Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1093
More ChatGPT musings, greenhouse work, pallets, doctors, that Aquaman movie, 10 shots of muscle relaxer straight into my neck, people still Tweeting
Good morning, howdy-ho, hey hey we’re the Monkees. Jane is safely at school. No G-Wagon today maybe the kid was sick. Saw a dad friend I knew and felt like a member of the community when I rolled down the window and said hi and he waved back. I KNOW PEOPLE. Played for Jane the 80’s Nottingham Post-punk, Middle-Eastern-inspired C Cat Trance. Not “Shake the Mind,” either. She claims to like them. That was nice. I suspect she is being generous. Also played her Maren Morris, trying to teach her what country music is. She is supremely indifferent. I take heart at her reaction to C Cat Trance over Maren Morris, no shade, no shade, Maren is great, that song about the house and bones is fantastic.
Speaking of country, are there a bunch of new Taylor Swift fans working their way back to her country stuff and then getting into Bonnie Raitt and shit? Are there even any new Taylor Swift fans, asks the dude with a six year-old daughter who is a giant Taylor Swift fan. Anyway, I hope there are. Then from Bonnie they get into Plains and Waxahatchee and maybe Orville Peck.
Listening to a band called Library of Sands, which spun out of the excellent stoner doom country band Brightblack Morning Light. This is the droney part without the country part or the vocals. It is good, but no Brightblack.
Watched Aquaman 2 last night my god I don’t know why I did this I was so bored. The first one was terrible too but I’ll watch anything with Willem Dafoe and Jason Mamoa had a certain roguish charm. Also have a soft spot for that wooden normcore actor who played Owl guy in Watchmen (the middling movie not the excellent HBO series). But this one? God. So bad. Owl guy was fine, Jason Mamoa’s mugging seemed ridiculous and formulaic and dumb this time. The parental stuff was all a cliche. The effects are just so, so dumb.
Why did I do this to myself.
I did do some productive stuff yesterday, though. Three 1:1s at work, plus the management meeting and a lot of quality emailing.
Oh I went to the neck doctor. I went to her because I wanted to talk to her about getting off of cymbalta. I mean, I like it just fine, but I don’t think it’s doing much for my neck (Cymbalta, aka Duloxetine, in addition to being an anti-depressant also relieves chronic pain). But I am pretty sure I am experiencing a flattening-out of emotion that I don’t love. Though that could just be age, hard to say. So I want to find out. Maybe I will regret this decision. Anyway, the stuff is apparently hard to get off of, so we formulated a plan. We shall see, we shall see.
BUT the more exciting thing is I wanted to talk to her about how I am supposed to get these amazing neck trigger-point injections four times a year, but they make me see her in-between every one, and her schedule is very hard to get on to, because she is friggin awesome, and so last year I only successfully had two. So she was like “all right let’s do one right now!” Which was amazing because usually they make a whole procedure out of it with checklist-manifesto-level double-checking and two nurses and a trainee and shit and this time she just cowboy’d up and did ‘em and it ruled. Also made the appointment for the next one in April. Fantastic.
Do I feel any better yet for them? Nah. But I will.
Yesterday a skid steer popped over from the farm and one of “our crews” (love saying shit like that) finally picked up the seven pallets of Teco Bloc that has been sitting in my driveway at the other house for like four months. I haven’t been over since he was done, but I am so excited to have my driveway back. I can finally turn around again. It’s gonna rule.
Electrician and I also made a plan for another one of “our crews” (love saying that) to join up with him on Friday to finish up the difficult part of the greenhouse electrical. If all goes well, that shit might be done by this weekend which would be amazing. I know I keep saying that. This is taking forever. Also supposedly got a date on the solar roof, but I’ll believe it when I see it. They are now six months late. The perils of being an early adopter I guess.
New Hampshire primary was last night — congrats Joe Biden on your write-in victory, that sure woulda been embarrassing if you fucked that up. I stupidly had some hope Nikki might beat Trump even though she’s terrible but I am just happy she’s staying in the primary to give him grief and misery for a while longer.
