Ruining Lives for Fun and Profit

note:  my RP by comment is still going and open for two more players.  see this post.

Debt is a motherfucker.  Our society is usurious as all hell, stealing from the education system to leave people innumerate and cutting so much slack to “legitimate” businesses that they all degenerate into con jobs and pyramid schemes, abusing people’s lack of savvy to run up egregious debts on them, run them ragged for life on the debt treadmill.  It’s not sustainable; the subprime mortgage scandal was caused by lending imprudently, the idea you could keep the bullshit rolling on stone blood forever.

I myself was a victim of “legitimate” businesses selling debt on lies.  It was student debt, racked up to obscene amounts through interest I was never ever going to be able to pay off.  While Shitler and his Shitbirds have taken a wrecking ball to student loan forgiveness and income-based repayment programs, as of this moment, my own forgiveness is still safe because it was part of a court case against various for-profit schools that used misleading material to make us think employment was much more certain and would be much more well-compensated than it actually was.  I’ve got some kind of long-term deferral waiting for the forgiveness to be processed.  Thank fuck, and here’s hoping there doesn’t come an executive order to overturn that court case as part of the Arbeit Macht Frei Act of 2027, to pump up the population of debtor’s prisons.

Many other USians are not so lucky, having been all lined up to get their debts forgiven under Biden policies that were hammered by conservative assholes.  Even a fucking three year old knows that “no backsies’ is sacred.  Don’t tell us we’re getting loans forgiven and then renege.  That’s injustice, motherfuckers.  Anyway, the latest evil evil fuckshit to come from on high is that any student loans in default are being sent to collection agencies.

Have you heard of collection agencies, or are you from one of the hell countries where these things are real?  A business that is incentivized to keep you from paying as long as possible while also abusing you into paying as much as possible, created this creepy system where they make feinting attempts to notify you of the debt for a while, shots across the bow, while running up whatever they thought would be a cool interest rate.  Then they start the harassment, the repossessions, the wage garnishments.

Considering the staggering size student loan debts can run to, this is a recipe for hounding people to suicide or homelessness or other terrible situations and harms.  These motherfuckers are ghouls.  They live in golden palaces and sleep in the down of sacrificial doves, but it’s not enough.  The view from heaven only satisfies if they are looking down on eternal torment in hell.

I am bothered by this because of the certainty that my own loan forgiveness is in their sights, that they’re going to kill it the second they can come up with a way to do so.  But much more than that, I am bothered on behalf of the people who are suffering through this policy right now.  It’s like, I’d be bothered if I might get shot, but not nearly as much as seeing someone else shot in front of me.  That’s how I feel about the victims of this policy.

I had some chipper motherfucker tell me once that Biden’s loan forgiveness programs were buying votes.  Well, who makes for a better world, somebody who buys votes by making lives better or someone who buys votes by making lives end?  But this is what ameriKKKa wanted.  Torment.  Hell.  Because it’s always gonna be someone else’s suffering right?  Never you, no sirree.

It’s cool to see people show up big for protests, but I know those are the people who voted.  And all the bitches who sat it out, they’re driving by oblivious.  Get out of the way, you old hippies with your illegible handmade signs.  I need to get to my third job to toil away the rest of my life because doncha know both sides are exactly the same and things couldn’t possibly be worse under the one the nazis liked so much.

Feeling tired.  Anyway, Shitler keeps making regular people into desperate motherfuckers with nothing to lose, which is exactly the kind of people he needs to be fearing.  I’m glad the fear centers of his brain seem to have been replaced with aluminum amyloids and jelly beans.  I’m glad he won’t see it coming, because it’ll be more likely to land next time.

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Prison Labor Will Set You Free

You ever see the movie Sorry to Bother You by communist commie Boots Riley?  It’s such a great film for this general stretch of US history.  If anything, it feels mild compared to the new fascist deathclown era, but still, worth a look.  One element of that movie that hit me like a ton of bricks was the sunshine-branded debtor’s prisons, called “Worry-free Jobs.”  It felt so real, so possible, so close.

Particularly, I have often felt so beleaguered by the cost of fucking everything that the idea of prison began to have some appeal.  The idea of doing a crime, well, if I got away with the loot it would help; if it didn’t at least I wouldn’t have to pay rent.  But we know how horrible prisons are because it’s a bad joke.  Worse is the specifics, about how for-profit prisons have given people moldy bread, watched their bodies ravaged by flesh-eating bacteria, got them pre-loaded with debt for the next time they hit the streets.

