Category: Longform
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All in a day's housework
Busy day so far.
New school street comes into effect next month, so to prepare this morning we parked away from the school and the kids scooted in with me chasing after them on my flat feet.
Need to teach little kid how to use his brake.
Had to pop into the school office to ask for a parents' evening form.
Went to Tesco to buy the items that Waitrose couldn’t deliver later.
No time for breakfast, instead peeled, chopped and boiled spuds, chopped and fried onions with lentils, prepared carrots and leeks for honey-roasting, cut broccoli florets for steaming, mashed potatoes and spooned on to onions and lentils mixed with gravy and HP sauce in a baking dish, grated Red Leicester to go on top.
Emptied our general waste bin, wet and dry recycling bins, and the food bin.
Unblocked the kitchen sink with the plunger.
Put my laundry away.
Washed up.
Put the groceries away.
Time for a late brunch.
Publish and REDACTED!
This was supposed to be a comprehensive account of events of the last couple of weeks in this corner of the interwebs. Instead, thanks to the events of the last twenty four hours, and on the advice of REDACTED’s lawyers, I’ve had to make some amendments.
Nevertheless, I hope it will help to clear up any misunderstandings and fill in any gaps about what has been going on.
Unfortunately, most of my source material has now been REDACTED, breaking the very fabric of our beloved internet. Forgive me for not taking screenshots.
OMG!!1!
The dust has REDACTED, it’s all REDACTED over, and it’s all REDACTED under the bridge now (or is it?), so what REDACTED time to start REDACTEDing over the muck of the very recent past all over again?
I don’t really want to do that, and I held back from saying anything directly at the time, or since, mainly because I didn’t feel like there was anything I could add that others hadn’t already REDACTED or that wouldn’t simply fan the flames of the REDACTED of the REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED that descended from their REDACTED REDACTED horses to demand REDACTED Rotten’s evisceration and expulsion from the internets for being a REDACTED-loving REDACTEDphobe.
And I didn’t want to upset or offend anyone.
But most of all, I didn’t want to be on the receiving end of someone else’s REDACTED REDACTED.
So out of sheer bloody-minded cowardice and self-preservation I sat back behind the safety of my keyboardless AI slop consumption screen and watched the entirely human generated shitshow go down with an ever increasing sense of unwanted vicarious and voyeuristic unease.
I’ve taken part in plenty of online arguments and fights over the years (hell, even some real life and in person ones, too), mostly in closed communities, but occasionally in public forums.
My memory isn’t what it used to be, but I can’t recall there was ever a winner in any of them (and if there was it certainly wasn’t me - although it’s not the winning that matters, of course, it’s the taking part), and no perceivable good has ever come about other than that the flames eventually burn up all the oxygen of publicity and peter out.
Oh, and I hope I have learned that its not worth the emotional toll of getting involved. I learned The Power To REDACTED.
I’ve also faced unfounded accusations in the workplace.
And I still carry the scars of my REDACTEDs' arguments when I was a child.
So all this arguing and accusing evoked in me some difficult emotions and memories.
LOL!!1!
As someone who still feels relatively new to REDACTED (after two years), and certainly not feeling part of the already well-established community - I’d already been “told off” by one of the sensible centrist liberal adults for lacking a REDACTED or REDACTED opinion because I drew a metaphorical and frankly dogmatic bloody line in the sand of the ashes of the thousands of murdered children in REDACTED, and planted a tattered REDACTEDbow flag in the rubble opposing the REDACTEDide of REDACTEDinians in REDACTED by REDACTED, and the Good Ol' REDACTED of REDACTED’s role in funding and arming it - I was aghast to witness the self-declared grown-ups bitching and fighting amongst themselves over who was the fairest of them all.
A few of the most fairest of them all promptly decamped to set up in another part of the world wide web where they will be safe from REDACTEDists and REDACTEDs, and fairytale queens cosplaying as old ladies bearing poison apples.
