Hands-Free

I don't really like that the coincidence of Christmas and New Years Day falling on the same weekday is really affecting my posting schedule this week. It feels targeted against me in a way I haven't felt, cosmically, since... since...

Oh man, that was a pretty standard structured setup for a good metaphor involving old popular culture references, for the amusement of all. Dang, these knotty writing problems used to be my bread and butter, but now as we enter 2026, the Era of Inevitable AI, an era defined (according to commercials featuring what I assume are the best and most compelling use-cases of a what we pretend is going to be a trillions-of-dollars industry) by a tool that sometimes will mildly help you do things that aren't that hard anyway and we're all used to doing better ourselves, as long as we don't mind the ways in which it sometimes/often gets things catastrophically wrong.

I've been pretty vocally against the creep of a human-created tool coming for human expression and the jobs relate to expressing it, but I think with all the very clear indicators that it's going to be the new normal with no perceived downsides or hiccups, I should be more open to getting on board.

Not quite to the degree that involves actually paying any of these vampires any of my currency,* but just, for now, you know, philosophically.

It's not a resolution as such, but I guess you can look forward to this space being filled with lorem ipsum to a much higher degree than normal as I happily and gratefully lay my neck on the grubby chopping block of progress.

Or to put it another way, to embrace, with both arms, the future, as long as we understand the AI future as a tidal wave. Everyone understands the best way to survive a tidal wave and experience all its (beneficial? probably?) effects is to try to hug it.

Happy new year, everybody.

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*excellent non-AI metaphor, everyone knows vampires crave nothing more than monetary wealth

Likely Story

It's the time of year where we find the best in one another. We also take the time and energy to make ourselves available to friends and family, to cleave unto our loved ones as they cleave unto us, giving of ourselves in ways above and beyond the everyday.

That feeling is pretty much the only way I was going to end up in an IMAX theater watching a 3D showing of Avatar: Fire and Ash this holiday season. Having seen the first two Avatar films, there is no force social or spiritual that was likely to soften my soul to the idea of 3-plus hours of James Cameron's embarrassing cowboys-and-indians non-parable parable about environmental something-or-other. 

No force of course except my youngest (adult) kid asking me to. For even bad movies, we're a good time. We set the precedent way back when we excitedly saw the predictably predictable Dwayne Johnson struggle-fest Skyscraper when he was like 15. It was awful in a way we both really wanted it to be, which led to an animated discussion in the drive home. It's the kind of bonding kids only do now in the Discord chat during co-op gaming.

More about this movie later, but I wanted to pass along this message of family and fellowship and the unifying power of Jim Cameron's pretentiousness in the form of a popcorn movie. Let's all try to carry that warm feeling of togetherness through the new year. We'll fashion our own upsides out of the slow-motion explosion of the post-Cold War international settlement, in this lull before the Great Venezuela War of 2026.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Speculative Fiction

So I'm not a screenwriter, but in my head, I've been compiling ideas for a spec script for an episode of the dystopian near-future anthology Black Mirror. I don't want to give away any of the details because, like most creative types, I live with the crushingly easily falsifiable belief that if my GENIUS IDEA gets leaked anywhere into the public sphere, Fat Cat Hollywood will swoop in, steal it, make ONE ZILLION DOLLARS off of it, leaving me high and dry. Like all made-up afflictions, the only real protection are hokum folk remedies, none of which are afforded by the internet, a body in which going viral is the actual goal. So the only safe thing to do is to keep it locked inside my head for now, kept warm by the frictive dissonance of knowing how impossible it is to get anywhere in show business rubbing up against the rock-solid certainty of my idea's inevitability.

It does't matter anyway, though, because if nothing else, Black Mirror has proven incapable of being able to keep up with the satirization of real life. It's exceedingly difficult to explore the thought-experimental ramifications of current events and behavioral trends when you live in a world where all of the flat ground has been systematically replaced by only all slippery slopes everywhere. Any idea one might have to make a state of affairs seem ominous or potentially silly is, at every turn, outpaced by the goings-on of day-to-day living. It's like entering a clown car into a Formula 1 race, but somehow the clown car is honking and seltzering its way to a full lap's lead with relative ease.

Like, nothing I'm going to come up with is going to be as dramatically and jaw-droppingly stupid as the farce of "artificial intelligence" as it currently exists, in the abstract, or the completely out-of-the-blue insertion of it directly into the most sensitive parts of the government with no warning, training or context.