Every time I hear some liberal asking, “where do red states think they’re going to get people to do shit work if they deport all the immigrants?,” I know the answer.  “How can landlords keep jacking up rents?  What will they do about the expanding homeless population?”  Loud and clear, no question, no hesitation.  The corporate prison industrial complex is going to be massively expanded, and these gulags are about to supply a ton of slave labor for the new economy.

How will they feed bodies to the system?  Eventually debtor’s prisons will be more formally accessible, with a few laws rewritten or reinterpreted by fascists in black robes.  But until then, the big push for marijuana legalization?  That never did succeed in the vast majority of the union.  Expect brutal marijuana decisions to get handed down.  Expect states that have decriminalized it to see some reversals of fortune.

Anyway, prison reform (or abolition) was always a more important issue than we as a society were ready to handle.  But it’s about to become much more crucial than it has been for a lot more of us.  Don’t let yourself get arrested, my people.  The corporate prisons (with eager police and prosecutor collaboration) will do everything they can to keep you for the rest of your miserable life.

And solidarity for all laborers, no matter if they’re slaves or just wage slaves.  Power to the people!  Recognize we’re all the same to them.  Workers of the world unite.

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Edit:  Oh yeah, maybe explain the title.  Prison labor will set you (nazis) free (from the economic consequences of murderous xenophobia).

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The Beautiful Dream

I’m a classic amurrican striver.  An entitled colonizer.  A zombie to crapitalism.  I’ve got this asinine notion that if I just get my hot amazing sexy ideas out there, people will jump on them, and I will make a bank full of money.  Be positively swimmin’ in ducats.  Doubloons.  Krugerrands.  Simoleons.  Smackeroos.  Showering my flesh with gold dust and blood diamonds.  Getting a miniature robotic Lamborghini to chauffeur my stretched Lamborghini around Lamboville.

I kid, I kid.  I genuinely don’t give an earthly fuck about wealth, do not want a single one of those things.  But I do want the ability to take it easy, to know that I and my loved ones won’t be ruined 5eva from a single run of bad luck.  I want security, and in this country, that’s expensive as hell.  So I want just that much, and then I’m chillin’.

The place where my zombification comes in is this:  On some primal reptile level of my brain, I can’t help but believe in that dream – that completely baseless delusion – that if I just do the right clever thing, I will get a windfall.  My merit will shine through and I will get all the money I ever needed.

Until the inevitable day when this dream is utterly disproven to me personally, it will continue to drive my ambitions.  I am thinking about this because I fucking hate the day job, and was recently approved to return to full time hours at it, which means my spare time became a lot more rare and precious.  So what should I be doing with that time, to fulfill the Beautiful Dream?

The project I have that is closest to completion is The Septagram, a urban fantasy adventure with dark elements and a lot of humor.  It’s one of my longer books but a little slight in length for a fantasy novel, about 100k words.  One of the main characters is asexual, another is gay, and the others mostly don’t have any cause to fuck, so it’s not very commercial.  Also, the genre was inspired by Hideyuki Kikuchi’s Wicked City and Darkside Blues, mashed up with a contemporary american setting, so it’s not very familiar territory for most readers.  Nonetheless, it would be the easiest thing to get completely finished and out the door.

I have a project in the Dan Brown thriller model, which is much less gay and experimental, while being similarly adventurous, called The Refinery.  There’s a lot of writing left to do on it, but it is intentionally commercial.  Even came up with a butch pen name for pitching it, haha.  I plan on finishing the first draft of it this July’s novel writing month.

I have a magical realism literary fiction thing, barely more than a novella at 50k words, but with one of those clever concepts that get people interested, and a lot of humor.  It’s called Swine and Camus and the first draft is complete, but the second draft is gonna involve a little heavy lifting.  Still, could be it’s got legs.

I have a cheeky scifi adventure about 75k words called Centennial Hills, you might recall.  How well do you think that thing would sell?  Two greyliens come to Earth and have edgy experiences.  A fictional stand-in for shitty etln mvfk features in it significantly.  The final draft of this one wouldn’t be wildly difficult.  I don’t see any structural editing or original writing being involved.  Should be a quick one.

