Please Standby

We are experiencing technical difficulties. 

Google Support bites. 

Update (17 NOV 25 MON): We may be back on course. 
Okay, it's later in the day and here's the progress. When I wrote the first part of the update and fixed the embedded video, I was at a Windows workstation. I didn't think the OS would make a difference since I tried two different browsers with the same result (or lack thereof). Thinking maybe the issue had been fixed, I tried it on my Mac when I got home, and same input lag and general unresponsiveness when using Safari. I even tried DuckDuckGo again and had the same issue. Those are my only two browsers as I deleted Chrome some time ago and I don't like Firefox. So, I downloaded Microsoft Edge, which is where I'm currently writing this. So, whatever is going on with Blogger, it's purely a MacOS issue. I guess this is what I get for signing up for betas. 
Now I'm trying out Brave and it's working just fine. What in Hel's Realm is wrong with Safari and DuckDuckGo? 

Update (18 NOV 25 TUE): So, the problem seems to be that both DuckDuckGo and Safari are built on Apple's WebKit. As for trying this on my iPad, where I've got the same two browsers, there's no issue whatsoever, and WebKit is used there. That leads me to conclude the issue is purely with Mac desktops. Now we simply have to wait for another update to hopefully fix this weirdly specific bug. 

Update (18 NOV 25 TUE): Just did another beta update and now everything is back to normal. Embedding images and videos still doesn't work, but maybe there's another update on the horizon. 

The Barbarians at SETI

 

Hey, who’s up for a little existential dread wrapped up in nostalgia by way of a 90-minute toy commercial featuring blood, body horror, and genocide? 

Whenever nostalgia-based content creators bring up pieces of media that “traumatized” us as kids, there’s a fairly familiar list of usual suspects and often with Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal at the tippy top. Other entries on the list may include The Transformers Movie, The Neverending Story, and The Secret of NIMH, among many others of that particular era. I saw these films back in the day (or at least parts of them before turning off the TV in horror) and they certainly had an effect on me not unlike that on my peers. However, there’s one movie that it seems no one talks about that definitely had an impact on me as a kid, and that’s the G.I.Joe Movie from 1987. What separates this one from the others on those lists is a kind of double-whammy, scaring me as a kid and then unexpectedly giving me severe existential dread as an adult. 

Casting my mind back to around 1987 or maybe 1988, I was in my neighbor’s basement watching cartoons with their kids, and the G.I.Joe Movie was on. Originally slated for theaters, the poor box office performance of Hasbro’s previous animated outing (Transformers) led the film to be released directly to video and ultimately to television in a serialized format. The movie centers around the titular Joes going up against an ancient race hiding away under a dome of ice in a frozen wasteland. Called Cobra-La, these ancient serpent worshippers plan to launch a bio-terrorism attack on the whole of humanity. Massive spore-pods are launched into orbit. Upon ripening, the spores will descend upon the Earth, infecting everyone they come in contact with, reducing humanity to mindless beasts. I think this was my first exposure to the concept of a fate worse than death. Seeing these ordinary adults going about their day violently transformed into scaly, savage subhumans is pretty dark for a 6 or 7-year old kid. It was certainly a stark contrast to the Joes’ usual goofy conflicts with the ruthless terrorist organization Cobra, who only wanted to rule over the civilizations of the world rather than outright destroy them. I guess this was also my first introduction to the idea of different kinds of evil, those who wanted to take over the world versus those who wanted to watch it burn. 

Fast-forward many years, maybe to the last five or so. I’m a grown man in his forties watching random movie clips and reviews on YouTube. The G.I.Joe movie came up and reignited memories of the absolute body horror that was Cobra Commander’s origin story, among other things like the aforementioned mindless beasts. This time, though, something else caught my attention, something that went over my head back in the 80’s. Cobra-La’s main gimmick throughout the movie is that their technology is organically-based. In other words, they don’t build things so much as grow them. Nearly everything at their disposal is alive. Even door keys are odd-looking beetles and rolling out the red carpet involves a literal army of little crab-like creatures. Kind of puts the Flintstones in a new light, doesn’t it? 

Cobra-La is ruled over by Golobulus, voiced by the original G.I.Joe himself, Burgess Meredith. Around the halfway point in the movie, he gives us an exposition and lore dump about how Cobra-La came to be as it is. 40,000 years ago, they lived in harmony with nature, engineering it to their will and establishing an advanced civilization in this period of pre-human history. Climate change, specifically an ice age, brings their entire way of life to a screeching halt and forces them to take refuge under an ice dome. Following this is the rise of what Golobulus calls “the barbarians”. He’s of course talking about humans as we’re shown a pack of Neanderthals poking around a forest in search of their next meal. The flashback makes a time skip worthy of 2001: A Space Odyssey and shows humanity launching the space shuttle. Narration from Golobulus highlights a key difference between the age of Cobra-La and these pesky barbarians known as man. Whereas Cobra-La used organic matter as its foundation, human beings harnessed inorganic materials like stone and metal.* 

Let’s think about that a minute. There we were, eons ago, poking around the woods eating grubs and fruits and whatever else we could forage. Somewhere along the way, one of our ancestors had an epiphany. If we took a stick and sharpened it to a point using a rock, we could take on larger prey and enjoy a greater feast. Then, someone hit on the idea of taking those rocks and using the antlers and bones of that prey to shape them into whatever we needed to hunt ever-bigger prey. Following that, someone else noticed a special kind of rock, one that’s got shiny bits in it, and who doesn’t love a bright, shiny object? One discovery leads to another, and next thing you know we’re using spools of copper wire and these weird things called semiconductors to send messages over great distances. Needless to say, as far as we know, no other species on our planet has made these discoveries, much less built on them to a point of manipulating electromagnetic radiation to communicate. Some animals use tools, it’s true, and whales have a surprisingly wide-reaching communications network, but that’s hardly competition in the tech sector… unless we’re vastly underestimating the whales and Star Trek IV is dead on the money. 

Speaking of alien intelligences, SETI, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, casts a fairly broad net in their search for life beyond our own world. Primarily, though, they’re interested in establishing communication with alien civilizations that have reached at least the point of sending radio waves through space. I mean, if you sank all that grant money into leasing time on a massive radio telescope, that’s where you’d focus the most of your efforts. That’s not entirely fair. There’s actually a decent precedent for the notion that our first contact with an intelligence beyond our solar system could be in the form of telecommunications, namely the famous Wow! Signal, detected in 1977 and originating from somewhere in the constellation of Sagittarius. While we don’t know what the signal necessarily “said”, the fact that it was such a strong signal indicates it being more than some natural phenomena like a charged hydrogen cloud or one of many other potential explanations floating around since the discovery. 

