Pigeons, in the morning outside “The Dominion” cafe, picking out the choice bits from a stew of vomit on the sidewalk, last night was a big one for someone at the Royal, sitting in cafe, making my notes.
This is the world.
And, in the news, in life, it's all been a bit overwhelming, a bit too much time on my phone doomscrolling.
Facebook, reels, a new style of narrative, one without resolution, “Hardcore Pawn” clips which end as he’s testing to see if the gold/faberge brooch is real, you’re left hanging, unresolved, or he steps outside for a fight and here the clip ends, what happened, another clip, streets of Pattaya, date with lady/boy? who knows? Which was it and you can’t tell from behind? I’m never curious enough to look up the ending online, it must be out there, but the (premeditated, by design algorithm) keeps you clicking on inanity after inanity, there’s are more sinister motivations here, but allow me to continue.
AI Slop by AI Bots, labelled “Digital Creator”, how do these earn money, I need to investigate this…or one of a recipe that involved boiling alive a few dozen large frogs, I reported this, it’s not a cultural thing, it’s simply cruelty for “like/views/subscribe”, Facebook reports back, it disagrees…
Facebook, I'm very tempted to abandon it, reasons of integrity, mental health, but I’m clearly not approaching this properly, the number of idiots out there, there’s got to be a way to monetize them, the same with tik-tok, I've never installed, despise everything about it but there’s got to be a way to make it work for me….
Or the random videos stitched together to tell a heartfelt story narrated by AI, man hits deer/moose/lion/chipmunk, takes home, nurses back to health, they become best of friends afterwards, looking at the clips, not the same animal from cut to cut, not even the same person, but this drivel, now, it chokes my feed…
or inane Ferrari pickup videos in which some idiot attempts to pick up a hot girl, gets cruelly rebuffed, only to get reconsidered once he hops into his Ferrari to drive away…
OR Xmas, the AI generated Santa’s sleigh being pulled over kittens, crushing them, so cute, only, only….
I joined the meteorite sub community to try and remediate the drivel it’s feeding me, only to find that I’m seeing way too many obviously not meteorites for sale, and people applauding, so deluded is the audience…
AI generated steampunk robots, 60’s hippy styled muppets dancing on human legs, HR Puff’n’Stuff inspired lunacy, it’s getting better, you can tell when someone’s actually taken time to edit it, never mind Facebook, at work, the big screen, music playlists with AI generated nonsense, beautiful woman holding wine glass in tentacled paw, drinking with 2 hands and a mouth gagging on a cigar, you would swear you were the first human visitor, customers watch in awe, it looks convincing, to a point, until you notice the hands on backwards, the vacant eyes, always something…
real content is vanishing, the presence of people on social networks becoming distressingly absent...
My Media Diet, over at friends watching her Netflix recommendations, first of all “The Umbrella Academy” - based (I’m guessing) loosely upon a graphic novel aimed squarely at misfit gothic teenagers, which imagines a dysfunctional “family” of superheroes who must put aside their differences and unite to prevent the end of the world. Occasionally humorous, the most likeable characters being drug-addled Klause and dismissive “Five”, but it ended lame and was, in the end, like most of Netflix, a complete and utter waste of time.
This was followed by “The Apprentice”, which was a documentary that covered a young Donald Trump’s relationship with Roy Cohn. Good, accurate, but god damn I need a hero, someone to root for, and there was no one here to answer that need,
And then there's the news: Bondi’s questioning and her willful misunderstanding of clear and transparent questions, Pete Hegseth, the worst of possible candidates, placed deliberately and with malice, note Hegseth’s Swastika Tattoo, now filled in to become a meaningless square, but still there, still there, there was Daniel Smith’s treasonous visit to Mar a Lago, along with Jordan Peterson and Kevin O’Leary, the news cycle fills with idiocy, the coal mining debacle in Alberta, strip mining and environmental devastation at a colossal scale, the wilful destruction of watersheds in perpetuity for the sake of a few local jobs, a lot of temporary foreign workers, and billions in profit to Gina Rinehart and whatever cronies in Alberta she had to pay off to make this happen.
The Coronation of Trump (and I mean Coronation), only a couple of days away and while I tell myself there’s many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip it does seem inevitable now, his posturing on Greenland, Panama, and Canada, the hilarious fail that was Trump Jr’s planting MAGA hats on the homeless residents of Greenland to pose this in a bar for a photo-op, all this while LA is on fire, burning to the ground, Olympus, as it were, home to the Gods of Stage and Screen, on fire, burning up, horrific footage now presented to us to conveniently distract us from the other fires burning everywhere in the world, not all fires need flames, crown this with Celebrity appeals to conspiracy or the GoFundMe’s being set up to help out the poor millionaires that lost everything, and indeed, if you only have a few hundred million or even a billion dollars you’re still relatively poor, why not set up a go-fund-me for the Gods, and the relief centres, handing out Birkins, Cartier watches, it's another world...
Meta’s refusal of the Fact Checking will inevitable lead to troll posting that Canada wants to join the Union, that we need to be invaded, for our own good, our socialist values are threatening the US, our - whatever, now he can say it and with Zuckerberg's consent it will become the truth.
Russia’s cable cutting between Finland and Germany, China’s patent on a cable-cutting anchor, the world’s full on at war already, less country to country then oligarchs against the masses, now to subjugate them all, one world government on it's way, only these will not be the times of prosperity...
News of the French Woman scammed by someone claiming to be Brad Pitt with cancer, hilarious, and that's the only laugh I've had all week, and it's cruel, at the misfortune of another...
All this news, I'm overwhelmed, by design, distracted, by design, and anxious as hell. I'm not the only one, I know, but the idiots lack the wits to be afraid, they can't see what's coming, the inevitable, and while it's true we need a cull it probably should be from the top down...
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I'll leave you on a good note: Wikenigma - A Catalyst for curiosity..., an inventory of things we haven't quite figured out yet.
And Vjaybombs, a projection artist on Instagram who's getting it: https://www.instagram.com/vjaybombs/
And this article, which promises advancement in reusing the energy of computing - in theory reducing the amount of power computers need by up to 4000%: https://spectrum.ieee.org/reversible-computing