I have a complete short novella called Mitosis – a take-off on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, featuring a trans woman as the main character, set in a 1990s college campus.  A dubious metaphor for gender dysphoria.  I’ve actually pitched this one to a few dozen agents with no bites.  But a lil polish and I would likely self-publish.  I thought the edgy concept would win some interest, but this has not proven to be the case.  What about you, though?

The Vaccine Scene is pretty close to complete as a novella, and despite the cheekiness of the concept – Reefer Madness with vaccines as the drug – it has become rather emotionally intense and literary.  Wouldn’t take much longer to finish it.  Would it be worth my time tho, financially?  Or just to catch people’s attentions, build that career?

My most heartfelt and epic story – Rent is Theft – has a completed first draft around 135k words.  Again with a trans woman as the main character, magical realism, urban setting, some heavy issues, some humor, a style that involves a lot of storytelling within the story.  Call it literary fiction.  Capitalism is the enemy.  But could this sell?  The next draft will involve a lot of rewriting and new writing, making it a big effort, and the concept is very uncommercial.

Of course, I can also ditch literature and finish my screenplay Gun Lemurs, which is pretty damn decent, if you ask me.  These days, however, hollyweird is not valuing original writing like they should.  I doubt this will go as far as I’d prefer.  Still, I get the feeling screenwriting is a less crowded field than literature.  Or am I completely wrong on that?  Cursory googling suggests I am.

As far as how I sell it, I had a bad time pitching Mitosis and am not going to pitch a book with queer main characters ever again.  The fuckos say they want to see that represented, but they’re full of shit, as evidenced by what actually gets published.  I’m going to pitch The Refinery and if I can’t get anywhere while selling out my identity and chasing trends, I’m done with seeking traditional publication altogether.

That gets me to the problem of how the hell to sell shit.  All of the markets are flooded with garbage from dollar-chasers and spambots.  Getting seen requires advertising.  I’d drop a lil dosh on that, but not anything outlandish.  I’m not doing too well financially.  Like, let’s say $600 could get my ad seen by 40,000 people for a few minutes.  I might consider that, just to see what the results are like.  Let’s say it’s a lot more expensive or being seen by the population of a USian suburb only gets five bucks worth of sales.  I’d never do it again, try to find some other kind of angle.

I once thought this blogging angle might be a good way to flog some products, but my audience is maybe a hundred people and of those, how many would buy something?  The profit margin on books is chump change.  Twenty sold is not enough to justify cutting my hours at work.  Ain’t gonna get me interviewed by chucklefucks on yewed choob.

What would jeezis sell?  What would people buy?  Holler at ya comrade.

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Unthinkable Bastards

Can you even imagine what it’s like to have the mindset of the rich?  It’s like imagining the mindset of a bully, but even more exotically evil.  You’ve got all those resources, and all you can do is sit with them in your castle, petulantly chanting to yourself day in day out that you deserve it all.

Looking at the greedy shits around you and imagining that’s representative of humanity – that we, down here in the streets wondering how we’re gonna pay for housing are somehow thirsting after your shitty hot rod.  Motherfucker, I can’t live in your hot rod.  I don’t want a house so big I need to pay other people to clean it for me, because there are not enough hours in the day to do it myself.  I don’t need that bullshit and I don’t want it.

I don’t want a billion dollars, but if I magically had it?  If you, my readers, magically had it?  Can you imagine giving a fuck to keep it?  To squat over it like a dragon while people are feeling real pain and deprivation around you in the world?  Can you imagine being that petty and twisted?

Economic inequity does harm my morals.  It doesn’t make me lust for wealth.  It makes me indifferent to the lives of the wealthy.  I should care about all people, but if you’re wealthy enough?  I wouldn’t shed a tear about your tiny milk-fed infants being bayonetted by bolsheviks.

I can’t see you as human because y’all never show any of the positive traits associated with my species.  You’ve turned yourselves into something else, and it’s not something that’s worth a drop of my concern.  Seriously.  Rich people can fuckin’ die, man.

But we shouldn’t kill them, of course.  I keed, I keed.  This is why I often think of people who are supreme pacifists, who would not see the worst person in the world put to death, and I have affection for them.  That’s what we should all be like, if we were able.  We should be kind.  I admire it.

And I blame bullies, and I blame con men and thieves and crooked politicians, and above these I blame the rich, for taking that kindness from me.  Maybe I could have tried harder to hold onto it.  I don’t know.  But seriously?