If you don't know, all military service members and Department of Defense War civilian employees had GenAI pop up as a shortcut on their government-issued workstations all at once last week, together simultaneously with a memo from Secretary of Pull-Ups Pete Hegseth giving zero guidance past, and I'm BARELY paraphrasing here, "you'll use this if you're not a total pussy."

Without burning my sources, I will say, this has been the first time I've seen large language models up close in action and this one... yeah, it's so useless it's actually dangerous. It's not just that it gives wrong answers to basic questions, it's designed to do so in human-emotional language so a) you won't get mad at it for being wrong, and b) it will give you confidence to keep using it, so long as you aren't interested in how it reaches its conclusions. It's like being handed a shovel handle with no spade on the end, but they gave it a pair of googly eyes. Sure, it can't do anything like the job you need doing (and may actually be a hindrance), but awwww, look at the funny little guy! You can't throw away a funny little guy!

It will--and this is true--tell you it is 100% certain about an answer you know to be wrong. And then when you point out that it's wrong, it will profusely apologize and praise you for your keen, piercing insight. It will also (someone told me!) explicitly admit that it is designed to provide useful answers, not correct answers. The criteria for what is "useful" isn't that important or interesting, but the point is, "correct" is an aspect of "useful" in the program as it currently stands, but it's nowhere near definitive or required as a component of a response. What's more important is that you feel as though it's done a job, with the finitudinal confidence of 100% certainty, without any regard for whether it's reflecting 100% of anything, let alone certainty. That's one of the hardest things to have 100% of!

So my Black Mirror idea about a whistleblower/retired ninja in a world where weekly personal blogging ended up on a J-curve trend-line instead of blowing away like a house made of straw or perhaps sticks back in like 2005, so he's also a celebrated cultural figure as well, but he ends up in a battle of wits, nerve and probably some throwing stars against a swaggering artificial intelligence vying for control of the nation's nuclear arsenal and porn sites, well, that's just going to have to get shoved into the dustbin of other GREAT IDEAS I've had as being too pedestrian now. Like my old half-written teleplay where Ronald Reagan eventually becomes a hated villain, it's just become passé. Back to the drawing board.

The Most Important Least Important Thing

You don't often get a shot to redo a mistake of missing The Most Important Thing In The World. It's the premise of a lot of movies of course, but they all involve mysticism or time travel or some woo-woo Hollywood hand-waving that somehow manages to get fully grown legal adults' consciousness puppeting the bodies of their former selves that may or may not be over the age of consent. There's a strong level of creep going on in the barely-sub subtext of it, but if you're Jennifer Garner or Tom Hanks, a boatload of personal charisma can paper over a lot of that.

Wait, those were both movies about kids jumping into the bodies of adults, not the other way around. Way creepier and in no way helpful to my metaphor, but I didn't really realize how extensive that subgenre of body horror comedies was. Huh. Hollywood is disgusting.

See, the 20-year-old me from 1994 has found himself transported to the body of me at 51 years old in 2025. First of all: yuck. What's with all this extra body hair? And who said it was OK for me to get this fat? Note to future-future me: just because "you can always move up to XXL T-shirts" doesn't mean that should be a goal, you know? But alternately, hey, you found a way to make a career out of majoring in history that wasn't law school or barista, good for us! Implausible, but encouraging!

In 1994, the international extortion racket and pirate cartel known as FIFA made the insane decision to put their signature event, the World Cup,* in the United States. It seems absurd now as we have the televisual rights for essentially every top-tier national league in the world (and some of the lower tier ones) in this country, but at that time, I will remind you that soccer was, with grotesque and inexcusable inaccuracy, labelled "gay." In 1980s-speak of course that means "things that threaten me because I do not understand them yet many other people seem to enthusiastically enjoy," which only mostly included actual homosexuality in this category. And the ones who used it the most viciously and vociferously turned out often to be just, as we would say today, manifesting.

Because of the money involved necessitating a high-profile rollout and ad push, and the fact that I was a college student with plenty of free time in the afternoons, I found myself dipping in to watch parts of matches from time to time. I couldn't even say that I watched that much (we were pretty sure about the epidemiology of "gayness" back then, and that's definitely one way to get it on you, by watching stuff other people might make fun of you for if they caught you in the act), or even all of the USA matches. The famous shock win over Colombia decided by an own-goal that eventually got Colombian player Andrés Escobar killed I heard about after the fact. And this happened at the Rose Bowl, like 30 miles from my house. I can't imagine what I was doing that seemed more important at the time, probably just busy trying to figure out how to wear my clothes backward.

