Not sure who to attribute this question to, I’ve been asked it by everyone. Colleagues, the woman at the chippy, my mam, the kids. That literally is everyone. And I heard someone on the train asking someone else.
Am I set for Christmas? 🎄
No. I don’t think that I am.
Sure. The tree is up. And we’ve got a dining table this year, so there is that.
Most of the presents are sorted for the kids. Not that they ask for much anyway. I haven’t wrapped them yet though.
We’ve done Christmassy things with the school. Church fate, tombola. All that stuff. Trip to the Panto for the youngest.
We’ve been to the Christmas fair. Endured the madding crowds that we can enjoy hot coal roasted chestnuts and hot mulled wine on the ice cold cobbles of a foggy medieval town while listening to street music.
We watched our first Christmas movie of the season, not Die Hard, but Scrooged. We recently watched Yippee Ki Yay at the local theatre and I’m all Die Harded out for now.
There will be other Christmas movies, Polar Express, Muppets Christmas Carol, and it wouldn’t be Christmas, legally, without It’s a Wonderful Life. I’m not really about the Christmas movies, it’s more about the ghost stories that go so well with the season, and the Nativity, obviously.
Christmas for me doesn’t kick in until the house falls silent on Christmas Eve. When the kids are finally asleep. When the last of the presents are wrapped and positioned under the tree 🎄, and I scare myself giddy watching the old M R James episodes from the BBC by the light of the tree.
But am I ready for Christmas?
Not particularly. Not even turkey dinner and work disco, and two ghost story productions (Casting of the Runes, and The Signalman, both excellent btw, go see them) have got me in the mood.
We still have to visit family and friends about the country. Still need a few pints with my drinking bud. We haven’t done the pantomime yet. We always try to get the final performance before Christmas, the atmosphere is fantastic.
But let’s get to the heart of the matter, the title of this piece. The Shuddersome Shopping Season. I just don’t understand it.
It’s one day, and everyone goes nuts. Christmas dinner is Sunday Dinner, but with more choices. I’d be lying if I said that I made pigs in blankets, sausage meat stuffing, coca cola ham, turkey, goose fat roast potatoes, honey glazed parsnips, extra buttery mash, roast rainbow carrots, cheesy cauliflower, baconised sprouts and chestnuts, and two types of gravy every sunday, but roast dinner is roast dinner. There’s no need to go crazy at the supermarket.
I can understand that some people will be feeding large family groups, catering to guests and having to buy extra, but the number of people eating is static, is it not? The people at the shop buying crazy amounts of food must surely be offset by the people that don’t need to buy crazy amounts of food because they’re being catered for.
I am keen, this year, to not do that. There will be Christmas Day extras. Smoked salmon butties for breakfast, plus the bucks fizz to wash it down, for example. And I will spend all morning in the hot kitchen, drinking wine, listening to Radio 2, while I chop the veg and thicken the gravy. I suppose by then, I will be ready for Christmas.🎄
What’s your favorite game (card, board, video, etc.)? Why?
I don’t play games anymore. Except for Family Games Night, then I play games. I can’t say that I have a favourite though, just whichever is the flavour of the day and that gets played to death, until we get bored and never touch it again.
At the moment, that game would be Cluedo, or Clue, for my American friends. We’ve got two versions. The modern one, and the classic.
We also play Soggy Doggy, but that involves water and batteries. For a long time though Monopoly was my all time favourite, but it goes on for so long, and ruins friendships, so that went into storage long ago.
I was always more of a video game player. My first computer was the zx spectrum and for the first week it was set up on the TV in the living room, and the whole family got involved. We played such games as Harrier Attack, Oh Mummy, and Treasure Island into the small hours.
There were thousands of games, but the one that captures my imagination most was Dizzy, and all of its clones and spin-offs. It kept me entertained for years.
Dizzy was a boxing glove wearing egg that bounced around the screen solving puzzles. The setting didn’t matter, the main interest was exploring the world, collecting objects and finding their purpose to unlock new parts of the game. It was almost as good as going outside.