I had forgotten that I still have a Twitter alert on Steve Kornacki. I kinda love that guy’s wonkish electoral math wizardry, kinda hate his studious apolitical schtick in the face of impending fascism. Anyway, the alert went off, cuz the dude really only Tweets during elections and the Kentucky Derby.
So I got sucked into Twitter and my god it is so depressing how many friends are still Tweeting! All the time! Like nothing has happened! Just merrily going on their way Tweeting about sports or VR or whatever-the-fuck and it is just absolutely mind-blowing. Like I guess I can forgive the bureaucratic-addled non-profits and governmental agencies; I hope their social media manager is “working on it” but these things take time. But the human friends!
The worst ones are the ones tweeting on and on about solidarity to the proletariat and shit and I’m like “okay well maybe look in the mirror first?” Elon Musk not really known as a union lover.
My friend Tim wrote a response to my ChatGPT bit in a GMHHAY a few days ago. He laid out some useful stuff that creatives could do with ChatGPT. It is worth a read. Some of the things I think he mentions are, I am finding, occasionally useful. It can do some very basic research for you on a topic you know nothing about, about which you just want the basics. I have done that once or twice.
Several people have told me that it writes for them, but like I said before, I don’t want anyone writing for me, I can barely handle an editor (except for Lisa, she is the best. Lisa taught me how to use hyphens. No one uses hyphens correctly and I used to be one of them and it was terrible, and now I see incorrect hyphen usage everywhere and it drives me crazy. N.B. I just mean hyphens, I was very good with my en- and em- dashes already.)
I have definitely thought if I were to ever pitch something again — like if I went and tried to raise money for my 2022 obsession of a Meow Wolf-meets-Ikea-of-Recycling, I would 100% use AI to draw me some sick-looking renders of my buildings and whatnot. Because I don’t actually know any really great illustrators, and I am a bad art director, and it would be temporary. Moodboard kind of stuff, not final output. Stuff we never paid illustrators for even at high-end agencies, because we basically just cut-and-pasted. If it required an actual story-board, like we occasionally did in my big agency days, I’d still pay a human being to draw it.
The thing that is really hanging me up on my ChatGPT experience in the OSX app is that it does not save your preferences and this is so dumb. So you need to, on your own, keep a text file somewhere with all your preferences of the way you want it to talk to you, and manually paste the text file in at the beginning of every session. Like… what the fuck? That is bonkers! How hard would it be for them to hack this into a usable UX experience (redundant initialism there) — just put a little “prefs” text space for you to enter shit once and have the app manually paste it in at the beginning.
My friends like Noah and Guan and some others are these expert-level AI users that have personal assistants set up using some AI products that aren’t ChatGPT and they have coded a bunch to make their AIs persistent and more helpful and all that shit but I ain’t got time for that man, I got swimming pools to build and adtech companies to run and kids to raise and whatnot. I don’t even know how! I think maybe I fucked up in not learning the ecosystem of AI companies and what they do.
Again, to reiterate, I still think this stuff is going to destroy the world — someone gave me an excellent example the other day: they found an AI-written book on Amazon about foraging in the forest that will straight-up get someone killed. Fantastic. Imagine that at a higher level. It’s inevitable. Hopefully it’s at a coal-powered plant instead of a dam or nuclear one.
BUT I do wish I knew it all a bit better. Is there a lumascape for AI companies? Oh I know! Let’s ask ChatGPT!
Oh shit let’s ask Bing AI Chat. Oh it won’t tell me because I have reached my limit for the day and I need to sign in. Except I’m signed in.
Alas.
Really not a lot of magic going on for me. I guess that’s what it comes down to: a lot of people have had these amazing a-ha moments where “AI” (such a stupid term for all this) did some amazing thing for them and it made them a believer. I keep trying, but nothing even close to magic has happened to me with AI yet.
Alas.
Today’s Media of the Day is this beautiful new song from shoegaze band The Fauns, to which I have been listening a lot the last few days. It is gorgeous. I love a good, deep, pure, unapologetic shoegaze song, where they’re not trying to, like, genre-bend or something. Give it to me raw, straight into my veins, reverb and delay like there’s no end to time.
Until tomorrow, fine feathered friend.