Good morning. Hello. How are you? #821
"The procedure" was fun actually. Ministry and sisters. Turkey. NC Supreme court shenanigans. Anti-AI religious exemption, plz. Shoegaze Elks lodges.
Good morning! Hello there! How are you? All well in Cloud Cookoo Land? Underrated movie, the Lego Movie. No idea why that just came to me. Maybe the general anesthesia is still coursing through my veins. Colonoscopy went just great. Anesthesia rules. No complaints. Doctor said he found a couple polyps and removed them, and that I should do this a little more often than normal. Through the haze of the drugs I asked hopefully, “so in one year?” And he said, “no, in three years,” and I was very disappointed. Only complaints were that my feet were very cold and they kept me waiting naked on the bed with a too small blanket for like 20 minutes, which was fine, but I didn’t have my phone. Which was also fine, I figured that was the rule and I tried to meditate, but then I heard the nurse offer the woman in the next prep bay to get her phone from her bag. WTF I feel cheated.
My future advice to all colonoscopy patients is to do it in the summer or wear extra socks and to sneak your phone in. A+ would do again.
One last discovery of this whole colonoscopy adventure is an absolute mystery. The whole time I was doing my prep, I was grumbling about the size difference between the large Gatorade bottles outlined in my prep documentation vs the reality on the ground in the local stores. The docs kept saying “32 oz bottle of Gatorade” which works out to 4 bottles making up a gallon. But all the stores around here only carried 28 oz bottles of Gatorade. This was maddening because it made all the math more difficult and I needed five bottles to make a gallon. Well, actually 4.5714285714 but who’s counting. So I bought my five bottles and started pouring them into the gallon jug and it turns out that the 28 oz gatorade bottles actually contained 32 oz of gatorade. That or both my large and small bottle had inaccurate oz measurement lines. WTF. It feels like Gatorade did some attempt at shrinkflation and whiffed it or something. I wonder what’s up with that.
Sisters of Mercy are coming on tour and coming close to Raleigh, but no cigar. Not even that close, really. Silver Springs, MD. I’ve seen ‘em twice but Emma hasn’t so I think we’ll probably go. Ministry is coming to Charlotte with Front Line Assembly and Gary Numan which would be fun but is a little far. Ministry’s also coming to Raleigh which is less far but on the far side of the city so, like, honestly not much closer than Charlotte, and that’s with Alice Cooper which is substantially less fun. Also they’re playing Emo’s in Austin on that tour I thought Emo’s closed did it open somewhere else? Why do I not know this? Also, both these bands are playing Fillmores. What’s up with all these Fillmores everywhere. One day a band will be able to play the entire United States playing nowhere but venues name Fillmore. Fillmore Charlotte. Fillmore Silversprings. Fillmore New Orleans. Someday my Fillmores will cover the earth.
The earthquake in Turkey is looking fucking terrible and I wish I had something more profound to say about it. I remember when I was in high school my friends and I had this little book, it was called “the book of questions” or something like that. One of those little party books that existed in the world before the internet took everything over. You pulled it out at parties and it asked “provacative” questions, except the good kind, not the kind that people ask when they are being racist or sexist but want to disguise it. Anyway one of the questions was “if you had to choose one which would you choose: a disaster in your home town that killed ten, one in your state that killed a hundred, one in your country that killed a thousand or one in another country that killed ten thousand.” We were, of course, moody existentialist teenagers who did not feel a lot of affinity to our fellow townsfolk, so the question was easy for us to smugly answer with the “correct” answer, but the question really struck me. It has stayed with me. I hate the premise, and I hate what presumably the most common answer. And I have always obsessed over the interaction of technology and the issue of the question. In “the olden days” we wouldn’t even know about a Turkish earthquake. When the 1556 Shaanxi earthquake killed 800,000 people, no one outside of China knew, no one had any idea ever for years, for decades. Were they supposed to feel bad? The correct answer is no, but we are, which makes me kind of hate technology. But, of course, Mr. Rogers style, technology also makes us able to help, so, you know, help.