They don’t make games like this anymore, and the more the graphics have improved the visuals, the less the imagination is fired. In a modern game, what you see is what there is, but in a low resolution game the world implied by visual prompts is way richer.
Something about that grave ..
It didn’t matter that the graphics were simple or that the colours clashed. There’s long grass here and you can smell it, hear the insects beating their wings. The tree is old, the wind rustles its leaves and its branches sway and creak, this tree could tell a tale or two. But that gravestone, it’s been there for a while and it’s started to sink, soon it will topple and disappear in to the ground, taking it’s secrets with it. Could there be something buried here? Treasure? A secret entrance?
I picked up this game on a trip to the seaside in the eighties. I read the packaging, consumed its treasure island themed art work with the sun on my face and the sea air in my lungs interwoven with the anticipation of playing the game when I got home, 3 long hours later. Memories like that can carry you from childhood to deathbed in a way that instant downloads never will.
I’ve played many games since. Blood, Grand Theft Auto, Bendy and the Ink Machine. There are good games but they don’t have the simplistic beauty or the imagination of the classics.
I can’t name an all-time favourite, there are just too many, but many have left an indelible soft spot.
I saw a post today on twitter about being haunted by ghosts. I posted here previously about ghosts, including the spectre of the child that sits at the bottom of our stairs, but it got me thinking about those other ghosts that haunt us. Not the lingering spirit form of the departed, but those of regret.
The ghosts that visit us in the past and ask for help.
I had a childhood friend, and for the longest possible five years or so we were utterly inseparable. But we were apparently, on different paths, or perhaps just one of us was. As we approached adulthood our lives diverged until just a couple of years ago and we got back in touch.
The intervening years had not gone so well for my friend and for reasons I can’t go into, he is no longer with us. This haunts me. Had I known I would have helped, wouldn’t I? All he had to do was ask.
The mind can take you to the strangest of places and it reaches back, far beyond our grasp. What if he did ask? What if he asked when it was possible to do some good, but I didn’t recognise it. A call for help stretching back through time to the one moment I could have made a difference. And I said no.
I didn’t know. I still don’t know. But what I do know is that one day, thirty years ago, a strange little man knocked on my door and offered his hand in friendship, and I had better things to do. How different things might have been had I not been so self absorbed. If there is a next time round, I will go for that walk and set the path differently.
She came to me in a dream the other night. His mother. I do believe that we can communicate in dreams, with both the living and the dead. She came to me in the night and brought a message that I cannot share, but I did get the chance to tell her that I loved her son. I impressed this upon her like her life and mine depended on it. Love, like brotherly love, and that I was sorry I wasn’t there.
Ghosts are real. They don’t always rattle chains and say boo, but they are with us, and we need to do right by them.
If there is one thing that we can all agree on, it’s religion. Not.
Do I practice religion? It’s difficult to say really. I wasn’t brought up to be religious. My interest lay in logic, and reason, and science. I was a big fan of star trek. Arthur C Clarke was my all time favourite author. There was no Sunday school for me, no baptism or confessions. The school dutifully served up parables and had us singing hymns with all the enthusiasm of a stale loaf of bread. I was led down the path of atheism.
I had to be an atheist. It was the only thing that made sense as a reductionist consciousness living in a material universe. Anything else was an absurdity, wishful thinking, or a means to control the gullible population.
And yet, my relationship with God was always a strong one. How could it not be? We are one with the divine.
My very earliest memories, from my very earliest years, they are obviously very vague. How can we process and store the vast amounts of experiences and sensations without any context? We can’t, but there are still memories. I remember being a toddler, barely able to walk or talk. I remember being shoed away from the things that weren’t for me, dangerous or fragile. But at that time, I remember the presence of God, always there, speaking, indistinguishable from the rest of the world.
I’ve had more than a couple of paranormal or spiritual encounters. Warnings on high that have saved my life in one way or another. Ghosts, premonitions, inexplicable things in the sky, and even a broadcast message from the future, I shit you not.
