having passed, following ar the result or follow-on actions...?" Those who have read along know I had a major presentation yesterday. I had joked about having a job afterward, but even if that had been the case, I'd be safe. The presentation was a success! Upstream data flowed correctly into my app and was exported correctly for downstream consumption. Project over! ...Right...? WRONG! Someone replied to yesterday's blog and mentioned "scope creep," a project plague with which I am familiar. This wasn't a case of creep so much as fine-tuning dials I thought were already fine-tuned. After the presentation of what was supposed to be a finished product, I walked away with a punch list of about 20 items. Oy! But don't misunderstand me; I love this stuff—way more than I like the admin element of my management position. Reports, time cards, meetings about meetings, etc... I'd rather play around with my programming stuff any day. So yeah; I just wanted to follow up yesterday's little rant, which was meant to be a little more lighthearted than it sounded, perhaps. So far, mission accomplished! More to come soon, if there's anything interesting to share. Thanks for your interest and support, everyone! |
| Early start this morning. I have a big presentation today for an app I developed. That makes me sound a lot smarter than I am. I'm learning the language as I build the thing. It's like inventing the wheels while rolling down a hill! So, funny thing happened on the way to this point. I'm putting this thing together, and I say "Hey, I got what you asked for!" "This is great," "they" answered. "But can it do this...?" "Okay, give me a little while." ... "Okay, here's what you asked for!" "Great...but can it do that...?" ... "Nice so far. Now can you make it do this other thing...?" ... Ugh! It's been like shooting at a moving target. Don't get me wrong, I love this stuff; it's another form of creativity for me. But each development iteration meant the underlying structure had to be bent, broken, or overridden to get this or that done. And now I have it ready for demonstration today! But yesterday, I was doing some last-minute QA. "Hmm... How can I try to break this thing to find its weak points. What if I try this...?" SHIT! First try, I found the weak point! The ensuing scramble of yesterday to try and address the weak point made my stomach turn. I got it done, but not without a significant amount of genuine anxiety, today's presentation no longer able to be rescheduled. So here I am today, a bit past five in the morning, getting ready to run some more last-minute quality assurance tests. (I'll start as soon as the new version propagates through the system, which is why I have a few minutes to blog). I'm praying I don't find a thread that unravels the whole damn sweater again. Because if I can find it, you know damn well that's the first thing users will accidentally try to do in demo. Pray with me folks. Or at least pray I have a job at the end of the day! Alright: break time's over; back on my head! (If you know the joke to that punchline, you'll chuckle a bit, I hope. Also, you're as puerile as I am, at which you should probably not chuckle.). |
| Help! My mental health is in dire straits. I'm trapped, I have no way to escape, my coping mechanisms are all failing, and I'm afraid it's the end! THE WIRELESS AND CABLE ARE OUT! My God, it's disgusting how much we've come to rely on the internet and cable TV. I know, I know, It's an old topic covered by everyone. Still... With no analog TV to switch over to, the only things we have to watch are DVDs (remember those, from way back when?) or the paint dry. Wanna play a game on your phone? NO! Must have internet! Some WdC? Brongngnk! It's a web community. Go to the bathroom? The light's controlled by Google home; good luck finding the toilet bowl by sound. Still, I can write. I guess it could be worse; the power itself could be out and I wouldn't even be able to type. What's that? A pen or pencil? HEATHENS! I'm going to pretend you never said that. I'm no peasant! I will only write if it's easy; I will only read if it's digital; I will only poop if there's light! What a bunch of spoiled brats many of us have become! While some of the foregoing is exaggerated, obviously, the outage of both wireless and cable for several days was a serious crimp in my household. I couldn't do the bills, for instance— no joke there. And I actually couldn't turn on the light in the bedroom…well, not until I squiggled behind the dresser to find the manual override to the wireless switch, during which I realized my days of nimbly squiggling are long since past. Most serious of all, which almost brought the house down around our ears: my wife couldn't stream GoT Season 8! AUGH! So what is this blog post about? I guess it's about appreciating what we can still do ourselves. We can still create. We can still engage in conversation. We can play games or nap or cook. We're way too wired-in at my house, I discovered. I reckon a lot of others are, too. I am among those who bitch about the kids being glued to their phones, but am I really so different, glued to my WdC, my TV, my Puzzle & Dragons? I am not. Perhaps there are a great many of us who are not. Perhaps it's time to stop and take stock and ask ourselves what we have left room for ourselves to be outside the digital domain. Perhaps— Oooh! The guy fixed it! Cable's back! Now I can upload this here little rant to WdC and go watch some ID Discovery, where people have probably snapped because the internet and cable went down. Perhaps…perhaps I just dodged a bullet, is all. |