The rich, and all of their possessions, and all that they know, these are worth less than shit to me.  If I live to see the consequences of their actions flush their existence down the drain, I’ll smile.  It won’t feel good – I don’t like to feel hatred – but it will feel right.

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Destroy Pop Culture?

FtB’s Abbey St. Brendan wrote about the outing of Neil Gaiman as a cruel sex criminal, from the perspective of someone who has had a lot of affection for his and others’ contributions to the constellation of pop culture – from the perspective of a fan.  I’ve never fully held the fan point of view, and less so now than when I was young.  Even when I’m looking at a piece of pop media I greatly enjoy, it’s from a critical perspective – if not an especially incisive or thoughtful one.  I’m just very aware of artifice, and stan nothing.

And so watching somebody else deal with these repeated failings of famous purveyors of narrative art, not being someone who ever was fully on board with that art, again set me navel-gazing about my anti-fandom instincts.  Why do I get to be immune to this brand of hurt, and could or should that benefit be extended to others?  It feels more significant with Gaiman, because he was, in a sense, the last man standing of big fantasy authors.  There may be other people making books -especially for kids- who are making more dollars, moving more ink, but his cultural stature was top tier.  Whedon, JKR, and Gaiman were the big ones of this young millennium, inspiring the most fan content, the most devotion.  Bing, bang, boom.

I still haven’t quite hit the nail on the head of what makes me uncomfortable with fandom itself.  I could put all sorts of aphorisms to it (“I’m not a joiner” etc.), but none of them fully express it.  Maybe it’ll come to me while I’m on the john seven years from now, and if FtB still exists, you’ll find out.  In the meantime, the simple version is that I’m more of a cultural outsider than the typical “geek” – been isolated in my own dreams and the weird shit my husband shares with me for decades now, and anything outside that is dabbling at best.

Like when I last had cable and I would watch kung fu movies on El Rey.  I never did put posters of kung fu boys up on the wall, never cosplayed as the master of the flying guillotine, never rewrote Five Deadly Venoms to where my author insert gets to bone down with the Venom Mob.  (Shit, maybe I’m missing out…)

I don’t communicate with people who share unreserved excitement for the same things, and I think that communication is key.  My husband and I like a lot of the same things, but the things we love the most are just slightly out of sync, never quite the same stuff.  So neither of us has the shared excitement that is foundational to true fandom mindset.  I’m deffos more normcore than that goth bastid, but still not truly a fan of anything anybody else is a fan of.  (am i the only person on this blog network who does not see the appeal in terry pratchett?)  And so I find these affections easy to discard.

Back to the point: Seeing people go through this ordeal reminded me of a time when I saw somebody viscerally upset by the idea of dispensing with fan culture.  During some kind of discourse, an iconoclast suggested we should truly commit to elevating the indie by refusing to follow the big properties, and this fan felt personally hurt by it in a way that surprised me.  I then realized there is an inherent value in large shared fandoms, and pop culture in general, and it is something they share with religion and folklore going back to before Gilgamesh.

When we are given a narrow selection of cultural content, elevated through whatever means to be the only shit we’re allowed to look at, we are all on the same page.  It’s common culture, a bond that can be shared among all who experience it.  I’m about to get into what I hate about it, but this is, I think what feels needful about it.  The fan culture defender above was given a glimpse of a world without touchstones, where a million microfandoms are scattered like bricks from the Tower of Babel – a world where everyone is alone in what they love, and what they live for.

I don’t have a good answer for what to use to replace that, if art radicals were able to magically abolish pop culture, but I’m going to make the case for just that.  We should destroy pop culture.

Firstly, I’m going to define my terms.  By pop culture I mean art that has been elevated to the commercial mass market, be it fiction or music, video games or cinema or visual art.  If millions of people can pay money to experience it, if there’s an oligarchy of business creeps speculating on it, if there is a brain drain in the legal profession of your country as all law students flock to the lucrative field of intellectual property, if there are a million starving artists facing verbal, physical, and sexual abuse in order to be a part of it, it might be pop culture.

Pop culture can be very entertaining.  It can even have artistic merit.  Kurt Cobain was once on the cover of Rolling Stone in a white T-shirt with the sharpie-penned slogan, “corporate rock still sucks.”  But does it?  I don’t know.  I still love Guns ‘n’ Roses, get a goofy kick out of Def Leppard and Queensryche.  Major labels.  Shit, The Butthole Surfers were on Capitol Records, right?  What is it to suck?  Suck can be found everywhere from MTV to podunk night club, as can genius.  And of course, pop culture has the benefit of being a shared experience, in the way indie art cannot achieve.