If you find yourself paying any sort of attention to the nature of what it is to be alive in the universe, we come across all manner of intractable problems. Questions such as why is there something and not nothing? What happened before the big bang? What even is consciousness?
It turns out that we’ve been asking these questions for thousands of years, and the more we learn, the less we can be certain of anything at all. Quantum mechanics tells us that the universe doesn’t even exist when we’re not looking at it. It’s almost as if all of this is in our head.
Nothing came from nothing, Cordelia, but the universe did. The unfathomably massive entirety of everything is thought to have a net energy of zero. In aggregate, the universe doesn’t exist. Everything leads to metaphysics.
Religion is villainised by atheists as the domain of ignorance and they shower it, and its followers, with ridicule. They attack its values and lore with nitpicks, but in doing so, they miss the point.
I certainly didn’t arrive at religion from a place of ignorance. I had the full atheist mindset for a long time, and it was only with thorough questioning of everything that I realised that atheism was the lie, not religion. The bible is not a means to control, though it undeniably can be hijacked by the ideologues for nefarious ends, but that’s to miss the point. The bible isn’t a blueprint for a kind society, it’s a guide on how to live a good life, and it’s purely serendipitous that a great society will emerge from a population that lived a noble and courageous truthful life.
Do I practice religion? Well, I don’t go to church, but I do practice gratitude, when I remember. Gratitude for the life we have gives us solace and serenity. I also try to live by truth because lying splits our spirit across multiple versions of reality, of which only one is true and the rest cannot last. Jesus taught us that we must go through hell to know heaven. If we think not of the afterlife, but as analogues for daily life, we know that nothing worthwhile is ever easy, nothing in abundance has value.
It’s possible to assimilate these lessons without incurring religion, but even a narrow thread of intellectual integrity must admit that there is a ‘why’ to be accounted for, and that is a question only for religion. And when recognising this, the benefits of practicing religion become obvious.
There’s this thing in my head. A memory, a dream, a wish, a half remembered scene from a movie. I think of it often, picturing it, wondering if I could contrive a story around it, though that’s not the point.
The thing is something simple, and it delves deep into my psyche, and because I’m nothing special, it must resonate with others on at least some level, so I’ll record it here.
It’s about a lonely place. A temple or fortress or palace, perhaps all three. A once thriving hub of the community teeming with hustle and bustle, laughter and sorrow. The whole spectrum of human experience strung out across years and now fallen silent. Entropy has won.
To be alone in such a place. Wrapped in a silence so thick you don’t believe it, and conversations carry on the wind from the depths of time or the recesses of your own mind, not that it makes a difference in a place like this.
What is left of the buildings are little more than remnants of walls and floors, stone steps and columns, worn by wind and rain, and ticks and tocks. You explore the grounds but there is nothing to find. Nothing much grows anymore, the soil is little more than dead roots in dirt. Dust rests wherever the wind can’t reach it.
Where you are is hard to tell, the engraved text on the stone walls and pillars is eroded beyond comprehension. The statues that still stand proud are little more than featureless pillars themselves, nothing to identify them.
Except for one. A statue in granite, or some other hardy stone has stood a better test of time than the others. But who is this? Time has done its best to rob her of her beauty but the life in her eyes persists in the stone, and her gentle smile. Who is she? Did you know her? How long have you been here?
How long? Long enough to doubt yourself. Have you explored the whole place? Perhaps there is more to be seen beyond the eastern wall. There isn’t, of course, and it all seems rather familiar.
The pale sun sets and the stars come out, but you’re not sleepy, you’re never sleepy. So you return to the steps where you always find yourself, and you pour yourself a glass of wine. There is always wine when the sun sets. Best not to question it.
Maybe tomorrow you can look beyond the eastern wall for something new, but for now there are stars to be watched. Not so many as there used to be, it seems like fewer every night.
Write about a time when you didn’t take action but wish you had. What would you do differently?
What would I do that I didn’t do? What indeed? This is one of those dining on ashes things, and I’ve enough to feed us all.
