Music

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Same as the oldphemism

It’s Tuesday, the 4th of February, in case you didn’t know or if you are reading this some time in the future.  I think it’s pretty unlikely that future generations will care what I’ve written, but who knows?

I am writing this on my smartphone today.  Yesterday I wrote using my small laptop computer, which is surely part of why it was a longer post than usual.  I just type so much more easily on a real keyboard.  Indeed, I can type faster than I can coherently speak in most cases, and almost as fast as I can think.  This is one of the reasons I am fated to reach out through my writing rather than by making videos or “reels”.

Of course, recently, since I started trying to use Instagram (which is relatively entertaining, at least) I’ve reshared there some videos of me playing music.  I don’t know if they really get heard by many people, but certainly more people seem to interact already with the videos than has happened on YouTube since I first put them up.  Almost all of my “views” on YouTube come from me, listening to my own stuff as part of playlists I’ve made.  I put my stuff among selections from various musicians I like, with the vague notion that it may increase their association in “the algorithm” with such famous musical acts.  This is a very vague notion; I don’t really know if the algorithm works that way at all.  In any case, the strategy hasn’t seemed to increase my exposure.

Sometimes I will also listen to my own music to help me get to sleep, which for some reason it seems to do.  Although, to be fair, getting to sleep is not my main problem.  Staying asleep is my problem, and last night was no better than usual.

I don’t have any serious, large-scale topic today, unlike yesterday, and that’s probably just as well.  I’m sure most people didn’t find it particularly fun to read that post, but I think it’s a serious matter to consider.

Today, probably the most momentous thing I have to report is that for roughly the last five days I’ve restarted taking my antidepressant (Saint John’s Wort, in this case).  I don’t really expect it to change anything significant for me, but I’m hoping it will give me a bit more energy.  Who knows, maybe I’ll become part of that cohort of people who start taking antidepressants* and gain just enough energy and proactivity finally to kill themselves.  I wouldn’t mind.

Oh, wait, sorry, I guess I should have said “unalive themselves”, not “kill themselves”.  That’s one of those stupid newphemisms that social media have led many “content creators” to use to avoid their videos being blocked.  I think this was mainly a Tik Tok based thing, though perhaps there has been some tendency for it on other social media.

In any case, it’s idiotic.  Replacing taboo words with new euphemisms just eventually leads to the newphemisms becoming taboo in turn, and newer, temporarily safe terms being chosen which will become taboo also, and then things shuffle back and forth going nowhere fast, like the linguistic undead**.  This all seems to arise because of the unwholesome tendency of humans to think that words can have magical powers.  They need to stop that.  Words have their own “magic” that is far more powerful and real than any imagined invocation of the devil that might lead to him appearing.

Anyway, that’s just about it.  I think, in closing, I’ll try to see if I can share one of those videos here as it appears on Instagram.  Maybe I’ll do more than one.  Anyway, I guess you guys will know if it worked.

*Not for the first time, of course.

**Would that be “ununalive” in Newspeak?

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Sleep that knits up the ravell’d blog of care

Hello and good morning.

As those of you who read this blog regularly know, I’ve been ill for almost two weeks now.  I can’t say that I’m fully recovered yet, but‒unfortunately‒I am getting better.  In the early stages of the illness, when I stayed at the house for two of the days of last week, I was at least able to get a bit of extra sleep, thanks to that tendency of the body’s response to illness.  Since then, though, I seem to have rebounded into worse than usual insomnia.  I feel truly horrible, and I also have a persistent cough that’s irritating.

I wonder if there’s anyone out there from my past who truly hates me.  If so, I hope they stumble across this blog, or have already done so, so that they can at least experience a bit of schadenfreude.  It would be nice to think that my pathetic discomfort and self-hatred were at least bringing some joy to the world.  It might be spiteful joy, but I’ll take what I can get.  It’s not as though I’m very good at bringing joy to people I care about and who care about me for very long, at least when they are in regular, close proximity.

My subconscious mind gave me a slight birthday present on Sunday, in that I woke up with a little tune in my head that I’d heard in a dream.  I wasn’t sure if it was something I’ve heard before, but I didn’t and don’t think so.  Anyway, I felt compelled to work out the tune and then put chords to it on Sunday.  Then, Monday morning, I very quickly worked out the guitar melody and chords and did a quick little production of that.  It’s only 16 bars long, so that was easy enough.

I posted the audio here on Monday.  I also made a weird little video with it on my phone; I’ve tried to play with Instagram lately, just because I have a default account since I have a Facebook account.  I posted the combined video there and on YouTube (see below).

I think it was too much of a distraction making my strange introduction and then adding the weird effects.  That was me just playing around with the Clip Champ app from Microsoft, just to see what I could do with it.  But my intro is longer than the song, and I don’t think it adds much.

Anyway, if anyone recognizes the tune from somewhere, please let me know.  If not, I guess this was my personal Yesterday* kind of moment, though my tune is much more banal than Sir Paul’s.  There’s no real shame in that, though.  The vast majority of all songs ever written are not as good as Yesterday.

On a whim, I worked out the tune of another (pre-existing) song on an online keyboard yesterday‒I don’t even recall what song‒but it was interesting that I ended up “singing” it in my head in C Major/A minor.  It wasn’t deliberate, and I only realized it as I finished working out the whole melody.

This was striking because that was the key signature that the above, dream-based song came out in, and in which it is played, above.  However, I know that is not the key in which I originally dreamed it, because as soon as I woke up with it in my head on Sunday, I opened my phone’s voice recorder and tried to sort of hum the tune into it.  I’ll put that recording right here, as evidence (or whatever).