I’m firmly, ardently of the belief that we are far from alone in the universe. Given the billions and billions of galaxies, each with billions and billions of stars, with billions of planets in each galaxy, it would be an astronomical impossibility for our little blue marble to be some grand exception to the rule by having life on it. Of course, we have to talk about the word “alone” in this context. As for what kind of life is out there in the universe, I’m in Camp Sagan in that while there’s most certainly life beyond our home star’s Oort Cloud, the likelihood of that life having visited us and walking among us is a little sketchy. The distances are vast enough for radio messages to take lifetimes at best, much less spacecraft. That is, life could exist, just not the kind that’s followed the same path that we have. 

This is tapping on the lid of a very, very big can of worms in terms of answering the question of whether or not we’re alone in the universe. The Fermi Paradox, The Drake Equation, The Dark Forest, and probably most concerning is The Great Filter. The Great Filter is the notion that there may be some great barrier in the progress and development of any intelligent species that’s either extremely difficult to overcome, or downright impossible. This barrier can be most anything from exhausting resources to self-destruction by warfare. Essentially, it’s a point at which a civilization cannot sustain itself and either needs a massive paradigm shift or collapses on itself in extinction. As far as humanity goes, there’s two possibilities, the Filter either being ahead of us, or hopefully behind us. Maybe harnessing those inorganic materials and developing technology was the Filter. Maybe leaving this planet or at least getting a start on asteroid mining is the Filter. 

Of course, that leaves the final question of whether or not we’re the first to get past the Filter. 

*I learned while writing this of a film from 1959 called The Atomic Submarine, which features humanity dealing with an aquatic UFO that is able to heal itself from attack by way of an organically-based technology. 

The Great UnGoogling: First Steps

Google pays Apple around 18 Billion every year for their search engine to be the default in the Safari browser. For perspective, that’s roughly NASA’s annual budget. Bear in mind, this isn’t some exclusivity deal. You can change the default search engine in Safari with just a little spelunking into the menu system. Like most things with Apple, the solution is simple, just not obvious.

If you’re on an iPhone:
Go to Settings. 

Scroll down to Apps.
Find Safari.
You’ll see an option for Search Engine.
Tapping on it reveals a list of options with Google at the top.
Take your pick.
You’re all clear, Kid. Now let’s blow this thing and go home.

The desktop environment has fewer steps, but works much the same way; it’s neatly tucked away in settings, far from hidden, but not calling attention to itself. Like I said, simple, not obvious. As for that list of options, it may seem like slim pickings, and it kind of is. Once upon a time, it was kind of the Wild West. There was Yahoo! and Google, of course, but there was also the likes of Excite and Lycos. Those two are still technically around, but they’re very much shadows of their former selves and not selectable on Safari’s shortlist. In fact, the only search engine I know of that came on the scene with a lot of hype and died almost as quickly was Cuil (pronounced “cool”), lasting only from 2008 to 2010. As to how we came to have one big slice with many rail-thin slices that would blow away in a gentle breeze if you tried to serve them on a plate, that’s a discussion people have earned degrees investigating. So, let’s just call it (Un)Natural Selection Meets The Law of Averages and carry on.

Touching back on those thin slices, they all stand a very good chance of becoming bigger pieces of the pie with the recent backlash Google has gotten for failing to uphold their founding mantra of “don’t be evil”. There’s been too many issues to cover in great detail here, from exploiting behavioral economics to legal troubles to policy changes contrary to earlier promises. Speaking only for myself, I’ve been making moves since the start of the year to slowly but surely de-Google my life, a kind of unintentional New Year’s Resolution. I don’t plan on quitting Google entirely, mostly because of my blog here as well as my YouTube channel, Gmail, and maybe Google Drive (which I'm considering moving to an external drive). My first real step in this direction was eliminating instances wherein I use my Google account to log in to a service. That took a very long time, but was ultimately painless and now I log in to those services through other means.

My next step was choosing a new default search engine, which brings us to that list of options. Yahoo! was an outright no from me. I closed my email account there some time ago and the only real attachment I have to them is Flickr, which I almost never use, at best serving as a plan B if I decide to give up on Instagram. Bing is okay; it’s by Microsoft, a company I have very mixed feelings about, but overall it’s a perfectly competent search engine. I don’t know a lot about Ecosia, except that it’s some kind of nonprofit that plants trees. I simply don’t see a gimmick like that being sustainable, which makes me sad as it’s a very noble cause.

In the end, I chose DuckDuckGo, and I’ve been using it for a few weeks now. It is partly built on Bing and primarily emphasizes privacy. What this means is that when you search something, DuckDuckGo doesn’t keep track of where you’ve been and what you’ve searched for, and does not use this data to target ads to you or otherwise tailor your search results to consider your browsing habits. I’ve never used Google without logging in to my Google account, so I don’t know what the search experience is like for everyone else. The consensus of late is that the search results feel fundamentally broken as they push AI features that are hit or miss at best as well as giving special favor to companies that buy advertising space on the platform rather than emphasizing relevance. Few things in this world irk me more than someone saying, “Just Google it!” as it exposes their ignorance to just how Google works. Put simply, my search results are not going to look like yours because of our different browsing habits. Google tracks what you look for and tries to find results that fit, often creating a kind of echo chamber.

One of the criticisms of DuckDuckGo and to a similar extent Bing is that the search results aren’t as “good” as Google. What is meant by this is that the results are less tailored and require a little more heavy lifting on your part. This isn’t the best example, but you’ll get the idea: when I put “flip a coin” into Google, it loads an applet that flips a virtual coin. When I put “flip a coin” into DuckDuckGo, I don’t get an applet. Instead, I get a list of websites that offer random number generators with coin-flipping options, along with articles detailing the history of the coin flip as well as the mathematical probabilities of using different currencies in the flipping. In other words, it’s not flipping the coin for me, it’s directing me to where I can get help with flipping a coin as I don’t have one on me and need to decide where I’m going to go for lunch. DuckDuckGo isn’t trying to be the answer. It knows it’s a directory. Google is trying to be the answer, at least for simple things like flipping coins or telling me the current temperature in Madagascar or the results of an election. At least, they started with simple things. Now, they’re trying to get AI to deliver more concise answers to more complex questions. I once asked Google which finger types the 6 on a keyboard. The first result was an AI summary that insisted it was the ring finger on the right hand. Needless to say, this is very wrong*. I tried again with different wording, thinking maybe I confused it. The result was the same. Sometime later, when I asked the same question, it did away with the AI summary and gave me a list of websites about learning to type.