There are many times I didn’t act, took the craven path, but one in particular sticks with me.
Long ago I took a journey on a train, a train that is now long since scrapped, from a place I no longer go back to, to a town where I no longer live. It was a late train, a late hour and delayed too. But it was buzzing, filled with weary travellers and revellers alike. It was the smoking carriage too, as I recall, back then it was where I liked to sit.
For the journey I kept myself to myself, enjoyed what little view there was of the argon lit streets in the sparse towns that punctuated the blackened fields of the English countryside, and occasionally sparking up a hand rolled cigarette that I had made for something to do.
About halfway through the journey I became aware that the shouting had lost its jovial hue and had turned quite sour. A barely intelligible Scots woman was hurling the most obscene insults at another passenger.
I was stunned. I couldn’t see what was happening but none of the other fifty odd passengers saw fit to intervene and that only reinforced my cowardice.
And what would I even do? I was a spotty bespectacled student with less meat than a half eaten buffalo wing, and even less gumption and street smarts.
So I listened, I winced and I cringed, and slowly I had pieced together what had transpired. By my estimation the plus sized mother had made the mistake of asking the inebriated Caledonian harpy to perhaps lay off the profanities and all hell ensued. This diminutive windbag hurled all manner of verbal abuse at the poor woman, who could do nothing but pray for a swift end to the torment of herself and her terrified son.
What could I even have done except make myself a target? You read all the time about heroes being stabbed for their trouble. But how likely was that? So if I stood up and took the flack, could I not withstand the noise of a screeching harridan for a couple of stops? Was this the man I had grown up to be? Had I forgotten the jubilation of the time I stood up to the neighborhood jerk and flung him out of his own garden? Sure, that jerk was no more than ten years old, but that was still older than I was at the time, and he never bothered us again.
What might have happened is that others might have stood up with me, and shown that terrified mother and her boy that there was still a shred of decency and hope in the world, and I might have retained that sense of forthright dignity that has evaded me ever since.
In the end it was the police that ended the ordeal. The train made an unscheduled stop at some nowhere town and the gob, along with her silent companion that I hadn’t even noticed, were removed from the train. The crowd found its voice again and cheered for removal, but I didn’t. I was glad that the ordeal was over, but I had no right to celebrate.
Years ago. Not so many as that train ride, but a good while nonetheless, my career meandered me on to various medical practices and surgeries, and on one occasion I was privileged to shadow an oncology consultant delivering the all clear to an immensely relieved and grateful patient.
The patient spoke to me directly, looked me square in the eye and told me, warned me, to take care of my body, and to watch out for the changes.
It’s not that I ignored the guy, I took the advice with good grace and promised to abide, but did I really? Did I? Did I go see my doctor all the times I should have, perhaps, perhaps not. What I do know is that had I taken more action along the way, perhaps the presence of the hairy hand of fate would now be just that little less apparent.
Some pictures have appeared in the media lately from the Mars mission. They’ve been described by some as resembling dragon bones.
As awesome as that would be, that’s not what I see in the images. To me, they look like poles sticking out of the rock, much like rebar protruding from unfinished concrete blocks. They cast long shadows along the stone.
Looks like rebar and nubs
It’s hard to determine the size of them, or their true shape from these images, but I find that the explanation given, that these are merely mineral deposits that have been revealed by the erosion of the much softer stone, to be a little weak.
Erosion on Mars is paltry by Earth standards, and even though the surface of Mars is billions of years older than Earth, the explanation doesn’t ring true. It’s an unsubstantiated assertion. We don’t know the age or erosion rates of this rock, or what the supposed mineral could be.
That’s not to say that I think this really is rebar in cement, just that it’s what it looks like to me.
Another interesting detail in the image is the presence of the small protruding nubs, which to me look a lot like the ones found on ancient megalithic stones.
Nubs
These nubs are not understood but it seems reasonable to assume that they probably served some purpose in the construction of these sites.
Again, not suggesting that this is what it is, but this site on Mars is definitely worthy of a second look.