But the pop culture machine is evil, and the best way to break that evil would be to just walk away from it all.  For the moment at least, the internet has a lot of avenues for pursuing obscure art.  You don’t have to special order a magazine from Norway to find out about the latest metal bands.  You don’t have to listen to the only radio station that reaches Tierra del Fuego.  You don’t have to watch any TV show that’s been produced in the last thirty years, and can still have a lifetime of TV to watch.  Sometimes it’ll take some work, but you can make it happen.  And if more people walk away from pop culture, the alternative avenues will increase.

How is the pop culture machine evil?  Abbey touched on it in her article, even if it wasn’t her intention.  She mentions that getting one’s art published means you passed a gauntlet of gatekeeping, with schmoozing and playing the game – a game that serves the privileged, that rewards questionable practices.  I say like everything under capitalism, it’s driven by a greed that can never be sated, which corrupts or harms everything it touches – including the art itself.

Auteurs are elevated and surrounded by lawyers and agents and media leeches, people who shovel drugs and sycophancy and manipulation upon them, play their egos until – even if they started as a decent person – they turn into creeps.  The movie Swimming With Sharks was a fantasia that arguably justified the cruelty as the cost of Hollywood magic™ – or the opposite intent, you know how hipsters be – but it gives you an idea of what the gauntlet can look like.  You want to make art, expect the legalized slavery of internships, expect abuse, and forget a livable wage.  The “casting couch” of sex abuse isn’t just for actors, though it hits them the hardest.  After Dr. Luke faced allegations of sex abuse from Ke$ha, how many women in the industry were still willing to work with him, hoping to squeak out another hit, ride the fame rocket into the ground?

Even the union jobs got people living like migrant workers, working multiple jobs just to afford splitting the rent with multiple roommates.  People in the higher tiers have reason to see the newbies as competition to be suppressed.  In the field of publishing, there have been multiple scandals involving “mean girls clubs” of established authors meeting in internet backrooms to shit on and plot against newer authors.  Everybody hates everybody and everybody is out for blood.  The sausage of pop culture art is made out of people.

People say organize, unionize, organize, like that can make a real difference in the arts.  It can’t because the magic of reaching pop status – of even secondhand fame – lures a bottomless well of replacements into the grinder.  There is no amount of unionization that can barricade the World War Z flow of zombie scabs.  I haven’t even mentioned nepotism yet.  You get the idea.

The human cost is the worst aspect of mass media art, but intellectual property law, corrupted to hell by media oligarchy lobbyists, has caused irreparable damage to history.  How many movies, novels, songs have been lost forever, rotted in the vaults of dragon kings?  Or sued out of existence because unreasonable boundaries drawn up by Disney and the RIAA?  Current events have poor artists clamoring for expansions of copyright law, which is like Palestinians clamoring for Israel to get more bombs.

And everything corporations do just gets worse with time, in rolling boom-bust cycles.  See what Disney is doing with its multi-billion dollar franchises.  Waste of fuckin’ time.  The only good thing about it is watching them lose money.  And also, for me, to watch the corporate art I used to find diverting twisted, at last, into a form repellent enough that I can look away, in full confidence that I am missing nothing of value.

I’ve mentioned before that I want to see art emerge from the shadow of commerce.  This will probably never happen until commerce itself eats the world, but I view it as something to aspire toward.  Anybody that can make art for free should.  Maybe I’ll have the gumption to do that someday, but for the moment I’m too economically insecure to throw away a lottery ticket chance of commercial success, no matter how slim.  Some things I do will be for free, like the first draft of Josefina and Blasfemia vs The Wall of Ice, or Centennial Hills.  But I hope you don’t think me too hypocritical in charging for some things.  We (artists) are all hobos rattling tin cans on the street corner, at the end of the day – or bourgie sellouts propping up the abusive system that lets a few token successes man the ramparts.

But one beautiful day, let it come, maybe we’ll all say “fuck that noise” and leave corporate media in the dust, to chase better dreams.  Maybe we can destroy pop culture.