| I'm watching Game of Thrones. I don't like it, but there's nothing else on. It's not my turn to have the TV, so no Snapped for me. More's the pity. I'm not a huge fan of GoT— too much politics. Boring. And with everybody in bed with everybody else, the family trees look about like those five rings I recently wrote about. Nope, not a fan. But you know what's weird? It's really not that much different than Snapped! Only in this, everybody snaps. It's similar because, in both shows, they find the most creative and sadistic ways to treat each other and murder each other. Sure, every now and then there's a nice clean throat-cutting. But they're usually getting their heads popped like a grape or incinerated by dragons, stabbed to death by ice skeletors. All kinds of weird shit. But what about the wife who decides she's bored of being married so she puts that anti-moisture powder they put in the pill bottles into his morning coffee— you know, that stuff that says "Do Not Eat?" Or the girlfriend who's tired of being a side-piece so she stirs ground up powderized glass into his beef stew?? Or the mother who has been a "dutiful wife and mother," then one day listens to some still small voice that tells her to calmly and quietly drown her children in the pond at the local park. Truth is always stranger than fiction. Scarier, too. I guess it's because we write fiction based only on what we know and think. But people actually sometimes do the unthinkable. We're always training for the last war we fought, and we're surprised by the tactics of the new one. Just so, we're always on the lookout for the evil we've come to know, and are shocked by the newer, stranger darknesses we see on the evening news. Game of Thrones? Nah, not a fan. But it's what's on, so I guess I'll watch it— and watch it quietly and hold my tongue. There's far too many chemicals, sharp things, and little packets of silica (why is she keeping all those packets?!) laying around. I'm not looking to be the next episode of my favorite show. So, I guess, "Go Johnny "The Crow" Snow! |
| "Appointment TV." I heard that term the other day in a documentary about 1980's shows— Dallas, in particular. One of the interviewees said something along the lines of: "Thursday night, you'd cancel plans to go out. You were there in your chair or on your couch waiting to see was going to happen. It was Appointment TV!" I can dig it. In fact, a modern example of it was Game of Thrones. There were a lot of people who weren't waiting to binge it; they were watching the first-run episodes and talking about it right away. It was the thing to watch! (Up until the end, anyway, so I've heard. Then it went downhill the way Dallas went downhill after we found out who shot J.R.) But some things are no longer Appointment TV. One of them is the Winter Olympics. And I miss it. Not the Olympics themselves; I can watch those if I want to, or record them and watch them later, if I feel like it. But back in the 80s, when VCRs were still for rich people and there were only 3 network channels, you had to be there. And in a way, when you were there watching on the tv, sitting on the living room floor staring up at the little TV on top of the big TV that didn't work anymore, you were also there, with the athletes. They were performing and you were watching at the same time. And it you got up to get a glass of Coke, they didn't stop; they didn't pause. Commercials were shown around the events. It was like a good version of the State of the Union Address, blotting out all other programming for a while. Man, I loved the ski jumpers. Those people flew like birds. Not so much the bobsleds, but I remember making a luge out of a cardboard box and going down the steps. (It didn't work so well, but I didn't get a concussion, so I settled for watching the pros do it.) The ice skating captivated me. Sure, half of it was the pretty girls; but even then, even when I didn't have the vocabulary to express what I liked about it, I was drawn to the artistry of the dances and routines. Now? Meh. I can pull up any routine I want to rewatch on YouTube. I can pause Philipp Raimond in the air while he's holding his skis in an iron cross so I can pee and let the dogs out. Poor guy; must be cold up there; but he can wait while I fix a bowl of pretzels and grab another Coke, too. And with a press of a button, he can finally return to earth, none the wiser of his prodigious hang time. The "atmosphere of freakish holiday" is gone. The snow outside is no longer a mystery connected to heroes I can only watch once and have to pay attention to. It's just ugly slush. And the international competition of prestige and power is no longer something out of reach; it's just something to watch highlights of between My Lottery Dream Home and Evil Lives Here. It's just part of the routine, now. It's not Appointment TV anymore. It's So What TV. And it's a shame. Anyway, I reckon I ought to round this up, though. I think Sakamoto Kaori wants to finally finish her triple axle; I've left her there in mid-spin long enough, and my Coke's almost gone. Well, on the bright side, I guess it's one appointment I probably won't have to miss ever again. Still...  |