There is an old episode of Doctor Who that starts with the Tardis landing on the Titanic. His assistant, I forget which, had persuaded him to take her on an opulent voyage so he honed in on the Titanic and off they went, but they didn’t land on the deck, nor were they in Southampton, and it wasn’t even 1912.
The Tardis had materialised atop an outcrop of sandstone in a hillside clearing, surrounded by dense ancient woodland. No sign of docks or sea or ladies in hats, just trees and scrub, and creatures unseen rustling in the ominous undergrowth
“Where’s the ship Doctor?” The assistant shrieked. I’m thinking it was Tegan.
The Doctor, Tom Baker’s I think, hushed her and listened carefully to the wind whistle past his curled ear. Then he licked his finger and held it in the air.
“Ah” He said at last. “Seems we missed the sailing”
“No kidding, so where’s the ship now?”
“You’re standing on it”
Beneath their feet was the weather worn sandstone lip. It was nothing remarkable, much like any rocky outcrop in any clearing in any forest.
That spot upon which the Doctor and his assistant now stood, we learned, was the very same spot where the Titanic had come to rest on that fateful night in 1912. And it was that same spot where it remained while the years took their toll. The iron hull and super structure slowly corroded away and the sediments settled above, hiding all trace of that legendary watery grave.
Europe and North America drifted apart over the aeons until the process reversed and plate tectonics brought the two continents back together where they formed a new mountain range that would come to dwarf the Himalayas, had they too not succumbed to time and long since reduced to gentle undulations beneath the new Antarctic Ocean.
One hundred million years brought this spot of deep ocean bed back to the surface, and millennia of ice and wind and rain chipped away the layers of sedimentary rock until finally, the iron remains of the sleeping leviathan once again saw the light of day.
In the yellow sandstone on which they stood, a thin band of iron ore stained the otherwise uniform rock. Fifty thousand tons of metal, and 1500 souls, now a barely perceivable geological curiosity.
Then there was a scream and off they ran to their next adventure.
Time is deeper than any ocean, and there is way more hidden within it. Every day it seems that new histories are being washed upon the shores of our knowledge. Tidbits of antiquity, seemingly inconsequential to the untrained or uninterested eye, but putting them all together, a picture is emerging.
On a treasured but dusty bookshelf in my office I have a series of books that I have had since childhood. It includes such wonderful titles as Alchemy the Ancient Science, Dream Worlds, Magic Words and Numbers, Ghosts and Poltergeists, among others, but there is one book in the series that I don’t think belongs. I’m reminded of Winston’s interview question in Ghostbusters.
Do you believe in UFOs, astral projections, mental telepathy, ESP, clairvoyance, spirit photography, telekinetic movement, full trance mediums, the Loch Ness monster and the theory of Atlantis?
Janine Melnitz – Ghostbusters
One of those things is not like the others. I’ll admit, I’ve had this movie quote in my head for five decades and it never struck me before. For the longest time I had no inclination to believe that the city of Atlantis was anything more than a myth, a legend, but that’s hardly surprising when the matter is always listed with other fringe topics in the book shop.
The YouTube channel Bright Insight has a great video outlining the evidence to support the Eye of the Sahara, the Richat Structure, as the location of Atlantis, I won’t go into detail here, but just looking at a picture of the thing and comparing it to the countless artistic impressions that have been created over the years forms a compelling case.
Atlantis is a curiosity, like Near Death Experience, Alien Abduction, not really given much credence, but why? Plato wasn’t, by all accounts, an attention seeking nutjob, why was it treated as anything but a historical account? I suppose it doesn’t help that Plato’s account was not first hand, it was passed down over 9000 years, so there was some room for error, but evidence is stacking up that there might be more to the story of Atlantis than mere parable or whimsy..
The Richat Structure Atlantis image search
This isn’t exactly a “The hair proves it” moment, but it’s hard to dismiss it. It’s entirely possible that a deluge, of the type that is known to have happened often during the 12000 bce Younger Dryas, could have swept Atlantis off the face of the planet in one night.