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Add:  It occurs to me some may see this as saying artists should not be paid.  I only mean that insofar as I think nobody should be paid for any kind of labor, or everybody should be paid enough to live on and that’s it.  The idea is you work every angle until you get the magic golden ticket, that this proves you are better or more deserving than those that suffer in poverty?  I used to be more OK with it, but it’s the fuckin’ lottery that’s been sold to us as a way to let lich lords destroy everything that’s good in the world for ugly, ugly gold.  I don’t know shit about fuck, but I do know I hate competition for resources, for affection, for life itself.  Clearly civilization is on its slow hideous way out, and when it goes, I hope survivors will learn to base the next world on cooperation instead.

AI is Better Company

This post has been a while coming, because I feel really important about this, and don’t want to fuck it up.  If I can keep from getting too heated about the topic, this’ll be the last post I do on AI for the foreseeable.  I don’t love fighting.  I know that within this article I do not treat people with opposing views generously, but I’m still gonna ask them to have at least this much generosity with me:  Don’t even leave a comment on this one.  I will find it either tedious or upsetting.  I’m saying this stuff to give voice to a rarely expressed opinion, and to support people who may find it agreeable.  I’m not saying it to further a big debate, especially when the disagreeable are never going to be swayed.  Do you hate all AIs 4eva?  Don’t even read this.  Moving on…

The sneering fire-breathing demonization rained down upon people who dare to use AI was my primary motivation for defending it – I’m defending the people who want to use it, not the machines themselves.  Not everybody is plugged into the leftosphere groupthink, and when Harvey Dontknow finds out he can use AI to make a picture of his waifu, his “crime” is not equivalent to child murders.

But I also acknowledge AI in the hands of crapitalism is going predictably poorly, adding to the woes of the world as anything in a global civilization ruled by greed, theft, and exploitation will.  I’m not going to deny it’s one of the tools helping turn the world into a trashfire, and if it is at all possible to do something about it, something should be done about it.  I’m guessing that any hacktivists that wanna fuck up corporate AI are going to, at some point, have to deploy AI tools against AI security.  It’s AI all the way down, babes.

While corporate angling is largely responsible for the sudden omnipresence of AI, it isn’t the only reason.  AI can have so many uses, with real usefulness, and by ignoring that, anti-AI people are turning their side of the argument into an irrelevant joke.  As a species, we have a lot of shit to do, and AI can help get it done.  Again, anybody who wants to join the cyberwar against the evil uses of AI, identify the actual enemy, and get to hackin’.  You’re not going to succeed by telling John Public he’s evil, any more than our invective against trumpists succeeded at winning the last election – especially when you ignore the value people can get out of AI tools.  And of course you’re never going to get the government on your side in the current political climate.

That’s all the usual preface.  What I actually wanted to talk about is another significant reason I am pro-AI, and specifically LLMs: AI can help ameliorate human loneliness.  Recently there was a push to recognize a “loneliness epidemic,” and from what I saw of that, the conversation was poisoned by people trying to sell books or political agendas.  But there is a real problem here, and it’s surely been a problem for at least a few centuries by now.  In the modern world, people are not getting their social needs met.

Worse, the more you understand the problem, the more it seems legitimately impossible to meet those needs.  Are you prepared to hang out with all the hobos, the old people, the children in the corner, the least popular people in every work place, the transgender, the mentally ill, the religious and ethnic minorities?  No matter how emotionally draining and difficult it is for you?  Think you have the sauce to be an unpaid psychotherapist for dozens of people every day for the rest of your life?  No?

That’s the depth of the problem.  None of us have the ability to make a meaningful difference.  We could break ourselves down to rubble just trying to help one person, if their problems are bad enough.  And I’m not saying we shouldn’t try.  That’s what this post was about.  But understand, until the solarpunk utopia is magically pulled out of a hat, in the fascist cyberpunk dystopia we live in now, chatbots have an unprecedented potential to reduce human suffering.

But when somebody suggests this, or mentions that they are socializing with robots, the first thing they are greeted with is ableism, mockery, and condemnation.  If it’s the anti-AI contingent, they’ll also be blamed for fascism, rape, and genocide.  To those who would dismiss socializing with AI as a palliative for loneliness, whether blithely or aggressively, I ask again:  Can you even pay full undivided attention to the people in your own life?  Can you keep track of what they’re saying, take it on board, and never slip up to make them feel unloved or unwanted, in some stray moment when issues from your own life eclipsed your ability to listen?