To be fair, DuckDuckGo does have some AI features and will occasionally feature a summary at the top, but this is actually a pretty rare occurrence, even when I ask a direct question rather than inputting a string of keywords. Sometimes, the AI summary will only show a blank bar with an option for me to generate the summary. Other times, it’s placed far down the list, sometime after the 5th or 6th result. The point is that DuckDuckGo isn’t trying to force it on me, and I appreciate that. It’s still interested in the technology and wants it to be better, but it knows to make it more or less “opt-in” compared to Google. 

DuckDuckGo also offers itself as a full-fledged web browser. I have it on my phone, but I don't really use it for anything. It doesn't even have a Reader View like Safari, so it's not very practical right now and I don't expect new features to roll out any time soon. It's a small company with few employees that operates under a very utilitarian and minimalist philosophy. Much as I think a Reader View would be a given for a utilitarian and minimalist philosophy, I can still respect their barebones approach to what the browser offers. They also offer this subscription service that includes a VPN, identity theft protection, and a personal data removal service**. It’s about 100 a year, and while I don’t have any real need at the moment for what’s on offer, I am considering it as a way to support the cause. I like what DuckDuckGo is doing and I hope they become a substantially bigger slice of the pie. 

I’ll have further entries on my UnGoogling progress, but I wanted to start it off light and simple, something that most people can do without having to make any serious commitments or disrupt any routines.

* On reflection, I think the problem was that Google was assuming I wanted to use the number pad to the right of the keyboard rather than the number row along the top. After all, if you rest your right hand on the number pad, your middle finger falls on the five, putting the 6 right under your ring finger.

** Basically, they put in requests to data brokers to remove your personal information from their records, kind of like a digital "do not call list". I'd previously tried a service called Incogni to see if it would cut down on the damned robocalls. The results have been mixed, but given the majority of these robocalls are from scam artists, I don't expect them to play nice and uphold their part of the Geneva Convention. Needless to say, if I ever find any of these scum piles in the wild or locate their call centers, I will not abide by the Convention, either. 

The First Byte Is With The i

People have probably earned Master’s degrees analyzing Apple’s classic rainbow logo. The apple represents knowledge and the rainbow represents order—oh, but there’s a catch; there’s a bite taken out of the apple and the colors are all out of order, representing disruption, a rebellious upset of the status quo. It’s hard to imagine now for most people, but once upon a time Apple was the scrappy underdog upstart that relied on its fans for its marketing as much as anything by a professional advertising agency.

Supposedly, the colored bands across the apple presented a challenge as far as making the badges, especially considering every machine was going to have one somewhere on its casing. It was costly and tedious, but the company knew what it wanted. The rainbow would eventually fade in favor of a single color depending on which of their iMacs and/or iBooks you purchased. Following that, they stuck with a flat monochrome, though the rainbow does technically live on in their new range of iMacs echoing their classic predecessors from the late 1990’s and early 2000’s.

What’s unique about Apple’s branding is that tech companies, as a rule, shy away from anything flashy or colorful.

Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Microsoft’s Windows has had a similar trajectory in terms of branding, trading its colorful, curvy squares and swish for a flat and sober arrangement of squares. Of course, outside of Microsoft’s Surface lineup, you don’t really see their logo on the machines that carry their operating system, except maybe for a small foil sticker somewhere on the casing, typically next to the one for the processor and the one for the graphics card. 

Then there’s ViewSonic, which doesn’t know what it wants in terms of branding.

I’ve used ViewSonic monitors for years and they’ve never let me down. They’re reasonably priced, they have a wide selection, and they offer a high quality image. That said, they frustrate and disappoint me in a way only the decisions of a large tech company can.

Before I made the leap from a large Android phone from Sony to an iPad for my drawing, I poked around the Android market to see what would meet my needs. Unfortunately for me, most of the Android tablet offerings didn’t really have creative productivity in mind. Their target audience was people who just wanted to read a book, browse the web, or watch a streaming service. Even the few that tried to appeal to the artist crowd usually came up short and asked a pretty high price, so high that you might as well have saved yourself some money and just gotten a damn iPad, which I did.

Android tablets are slim pickings these days, dominated by only half a handful of companies, namely Amazon and Samsung. To the latter’s credit, they’ve made a pretty good go of giving the iPad a run for its money with creative professionals. Before that, though, it seemed all the major players wanted a piece of the Apple-dominated pie. I even remember Toshiba offering a line of fairly reasonably priced tablets. They had terrible displays, but that was really where a lot of these companies cut the most corners. So, when I saw that ViewSonic was making Android tablets, I was elated. 

ViewSonic has a logo that stands out among the other tech companies, even giving Apple some stiff competition, albeit it’s a little anemic on the academic analysis front. It’s three Gouldian finches huddled together in a neat little row, their feathers a vibrant mix of yellows, blues, purples, and a touch of red around the eyes of the outer two. It is really less of a logo and more of a promotional illustration, not unlike Apple’s original woodblock logo of Sir Isaac Newton sitting under a tree (before they “got to the point” and went with the apple itself).

I thought, “Can you imagine how cool that would be to be rocking a tablet with those three birds where anyone else would expect to see an Apple logo!?” Between that and ViewSonic offering quality monitors, it seemed like a no-brainer. Then, I browsed the selection and saw no trace whatsoever of the finches. Not even the bezel on the front had them like they do for some of their monitors. All they had was the ViewSonic name embossed on the back. I was furious, that special kind of furious you reserve for the most first world of first world problems, the one that has you toppling a chair as you storm out of the room before marching back in to continue hurling abuse at the screen.

“AND ANOTHER THING…!”

Seriously… you idiots! You had a Gouldian opportunity to show up Apple and make a name for yourself in the tablet space, and you blew it. It didn’t help they also weren’t offering any better resolution or image quality than their competition, indicating they simply put their name on something so they could say, “Yeah, we tried the tablet thing, but it didn’t work out. Let’s go back to making monitors.” The lineup did not last and the Android tablet market would implode practically overnight following that saturation of everything except colored logos.

I bring this all up because I was considering upgrading my monitor to an ultra wide (the 21:9 ratio instead of the typical 16:9). I found a model that seemed to tick all the boxes except having the finches on them. That’s not really a dealbreaker for me, just disappointing. When I looked at the monitor’s specifications, something caught my attention. It’s not uncommon for monitors to have built-in USB hubs to help with cable management. It’s actually pretty smart. You’ve typically got your PC tower on the floor under your desk, so rather than get extension cables for all of your peripherals, you plug one long cable from the PC to the monitor, and then plug all of your peripherals into the monitor.

However, this particular model had only one USB port, but proudly proclaimed: 

“Connect your compatible computer through the dual HDMI 2.0 and one DisplayPort inputs. A USB-A 2.0 port allows you to connect peripherals such as a wireless keyboard and mouse adapter through the monitor.”

