Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again—October 20, 2022—and thus it’s time for my weekly blog post, though I’ve been writing my near-daily blog post all along this week and for many preceding weeks.

I posted yesterday about the two videos I’d uploaded to YouTube with my readings of two of my favorite poems, and I hope those of you who are interested in such things enjoyed them.  The only comments I’ve received were on Facebook, and those were actually on the sharings of the videos themselves, not on my blog post, or on YouTube proper.  I guess it’s something.

I did a first draft, so to speak, of a recitation of The Raven yesterday, and I started to work on editing the audio for it.  I realized that I cannot use that video, since I made a few errors—a wrong word in at least two places that doesn’t even make sense.  I honestly cannot understand how that happened, since it’s an error I’ve never made before, as far as I can recall, when reciting the poem.  Anyway, I’ll have to re-record the video.

At least working on the audio led me to decide what I was going to do for the background music for this, and I’ve prepared that (it’s remarkable what I can get done since I no longer write fiction or play guitar in the morning).  It didn’t involve me actually playing and recording any new versions of music, but I did work with my own recorded music to produce it, and it’s suitably eerie, I think.  I’ll let you all be the judges of such things.

On a less cheery note, I had a terrible night’s sleep last night, waking up at around one thirty, struggling to try to get back to sleep, but only succeeding for a total of about fifteen minutes by my clock.  I did at least have a dream during that fifteen minutes, but it was one of those typical, semi-mundane but still bizarre dreams, and it involved some annoying scheme that took over computers and cell phones, but in a fashion such that I can’t see what the point would have been, other than pranking.

I don’t understand computer pranking and hacking, or why someone would think it was funny.  I guess there’s no accounting for one’s sense of humor.  I, for instance, think it would be funny to castrate all saboteur-type hackers* without anesthesia or antibiotics and to use fire to stop the bleeding.  I think it would be hilarious.  But that’s just me.  I’ve always had an odd sense of humor.

That’s pretty much all I have for you today.  I’ll work on redoing the video for The Raven, possibly even this morning.  If I get a take that I like, I could be finished and post the video by this evening, but the takes are about ten and a half minutes in length—that’s the time it takes me to recite the poem with a bit of voice-acting thrown in—so if I screw it up, I probably won’t do another take.

Still, if I do post it to YouTube today or tonight, I’ll probably share about it here on my blog tomorrow, assuming I’m still alive and sharing, which is not necessarily my preference.  Honestly, I don’t know what most people see in staying alive; I imagine most of it truly has to do with innate biological drives, a fundamental, “terminal” goal, in AI-speak (though it’s ironic to use it here), and people just make excuses for it, confabulating justifications and motivations for staying alive when it’s really just animal programming due to natural selection that impels them to continue.

Oh, well.  That’s life.  I hope yours is enjoyable, at least for today, and hopefully from now on, for as long as it can be for you.

TTFN

*Other than, perhaps, those who are legitimately and honestly taking part in some form of political protest, but that should be a very strict set of criteria and very limited in application.  Hackers can potentially cost a society millions and even billions of dollars with minimal effort or risk on their parts, and when society loses such amounts of money, there are people, somewhere, who because of that, go without enough good food, without medicine or mental health care; there are people who suffer in general and who die prematurely.  It’s not obvious to see, not as straightforward in proximate cause as most homicides, but its effectively a mathematical certainty.  These are petty and cowardly murders committed anonymously and at a distance, for no good reason but to assuage weak egos.  If that’s the sort of thing you’re into, you should go into politics; at least then you might accidentally do some good.