And then they had a WHOLE WORLD CUP FINAL in the same place, just like a week or two later! An easy drive away! With mostly adequate parking! And I didn't even TRY to go!

Now, though, redemption is an option. In 2026 they're finally running it back. However, after really drinking the poison in 1998 where I think I watched every available match, the World Cup is probably my favorite thing. I love it more than any movie or book or anything else one might take in with their senses in their discretionary time. This week they've had the draw for the games and Team USA is playing several of them right here in SoCal again, this time at Fancy Landed Spaceship SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, which I know from personal experience I can get to and return home in the space of a single day. It almost bothers me the level of compulsion that now exists in my being driving me to procure tickets to at least one of these matches.

Part of the reason it bothers me is I don't like feeling like something outside of me has control of my decision-making functions, but we are where we are, as far as that goes. I'm not going to choose not to be unreasonably excited about LITERALLY EVERYTHING, that's a pose, not a way to actually live. I'm pretty full on GenX when it comes to apathy and the allergy to earnestness, but even I have my limits.

The second part that bothers me is that my money is going to go to the most absurdly disgustingly brazenly openly corrupt international organization in the history of international organizations, which is saying something when we know the International Olympic Committee exists.

But I'm trapped. It's the thing I love the most, except maybe my children. Would I love my children less if they were involved in human trafficking, slave labor and the general immiseration of segments of the world population that would already show up pre-miserated? Probably, but you know, rest assured, the relationship would then be complicated. Like the way people who became adults in the 1970s now feel about Woody Allen films.

And that's about as much influence as we have in this world where basically everything has been corrupted. We get to feel conflicted about it. Make no mistake, I'm going to overpay for this ticket if I can get hold of one and I'm going to go, mostly because the next time the event rolls around this way, I'll likely be either too old or too dead for the steep rake of upper-deck stadium seats. So I'll take my second bite at the cherry here and let the moral dissonance ride. It's not like I haven't had a Chik-Fil-A sandwich since they were outed as being shitbirds. I've got some real practice at this rationalization thing.

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*We didn't have to call it the Men's World Cup yet as we were still laboring under the delusion that nobody would be interested in women's sports even though like 50% of households had tuned in to watch the ladies' figure skating final alone in the Olympics that year. Oh Lillehammer, you were wonderful.

I Feel Seen

I probably haven't been as careful as I could have been leading up to this point. Sure, I post anonymously and mix it up by including bits of true things that might have been zhuzh-ed for effect or even outright lies because I'm a seasoned enough writer to know aspects of my actual life aren't good readin' material. I'm just out here doing everyday stuff like everyone else. Humdrum mundanity abounds like the compounding aches and pains of progressing middle age, what medication I may or may not be on, what shows I'm watching on which streaming platforms, which shows you definitely need to watch ohmygod-how-have-you-not-seen-that-yet-it's-so-good, Australian rule football scores, that time I ate a diamond, how I've cut my average down to four bar fights per week and the dizzyingly graphic/borderline upsetting details of the sexual dynamics within my eight-person live-in polycule. Just normal stuff, yawn.

As careful as I've been (for your reading benefit!), I'm sure it's possible to piece together some of the actual aspects of my life, like how I very subtly over the course of the recent government shutdown and in a series of consecutive multi-hundred-word posts given the impression that I'm a worker in federal governmental employ somehow.

But haha, how could that be true, no way! Those jobs are super hard to get! That's a cushy life (as I've heard) basically free money for no work, where you can just fuck off and play golf or tennis during a work day. The jokes' on those federal workers, whoever they are, because tennis? That's actual effort, so much running! If I'm getting paid for not working but had to pick a sport to do instead of my not-work, I'm not taking one with a signature injury named after it, I'll tell you that. Also, with all that sweating, I'd be really threatening my reputation as an indolent layabout. Not worth it! Everyone knows the laziest athletes all play pickleball.

In the interest of maintaining my air of mystery and looking to protect myself better in the future, I won't confirm or deny if I'm a federal employee. Especially on a social media platform like this. Saying anti-Trump things on a site readable by anyone? That's how you get fired these days, that's what I've heard.