Speaking of apples, it was First Man REDACTED who ate the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and brought about the Fall of Man. First Man REDACTED, and First REDACTED Eve, lost their innocence and became ashamed of their nakedness. Their sinful obsession with REDACTED made them the world’s first REDACTEDs.
Led by judge, jury and executioner in-chief First Man REDACTED, the REDACTEDers had decided that REDACTED Rotten’s use six months previously of “REDACTED” was non-binary and cast-iron proof that REDACTED is, in fact, REDACTEDphobic, and that cannot be tolerated - or at least, it cannot be tolerated six months down the line when First Man REDACTED, who wasn’t cyberstalking REDACTED Rotten at all, just happened to notice that REDACTED had paid for a subscription to REDACTED’s newly unelected REDACTEDist henchman REDACTED’s REDACTED.com.
Not only was he a fully paid up member of the REDACTED billionaire’s despised social network, REDACTED had publicly praised REDACTED’s REDACTED exploration ambitions and his REDACTED cars!
As if this wasn’t REDACTED enough on its own, REDACTED was named as a REDACTED of the REDACTED indieweb REDACTED social network REDACTED, set up several years ago as a community-minded alternative to the toxic REDACTED by the ever so manly monikered REDACTED.
“HOW COULD MANLY MONIKERED REDACTED EMPLOY REDACTED-LOVING REDACTEDPHOBE REDACTED ROTTEN?!!!!”
“MANLY MONIKERED REDACTED MUST IMMEDIATELY “PRONOUNCE” HIS PERSONAL ALLYSHIP WITH TEH REDACTED COMMUNITAH!!1!”
“REDACTED MY AUTHORITAH!!1!”
FAFO!!1!
Don’t get me wrong. I think REDACTED could and should be more careful with his REDACTED utterances, particularly in his role as a REDACTED of his own REDACTED, which I presume he welcomes anyone and everyone to use, contribute to and subscribe to. It does look bad that he’s also a REDACTED REDACTED, and paying REDACTED to use REDACTED, AND praising REDACTED (especially in light of REDACTED’s overt REDACTED salutes).
But in my humble, unwanted and irrelevant white middle-REDACTED male REDACTED-gendered opinion, none of that defines him as a REDACTED-lover or a REDACTEDphobe. I mean, he could be both, or one or the other, or neither. I don’t know. I think it’s disingenuous to pretend otherwise.
That said, it doesn’t mean people can’t be offended by any or all of it six months ago, two weeks ago, now and forever more. In REDACTED’s defence, it seems like he did make some kind of apology at the time even if it wasn’t good enough, and it was compounded by his publishing of later REDACTED posts complaining about being ‘REDACTED’.
REDACTED, a REDACTED REDACTED who did take offence at REDACTED’s “REDACTED” comment REDACTED her subscription to REDACTED’s REDACTED service, and REDACTED about her REDACTED. REDACTED REDACTED her in full, and while it shouldn’t have REDACTED, could have been REDACTED much better, and undoubtedly left a very REDACTED REDACTED in the mouth for REDACTED, First Man REDACTED and plenty of others, that really should have been the end of it.
As others have REDACTED better than me, it does appear as if First Man REDACTED had it in for REDACTED and saw REDACTED’s blue REDACTED account and his praise of REDACTED as an opportunity to exert some kind of REDACTED or “REDACTED” upon him. While I’m not suggesting REDACTED set out to invoke the REDACTED REDACTED, he knows as well as anyone what it’s all about and The Power To REDACTED get involved in other people’s battles.
So it’s somewhat ironic, if no less unpleasant, that in seeking to give up his Power to REDACTED in order to REDACTED the internet, he has now had to REDACTED his REDACTED REDACTED in the face of REDACTED REDACTED.
The goat singer
In the echoes of the goat singer’s song,
where Dionysus whispers through the vines,
we find ourselves entwined in ancient rites -
fertility rituals of death and rebirth,
of new life and new wine.
Here, survival is the meaning of everything:
the stars beyond our reach, the earth beneath our feet.