As I knew my voice was hoarse, and I wasn’t sure how well it would come across later (even to me) it wasn’t long before I opened up the online virtual keyboard (it was too early to use the real one) and worked out and wrote down the tune.

Anyway, the point is, between the time I had hummed the tune directly after my dream, which I’m pretty sure was in the key in which I dreamed it, and when I worked it out on the virtual keyboard, I’d taken it from G-sharp major/F minor (which I think is roughly the key in which I hummed it) to C major/A minor.  I don’t know why this happened, but it does make nearly all the black key notes go away.  C major is the simplest, most basic key‒in a sense, anyway‒whereas G-sharp major has its root on a black key.

I’d like to imagine that my subconscious mind corrected it to an easier key signature for me, and that’s not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.  I’ve been playing piano since I was nine (not continuously) and cello since I was ten (ditto), if only at a very flippant and superficial level, never developing any real skill with either instrument (and I do not have perfect pitch in the sense of being able to tell you what note is being played when I hear it, but I can certainly tell if something it out of tune with itself and otherwise deal with relative pitch).  Still, my subconscious might very well have enough imprinted memory of notes and scales to steer me toward easier keys when I’m writing something or sounding out something by ear.

All of this, though, is just a meandering distraction.  I’m not likely to do anything more with my dream-based tune, even if I become more firmly convinced that it’s mine.  I’ve occasionally found myself humming some impromptu lyrics to it in my head, but they are horrifyingly bad and stupid.  Compared to them, McCartney’s first lyrics to Yesterday‒“scambled eggs…dah dah dah dah dah, I love your legs”‒are worthy of Shakespeare or Milton.

So I’m not going to tell anyone what those are.  Anyway, sixteen bars do not a song make, as Yoda might say, so if I were going to turn it into something, I’d need to extrapolate.  That’s not hard to do once you’ve got a basic melody, but it requires you to have the drive to make a song.

I have no such drive for anything, really.  I can barely write this blog, and I am only doing it because I am a creature of habit and routine.  I am thoroughly exhausted by my worsening sleep, and I feel as though I’m experiencing the world through a multi-dimensional haze.  I’m also very depressed and I miss my kids and all the various other people for whom I’ve been too unpleasant for them to want to stay around anymore.

From day to day, and for a very long time, I have been thoroughly alone, and I fear that serves the greater good of the people who matter to me.  Even this week at work, since I’ve been here every day, has been far less successful than the days when I was out of the office.  Everything tends to be better when I’m not around.

I’m not living; I’m just waiting to die.  It’s taking a long frikking time, though, and I’m running out of patience and energy.  But I still can’t seem to sleep.  As the Ramones sang, “I wanna be sedated”.  I wonder if Michael Jackson’s old doctor is making house calls**.

TTFN

*Every Breath You Take had a similar origin.

**Is it too soon to be joking about him?  I have long been personally affronted by the fact that he spent less time in prison than I did.  Then again, he wasn’t in Florida.

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Writing (and other things) report on Friday 4-26-2024

Well, I went a bit more nuts than usual this morning, and between 5 and 7 am I wrote 2230 words on Extra Body*.  It goes to show that severe insomnia at least can be useful in some ways, though it remains horribly miserable and miserably horrible.  Still, at least I’ve made up some ground from being so under the weather physically over the last week.

The story is already — of course — longer than I would have expected it to be, as tends to happen with my stories.  I’ll try to pare it down a lot during the edit, but hopefully people who read it will appreciate that it’s not just a quick and dirty tale, so to speak.  It’s not as though I’m wasting a lot of time in unnecessary details; at least I don’t think I am.

I even got out the guitar and strummed and sang a bit this morning.  Singing is weird, though, because when I sing even banal songs, I often find myself tearing up and fighting not to cry.  It’s weird, and a little disquieting.  It’s not as though I can express my emotions at any other time, and it’s not as though the song necessarily matches the feeling.

Oh, well.  I’m a freak, anyway.  What can you do?

I apologize for the length and oddness of yesterday’s post.  It doesn’t seem to have garnered very many readers, or at least not very many “likes”**.  I can’t really blame anyone; I went a bit nuts with that, as well.

I expect to work tomorrow, barring the unforeseen (as is, of course, always the case with everything), so I’ll probably get some more writing done then, though perhaps not as much as today.  I don’t know about guitar; the bases of my thumbs are still giving me a lot of trouble, and it makes playing rather painful.  Perhaps they feel left out, since so many other joints and skeletal and connective tissue structures act up on me.

Have a good day if you are able.

*I’m thinking I might change the name of the story before I publish it.

**Incidentally, I was surprised to realize recently that my song Like and Share has almost twice as many plays as any of my other songs.  I guess it’s the song that’s most pertinent to the modern age of social media.  It’s still only a bit over 500 plays — I have no idea what the stats are on Spotify or iTunes or TikTok or any other venue — which is NOTHING compared to normal commercial songs or even the songs of serious but amateur musicians, but it’s an interesting statistic to me.

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Monday morning…looking up?

It’s Monday morning again, as tends to happen around this time of week.  I hope you all had a good weekend.

I’m starting this blog post at the house, where I’m waiting to see if the Uber prices come down a bit before deciding to take one.  If they don’t, I may decide to walk to the train; it’s relatively cool out, and I feel physically rather energetic.  I may even take the bus, though that’s a circuitous and irritating path.  I’ll keep you posted about what happens.