But you can ask yourself: is it still "social" media if literally no one is reading it?! My best defense--wily, sage, definitely on purpose--is having an audience that, when averaged out over the years, is statistically indistinguishable from zero. An almost null level of engagement sure feels like winning to me, no matter what my dad, teachers, ex-wife and therapist(s) used to tell me.

I'm a little worried though, as the dark corners might not stay so safely umbral these days. Now they can train AI to scour the internet--all of the internet, even these cobwebby parts nobody has ever looked at--for whiffing, acrid, burnt-cinnamon hints of baked dissent. Then I'd be found out! Done for! Activated!

I guess the answer is to make hay while AI is still bullshit. Our days here, just like my time in the federal job I DEFINITELY DON'T HAVE, are numbered.

A Day of Humble Gratitude

OK, so I totally forgot to post something yesterday on schedule, but traditionally, Thanksgiving is a day I "skip" by posting something short and punchy and definitely not evidence of compulsive behavior on my part. People need this. I'm doing a public service.

But as I've got people coming today, I'm not feeling 100% and I still have Thanksgiving dishes to finish doing, we honor tradition by cutting this off here. I leave you with a picture of US Olympic legend Jesse Owens racing a horse:

Life comes at you fast, people. Sometimes you find yourself in a position where you have to take a race vs a horse as a spectacle. Some of those times, though, you do beat the horse.

A Reverse Theodicy

It's getting to the point where I'm not certain there's an actual balance to be struck between being informed and being driven insane by the attempt to be informed. The problem is that the delivery systems are made of garbage just as potent/more potent than the content, like if you were in medical pain and the IV tube providing your morphine drip was made out of fentanyl. You only need one of those things in this circumstance, but you'd have to choose to overdose every time you elected to stick it in your veins. It's not even the medicine necessarily that is tainted, there's just no way to get to it without approaching the taint. The secondary imagery there was unintentional, but do with it what you will. I can only apologize.

Like all good lefty leftists, I'm on Bluesky more than anything for all my unclean "news," but I try to be cognizant when I'm scrolling that the dopamine is the point. I'm not dumb enough (anymore) to go sliding through the postings with the idea that I'm being in any way "informed" by what I'm ingesting. It's more about being surrounded with things I find soothing for a short period of time, even though I know the exercise is a) pointless and b) inherently dangerous. It's like taking a nice hot bath while trying to dry your hair with an electric blow-dryer at the same time.

It's gotten to the point where I can't really even tell if there's a "lot going on" week to week or day to day. If you follow the chatter, it sure feels like it's busy out there, but churning up the dark, sludgy sand at the bottom of the lake isn't the best or most productive way to spend a day at the lake. Like, what if I just didn't try to do that at all? I can elect for a certain amount of ignorance still, can't I? What is my (ostensibly civic-minded) curiosity going to merit me other than some cloudy water and hands and arms covered up to the elbow in lake goo? Who is benefiting in this scenario?

I'm doing a lot of imagery because I'm avoiding the actual topics out there with jags of goofy poesy as a procrastination/coping bit. I pay good money for therapy, I can cobble together some low-level self-awareness here and there.

But look, tell me which of these things is actually news:

• Dick Cheney died and a bunch of people went to his funeral.
• Trump called a female reporter "piggy" when he didn't like a question.
• Trump said Democratic some lawmakers should be executed for treason.
• There's an AI bubble that could/will crater the economy.
• A bill for the DoJ to release files related to Jeffrey Epstein passed almost unanimously.

That seems like a lot of stuff! But which one(s) of those items is/are a) information I need to maintain my status as an Informed Citizen responsibly participating in a functioning democracy; and which ones are b) brain worms coated in a slow-leeching, unholy pill jacket of psilocybin and e. coli? Like is it possible to find nuggets of useful truth generated and delivered by a Dedicated Bullshit Machine?

The argument could be made that the AI bubble thing and maybe the Dick Cheney thing are pieces of legitimate news that it would help to know if I wanted to have a not-instantly-embarrassing conversation with a random stranger.

Of course that's a false premise though, because you'd never talk to a random stranger in this day and age, would you? As soon as you get past the introductory pleasantries, you know you'd have to brace yourself for some level of actively disinformed conspiratorial nonsense. Or at least what used to pass for actively disinformed conspiratorial nonsense, which is now just shit that's on the CDC website's front page.

That's a good example though, because "your Center for Disease Control is encouraging you to watch your children die from preventable disease" is news you should know. Actionable to the point of life-saving, especially if you have vaccine-age children. Phew, I think we found the bar.