Good versus evil, truth versus lies,
blame and luck, conspiracies and fate.
Destiny waits like a vulture on the tiles,
and bad choices remind us,
Of the arrogance leading us down paths we can’t retrace.
We are always wanting more -
more wine, more power, more love, more life.
But injustice follows us like a shadow,
inescapable, irretrievable, inevitable.
“You paid a price to come this far,”
As if suffering were currency,
as if pain could buy redemption.
Euripides knew it well:
the gods are not just.
They play with mortals like toys,
throwing dice with our fates,
laughing at our despair.
Moral ambiguity reigns supreme,
and protest is futile,
a scream into the void that answers only with silence.
Cynicism grows like weeds in the cracks of our souls,
but still, there is hope -
a flicker, a spark,
a stubborn refusal to give in to the darkness.
Diatribe becomes spectacle,
entertainment for the masses,
as we watch our own downfall unfold
like actors in a play we didn’t write.
Insanity creeps in,
whispering in our ears,
telling us we’re not good enough,
that we’ll never be good enough.
And maybe that’s true.
Maybe we are all doomed to fail,
to fall,
to lose everything.
Desertion, rejection, loss -
the Fall of Man,
the absence of God.
We cry out, but no one answers.
We reach out, but no one takes our hand.
Tragedy guaranteed,
but still, we’re alive.
Apart from the ones who aren’t.
Now there’s the real tragedy -
the ones who didn’t make it,
who didn’t survive the journey,
who didn’t pay the price,
or who paid too much.
Suffering is knowledge,
the bitter fruit of humanity.
We taste it every day,
in every breath,
in every tear.
But even in the darkest moments,
there is light -
a glimmer of something beyond the suffering,
beyond the pain.
A hope that refuses to die,
a faith that clings to the edge of reason,
a belief that maybe, just maybe,
we are more than the sum of our broken hearts.
And so we keep moving,
through the desert,
through the wasteland,
through the ruins of our shattered dreams.
Because even though the road is long—
or there is no road and we have to find our own way -
we are still here.
We are still alive.
And that, in itself, is enough.
Roadblock
I live in a cul-de-sac.
My life is a dead end.
It’s a no-through road.
With nowhere to go.
Stop signs.
Barricades.
Danger!
Keep Out!
No way in.
No way out.
What are you waiting for?
What are you waiting for?
It’s a waiting game.
Can’t wait forever.
The waiting’s over.
Something’s wrong.
Sitting in God’s waiting room.
Waiting for death.
Waiting for life.
Waiting for something.
Anything.
And nothing.
An appointment with the doctor, or the dentist.
To diagnose, to clean, or to remove the decay.
Come back if things don’t get better.
Come back in six months, or a year.
Or not at all.
Waiting for the train.
It never arrives.
It doesn’t stop.
It leaves without you.
Waiting for love.
If only someone loved me, everything would be all right.
And they do.
And it is.
But still, I’m waiting.
So it’s not that.
Waiting for the right moment.
Billions of moments, and none of them the right one.
Talk about bad luck.
Waiting in line.
Billions before and after me.
BBC says IDF murdered children and lied about it
‘The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) says the building was targeted because it was a Hezbollah “terrorist command centre” and it “eliminated” a Hezbollah commander. It added that “the overwhelming majority” of those killed in the strike were “confirmed to be terror operatives”.
‘But a BBC Eye investigation verified the identity of 68 of the 73 people killed in the attack and uncovered evidence suggesting just six were linked to Hezbollah’s military wing. None of those we identified appeared to hold a senior rank. The BBC’s World Service also found that the other 62 were civilians - 23 of them children.’
IDF said bombed apartments were Hezbollah base - but most of dead were civilians bbc.com
Life lessons
On Sunday I was listening to Lianne La Havas' COLORS rendition of “Bittersweet” on YouTube.
We’re picking that fight everyday
This shit’s going nowhere
The Algorithm did its job well and showed me the latest KEXP concert by a new to me band called English Teacher. I was blown away.