…

Okay, well, the price dropped an acceptable amount, so I booked an Uber, but the estimated wait is 15 minutes, which is unusually long for this time of day.  That further cements my plan to try to make sure to walk back from the train on the way “home” this evening.  Yes, it will take longer even than waiting for an Uber, but it will cost less, it will have a lower carbon footprint‒though I will make many more actual footprints‒and it will also get me some good exercise.  I hope you can all help keep me honest and maybe even spare some words of encouragement.

I have some good news to share with you today.  It’s not momentous, but it means a lot to me.  I did not start on HELIOS, but I’m happy to report that I’ve started something else.  The prospect of beginning a new novel, even a “light novel” sci-fi story, was a bit intimidating, so on the other spiral-bound notebook, the one on which my cousin recommended I write a zombie story, I thought maybe I would write a short story.  I didn’t intend to write a zombie story (sorry, Lance) since I don’t even really enjoy reading or watching such stories, but it’s still a good basic idea.

I opened up my old collection of story ideas, from which came more than one of my existing works, and scrolled down.  Most of the ideas weren’t that gripping for the moment, but quite a way down the list I found an idea whose time, it turns out, had come.

I won’t tell you much about the story idea here, partly because I don’t have the full thing sketched out, but mostly because I don’t want to diminish my drive to write it.  It’s called Extra Body, and no, it’s not a horror story.  If anything, it’s a sort of lighthearted sci-fi short story, but set in the ordinary, modern world.

I wrote one page of it at work on Friday, and then yesterday‒yes, Sunday‒I wrote another page and a half.  It’s almost, but not quite, unheard of for me to write fiction on a Sunday, simply because I habitually mandate that as a mental break day from writing fiction.  However, since I’ve been on quite a prolonged mental break from writing fiction anyway, I decided to get in an extra day.

Also, instead of setting my usual daily goal of 3 to 4 pages of writing, I just set my goal to at least 1 page.  That takes a lot longer when I’m writing “by hand” than it does when typing‒I can type a full 400 to 500 word page in a very short period of time‒but that’s okay.  I’m hoping this pressure will keep me more concise than I often tend to be.

I must say, it’s good that I’m keeping the target low when writing by hand, because my hand muscles are deconditioned for writing much on pen and paper.  Of course, my writing is also terribly messy, but that is nothing new.  As I rediscovered yesterday, I can always read my own handwriting at least.

This shouldn’t be too long a short story, especially not for me.  It’s not going to be terribly deep or thought provoking, just a bit of fun.  Then, maybe, once I’m done with that, if I’m still around, I can start HELIOS.

Another thing, in closing for the day:  I did in fact look up the chords and tabs for All Apologies only to find that, though it was originally played in a form of the “drop D tuning”, it’s just a 3-chord song (not counting sus-2 and 7th chords, which one usually does not).  I decided to learn it using standard tuning, because I don’t like having to twiddle with the tuning of my guitar so much.  This meant I had to figure out the main riff for myself, since the tabs are not really any help, being all in the original tuning.  That wasn’t much work, though.  It’s a nice sounding riff, but it’s actually quite simple.

So, since I had the guitar out anyway, I decided to look up the chords to Close to You, in preparation for possibly recording my parody, Antichrist.  This song has slightly more chords than the other one, but unless you count the “truck driver” key change in the middle, it’s also really a pretty simple song.

I guess most popular songs are not all that complex.  One can get spoiled when playing around with Radiohead and the Beatles, let alone with having played Bach on the piano (and cello), or having been in pit orchestras playing West Side Story and the like.

Anyway, as may be obvious, I’ve gotten a slight boost in my overall energy, partly from better allergy control, I think, so that’s good.  I hope it continues.  We shall see, I guess.  For now, at least I’m being slightly productive.  I hope all of you are feeling at least as well as I, and that you have a good week.

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“Find my nest of salt”

It’s Friday, in case you didn’t already know, and since I am not scheduled to work tomorrow, it’s actually the last day of the workweek for me.  Oh frabjous day*.

I didn’t write a post yesterday, because I was out sick.  I think that some dip that I used had been in the fridge longer than I had remembered and had gone bad or summat, though it tasted okay.  Anyway, it certainly didn’t want to stay down after a while, so that was unpleasant.  I was worried that I might have caught some upper GI virus, but it was too self-limited an illness for that.

I feel as though I get sick on Thursdays more often than on other days, and especially on ones after a week in which I worked on Saturday.  I’m not sure if this is true pattern recognition on my part or some form of selection bias, but it feels as though it’s at least a slight trend.  I would suspect‒if it’s something real‒that it’s related to me getting worn down mentally (and physically) and becoming vulnerable to random physical insults after having had a longer week and no real recharge time.

This didn’t happen to me in the past, but then again, I was younger then**, and my reserves were deeper.  Also, I had a family to come home to, and a safe environment, and friends, and books that I wanted to read.  It was also reasonably quiet both at home and at school or work, and what noise there was‒even when it was quite chaotic‒was related to what was happening, what was being done, what the work entailed.

Things now are much different, and I need to find a way to recharge myself more rapidly and reliably, at least if I want to avoid total system collapse.  I’m not sure that I do want to avoid that, though.  Some part of me occasionally thinks that, at least if I completely fell apart, people would have to notice, and maybe someone would help me.