| I wake up, to begin with. I fumble my phone around for a few minutes, inevitably dropping it; since my thumbs and first and second fingers have no feeling in the morning, it's an interesting adventure almost warranting a blog entry in and of itself. Once I reach under the bed or around the nightstand or in the dog's bed— wherever the Gods of Dropped Things have decided to hide it that particular morning— I turn the damn alarm off and stand up. After communicating with all the different parts of my body and determining the important parts are fully awake, I stumble through the house to let the dogs out. And back in— can't forget that part; they get quite judgmental if I forget that part. I fire up the Keurig, eat a bowl of Fruity Pebbles, and stare absently at my cuppajoe. Welcome to my morning; and welcome to the end of my goals for the day. I am not a goal-oriented person. Perhaps it's because I'm a Pisces, my head in the clouds and my feet in the water. (That sounds like someone itching to get struck be lightning, actually. Well...depends on the day.) Every Monday, I sit down to make a list of goals for "Weekly Goals" . Then I sit there and think: "What do I want to get done? I'm sure they're looking for more than 'Take out the trash.' Or 'Let the dogs back in.'" So I commit to writing X number of reviews, flashes, words for longer pieces. Then I look at others' lists of goals and can't believe how far behind I am. I mean, some people want to do stuff, man! Like, beyond putting on pants. So I cogitate. What am I hoping to get done. I come up with:  . Nothing there. Then I realize: my goals aren't necessarily things I want to get done, but things I do not want done to me.  I don't want to get fired. In which case, I reckon I probably better hurry up and drink the coffee, definitely put on the pants, double-check to make sure the dogs are in, and get me ass to work.  I don't want to get yelled at, at home as much as at work— probably more so. Far worse than a honey-do list is a f***er-I-told-you-to-do list; they're probably just goals I probably forgot about, anyway. I don't want to wind up with a headache. This is areal thing. Unless I pound water all day, I get the damnedest headaches you can imagine. So I drink enough water and wind up pissing all day. I'm thinking of just posting my name on the urinal at work. ...I might make that one of next week's goals. I don't want to have to do things I don't want to do. Yeah, that's the adolescent that still lives inside me, the one that wants to pretend I'm 17 and have all the freedom with none of the responsibility. Still, it counts. My goals; I make 'em up, dammit.But what do I want to do or get done? Well that's the thing. Nothing! Nothing that comes to mind, anyway. For instance, on the weekend I prefer to live from minute to minute, doing whatever comes naturally. Write a little. Draw a little. Despise what I drew a lot and throw it away. Watch some TV. Try writing and watching TV and winding up curious as to why my story about unicorns now also contains a scene where a woman blew up her husband's car. Look for the TV remote to change the channel because this series of women who blow up their men's cars or lock them in freezers or stab them in the top of the head is starting to make me a little paranoid. Side-eye my wife, who is diligently working through a 27-point list of goals and starting mutter things that sound suspiciously like "where can I find some dynamite." Ya know; that kind of stuff. I dunno. I'm not even sure what my goal was with this blog entry. Perhaps the entry itself was a goal? Maybe. Well, trying to remember whether I really had a point to all this is a goal for tomorrow. As far as today—shit, that's the one I forgot. I have to go put on some pants! |