Even though I’ve seen more COLORS Shows than KEXPs
A bit prog at times, and a lot music studenty, but they can really play so that’s all forgiven, especially if you listen to the interview with the band at the end of the full concert.
“Albert Road” is possibly my favourite, although I think the recorded version is even better and more poignant with the video (especially in light of the drama of the last couple of days):
(Steve’s mate’s son used to play in The Fall…)
So don’t take our prejudice to heart
We hate everyone
The world around us never showed
How loving can be fun
More than The Fall, they somehow remind me of The Sugarcubes, who I loved back in the late 80s, but who I haven’t listened to properly for a long time. I listened to the album “Life’s Too Good” this afternoon while working, and it was better than I remember it. “Deus":
He put me in a bath tub
Made me squeaky clean
Apparently Bjork’s producer produced English Teacher’s album.
More reminiscent of The Fall (and Frank Sidebottom), perhaps, is their song (and video) about the singer’s smalltown hometown of Colne in Lancashire and its inflated egos, “The World’s Biggest Paving Slab”.
I am the world’s biggest paving slab
So watch your fucking feet
What's out there?
What’s out there?
My space-obsessed four and three quarter year old might ask me that soon, so I better have an answer.
At the moment he’s happy to copy his ten and a half year old brother and stick with “What’s in Uranus?” for laughs. (Although he does actually want to know what’s in Uranus, too.)
Recently, I have been replaced by Professor Brian Cox on bedtime story reading duties.
Instead of me reading simple kids' books on space until he falls asleep, Prof. Cox narrates stories on YouTube about black holes, space-time elasticity and Fermi’s Paradox. It’s fascinating, and sends the little one off to sleep at least as efficiently as me reading to him.
I admit that while I was aware of Fermi’s Paradox, I hadn’t quite cottoned on to its significance.
That, in answer the the question “What’s out there?” there’s an unimaginably vast number of planets, stars, galaxies, etc., in an even more unimaginably vast and mostly empty space. And in spite of this vastness, there’s absolutely zero evidence (so far) of any kind of life at all other than here on our tiny, tiny speck of Earth. We’re alone.
Echoing Carl Sagan, Prof. Cox was quite poetic about it and described it as the Universe taking millions of years to come up with just the right conditions for an unbroken chain of evolutionary life to emerge that has an awareness of itself.
And that the Universe is a frighteningly violent place so it’s quite miraculous that we haven’t (yet) been smashed or fried in some astronomical event. In fact, we look odds-on to smash or fry ourselves first right here, right now.
Our evolutionarily advantageous over-confidence will inevitably lead us to self-destruction, as surely as boom leads to bust, as we ignore climate warnings from our wise elders, wage war on our brothers and our sisters, and repeatedly fail to think of the children.
We’re wedded to screens and technology as life passes us by. Doom-scribing, scrolling and trolling, when we should be out there talking to our neighbours, being the change we want to see in the ‘hood, and showing some fucking solidarity with each other. We’re not all perfect, we can all say and do the wrong things, even hold the wrong beliefs.
Identity politics has much to answer for, but the answer isn’t to dismiss people’s lived experiences. Each to their own, and everyone must be able to live their lives as they want to while not harming others. But when someone expresses themselves in ways that cause hurt or offense, piling on and ostracising them often just deepens divisions.
Instead, we need to find ways to acknowledge everyone’s feelings and guide each other toward mutual understanding. This isn’t easy, especially online, but it’s essential if we want to build real solidarity.
Because the point is that the people who want to colonize Mars, or make “their” country great again, or spend billions on war when our elders are dying in hospital corridors, are not on our side. If we could find ways to stick together, however we identify as individuals, we could challenge these concentrations of power and wealth.
I feel certain that if everyone had a decent home with enough food, meaningful and/or well paid work, and enough free time to pursue leisure interests with friends and family, then very few people would give a flying fuck about what pronouns people prefer, or if someone moved from one “country” to “another”.