I don’t think this is a myth anymore. Not now that the evidence for high technology in abundance, scattered around the megalithic sites across the world has been brought to my attention. The work of Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson, and YouTube channels such as UndiscoveredX and Bright Insight are doing a wonderful job shining a halogen torch on the historical inconsistencies, and I’ve only just begun to scratch the surface.
It’s spring as I write this, and as I looked out of the window of a holiday let, across the tree tops of the steep hill of the park, and out across the water to the timeless view of Scottish mountains, I am struck by the enduring permanence of the view. The mountains carved out from solid rock by miles thick glaciers. The murky depths of choppy brine that flow to the ocean. Centuries of farmers have tended those hills, raised crops, driven their sheep. And centuries of sailors, merchants, adventurers, have plied those waters. An unbroken history, going back down the generations.
But then my gaze is broken abruptly by a thud on the window. A bumblebee ramming the glass brings a new perspective into focus. Against the backdrop of the seemingly eternal landscape, the ephemeral bee, brand new to the season makes its presence known. And the tree tops, over which I enjoy the view have recently been cut back. The bee knows not the date, it doesn’t know what year this is or what happened in the previous cycle. It is merely here and now. The trees are not what they might have been had they been allowed to grow, they will grow back, and they will be cut back again.
In this information age we have grown accustomed to knowing who we are and where we came from, the certainties of our past, the story of who we are, but is that an illusion? A lie? A cope? Does the bee have any doubts about its identity? Will it be remembered by the next colony? I have my doubts.
Just as the ship destroyed by Propsero’s magical storm sank beneath the waves and left no trace, so too the memories of the behemoth that was the Titanic will also vanish in time, but for those who know where to look, it’s mark will be found and understood.
The world turns and the crust churns. We cannot know how many shakespeares there have been, how many Einsteins, or how many Hitlers for that matter, if the passing millennia tear down all that we built, but the slate isn’t wiped clean every time. Some remnants remain to be found and understood, if we care to take a second look.
Sunday mornings for me of late have become a sort of sedentary stay in bed and generate AI art for a while type affair. Are we allowed to call it art? Dunno.
I have been thinking much lately, not least because I’ve been researching it, the lost ancient knowledge, or rather, what we can discern of it from the scraps of evidence that survived the passage of time thus far.
I wondered what the AI might tell me about the various ages of the zodiac. Aquarius is in ascendance, and the transition is often met with new dawns born of painful endings.
So what does Age of Aquarius mean to the AI?
It’s all a bit psychedelic and blended with Eastern mysticism. Hardly surprising.
Age of Taurus?
Age of Taurus, the Bull, from 4300 bce to 2150 bce, is a much different affair. It was the dawn of the iron age, and growth of civilization, and cows.
The Age of Pieces?
Pieces, the current astrological period began in year 1, and will run to 2150, at which point something cataclysmic may or may not happen. Curious imagery, looks like a video game. The age of Christianity and fish, not really getting that from the AI.
Next I tried Virgo, my own sign.
The Age of Virgo is duller than I imagined. It ran from 13000 to 10750 bce, the Younger Dryas period, the time as the great floods that reshaped the geography and climate across the planet. Maybe this is more representative of the next Age of Virgo in around 12772 AD.
Out of interest, I wondered what AI might know of the Younger Dryas period and it gave me scenes of melting ice, which is accurate I think.
And with the addition of the word ‘catacylism’ we get more end of the world stuff.
These don’t tell me anything, the AI doesn’t know anything that we don’t already know, but it’s a fun way to spend a Sunday morning in bed, coffee to hand.
AI is everywhere already, and it’s only going to get everywhere else. I can’t even sit in bed on a morning with a mug of hot coffee, scrolling through my Facebook feed, without seeing more ads for AI.
Create high quality content in seconds. Sounds like a bucket of awesomeness doesn’t it. Here I am, struggling to manage just one post a month, as I try to balance my time across work and watching telly and all the other drudges that take priority. Why bother collecting thoughts, doing research, selecting images and wot not before writing it down, editing, and, with no shortage of trepidation, hitting the publish button.