I doubt it.  The world is not set up well for doing very beneficial things, especially to and for people who are odd.  And I certainly don’t seem to be the sort of person people like to keep around for very long at a time, not in close personal contact, anyway.  They’ll happily‒or willingly, anyway‒keep themselves surrounded by shallow, lazy, manipulative users, as long as they wear at least a façade of warmth and cheerfulness.  But if someone approaches things differently, and is too mentally fatigued and fed up to bother trying to pretend otherwise or to force smiles all the time, they withdraw, even if that person works hard and tries hard, and is creative and smart and would never willingly betray them.

This is all hypothetical of course, but it does highlight why I think people‒indeed, the world‒are probably not worth keeping around.  Or it’s not worth keeping myself around to be among them.

Case in point:  for at least two days now (and it may have happened yesterday, too, for all I know) the Tri-Rail trains going north and south from my station boarded (with last-minute announcements) on opposite sides of the track from the ones they usually arrive on.  Now, it can make sense for one of the trains to board on its opposite side from usual; track maintenance needs to be done from time to time.  But having the trains switch sides smacks of someone just having screwed up, and then having done so again.  It’s not reassuring for passengers, that’s for certain.

Of course, my own reliability is not impressive lately.  I haven’t yet started work on HELIOS, though I have the blank notebook in my backpack (and another one remaining at the office).  I think, oddly enough, that if I were able to find a way to work on that during the day, I might recharge a bit just from that.  Then again, maybe I’m wrong.  I’ve only ever really successfully written fiction consistently early in the morning in near-silence.

Well, I haven’t given up on it yet, but I’m not optimistic.  I guess I’ll let you all know if I succeed in starting.

I also feel like I want to get the tabs to the Nirvana song All Apologies and learn it, and maybe do a recording of it, but I doubt that’s going to happen.  My guitars are just sitting unused.  Despite this, they give me no reproach‒guitars are very nonjudgmental that way.  They merely sit there, fallow, waiting and gathering dust, as is my keyboard (the musical one) and my cello.  It’s a shame, I know.  But, as the song’s lyrics say, “I’ll proceed from shame.”***

For now, though, I won’t proceed any further than this final paragraph.  I hope you who read this all have a good day and a good Saturday and a good Sunday if you’re at all able to do so.  As for everyone else, well, who cares about them?  They’re not like us, right?  We don’t need them.  They are our enemies, and we are theirs.  JK…OAI.

*Was anyone else really, really bothered when, in Tim Burton’s movie version of Alice in Wonderland, they referred to Christopher Lee’s character as if its name were “Jabberwocky” when that was just the title of the poem from which it was drawn.  The creature’s name, or title, is the Jabberwock.  It says so right in the second stanza of the poem:  “Beware the Jabberwock, my son!”  Yeah, I figured nobody else probably cared.

**Almost by definition.

***I don’t believe that the line is “aqua seafoam shame”, as so many people seem to think.  That’s merely a classic mondegreen.  I think this largely because the mondegreen version is a weird, abstract, bizarre bit of imagery that doesn’t resemble anything else in the words or tone of the song, whereas “I’ll proceed from shame,” follows quite logically from the preceding “I’ll take all the blame”.  Cobain’s lyrics could be cryptic and quasi-nonsensical sometimes, but their tone is more consistent than the whole aqua seafoam thing would be.  End rant.

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This is NOT a quote from Shakespeare (as far as I know)

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the first of February in 2024 (AD or CE) and I’m writing a blog post for the day even though I’m not at all sure of any good reason to do so.  I even began it in the traditional way (“Hello and good morning”) in which I have usually started my Thursday blogs, going back to when Thursday was the only day of the week I wrote them, reserving all other days for writing fiction.

I don’t think I’m going to do a modified Shakespeare quote for the title, today, though.  It’s too much of a pain and takes too long, since all of the most obvious ones have already been used.  I suppose I might change my mind before the time I publish this, in which case, you will already know, though I do not know as I’m writing it.

As the 11th Doctor said:  “Time travel; you can’t keep it straight in your head.”

Yesterday’s blog post title was an actual quote from the song I referenced in the footnote.  It’s a good song (off OK Computer).  Radiohead did an amazing job making sounds that were evocative of the notion of aliens and the like, and it has the wonderful little riff at the beginning and end.

That album really is one of the greatest albums ever.  It’s not a concept album.  Radiohead is too eclectic a band, I think, ever to try to make a concept album, though their albums tend to have an internal cohesiveness to them.  They often are very careful and strict about the order in which to put their songs, and which ones to include.

For instance, in OK/not OK, their rerelease of OK Computer a few years ago, they included several songs on the “not OK” portion that they hadn’t included in the original, some of which they left out because they didn’t match the tone of the album.  I certainly understand where they were coming from, but it’s a mild shame to have had to wait so long for songs such as Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2), Man of War, I Promise, and Lift.

That last one is one of my very favorite Radiohead songs.  It sounds too upbeat and hopeful for the tone of OK Computer, but I take that as “deliberately” misleading, a slightly different version of what they did with No Suprises (in which the song sounds like a beautiful lullaby, but the lyrics tell a very different story—I did my own “live” cover of that song, because it’s so representative of how I feel much of the time).  Alternatively, one could say that the tone of Lift is positive because the singer takes a very different attitude toward the subject matter as I take it from the song compared to most people, and is optimistic about it.

I interpret Lift, consistent with my biases and attitude, to be a song about escaping from life (by dying).  “This is the place.  Sit down.  You’re safe now.  You’ve been stuck in a lift.  We’ve been trying to reach you, Thom*.  This is the place.  It won’t hurt ever again.”  And, of course, later there’s the line, “You’ve been stuck in a lift, in the belly of a whale, at the bottom of the ocean**.”