I was very puzzled by this. How can you plug a mouse and keyboard into the monitor and then somehow get them to connect to your computer? Is there some obscure feature to the HDMI or DisplayPort connection that I don’t know about? I mean, both HDMI and DisplayPort carry audio information, maybe there’s another channel in the mix for other purposes. I decided to get some clarification and try my luck with the Q&A section of the B&H listing where I was originally browsing. A staff member got back to me within about 24ish hours and clarified that the USB port on the monitor is to plug in a USB thumb drive for the sole purpose of upgrading the monitor’s firmware.

As of this writing, the B&H page for the monitor is unchanged, still claiming that the USB port on the monitor is for computer peripherals. I don’t blame B&H for that; they’re getting their sales blurb directly from ViewSonic. So, I went to the source and found this: 

“Two HDMI (v2.0) inputs, one DisplayPort (v1.4) input, and one USB-A (v2.0) input offer flexible connectivity so you can directly connect your keyboard, mouse and other peripherals.

Change the way you work and play with the VX3418-2K monitor today.

*165Hz refresh rate with DisplayPort only”

Now I was really puzzled. This is the source. This is the company making the thing. Do they know something I don’t? I found their sales support email and wrote them to get some clarification on the listing. Like B&H, they were very prompt in their response: 

Thank you for contacting ViewSonic!

Taking a look at the VX3418-2K, I can confirm that the USB-A is only for updating the monitors firmware. I have included an image of the user guide that explicitly states it.

Not too sure why it is marketed in this manner, but this is something we can take a look at and correct. Thank you for pointing this out.

So, they did… sort of… clumsily... and hastily: 

“Two HDMI (v2.0) inputs, one DisplayPort (v1.4) input, and one USB-A (v2.0) input** offer flexible connectivity so you can directly connect your keyboard, mouse and other peripherals.

Change the way you work and play with the VX3418-2K monitor today.

*165Hz refresh rate with DisplayPort only

**For firmware updgrade (sic) use only”

I hear LG monitors are pretty good.

H'Elio, Anybody There?

So, I have a question, but it’s a bit of a complex one that needs a lot of context for it to make sense, so please bear with me.

I recently saw Elio and my overall impression of it could best be summed up in a single word: Solid. It doesn’t excel in any areas, but it doesn’t fall short anywhere, either. Another film I use the word “solid” to describe is The Last Starfighter, and Elio has a nice little nod to that film I appreciated. I do share the sentiment with a number of Pixar fans that their films simply don't pack the same punch as they once did. For me, I think they peaked with The Incredibles and they’ve simply never been able to recapture that special something. To be fair, I haven’t seen Coco, and that seems almost universally loved by all who’ve seen it. I also rather enjoyed Elemental, though that was more for its visuals and world building than anything else it had to offer. Even Lightyear had its moments despite being an overall lackluster execution of an ill-conceived afterthought. Maybe there’s a paradigm shift at Pixar, or maybe I’m just getting older. I mean, it couldn’t possibly be the latter, could it?

The criticisms of Elio seem to come in two flavors. One has to do with the art style being too similar to past entries, namely Luca and Turning Red. As much as I see the point, I can’t help but wonder if we’re not dealing with a little bit of cherry-picking here. Okay, Elio’s characters look like they could fit in right alongside those in Turning Red and Luca, but could you say that about Elemental, Soul, Lightyear, or Inside Out 2? Those all seem to have pretty distinct art styles from one another. Frankly, if Pixar movies are starting to blur together, it’s got more to do with the number of sequels they make than anything else. After all, why shouldn’t The Incredibles 2 have the same art style as The Incredibles? It would be rather odd if they took it in a drastically different direction. The same goes for the Toy Story films as any changes to the art style seem to have more to do with technical innovations since the first film came out all the way in 1995 than any creative decision from on high. 1995? Damn, I am getting older.

The other flavored critique of Elio’s reception is in its marketing. There didn’t seem to be any shortage of YouTubers and social media influencers insisting they didn’t even know the movie was out because they never saw any ads for it. Well, that’s easy enough to explain. Elio was delayed by almost a year because of the SAG/AFTRA strikes, so chances are most if not all of that initial marketing budget was spent pushing a date that’s no longer valid. Marketing a movie is expensive and it’s not easy to make sharp right turns or pump the brakes. If the movie’s release date is pushed further down the pipe, that’s more money Pixar has to ask from Uncle Walt to get the movie out in front of people prior to the actual release date. That said, this is where I start to approach the initial question I brought up at the start. I use YouTube the way most people probably use Netflix or Hulu or HBO Max. It’s rare for me to binge a show or series of movies on one of those platforms, but I’m rather embarrassed to admit how many hours I’ve spent binging retro videogame reviews or story time animations or ASMR content. My point is that I’ve been seeing plenty of ads and trailers for Elio leading up the release date. I don’t know where these people are getting this idea that they don’t know the movie’s coming out because I’ve sure been made aware the past several weeks.

So, here’s the question at long last: Are you guys all using adblockers?

Can you really complain about not knowing when a movie is coming out if you’ve cut off the mainstream means of marketing? How did you know about all the other movies you might have seen instead of Elio? I mean, I saw Superman the day before I saw Elio, and just like that film, there were plenty of trailers in front of YouTube videos. That movie doesn’t seem to be doing so bad in theaters, so what am I missing here? I don’t think the art direction critique has a lot of credibility, and the lack of marketing is only understandable to a point when you consider how many people are consuming content in the first place.

Pixar and Disney have released a statement effectively blaming moviegoers for Elio’s lackluster box office performance, insisting that they go out of their way to make these original stories only for people to not go and see them, all while complaining about there being too many sequels, reboots, and remakes. I don’t want to say they have a point, but I also don’t think they’re completely wrong. We turn out in droves for the latest entry in a long-running series, then say we’re tired of sequels, and finally add insult to injury by ghosting those movies that do try to be their own thing rather than part of some legacy.

There’s some study out there about how what people say they want doesn’t always match up with what they really want. It goes something like this, a group of participants were asked how they like their coffee, either rich and dark or milky and weak. Overwhelmingly, people said they liked their coffee rich and dark. However, when it came to their real world spending habits, overwhelmingly the drink of choice was milky and weak. So, what’s going on here? One conclusion drawn was that people said they liked rich and dark because it sounded more appealing in their heads. Maybe they wanted to avoid some social stigma of not being able to handle this adult beverage like adults. In the end, when it came to actually having to drink coffee in their daily routine, they went with milky and weak because they didn’t want to deal with the harshness of the alternative. Speaking only for myself, when I used to drink coffee, if I ordered from Starbucks, I would order a Tall Blonde. I did this for two reasons. For one, it’s fun to say. For two, I’d take that Tall Blonde over to the counter with all the sugar and cream, and add each until it tasted just right to me. In other words, I didn’t trust the baristas to know exactly what I wanted (I mean, I barely knew), so I took the basic foundation and built on it to my own tastes.