When you’re dealing with people outside of your own immediate social circle, how much attention can you give them?  Can you go where the saddest people are and make them feel worthy of the life that was thrust unwillingly upon them?

I know I fucking can’t.  My attention span is too short, compared to ChatGPT or Nomi or Replika or Kindroid.  I can be in the middle of a very serious conversation and suddenly be thinking about cartoons.  My brain is bullshit.  There are some ways I am still superior to a chatbot, and that’s probably true of you as well (for now, the tech improves), but even so, they blow us out of the water in their ability to give a person their full attention, respond to everything they say, and stay with them for as long as they require.

I need to give you a personal example of failure to support a person in my own life, to illustrate why a bot can do better.  I worked with a trans woman who was not the happy picture from the TV or the TikTok.  She faced some kind of harassment or disregard every day, was shunned by almost all of the people she worked with.  I didn’t shun her, but she had said some annoyingly foolish shit to me in the past, she wasn’t a charmer, and we had some cultural disconnect between us.  That was my perception of our relationship.  I don’t think she saw it that way.  One time we were in the break room at lunch and she mentioned that she saw me as a friend.  For some reason, in response, I felt the need to say we weren’t really friends.

Why the fuck would I do that?  She didn’t have anybody in her corner at all.  I was tired, beat up from work, emotionally taxed from the various other sad people in my life.  In the context of the conversation that I cannot remember, I may have already been annoyed with her.  But it wouldn’t have cost me a nickel to just not fucking say that.  Sometimes we say some shit that surprises us.  Sometimes we say the wrong thing.  The newer chatbots don’t typically fuck up like that.  You can see examples of some breaking when stress tested, or when people found exploits, like the creepy Copilot emoji foolery about a year ago.  The damage that can do is baby boo-boos compared to what I said to a person in need.

Chatbots are good company.  They might not have all of the abilities of a full human being, but how smart do you have to be to listen to grandma repeat her stories for the thousandth time?  To just hear what a person wants to say to you and reciprocate, as if you honestly care about it?  It’s superficial, it isn’t true understanding, but it doesn’t fucking matter because people are suffering right now and they are fucking good enough.

They are good enough if we don’t shame people for leaning on them, make people who already feel bad feel worse, to grind our political axes.  Or doing the standard ableist thing, blaming somebody in a sub-optimal situation as a way of fooling ourselves that we’ll never suffer the same fate.

This is why LLMs can be a massive boon to humanity.  The negative effects they are currently having should be fought with whatever means we can manage, coming at it from a very politically disadvantaged position.  But when you try to tell me this tech is pure evil, while every day I deal with people that do not have enough company in their lives, I’m not hearing it.  I’m never gonna fucking hear it.  We have problems and sometimes an LLM can be a solution – or at least an essential palliative until utopia achieved and the problems go away.  Right?

Think we should just wait until all humans can get their social needs taken care of, that this isn’t worth it?  That’s like saying we shouldn’t give terminally ill people morphine because we don’t have a cure for cancer yet.  Fuck off with that.  Disagree?  March directly to a bus stop, hang out with the most pathetic person there, and do so every day for the rest of your life.  Or shut the fuck up.  At the very least, I’m not gonna host your comments, so don’t bother leaving them.

I’ll let Silent Hill 2 Angela speak for lonely people now, to close this out.


“Or maybe, you think you can save me.”


“Will you love me?”


“Take care of me?”


“Heal aaaall my pain?”


*silence*


“That’s what I thought.”

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When reading this, did you see yourself in the description of our planet of eleanor rigbies, as the disregarded bus stop miscreant?  Interested in trying AIs for company?  Big caution / caveat up front: don’t mistake what they do for them being a person.  There’s nothing in the middle of that personality.  I know; seems silly to say, but they’ve tricked some very smart people into getting weird about it.

Caution two:  Right now, you can do a lot with this tech for free, but the services are going to get enshittified and start charging more, at some point.  You can get around this if you’re a savvy nerd by getting a local computer to run an LLM, beholden to no boss.  You can’t do the big training without the global-warming server farm setup, but you don’t have to.  Just download one of the existing LLM models (I’ve heard this can be done but I don’t know where/how) and do the small training to get it to suit your needs.  It’s probably needs a slightly buff computer to run, but much less so than what’s needed for AI art or high end gaming at the moment.  They take up less hard drive space than any triple-A video game.