I interpret this as expressing the thoughts of someone who’s finally getting out of all the stress and pain and horror of life (the lift, the two words being only off by one letter) into the safety and freedom from pain that is death.

On the other hand, the song ends with the words, “Today is the first day of the rest of your days.  So lighten up, Squirt.”  That could be taken as life-affirming and optimistic, and I’m by no means certain that Radiohead intended the song to be about what I take it to be about—my biases are clear and obvious, even to me—but that last line can still work in my interpretation.  After all, he doesn’t say it’s the first day of the rest of your life but of the rest of your days.

I’m overreading things, probably.  In any case, it’s a great song, and if you want to interpret it in a positive, life-affirming way, by all means, please do so.  It’s art, innit?  You can interpret it according to your impressions.  Just remember, this was a song from the time in which the band created (or at least finished) such tracks as Exit Music (For A Film), Climbing Up the Walls, Let Down, Fitter Happier, and of course, the aforementioned No Surprises.

As for other “not OK” songs, I really love Man of War, which was reportedly inspired by James Bond.  The video for the modern release is brilliant and haunting.  I also really like both to listen to and to play and sing Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2), though I haven’t done so in quite a long time.  I did a video of myself playing and singing it once, but it’s not up on YouTube.  I didn’t think it was very good, and I think my voice broke at one point.  I might have shared it here, though.  Yes?  No?  I’ll try to find out before I publish this.  If so, I’ll put a link:  Here.

If not, I won’t***.

By the way, I’m writing this post on my laptop computer (is it an OK computer?  It’s pretty darn good, at least), for the same reason I did so yesterday:  to give my thumbs some rest.  That does seem to be doing at least some good.  The bases of my thumbs are still quite sore when I rub them, and they feel stiff, but at least typing doesn’t make it worse, since I don’t use my thumbs during regular typing.

Anyway, that’s probably all I need to inflict on you today.  I did not know, when I started this post, that I would be mostly discussing Radiohead songs.  I do really like them, though.  And the new mini-band, The Smile, that Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke have formed, along with Tom Skinner, has some good songs as well, though I haven’t listened to all of them.  Their recent video for Friend of a Friend has the trio performing for what seems to be a group of elementary school students, and at the end, after bowing to the pleased audience, Thom has a nice little smile on his face.

Who could not smile after having a bunch of young kids cheer for your song?

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  The train is going to be here in a moment, and it’s not as though I have any further agenda.  My pain is nearly back to its usual baseline level, which is not great, but at least I’m more or less accustomed to it.  I’m not going to insert a picture in this blog post, unless I change my mind, but if I do, you’ll already know.

I may write a post tomorrow, but I may not.  It’s more likely than the possibility of me writing some fiction tomorrow, though, sad though that fact may be.

TTFN

*I usually sing it as “We’ve been trying to reach you, Rob.”

**This line “reminds” me of the ending of Weird Fishes/Arpeggi, another brilliant song, which closes with the words, “I…I hit the bottom…hit the bottom and escape…escape.”

***I have no such link, but I do have the original video file.  I decided not to share or upload that, but quickly rendered the audio from it, did a little noise reduction, compression, added some reverb and so on.  You can hear my voice really break at 2:13 or so, but that’s not the only time.  I think you can hear why I didn’t put this video on YouTube, but I like my little comment at the end, so I didn’t even edit out my cringey “Ohhhhh”s, though they are embarrassing.  Here it is:

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What could compare 2 A future of cyber super-stupidity?

Well, I’m back on my smartphone to write this blog post, but I’m not going to do the whole indenting thing this time.  It was a cute little indulgence, but it doesn’t really add anything, and it’s a minor pain, and I’m just not going to do it.  So, there.

I didn’t bring the laptop with me yesterday, because I was still in a lot of pain by the end of the day, and didn’t want the extra burden.  Of course, I’m still in a lot of pain now, as I write this, and I’m sweating even as I just stand still outside.  I don’t think I’ll be using the laptop again any time soon.  But I guess I might change my mind again, depending on how I feel and how things go.

I’m certainly changing up my shoes again, trying to find a pair (and a type) that gives me the least trouble.  I don’t know how much, if any, difference it will make, but I have to keep trying things, just in case something works; I’m too stubborn to do otherwise.  I also widened my pull-up stance this morning to see if that helps, and maybe it will, and maybe it won’t throw my left shoulder into a tail-spin like it did the last time I tried it.

I know, I know, all of this is boring.  I’m a boring person, what can I say?

I did get out the guitar just a little yesterday, because one of the new people at work asked me about it, after recognizing that I was listening to a Radiohead song (Climbing up the Walls).  I’ve downloaded the chords for Nothing Compares 2 U again.  I frivolously imagine that I might do a video of me playing and singing it in honor most specifically of Sinead O’Connor, who just died, making her the third and final person I associate with that song to die (the other two, of course, being Prince, who wrote it, and Chris Cornell, who did my favorite version of it).  Hey, maybe if I do a good version, and people enjoy it, I’ll get caught up in that group, so to speak.

Fingers crossed!

I have tomorrow off, so I won’t be doing a blog post.  I’ll have a full weekend by myself to do fuck-all on my own.  I hope at least to be able to go for a walk if my back cooperates.  Other than that, I really have nothing.  I guess I might watch a movie or something.  I’m not going to go to the theater to see Oppenheimer, though it looks like a good movie.  After my last visit to the theater by myself, I just don’t see it being much fun.