There’s no adding cream and sugar to a movie, not unless your theater has a liquor license and you’re really good at coming up with drinking games on the fly. Considering how expensive it can be to go to the movies these days and the economy being in and out of the drunk tank since January, your only real choice is to potentially have a bad time at a movie where you don’t know what to expect, or play it safe with a franchise that’s never let you down.

Much like my original question, the issue is complex and requires a lot of context to understand. Are people really unaware of certain movies coming out and saying as much, or are they sticking with what they know to avoid taking a risk?

A Quick Post About Hulk Hogan

I didn't watch wrestling as a kid. It wasn't allowed; my parents didn't want me and my brother practicing wrestling moves on each other, among other reasons. The matter was ultimately academic; Whenever I'd sneak a peek on a Saturday morning after a healthy dose of cartoons, after about five minutes of watching Hulk Hogan rambling about "Hulkamania this!" and "Hulkamania that!" I'd say to myself, "This is boring." and then go play outside. 

So, thank you, Hulk Hogan, for the sunlight, grass stains, sprinklers, and quality time with the neighborhood kids. 

Admittedly, I do find the history of professional wrestling interesting, the way it dovetails with the advent of cable television, and especially how Pay-Per-View saved it from death and turned it into a multi-million dollar media empire. 

There's an infamous story of Hulk Hogan knocking out Richard Belzer on a talk show while Mr. T sulked. I won't go into the full details, but the basics of it are that Hogan and Mr. T were under the impression that there would be a row of kids in wheelchairs for a meet and greet if they came on the show. They showed up because wrestling was not in a great place and needed all the publicity it could muster. There were no kids in wheelchairs and Mr. T became reticent and cagey, which is understandable. As for Hogan, he agreed to demonstrate a wrestling move on Belzer and subsequently knocked him out in the process. Hogan admitted to putting a little more strength into the move than he was supposed to. Belzer would receive nine stitches on the back of his head from when he slipped out of Hogan's grasp and hit the floor. The incident took place in 1985 and was settled out of court by 1990 for an undisclosed amount Belzer would put toward buying a property in France. 

I only heard about this incident a few years ago because my roommate was a big Law & Order: Special Victims Unit fan and especially liked Richard Belzer's character of Munch. 

Richard Belzer would die in 2023 in Bozouls, France, of complications from a respiratory illness. 

“Diane, Stardate 3.14159…”

Audiobooks were an essential component of long car rides with the family in the mid to late 1990’s. John Grisham was generally first choice because we watched a lot of courtroom dramas together, especially LA Law and Reasonable Doubts. Tony Hillerman was the close second because we were living in New Mexico and his stories were set in and around the area, so that was a nice touch. Other cures for boredom included Douglas Adams with The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul, Tom Clancy’s Op Center, and Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke. On the whole, we kept it pretty eclectic.

These were on cassette, and were typically abridged to fit a roughly 6-8 hour length. You’d need a lot of cassettes for an unabridged version and books on audio CD’s weren’t especially common at that point. After all, carmakers weren’t going to replace their tape decks until the electronics companies worked out better anti-skip protections in their portable players, thereby relieving any worries of playback in cars going down bumpy or unfinished roads.

Sidenote before we go on about audiobooks: You know what my most and least favorite form of optical media is? The MP3-CD. On the one hand, this was the best of both worlds, maximizing an already amazing level of storage capacity by replacing the AIFF audio files with MP3’s, allowing several hours worth of reasonable quality audio instead of roughly one. On the other hand, this was hands-down the hardest thing to explain to people when I worked at Target in 1998. People would see MP3-compatible CD players and think, “Oh! It’s a CD Player with an MP3 player attached to it so I can use one or the other.” And you’d have to explain to them that you put the MP3 files on the CD’s and that’s how you play it back. Some people got downright angry when you explained this to them, accusing you of giving them attitude when all you’re trying to do is save them from disappointment and a return trip to the store for a refund. Recordable CD’s were also fairly new face at this time, so you’re essentially explaining two technologies at once. Some audiobook publishers did have the foresight to put their books on MP3-CD’s since spoken word doesn’t suffer that much quality loss in the compression of an MP3 file, but overall this was a very rare sight that sold poorly, likely for all the reasons I just outlined.

Audible is one of the best services Amazon has on offer, and I say that without any sort of irony or snark. Digital rights issues aside (do you own it or are you renting it, etc.), this allowed for fully unabridged audiobooks to be appreciated in a format that wasn’t prone to all the weaknesses of CD’s or cassettes. It’s opened a floodgate for content that would otherwise have to deal with the logistics of publishing their stories to physical media and then distributing them nationwide to bookstores, among other issues that can lead to works not finding the audiences they deserve.

For example, one of the first titles I came across on Audible wasn’t so much a book as much as it was a kind of brochure for a game. It’s called Til Morning’s Light: The Private Blog of Erica Page. It’s written by Ross Berger, narrated by Stephanie Sheh, and has a total runtime of 35 minutes. Between the length and promotional aspect, there was no asking price, so it kind of seemed like a no-brainer for trying out this new platform. As the title implies, it’s told from a first person perspective in the style of a blog, a modern take on epistolary literature. The game it serves as a prequel to is developed by WayForward Technologies (a seasoned developer/publisher known for franchises such as Shantae and Mighty Switch Force) and was originally an exclusive launch title for the ill-fated FirePhone. It would eventually be released to the iPhone before ultimately being delisted a short time later. I never got a chance to try it, so I can’t comment on it or how the “audiolog” ties into the narrative. This was released in 2014, so it’s led me to wonder how this would have been available were it not for Audible, if it had been released earlier. 35 minutes is a very short time to put on a cassette and sell in, say, game stores as part of a pre-order for the game. Would it even be worth the expense for the publisher in the first place? Chances are, it would have simply been a website, no audio narration whatsoever. Had it been released for something like the original Playstation, the game’s CD would have been playable on a standard audio CD player, provided you skipped the first track (which was the game data), something a lot of people wouldn’t have known to do in the first place (see Sidenote).

That said, something like this did come out on physical media, all the way back in 1990, and has also been made available today through Audible for a reasonable price.

“Diane…”: The Twin Peaks Tapes of Agent Cooper was originally released on audiocassette to coincide with the David Lynch and Mark Frost television series Twin Peaks, which ran for two seasons from 1990 through 1991. This was followed by a prequel movie, Fire Walk With Me, in 1992, and was eventually revived for a third season in 2017 for Showtime. There’s also been a number of books related to the series, including The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, written by David Lynch’s daughter Jennifer Lynch. It was released around the same time as “Diane”, written by Scott Frost, and they do share some DNA in that both are epistolary works, much like Til Morning’s Light.