Not anymore says the AI people. With just a few clicks and a couple of key strokes, I can spam the entire internet with self referencing auto drivel.
I don’t know if I can challenge the “high quality” claim at half seven in the morning, but what is clear is the value destruction this will cause.
Anything that can be created in seconds by anyone anywhere cannot be said to have value. Value is derived from scarcity, everyone knows that.
So where does that leave bloggers? Dunno really.
I will continue to write the occasional post here and there, but I suppose the odds of being found and read will be even worse once the click bait factories deploy AI content on mass to the masses.
I picture an internet dominated by content produced whimsically and ephemerally, tailored to the user’s recent activity. Whole websites, like TV tropes for example, that took years to build with hundreds of contributors, will be created on the spot, and coloured to fit the views and biases of the individual in the interest of keeping them engaged long enough to register as an impression to an advertiser.
We won’t be able to trust a single thing we see on the internet. Photo and video and voice evidence will mean nothing. A few words uttered and you’ll have video evidence of anything you like.
The standard of the images above is low, and on closer inspection, they don’t withstand any scrutiny. The eyes are particularly creepy. It will be easy to fool some, perhaps many for a while, but I think this is a huge shift in our civilisation. This is perhaps the beginning, ironicaly, of an information dark age.
Before the invention of photography and audio recordings, if something happened, we had to go on the word of those who witnessed it. I can see us returning to that state of being. Anything on the internet will be, to all intents and purposes, unreliable, unverifiable.
What we see and hear from the internet will bear even less semblance to what we see in the world beyond our window. Everyone will have to engage in their actual communities in order to survive, or at the very least, maintain the social order.
Am I catastrophising? I don’t think I am. I think we’re about to enter a very turbulent era in human history. The reality of AI is changing our relationship with everything.
I have a love of food, for example.
With AI I can enjoy endless images of food, food porn, and not a single chef need lift a finger. Shame they can’t be eaten.
These cakes and roast aren’t real, but they look good enough for a blog to be skimmed through, and it took next to zero effort to create them.
I could be a travel blogger if I wanted, and have the AI write up convincing articles and journals of exciting exotic places that only exist in ram.
The early days of the internet were great for exchanging ideas and finding like minded groups to talk about anything and everything. There were always trolls, and you couldn’t always trust that the truth was being told. But it was more or less a certainty that you were interacting with another human, or possibly a cat. We don’t have that certainty anymore. Conversations with AI can be utterly convincing. Imagine a forum where there are hundreds of Bots chatting among themselves.
The very idea of a website is under threat. Anyone looking to buy a fishing rod might stumble across a well established forum with decades of threads and posts and helpful members happy to direct the new member to a certain rod. A well established forum with decades of threads and helpful members that only exists for the duration of the transaction.
Does a website exist if no one is looking at it? The internet will become a probability wave.
Deep.
AI, I’m told has already encroached on the world of adult content creators. I don’t like to judge, but it’s probably not a bad thing if the demand for live acts of depravity drops out. How this plays out is anyone’s guess though.
I mean, here I am, typing my own words for an article I could have generated in seconds, and no one would have known. But that’s not the point. I would know, and as AI becomes increasingly dominant, demand for actual words written by actual people, in my view, will only increase. Real experience and real accounts of real experience will become cherished.
I’m not one of those king Canute luddites resistant to change. I have nothing to gain from shunning AI art. It’s given me the opportunity to illustrate my words without resorting to effort, and paying an artist.
Does it really matter that these images are AI generated? I’m only using them to brighten up the page anyway. I’d be a fool not to, wouldn’t I?
The long and short of it is. AI is going to be disruptive. Blogs like this, will become unique and authentic voices amidst the plethora of valueless content, and I have some faith that readers will know the difference, but the only way they will be certain is to see with their own eyes. If we have something to say, we’re all going to have to get used to speaking in public. The written word will count for little, and this complication will, ironicaly herald in a new simpler time.
Duggan's Dig 