Oh, but I do plan on calling my sister this weekend!  That will be good, so there’s something positive, at least.  Sorry, I didn’t mean to disparage her or be dismissive.  Talking on the phone to her is pretty much the only thing to which I look forward.  I still always get anxiety before using the phone, but that’s not her fault; that’s my defect.

Here’s something darkly amusing:  the Google Docs autocorrect is now urging me to add a “to” after the word “forward” at the end of the penultimate sentence of the preceding paragraph.  This is the state to which we’ve fallen; the pseudo-helpful editing software system suggests that I change a perfectly grammatical sentence by adding a preposition (sans object) to the end of that sentence!  Why?  I suspect because that’s what almost everyone else does out there in the trash heap of humanity*, and that’s the source of the system’s recommendations.

This is the crap from which such LLMs as Chat GPT and the like are compiling their informal and inscrutable linguistic rules and predictive language models, and to which they are then going to be adding their shitty, shitty, derivative writings and recursively worsening the deterioration of human reading and writing (and thinking) ability.  Maybe we should burn them all down, along with pretty much everything else.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m no Luddite by any means.  I’m quite a fan of useful technology, including computers in general, and of course, I love science.  But technology that decreases people’s need to discipline and improve themselves in writing, in reading, in thinking, and in seeking out reliable information makes me nervous, to say the least.

People tend to be mentally lazy much of the time‒thus the current and recent polarized and moronic political climates. The way many people use technology that they don’t even remotely understand is not improving that tendency.  So, what if our future dystopia is not, for instance, the rise of a super intelligent AI that either reduces humans to its dependent pets or eliminates them entirely but an actual artificial stupidity that people think is smart, and which is more efficient and potent at being non-intelligent than humans are, as well as at giving humans what they “want” in the short term?

What if those wants become self-reinforcing and ever more intense, as any supra-normal stimulus can cause to happen?  What if this leads everyone to a mutually dependent culture of stupid eloi and stupid morlocks with neither truly victimizing the other, but both perpetuating a clueless, increasingly incompetent civilization of human and artificial minds that cycles about in increasing ignorance of the greater universe, and is eventually obliterated by some entirely avoidable catastrophe?

In many ways, this scenario seems worse than takeover by truly super-intelligent AGI, because at least with the latter there would be super-intelligence, and it would have the potential to endure and learn and grow and spread and perhaps even become cosmically significant.

(This is all somewhat reminiscent of ideas discussed in the excellent video Dystopias Don’t Go to Heaven from the YouTube channel Highly Entropic Mind.  I encourage you to check out his stuff.)

I think it’s better to use complementary technology to the degree possible, as David Krakauer refers to such things as abacuses and bicycles and actual maps that enhance our abilities.  I think computers in general, and search engines, per se, are complementary in that, to an active mind, they allow much faster access to and use of legitimate information.  But systems that write (and sometimes just make up) stuff for people to consume without ever going anywhere or knowing anything about the quality of the information source, and which can even potentially make fake video and audio, could easily just lead everyone into a virtual world of spiraling, increasing idiocy.

Maybe this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends‒not with a bang but with a singularity of self-reinforcing non-intelligence.  It would be ironic at least, and I do appreciate irony.

Anyway, that’s enough for today, and for this week.  I guess I’ll write to you Monday if I’m still doing what I do.  Have a good weekend, please.

*I’ve even read formally published books, released by respected publishing houses, that contain sentences that end in duplicated prepositions, e.g.: “…to which I was looking forward to.” And people wonder why I often just want to die.

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You are not I, but I have a URI

In case anyone was worried, I apologize for not writing my blog post yesterday.  I was “home” sick with an upper respiratory infection, and had neither the energy nor the inclination to try to write a post.  I’m obviously not completely recovered today, but I am going in to the office—it’s payroll day, after all—and I feel a bit better than I did on Monday afternoon and yesterday, at least physically.  My mind feels quite foggy, but that’s not that unusual.

Of course, I’m not going to write either my follow-up neurology post nor the post about sugar and its discontents (so to speak) yet.  My mental acuity is not up to those at the moment, nor am I completely prepared for the former article, so I won’t be getting to them quite yet.  For those who might be waiting, again, I apologize.

There’s not much happening that’s particularly interesting.  I have been rereading the latter part of The Chasm and the Collision over the past few days, and I’m pleased to note that I still enjoy the story.  Parts of it even bring me near tears, which is a curious experience for the author, but then again, I guess it is more personal to me than it might be to others.  I’ve found a few typos—less than a handful, I would say—that were missed before, and if this were a world in which I had time and will and executive function (as they call it), I’d fix them and try to go and adjust the text for future purchasers, but I’m not up to that.

Anyway, it’s nice to know that at least I like the book, still, but I think there would be a lot of people out there who would like it, if it could be brought to their attention.  Unfortunately, I’m not good at self-promotion in any serious way.  This blog is as close to promotion as I get, and you all see how upbeat and enthusiastic I am with it.

Speaking of typos—I was, you can check for yourself—I’ve been making an awful lot of them while typing this.  I guess it’s part of being sick, or sicker than usual, or sick in more ways than usual.  I also, after waking up many times through the night, actually didn’t hear my alarm clock until the second repeat, ten minutes after it first goes off, because apparently I was sleeping on my left side, and I’m very hard of hearing in my right ear.  Probably at least a bit of it is also because I’m sick.  I wish I could say I felt more rested, but who feels better rested when sick?  Maybe afterwards, but not while it’s going on.