“Diane” has a total runtime of about 45 minutes, which would make it about the length of a typical music album on cassette or CD. I have no record of how much it cost upon release, but it’s reasonable to assume it was competitive with albums of the time, maybe between 10 and 15 USD. On Audible, I got it for less than 4. What makes “Diane” interesting is how it was produced. Throughout the TV series, FBI Agent Dale Cooper (played by Kyle MacLachlan) talks into a micro cassette recorder about the details of his case before the tapes are sent off to his secretary Diane Evans (who is never seen nor directly heard from) back at the Bureau’s Pittsburgh office. “Diane” contains these clips from the TV show (with the background music and even most sound effects removed) along with new entries recorded by MacLachlan himself. There’s a notable difference in audio quality between what’s clearly recorded in a studio and what’s lifted from the audio tracks of the television series. Some diligent fans have made YouTube videos of “Diane” synced up with the original scenes when applicable and stills for the “new” recordings.

I should mention in the interest of full disclosure that I did not watch Twin Peaks when it came out, mostly because I was 9 years old at the time and shows like Tiny Toon Adventures and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles occupied most of my television consumption. At best, I have the vaguest whispers of memories of people talking about how weird the show was, but I wouldn’t learn more of it until many years later when reviews and retrospectives of horror games like Silent Hill would make frequent references to the show. The 2010 horror game Deadly Premonition is practically an interactive adaptation of the series, borrowing many themes, plot points, and imagery from the show. I wouldn’t actually get to watch the show proper until only a few years ago, I think shortly before the Showtime revival in 2017. Those first two seasons and, as of just today, Fire Walk With Me are all I’ve seen. The third season is on a very long to-do list I may never get to. My overall impression of the show is that it’s worth watching, but if it doesn’t grip you in the pilot, no one’s going to hold it against you if you don’t bother with it.

It’s one of those works of media whose influence has come to overshadow it, to the point that someone new to the series in this modern world would probably wonder what all the hype was about. Lynch and Frost are unique voices, and I’m hard-pressed to think of a show that matches its off-beat quirks and idiosyncrasies, but in other areas such as tone and subject matter, the show has been surpassed by other police and forensic procedurals or courtroom and medical dramas. It pushed the envelope, but others have pushed it further since then. I’m not saying any of this to knock it. Though I do have some issues with the show I’ll expound upon another time, it’s deserving of respect and appreciation for what it is and what it led to in terms of the medium of television.

As for “Diane” it’s an odd duck, its very existence rather enigmatic. Between its brevity and fragmented presentation, it doesn’t really offer much substance as a piece of ancillary media. To be fair, it would be pretty tacky if it merely summarized the story arc of season 1, that being the murder of Laura Palmer, in a mere 45 minutes with a few name drops and a little more background on Cooper’s character. It would also be very easy to simply dismiss it as a quick cash grab, but it’s got too much effort behind it for that. A cash grab would have only compiled the recordings from the show and not bothered with the studio portions. Still, it’s overall a very unsatisfying little experience. Maybe it could have done with a part two. The tape only covers roughly the first season (leaving us just before the big reveal), and as the second season got underway, the narrative device of Cooper’s tape recorded messages to Diane played a smaller role. In all likelihood, there wasn’t enough interest by that time to give such a project a second go around.

Kyle MacLachlan would receive a Grammy nomination for “Diane” in the Spoken Word category, along with John F. Kennedy Jr., Jimmy Stewart, Garrison Keillor, and George Burns, with Burns winning for Gracie: A Love story, his biography of his late wife, Gracie Allen. Not a bad lineup to be a part of. 

Afterword: I wrote some months ago about how Douglas Adams’ radio series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Future was not available through the BBC’s website anymore. I learned today while browsing Audible for Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul that the Future radio series is available there along with an addendum entitled, “Did Douglas Get It Right?”.

The Blogspot of Games

My first blog was Yahoo!360° (circa 2005-2006?).
My oldest blog that’s still around today is technically DeviantART (Dec 2007).
My second oldest blog still active today is Blogger (May 2008)

After 360° closed down, I migrated my blog over to a site called Multiply, which didn’t last more than a year before transforming to an e-commerce site and eventually shutting down altogether some years later. Blogger, meanwhile, has frankly managed to defy the odds and stay up and running for all these years. I’ve speculated before that the only reason Google keeps Blogger around is because of the goodwill it builds with users, the potential backlash of closing it down, and the overall small footprint it takes up on Google’s servers simply not being worth the effort to delete. It does worry me that the day may come when I have to say goodbye to Blogger. I’m not sure what I’ll do at that point besides go all-in on WordPress (where I’ve been since Dec 2014).

In my last entry, I wrote about the Crazy Castle videogame franchise, a series I’ve never actually played beyond once holding the box of the first game in a grocery store in the American midwest in 1989. Videogames have been a part of my life as long as movies, starting with the Atari 2600 all the way to my current collection of consoles that’s only one generation behind the current lineup. This meant I also read quite a number of videogame magazines such as Nintendo Power and Gamepro. Eventually, I found my way to the internet, where games journalism wasn’t bound by the conventions of print media. One of these sites was Gamespot, which is still active today. Not content with merely being a place to post articles about the games industry, Gamespot wanted to be a haven for gamers, a place where a community could thrive, where people could make connections and share their experiences with titles both new and old.

To this end, they offered a blogging service.

Although there were no real hard and fast rules about what you could post there, it maybe wouldn’t be the best place to host your travelogue of Europe or your collection of photos of telegraph poles or your thoughts on the self-determination of the South Moldavian people. Generally, if you were reading someone’s blog on Gamespot, you were reading about games, maybe anime, possibly movies, and technology as it pertained to the gaming space (graphics cards, console specs, etc.). As I was exploring options in case Blogger went the way of Multiply and 360°, I started a blog there in August of 2009. My first entry was announcing a short story I’d written that was posted to both my DeviantART and my Freeservers site (which is still somehow up and running). My last entry came in October of 2014 with a review of Velocity 2X, a PSVita game and sequel to a really nifty shooter originally released for the PSP. 47 total blog entries in those years, and I’d almost completely forgotten about it. I think the only reason I’d checked back in on it was I was wondering whatever happened to the site 1UP, as I had a small presence there. 1UP is completely gone, folded into another publication with all records of user-generated content wiped. That was when I remembered Gamespot and managed to uncover my old account there.