In our last election, the Republicans in North Carolina took the Supreme Court, changing the court’s composition from a Democratic majority of one to a Republican majority. In doing so, they have decided to immediately re-hear two cases that were decided last term. Not because, you know, there is a new case before them with new arguments or anything just because they didn’t like the outcome of the last trial and they want to change it and they don’t want to go through the hassle of, you know, actually finding a case to bring before the court and pretending to listen and go through the whole pantomime of the thing. Which, I suppose I gotta admit is probably a lot more honest than the way the “Roberts” court does it, and I suppose when, someday, assuming the country lasts that long, we take back the US Supreme Court, I suppose then I will be in full support of this sort of speedy approach to righing the wrongs if Kavanaugh and Amy Covid Bash. But in the meantime, I would like them to, you know, go slow about these things, so I am outraged at this new, blatantly partisan shenanigan. Can one have a singular shenanigan? I declare yes, I am not going to edit this sentence. No going back now.
Hello I would like to request a new religion. Or, barring that, if one of the major religions could come out strongly against all forms of AI, I will sign right up, the rest of their canon notwithstanding. I want to be able to opt-out of every single AI, every single stupid-ass Midjourney and ChatGPT and combinations thereof. I would like the force of government, via a “religion,” to require that companies offer this opt-out. I want to opt out of every “For you” algorithm, though I suppose there is a difference between “Algorithms” in the high-oughts Facebookian sense and large-language-model AIs and their more sophisticated not-brethren. But I want out out out. All of this is a terrible idea, serves no one, offers nothing to the working folk and is an asbolute bummer of miquetoastosity and capitalist depravity. Make it stop. Let me opt out. Let me hide behind the robes of Amy Covid Bash’s hypocritical religions cake-opt-out paradigm and put it to some good by protecting me from paperclip maximization and a bunch of written documents with too many fill words when we could have bullet points. Place that humanist, anti-AI church on the map and I will attend services.Put that sticker on my driver’s license please.
I can’t stand it. I feel like I’m alone here. Why do we need computers to make pictures and write for us? Fuck why aren’t they cleaning the air and water instead? Why did we spend billions and billions of dollars to make AIs whose primay accomplishment so far is to make us want to shout “shut up and help.”?
Also hello fact check: there is no such thing as an “MBA Exam” that gives you an MBA that is stupid. Like if I path a “math exam” I did not earn a “math degree.” And everyone knows the main value of an MBA is the people you meet along the way. And the MBA is like the 211th most important thing in actually knowing how to “do business” my god this is all so dumb.
Speaking of churches I was thinking that these days Shoegaze is sort of like a church. Or an Elk’s lodge or something. All around America, every Sunday, there are thousands of shoegaze bands that get together in garages and basements and practice spaces and plug in all their guitar pedals and start strumming reverb and delay-soaked chords over and over and sort of stand there in a trancelike state communing with St. Kevin and the shoegaze gods and it really fills me with a lot of joy to think about this and I need to find a nice room where I can play a G chord through 12 guitar pedals really, really loudly for a while. That would be reallly nice.
Last night I tried to teach Jane about “focusing on the positive” and boy she did not want to do that one bit she wanted to focus not on the fact that she was getting a Mommy Breakfast on Thursday but rather on the fact that she wanted more than one Mommy Breakfast. I tried to explain to her that she skipped right over the part where she should feel some joy about an impending Mommy Breakfast and what does she like about Mommy Breakfasts is it the pancakes? The Mommy? The different egg or banana style? And I tried to explain to her that focusing on the positive made us happier and healthier. And then I saw her try, for one fleeting second, like Luke trying to lift the X-Wing out of the swamp on Degobah, and it was beautiful and delicate and I tried to encourage it while it was there but it faded quickly and went right back to no this is BS I want multiple Mommy Breakfasts. But it was still a win, and when I was downstairs telling Emma about it we agreed that even in failing, that try put her ahead of the game. And probably years ahead of us.
Got a moody and quiet one for you today. Threw in the one moody quiet Ministry song in honor of their impending “Alan’s miraculously still alive” tour. Might be getting into another Sinead mood.
Until tomorrow, friends.
i was just having a discussion about AI’s yesterday. my cousin (who is a screenwriter/director/etc) was saying that someday in the not too distant future all scripts will be written by AI’s and the thought of that made me so sick. why would humans ever want to stop being creative? i agree with you, get AI to fix problems humans can’t seem to get to or don’t want to or don’t know how to. ughhhh
wait, did the pooper people not prescribe you a big ol' gallon of pooping potion? you had to buy gatorade and miralax separately? WTF—i'll send you a photo of what they gave us!