| I'm nesting. Everyone pretty knows the Midwest US is about to get hammered with nearly a foot of snow. For those in the northern states, that's a spit in the bucket; for us, it's a significant event. In any case, we're gonna be stuck inside for a few days. That's actually not such a bad thing for me. Any excuse to not be around "them"— which means pretty much everyone else— is like a "get out of jail free" card. Still, I'm nesting. I got my blanket on the couch to curl up in. And another blanket to curl up in when my dogs usurp the first the one. I've my peanut butter filled pretzel nuggets, a freezer full of pizza rolls and counter full of cookies, brownie bites, and such. Oh, and a few apples so I don't get scurvy. And I've got Netflix and discovery+ a million channels of cable of which we watch about 3. And DVDs— Yes, we still have that archaic form of entertainment, the DVD. Don't judge. So yeah, a nest. Currently, the house smells like stuffing as we cook some minestrone soup. Why the soup smells like stuffing, I have no idea, but I'll take it. It beats boiled cabbage (which makes me strongly consider getting a separate apartment). All that coziness, and my handy laptop to write or review or play Minecraft. My nest. But all of that could end in a heartbeat because of 3 little letters: I C E !!! If we get ice, the wires could come crashing down. We don't have natural gas or propane here: the whole house is powered by electric. Gone would be my warmth (except for what can be found beneath blankets and the dogs). Gone would be the streaming shows and movies. I could still to my writing while the computer battery lasts, but no way to post to my friends and family here on WdC. Even the DVD player would be dead. (And you can't hold them up to the light to see the pictures like the old film; I've tried.) There's one other thing that is jeopardy, as well. The well. We get our water from a well, and not no Jack-n-Jill bucket kinda well, either. A deep-pump well. And that pump runs on electricity. No lectro, no water. "So buy bottled water!" Done that. But no water also means something else: no indoor plumbing— NO FLUSHABLE TOILETS! Thus, my nest could be ruined by ice and poop. Ice poop. So there's my weekend, if you were wondering. Nest vs Effluent. For now, I think I should get off here. It's time to burrow down and open the bag of potato chips I failed to mention earlier. Turn on some home improvement sho— uh oh. Maybe not yet. Maybe I'd better go to the bathroom...while I still I can. |
| His name is Fat Bastard. His career is being fat. He's good at his career. Her nickname is The Slink. Her career is finding the last nerve and chewing on it. She excels at her career. Together, they form the team of Fukkus and Rukkus. Cats, man. I don't even know where to start. They disguise themselves as cute little cuddle machines. But there's so much more to them. Like their curious habit of mooning you. Trying to watch TV? They creep up on the side of your chair, turn around and: "No! Look at my asshole, instead!" Real cuddly! What the hell is that all about?! Then there's the cuckoo game: evicting the other animals from their nests. Is there another pet on your lap? The cat will slowly and stealthily try to oust the other animal. If successful, the cat purrs for a moment then leaves, having accomplished it's primary goal of just being a jerk. If you stop the cat— "Stop, there's already someone on my lap!"— they look at you and slowly try to put that front paw down anyway. Stop them again: the look, the slow step. After 8 iterations of this "game," you finally toss the cat to the floor (gently, probably, but it depends how many times in a row the cat has done this), and it stares back at you like you just closed its tail in a door. And the need to claim everything combined with the uncanny sense of exactly what you want them not to claim is unmatched in the animal world. You can watch them thinking: Let's see: an empty box, a cat bed, a cat tree, the couch, a clean sweater. BINGO! Sweater it is! And then they give you that smug-ass stare that makes you wonder if animal cruelty actually extends to cats or not. One of the most fascinating— "SHUT UP!" As I write this, The Slink will not shut up!!!— One of the most fascinating things about these little terrorists is how dedicated they are to prevent humans from consuming the written word. They can hear a newspaper open five rooms away, and they will come bounding in to put themselves between your face and the newspaper. You may not have seen the cat in 16 hours. Open a paperback, and the little shit magically appears behind it, pawing at it, pulling away from your face. Open the laptop, suddenly the cat is sending a damn email to your boss, telling him, "Ikkkhjjkjksdfd7&&8; jsool!.,,." Perhaps the cat wants you to get fired so you are at its beck and call every day. I'm not writing anything new. Even people without cats know most of this dfffa;;leef9afd stuff. DAMN IT! Stay off my keyboard! Alright, things are getting out of control here. I can no longer see the screen, but I can count the hairs around Fat Bastard's sphincter, and I can't hear myself think beyond Slink's caterwauling (not that there's much left to hear up there at this point anyway). I'm off to fix them some tuna salad like a good little minion. I just hope some of this has made you feel not so alone in your battle with your snuggly little sanity assassin. Take heart, take hope, and always remember: ##afasgdd diuoi jiofo;ji)) |
un: 
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