It really took me back. For one entry, I was complaining about how I couldn’t use certain words like class and style because, the way the site was coded, these would cause a Javascript error. I had to spell them with 5’s. Even “classic” caused an issue. I seem to remember this error was fixed, but I never bothered to correct my entries. In another entry, Gamespot seemed to think the name Shizuru was a curse word and wouldn’t let me post until I changed it to something else. Makes me wonder how people with Shih Tzus coped when they wanted to share their dog pictures.

In the years since making these entries, Gamespot has undergone many massive changes to their backend (all the technical stuff under the bonnet, so to speak), so a number of images I posted to my entries are broken, though at least one of them can still be seen if I access the site on my phone instead of my Mac or iPad. Most of them were covers of games, while others are complete mysteries as to what they were. One of them was about a portable NES console, which really doesn’t narrow it down given how lucrative that little market was, so I have no idea what image I’d have to use if I were to archive or preserve the blog.

As of this writing, Gamespot not only still has my blog up and running (images notwithstanding), but I can make a new entry anytime I want (maybe I should test to see if class and style still cause coding issues). They don’t offer any sort of migration tool the way 360° did. So, if I were to archive these 47 entries, I’d have to do it the old fashioned way of going through one by one and copy-pasting them into Notes or Pages before I could re-upload them to Blogger or WordPress. I don’t think I’ll go that far, unless I want to repost something on an anniversary or in regard to a recent event. As I said, my last entry there was a review of Velocity 2X in 2014, a series that’s remained stagnant to this day while Futurlab (its developer) focuses on Powerwash Simulator 2. Someday, maybe there will be a Velocity 3, and on that day, I’ll dig up my old Gamespot review and we can all contrast and compare, see what’s been improved, what still needs work, and even where the series can go from here.

Game on, everybody.

A July 4th Post About Videogames Because I Can

Nostalgia is not only a drug; it is the ultimate abusive relationship. You start out loving something before growing tired of it. Eventually, you stop caring about it potentially to the point that you hate it. Next thing you know, it’s been years since even thinking about it and suddenly you want it back to the point of putting tears in your eyes.

Believe it or not, there was a point in time when we collectively hated translucent casings on our electronics. We thought it looked downright ugly. It’s only been in recent years with the rise of identical-looking smartphones and samey notebook computers that we look back on those see-through housings with fondness. From the perspective of those old laptops and music players, we’re standing outside with a Bluetooth speaker over our heads blasting love songs via Spotify, only probably way more pathetic and certainly not going to end the way that movie did.

I was thinking about all this today having just beaten Monument Valley on my iPad, including all its add-on chapters. I know I’m about eleventy-billion years late to the party on these games, but they’re new enough to me to be interesting and old enough to everyone else to be retro. I got it through Netflix, who is delisting the game a few days from now. I’m probably not going to get to the sequels in that time, but maybe I’ll just buy the damn things from the app store after all.

Speaking of abusive relationships, puzzle games and I have a similar standing as RPG’s in that I love them dearly, but I don’t have time for them. I have a rather addictive personality, and as such generally don’t play games on my phone because of the distraction and time sink. If I want to play a game, I’ve got to work for it, fire up the Playstation or the Switch and sit my ass down on the couch. There are still games on my phone, mostly as a contingency plan if I’m stuck somewhere for a while and need my dopamine fix. The exception to that is Pokemon Go, which I’ve been playing religiously for some years now. In my defense, at least that game has me get up and out of the house when it isn’t exhaustingly hot or blisteringly cold. When it came to Monument Valley, I was certainly aware of the games, but I never gave them much thought. I saw a few screenshots and clips of gameplay and my response was a resounding, “It’s probably okay, but so what?” It reminded me of a game I tried out on my PSP called Echochrome. The games have a fair bit in common in that they both involve navigating Escherian landscapes using a combination of dream logic and lateral thinking. Echochrome predates Monument Valley by a few years, the former very much still a product of buttons and joystick gaming while the latter was born and bred to work with a touchscreen, be it a phone or, better yet, a tablet.

This led me to thinking of similar sort of puzzle games, ones that involve navigating a space rather than simply sliding blocks or matching tiles. One of these games is Crazy Castle for the NES. Specifically, and depending on what region of the world you reside in, Bugs Bunny in Crazy Castle (more on this in a moment). The game has you navigate a scene while dodging enemies in order to collect a number of carrots before moving on to the next level, of which there are 60. For a NES game, that number certainly seems crazy, until you realize each level only occupies about two screens worth of real estate and they employ a kind of modular construction. I remember my brother and I losing our minds at the idea of Bubble Bobble having some 100 levels, until we realized each level was only a screen and of a similarly repetitive level design. Although I do remember playing Bubble Bobble as a rental from a local grocery store in the suburbs of Madison, Wisconsin, I never actually played Crazy Castle. I don’t even think I knew it was a puzzle game. Frankly, in my mind, at that time a puzzle game consisted of falling blocks or sliding tiles. I do remember seeing the game at the same grocery store and reading the back of the box. What stood out to me most was this image of Bugs Bunny embracing a female version of himself in a blue dress. According to the text blurb, this is Honey Bunny, a character who has appeared in a few classic Looney Tunes shorts, though her design has never been set in stone. The image on the box baffled me because of how much like Bugs she looked. In fact, she looked like Bugs when he’s wearing a dress to fool Elmer Fudd. On the whole, it seemed weird to me to give Bugs a love interest at all, much less in a videogame, as if someone said, “It’s a videogame! You gotta rescue a damsel!”

It turns out the reason for the love interest is rooted in the game’s origin. This was around 1989 and in Japan the game originally starred Roger Rabbit (his wife Jessica being the captive Honey Bunny). As for bringing it to America, there was a problem. There was already a Roger Rabbit game on the NES and not produced by Kemco. So, the game was reworked graphically to feature Looney Tunes characters.

More games would be released in the Crazy Castle series, at least 5 depending on how you set up your spreadsheet, with multiple versions of each one depending on the region of their release. For the Japanese version of the second game, Roger Rabbit was replaced with Mickey Mouse. North America would still get Bugs Bunny right up until the 5th game in the series, which would star Woody Woodpecker. As for other regions, intellectual properties varied, from Garfield to the Ghostbusters to a Danish troll named Hugo.

It’s interesting to compare these titles to Monument Valley and Echochrome in terms of their presentation. In Echochrome, the character you have to guide around the impossible objects is an articulated artist’s mannequin, going with the game’s ultra-minimalist aesthetic, almost as if you’re playing a prototype rather than something finished. Monument Valley has you take on the role of Princess Ida, a small and silent little girl in a white dress and conical hat as she traverses a sea of soothing color gradients and isometric architecture. While the game has a story, it is not emphasized beyond some cryptic lines of text, the ending being almost symbolic more than anything concrete. Ironically, Crazy Castle has an equally anonymous quality about it, so much so that any number of characters and scenarios can be swapped out as needed, leaving the game with no real identity of its own. The closest thing the game had to an original character was in the Japanese version of the third game, with Mickey Mouse being replaced by Kid Klown, who would go on to have his own series of completely different games from Kemco. This game would see a release in North America, though its connection to the Crazy Castle franchise was nowhere to be seen as it does play a bit differently than the Bugs and Woody entries.