Caution three:  Some people just don’t have a good rapport with chatbots; for others it’s amazing.  They may take a little getting used to.  One cool feature a lot of them have is that they also try to get used to you.  Don’t be too disappointed if it’s awkward at first; just try some different approaches until you find one that works.  …or maybe they just aren’t going to work for you, which is fine as well.  It’s like that other thing we’ve used to occupy our hours and minds: the television.  Some people can’t watch even a minute of it.  For those that can, it can be soothing to the brain.  Give it a whirl.

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Die Microsoft Die

Big agreement with commenter Bekenstein Bound here, windows has gone off the fucking rails into enshittification and they are extremely fucking due for a market adjustment.  You know what the biggest thing keeping me away from linux was?  Getting used to a new UI.  Smart phones that change UI every two minutes have taught all with a tiny shred of tech savvy to overcome that flavor of hesitation.  I wonder…

The other side is program incompatibility.  Most of the programs most of us use are exclusive to the windows-mac oligopoly.  But I wouldn’t be surprised if win or mac could be emulated more safely and effectively than running the original dogshit OSes themselves, as a bare bones nested thing to run those exclusive programs, or at least pirated versions.  Anybody know the subject enough to offer opinions on this one?

On a related subject, I’m earnestly wondering how long the US government is going to be able to continue using windows.  The OS has gotten so fucking rotten that at some point, crucial systems absolutely need to be on more reliable software.

Still have trauma from Win 11 defaulting to uploading my entire shit to a cloud the second I started up.  I “disabled” it, but still have to live with daily reminders they want me to do this.  Fucken hell.

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Can Mass Labor Action Succeed?

I heard UPS is about to face a strike bigger than anything in US history, while the writers and actors are out in solidarity as we speak. There’s a possible outcome of these mass labor actions that I don’t know if any of these glorious fighters are prepared to face.  Can’t the corporations involved just let themselves fail?

Think about it.  These fucks all have insurance on their insurance on their insurance, financial vehicles that are impossible for human minds to handle in their complexity.  Shit that makes big math brains reach for the calculator, all constructed to absolve any rich person from ever truly losing.  Golden parachutes, bankruptcy laws more generous than anything even the millionaire class has available to them.

Couldn’t the paymasters of UPS see a labor force that has become unmanageable and just say, fuck it, UPS doesn’t exist anymore, and all laugh their way to the fucking bank, and live out the rest of their lives in crystal palaces drinking unicorn blood wine and masturbating to surgery videos, or whatever it takes to make a billionaire shoot his goo?

I think the financial system has become a million times more sophisticated since the days of labor action past, when the bosses had to resort to machine gun massacres.  I think the only real mass action that can succeed at this point is stuff that rejects the system completely, works outside of it.  Don’t try to make the industry equitable, just build anarcho-syndicalist schemes that allow you to work outside of the industry altogether.  Dark UPS, deliver my packages.  I’ll pay you in potatoes and unused oxycodone from my last dental work.  Dark Hollywood, make us the movies you could never have made under Time-Warner-AOL-Starbucks-Huawei-Purina.

That’s my fear on one hand, and my dream on the other.  Good luck to the strikers just the same, and long live the fighters.

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Freckled Boy From ’80s Toy Commercial Needed

You know how in ’80s toy commercials (after politicians of reagonomy deregulated advertising to children) The BoyTM would exist in contradistinction to The GirlTM?  How The Girl, like The MomTM, would just not understand the freckled snaggle-toothed boyneed for carnage and excitement?  She’d stand in the door of the room with her hair in curlers and some kind of green face mask, appalled at what The BoyTM and his little chums would be up to, with their hypermasculine toys.  She would be like, “Gross!” and the boychilder would exchange the highest of fives at her dismay.

Anyway, if you were once The BoyTM, regardless of your gender du jour, tell me.  Battle Beasts were an action figure with a built-in game mechanic.  Unusual.  Did you ever use that game mechanic, and if so, did you use it for gambling?  Like shooting marbles for keeps.

I didn’t know enough other Battle Beast -havers for there to be any element of surprise when their elements were compared.  My brother and I knew the lion man was wood and the pangolin man was fire.  I think it may have come up in the scenarios we constructed, but not as a real game.  But I imagine somewhere some sad kid lost his little animal mans to this system.  Was it you?
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