Maybe then we can leave a planet that’s still inhabitable for our children.
Of course, it’s also possible that we are not alone. It’s possible that aliens are among us, badly disguised as awkward, orange humans, or owls, or neutrinos.
Who knows?
AI, ethics and democracy
I keep reading that AI is dumb, dangerous and demented. And I’ve no doubt it’s all true. Ethan Mollick, author of Co-Intelligence, describes ChatGPT as “a very elaborate auto complete like you have on your phone”
AI slop is contaminating our lives with worthless junk, and while I’ve played with and been briefly amazed and entertained by Google NotebookLM’s auto-generated podcast creations, they can get repetitive, boring and stupid very quickly.
We can rail against AI all we want, but it’s not going away. I expect AI to get smarter and to have fewer hallucinations even if the danger level remains high.
What is Al good for?
Micro.blog uses Al to generate Alt-Text descriptions of images and that seems to work well enough for its intended purpose. What it can’t do, of course, is generate descriptions that are personal to the uploader or post context, e.g., if I have a picture of my son the description will be a generic “boy with curly hair” or such like.
I’ve used Google’s Gemini on blog posts I’ve written and it’s given me some very positive feedback about my writing, enough to make me feel good about myself (certainly much more so than any human reader). Although it also got into the habit of creating its own alternative versions, which often were funnier and more interesting (to me) than my own writing. (It will also roast you if that’s your thing.)
Similarly, Google NotebookLM has fed back on my entire year of posts in 2024, and was very nice about it, too. It is quite therapeutic to hear that, as long as you take it for what it is - an elaborate auto-complete that ultimately will rot your brain, take your job and ruin your life.
I’ve also used both for work in some limited ways - drafting a job description, drafting cases for support for funding applications, and summarising or analysing documents. Both require some degree of human intervention, but the process and product was useful in helping me get started, and complete the tasks.
One area where I found Al to be most interesting was in commenting on and forming an ethical response to a local democracy issue where I live. I found the response to be in line with what community campaigners (including me) had been asking for, and in total contrast to the response from our elected representatives, authorities and business leaders. That must be the auto-complete.
While I don’t think I would yet call for all politicians to be replaced by AI, I do wonder if there is a potential use case here for analysing policy implications, or at least highlighting ethical considerations?
I ran these thoughts past Claude.ai and this is a summary of what it had to say:
- democratic processes need human judgment, accountability, and the ability to balance competing interests the ways that AI currently cannot
- core ethical principles that should guide public service:
- transparency about conflicts of interest
- accountability to the people
- clear acknowledgment of problems rather than minimisation
- practical solutions for reporting complaints and response
- the fundamental duty of public officials to serve their constituents
Human decision-makers can, of course, choose to prioritise other interests over ethical imperatives
I suggested to it that the AI response to the Southall Gasworks issue demonstrated more “empathy” than the human political response:
- The AI’s response prioritised human wellbeing and acknowledged suffering, in contrast to the actual political response, which was bureaucratic and dismissive, treating hundreds of complaints as isolated incidents and prioritising procedural responses over human impact
- A truly empathetic human response to such serious health impacts should have been immediate and decisive action to protect public health
Of course, the AI response wasn’t actually empathetic. It applied logical ethical principles that prioritise human wellbeing. What looks like empathy is actually systematic ethical reasoning unclouded by personal interests, political considerations, or institutional self-protection.
I suggested that it might not be uncommon for political leaders to lack empathy, and that it’s therefore so much easier for them to allow personal, and powerful political and institutional interests to take precedence over what most ordinary people would see quite clearly as the interests of human wellbeing:
This connects to research on the prevalence of psychopathic traits in leadership positions. In the Southall Gasworks case, a leader with normal empathetic capacity might find it psychologically difficult to:
- dismiss hundreds of health complaints from suffering residents
- accept substantial gifts while community members develop serious illnesses
- continue business as usual while learning of deaths potentially linked to their decision
Of course, even someone with empathy might not be able to resist powerful institutional or financial pressures.