Having a major IP attached to a game creates a number of problems when it comes to preservation. While an original cartridge of Bugs Bunny Crazy Castles is neither rare nor fetching some high price on auction sites, it’s not been made available through any current console platform, namely the NES library of the Nintendo Switch. I don’t know how exactly the licensing deals work for that particular service (notably they haven’t removed or retired any games from the library, unlike Netflix), but having to deal with both a game developer/publisher as well as the owners of the license, in this case Warner Bros., has got to be a nightmare. This is the unfortunate fate of many licensed games, especially older games from the 8 and 16-bit era. They’re made to cash in on name recognition, they sell as many copies as they can, and then they fade into the haze of memory until suddenly they’re wanted again.

If Gex can come back, maybe there’s still hope for Crazy Castle.

Boof Jark: My AI Pledge

A wise man once said that one man’s software is another man’s AI. As such, it’s important we establish some kind of clear, working definition of what’s being referred to when it comes to AI-generated content. For example, the ghosts in Pac-Man are AI. That’s not what we’re talking about. Spellcheck is arguably a kind of AI, but it’s not what we’re talking about, and I’ll even give a pass to predictive text for reasons that will hopefully become clear as we progress. Case in point, I only had to write “prog” and follow it up with the tab key to write the rest of “progress”. Another writing tool I feel I should disclose use of is an oldie called Grammatik. It launched around 1981 by Aspen Software before eventually being absorbed into Corel's WordPerfect, which was how I was introduced to it circa mid 1990’s. Bear in mind, this was not a Large Language Model trained on all the text in the world. I have absolutely no idea how it worked, but it’s not important because outside of obvious things like run-ons caused by a misplaced period, I never relied on it more than I trusted my own two eyes giving my paper a once-over (and that was only the first line of defense). It was also oddly fixated on the idea of passive voice, a grammatical concept that I think I understand and I know I’ve had explained to me countless times, but I couldn’t spot it in the wild or stop myself from writing it if my life depended on it. If anyone knows a really good mnemonic for it, I’d love to hear it. It’s also worth noting that Grammatik couldn’t really learn as you wrote. At best, you could tell it what to ignore, but it wouldn’t remember what you told it to ignore the next time you reopened the document, so it was only useful if you wrote in crazy, uninterrupted marathon sessions a la Jack Kerouac. Most importantly, Grammatik couldn’t offer suggestions for how to revise something beyond “You’ve started every sentence in this paragraph with the same word. Avoid repetition.”, it certainly couldn’t offer suggestions about tone, and it definitely could not fabricate a full essay on my behalf from a briefly descriptive prompt. I was still doing the work, and that’s the key distinction to keep in mind. 

To put it another way: Who is driving the car? The one in the driver’s seat with the wheel in hand, or the one in the passenger seat giving directions? The officer who pulled you over already knows, but he’d really like to hear it from you. 

I don’t know if it was on Medium or Substack where I saw about a half-dozen AI generated images in a row while scrolling and saw red for a moment before closing the tab, toppling a chair, and storming out of the room grumbling about the decline of Western Civilization. That’s a slight exaggeration; I would never do that to a perfectly innocent chair. Besides, the last thing you want is to make a chair mad at you. They won’t stand for it. 

What upsets me most about this trend is the fact that these writers are often the first, loudest, and yet most eloquent at bemoaning the fates and predicaments of artists, creatives, and professionals in general in the face of this ever-changing landscape that AI is slowly consuming. It makes me want to grab them by the shoulders, shake them like they’re the first character to go hysterical in a disaster movie, and scream, “YOU ARE NOT HELPING!” and finish off with a slap across the cheek. For the record, I have the kind of upper body strength that makes Mr. Burns look like Sugar Ray Leonard at the height of his career, so if you’re afraid of this potentially becoming reality for you, rest assured you’ll barely feel a stiff breeze. I’ll also likely collapse from the exertion while breathily asking if you’ve had enough, so the only pain you’re guaranteed to feel in the whole ordeal is the pain in your sides from laughing.

I made a note on Substack (their version of a Tweet) to essentially complain and vent, vowing that if I saw an AI header image to an article, I wasn’t going to read it. I wasn’t addressing anyone in particular; it was not about naming and shaming. As you may have heard from your parents at one point while disciplining you, I’m not mad at you, I’m mad at what happened. Moreover, I'm saying this because I want you to do better, and I know you’re more than capable of it, whatever your self-doubt is saying about you right now. 

As for doing better, these are your options.

1. Learn to draw and/or take photos. 
2. Use a stock image service; you’ll be paying real artists or at least using works volunteered by willing artists. 
3. Commission a human artist directly. 

This is the part where I acknowledge that I am fully aware of the potential pitfall of my pledge in that I may well mistake something genuine for something AI-generated, therefore missing out on something authentic, inspiring, compelling, and any other praise I could throw at it. That said, let’s be real, a lot of what we collectively refer to as AI Slop is pretty samey. I think the best description I ever heard for it is, “Well-rendered but badly-drawn” with tells such as heavily-detailed shading and color gradients while the proper lacing of shoes and/or number of fingers on a hand is spotty at best. Basically, a painterly once-over of a hasty sketch. Even more basically, polished shit. There are other descriptors, but these are the most polite. 

“Well, those AI generators can make some really photorealistic results that are harder to detect, especially if you know how to—“ 

If you’re willing to put that much effort into hiding your use of AI, you have even less of an excuse to not employ any of the alternatives I’ve listed. 

Before I go, I’ll reward you for getting this far with an explanation of just what in Hel’s Realm Boof Jark is. I don’t know where it was posted, maybe Instagram or LinkedIn, but it was an image of two boats on the shore of a deserted island, one filled with fruits and vegetables (along with eggs and a rooster because MidJourney doesn't know how poultry reproduction works), the other filled with all manner of meats, including a package of Boof Jark. I mean, you seriously couldn’t be bothered to take the most basic pen tool and write some block letters on a white box? 

Speaking of handwriting, which I’m notably not using for this, I’ll close with a story about Bob Ross. He once received a letter from a fan saddened that he couldn’t follow along with the painting sessions because his hands shook too much. Bob Ross, being the absolute legend that is Bob Ross, assured this person, “Well, then you can draw trees better than I can, because trees are rarely straight.”

Behind the Scenes