I’m wearing a mask on the train today, since I am sick, whereas lately I’ve been occasionally going without it, since often I’d literally be the only masked person in sight.  Perhaps going without a mask is why I’ve gotten sick.  It would make a certain amount of sense.

I think I may try to reread some of my other stories.  Somebody ought to read them, since they’re out there, and it’s not their fault their author isn’t good at promotion.  There are whole communities of people on Twitter and the like who promote independent writers and publishers, and I’ve tried to be an active member of such things in the past, but I’m afraid I have a hard time not getting stressed out by the whole process.  I guess this is why authors get agents and work through publishing houses, but frankly, the notion of dealing even with those situations—getting an agency or a publisher or any of that—is too daunting.  I barely have the will to get up and out of “bed”, frankly, but staying there would be more unpleasant than getting up, so…

Anyway, all that isn’t very interesting.  I guess the only other moderately interesting thing I have to note is that, Monday evening, as I was on my way back to the house, and already feeling the effects of this URI, I was “inspired” to write lyrics to the chorus and after that the first verse, and then a slightly altered second chorus, to a new song.  I even had a little melody in my head to go with it at the time, though I don’t recall that now.  I recorded the initial chorus, sort of, on my voice recorder, though I’m not sure I really caught the tune I had in my head for it, and then I wrote that chorus and the rest in the note-taking app.  I suppose I should email them to myself, lest my phone die and they be lost (though that wouldn’t exactly be a tragedy).  It was a slightly upbeat sounding melody, which was mildly ironic given that the words were rather negative—a cautionary note against complacency and overconfidence.

Is it any surprise that new song lyrics I would write would be so?

Anyway, that’s all that’s going on right now.  For me, I mean.  I don’t know if I’ll go any further with the song idea, but one thing I will do is try to avoid getting too wordy with it, since I tend to do that and end up making songs that are quite long.  I’ll add at most one or two other verses* and maybe a vocal bridge section if the mood for that strikes me.  We’ll see.  Odds are nothing is ever going to come of it, which is fine, because it’s not as though anyone makes a habit of listening to my music, anyway.

Okay, that’s enough of that nonsense.  I hope you all had a decent Tuesday, and have a good last day of November today.  Tomorrow begins what by name should be the tenth month, but which is actually the twelfth month—December, in case you didn’t know.  Yippee.

*To be clear, the verses and chorus such as I have are remarkably unwordy for me, so two to three verses, a chorus (with minor changes in its second repeat) and maybe a little bridge would not be too much.

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The blogs of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo.

Hello and good day, everyone.  It’s Thursday morning, the last Thursday of May (2020 (AD or CE (Gregorian calendar))), and—at least where I live—people are starting to go back to work.  We can only wait and see whether this will be something that large numbers of the population will regret or not, but I can certainly sympathize with their desire.

I haven’t yet written anything for Iterations of Zero this week.  I could post one of a few bits that I’ve already written; I have two pieces primed and ready.  However, those essays are rather dark and somewhat negative; they have a sardonic and grim character, and that’s not what I want to get across right now.  I’m trying very hard to be positive (this despite appallingly wet weather, even by south Florida standards, which is making my chronic back pain flare up something fierce*).

So, instead of using either one of those articles, which I’ll save for later, I think I’ll make a post embedding my five original song “videos”** which are up on YouTube.  I’ve said before, half-jokingly, that I have roughly half-an-album’s-worth of original songs recorded and produced, and I’m inclined to work toward another half, just for shits and giggles.  But it would be nice to have more people tell me what they think about the songs before I put a lot of effort in.  I have received good reviews from those who have listened so far (and they weren’t all family members).  Considering the limitations under which they were made, I think the songs have come out remarkably well.  Still, I’m definitely my own primary audience thus far.

This isn’t so terrible; it’s nice that, just as I enjoy reading my own stories, I also enjoy listening to my own songs.  But I do face a serious obstacle in that I’m built or was trained or raised in such a way as to find self-promotion extremely difficult, and even distasteful.  Some large and loud part of me finds it unseemly to tell people, “Hey, listen to this song that I made,” or even, “Hey, you should read this book that I wrote.”  I’m also terribly embarrassed to be in the same room as someone listening to one of my songs.

I think I would benefit greatly from awakening just a little bit of the Trumpian spirit that must surely lie dormant within me.  When I’m honest with myself, and can push past my cringing, I really do think the songs are pretty good, especially considering what I have to work with***.  And in all honesty, I think my stories and books are quite good, and if it wouldn’t be just supremely cheesy, I’d go on Amazon and rate them each five stars and give them dazzling reviews.  That’s probably what Kanye West or The Donald would do, but I don’t know if I’m capable of it.

Speaking of my books, I’m about seventy pages from finishing the second to last run-through of Unanimity.  This means that the final turn, with layout, cover design, etc., is fast approaching.  I’m tempted to say that I feel like Frodo finally reaching the Plateau of Gorgoroth, but Unanimity is definitely NOT like the One Ring.  That is to say, I don’t consider it a cursed or dark or deadly burden of which I’m eager to be rid.  Quite the contrary, I love it dearly****.  But it has been a helluva journey through spacetime and through mindspace and workspace and whatever other phase space one might conjure to describe the process.  It’s certainly taken longer in proper time than the journey portion of The Lord of the Rings took‡, though the main-arc events of that book, from “A Long-expected Party” even just until “The Scouring of the Shire” last at least a good seventeen or so years, if memory serves.  Correct me if I’m wrong†, please.

With that good and exciting news, I think I’ll wrap things up for the week.  As always, I wish you all the best of all possible things, both short-term and long-term, both deep and shallow.  And though it is true that, if wishes were horses, we’d all be hip deep in horseshit, that wish is nevertheless entirely sincere.

TTFN

*Do you hear that high, plaintive, irritating sound, Mr. Anderson?  That is the sound of the world’s tiniest Stradivarius playing a doleful tune.

**This is in scare quotes because the video portion of these songs is just a fixed shot of the Iterations of Zero symbol.  It’s simply a fact that YouTube is one of the best, most available means by which one can spread an audio file and make it available, in principle, to the largest possible audience, but to use it, you need some kind of “video”.  There is no comparable “YouWoofer” or other stereo-speaker-titled venue for purely audio tracks for people to share, though podcasts are certainly all the rage.  Likewise, Facebook lets one upload videos as one wishes (true to its name, I must admit), but if there’s a way to upload purely audio files to the platform, I’ve yet to discover it.  Ditto for Twitter.

***Cue the “back-alley” doctor scene from Tim Burton’s Batman, in which the nascent Joker first sees his new face.

****And you will, too.  Believe me.  Everyone agrees with me.  No one’s ever done a book like this before.  It’s huge (it really is).

‡Or brandybuck or even gamgee.  Ha ha.

†I know, I know—I?  Wrong?  I!?  Don’t be absurd!

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Time and the hour blog through the roughest day

Hello and good morning. Welcome to another Thursday, a reminder that you’ve survived for yet another week.  Congratulations!  You’ve earned the chance to read yet another edition of my weekly blog.

I’ve been thinking about the recurrent and ongoing desire I have to reinvigorate Iterations of Zero, my “other” blog, in which I range over a wider…well, range of topics, many of them darker than what I address here.  I tend to keep this blog, the one you’re reading, focused on my creative writing (books and short stories) and on music when that comes up (though that also appears on IoZ).

One of the biggest obstacles to IoZ is that I imagine that I should write about planned and specific topics there.  When I write this weekly blog, I don’t plan it in advance.  I just write whatever comes out, rather in the way that people have conversations*, and it seems to work nicely.  So, what I intend to try is not to plan what I’m going to write in Iterations of Zero, but simply start writing as I do here, and see what comes out.  Hopefully, I won’t start channeling ancient Lemurians or some similar such nonsense.  I can think of it almost as a kind of free-association psychotherapy…except that I can’t really do it while lying on a leather “couch”.

This won’t clear away every barrier to posting in IoZ.  One of its other main obstacles is time.  I don’t want to sacrifice another weekday morning that could be spent working on my books, since I already miss one of the those a week doing what you’re reading now.  And, despite my exhortations for all of you to send me lots of money so I can become independently wealthy and write full-time, I still have to work for a living, and to commute (yes, I’m back in the office full-time now), so my free time is woefully limited.

I’ve tried various means to get around that problem, including buying a Bluetooth keyboard for my cell phone so I can write blog posts there.  It’s a nifty little gizmo, and it does its job nicely, but it hasn’t seemed to make me any more likely to use my spare moments to write.  I’m much more prone to use them to read blog posts and to check various news and science sites.  I guess I’m going to have to bite the bullet and just tell myself to write something—anything—every Sunday, which is the one day I never use to work on my books**.  We’ll see how it works out, but it can be soooo hard to kick myself into gear on Sundays.

Now, to abruptly shift gears and address another potential time sink: I’ve been considering restarting audio recordings of some of my work.  I have a few published short stories for which I haven’t recorded audio (and thus haven’t posted to YouTube), and of course I only reached Chapter 9 of The Chasm and the Collision before deciding that not enough people were following it to make it worthwhile***.

However, there is real, personal, ego-syntonic joy in reading my stories aloud and posting them for people to listen if they want.  Doing so in the past also helped me learn how to use Audacity, which led to me being able to record and produce my original songs, which is double-plus-good.  So, what I think I may do is put out a few posts here with links/embedding of my short stories’ audio “videos” (one post) and chapters of CatC (another post) to give you all an easy place to link to them, to see if I get any new listens, and to elicit any comments in favor of or against me doing further recordings.

It might also be nice to do a post embedding my song “videos” as well, since I have little bits and pieces of the beginnings of various others bouncing about on paper and in my head and might be pushed toward or away from further efforts by reader/listener response.  But that’s mainly orthogonal to the preceding point.

As for much more important matters, Unanimity continues to draw nearer to its final form.  I’m within a few hundred pages of the end of the penultimate edit!  That might not sound like much, but in a half-a-million-word novel, believe me, it’s getting close to the end.  Of course, the final run-through will be the hardest work since the original writing of the book, but the excitement of being near completion should easily keep me going.  Hopefully, I’ll be able to spread a little of that excitement to all of you.  There are worse contagions to catch, as we all know.

With that, I’ll call this week’s blog installment good and move on to other things.  I hope you’re all well, and that you stay well and become even better over time for as long as you are able.

TTFN

*Some of you may say that this fact is obvious based on the quality of this weekly blog.  You really know how to hurt a guy.

**There’s nothing religious about this; Sunday is just the one day of every week that I never go to official work.  For that reason, it’s also the day I do my laundry, and I can guarantee that there is nothing religious about that process.

***I honestly don’t understand this.  I know I’m biased, but I really love that story—and others have told me they love it also and have thanked me for writing it—and I think that I narrate it well.  Oh, well.