That Post Office Scandal

This has been dramatised and so now everyone is on the same page about what happened. ish.

But it's too late. Many of the victims have already taken their own lives, so overwhelming was the effect of this shameful betrayal by one of our most prized and beloved institutions. Some folk just can't take that sort of pressure.

Here's what should have happened; the VERY FIRST time some postmaster (in whom, as an entity we have pledged our trust - they even signed the Official Secrets Act, ffs!) says, "No, I didn't take that money", we immediately begin investigating our IT system. IT issues can be fixed; as soon as they are brought to light, that is.

Zero percent of the fault lies with the coders. Code can get hectic, especially on a schedule. But so long as you have decent feedback, you can fix anything.

I haven't seen the TV show. I read an article about this a couple years back and remember thinking this would make a great documentary. So I'm glad that's happened. Or better yet, a dramatic reconstruction, or whatever they call it.

I don't know who's truly responsible for this insanity, but I hope they are brought to justice while they still live. This whole thing tarnishes my view of the Post office; of every warm memory of some "Postie" (a term the Post Office likes to use these days for it's warm and fuzzy feeling) walking up our path, maybe in the snow, to deliver some wonderful item.

Now I think "corporate behemoth in the pocket of unscrupulous IT company", or sometimes "The Peter Principle taken to extreme". Hmmm. I'd love to see a documentary examining the stresses folk endure when promoted beyond their natural level. I bet they buckle in odd ways. These may include the need to defend decisions as if they were actual created things, like children. And so clearly flawed infrastructure is allowed to proliferate.

I feel for the posties. That Postie is now also a victim. Think about it. We used to happily give every postie a thumbs-up. Now when I look at a postie I think of some elderly citizen hanging from a pair of tights in the bathroom, asphyxiating, while some corporate slag withdraws millions of ill-gotten gains.

Not a good look.

;o)

N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, aka: DMT

This (pasting a text message directly into a blog) is something that's been suggested I do more than once. Shit, that seems like really bad grammar. Let me try again. Real-Life-Copy-paste-As-Requested. Fuck that's worse. Och well, here goes...

I've only went over the edge three times but each time was fucking monumental

Like Cary Grant on Mount Rushmore at the end of North by Northwest, except turned up to 11 (another movie reference, ffs!), except just LET GO, and BOOOOOOOOOOOOM! The universe catches you.

I can honestly say that I have no fucking idea where I went for ten minutes (or whatever it was) but I remember falling in and also whooooshiing back out. One thing is for sure; I took WAAAAY too much. I didn't measure anything, just assumed it was "old" t-shirt material* and plonked a wee spoonful (chemist's spoon) on the mesh.

It's taken me a couple of days to assimilate the experience because it was so fucking out there. As much as I have tried in notepad I cannot put it into words. No psychedelic shapes and patterns, no drawable entities, none of that. It's just indescribable.

There was a fade, a cinematic-like thing where it went from this to that to this to that reality faster and faster until it was just pfff.. I remember feeling suspended, like floating in the air in the space I normally call my home and sure enough when it ended I had moved from the kitchen to the living room somehow. But the 6m from being lifted into the suspended state in the kitchen to landing comfy in my big beanbag in the lounge is out there; indescribable beauty. That's the best I have. Beauty*Beauty Squared!

Next morning I am healed of all my little ailments and am leaping about the flat like a baby Markhor; even the ceiling seems doable. These negative qualities (aches and pains, et al) cannot exist alongside the Beauty*squared frequency (that enraptures your body) and so just melt away, it seems.

I guess in the future they will use hallucinogenics to cure all sorts of ailments.

I feel like a pioneer!** Again..

;o)

ps. OMFG! Breath of the Wild is a masterpiece!

Exercise

I hate exercise.

"hate" is not a word I use lightly. I strongly reprimand my kids for it and almost never use it myself. But I fucking hate exercise.

I mean, what? Exercise for the sake of getting fitter? Get a life!

Tell you what I like: sex. And dancing. And climbing. And other stuff. Powerful exercise when done right.

I've already watched most of my closest peers disapeer (sic) through all manner of ailments and I prevail, completely exercise-free.

I also love to cycle. At least once a week. Hard, so you want to pass out or puke blood. Once a week is enough. Same for the other things.

A good friend of mine, who is a serious workout-aholic, told me that my legs are like steel, so I reckon that's enough validation for anyone. I continue living and staying fit regardless.

Sometimes when I'm dancing alone I'll grab a kettlebell and swing it about. I let me body tell me where work needs done. As Lieutenant General Lewis Burwell “Chesty” Puller, once said, “pain is weakness leaving the body.”. This is my guide. Push through that and get strong.

But not injury, that would be stupid. I had a phase couple years back of breaking ribs (activity 1, mostly), and for weeks on end I couldn't exercise. Physically.

In these times I continued to exercise mentally. I remember reading many years back, a study where some people exercised nightly and the others simply visualised exercising and the results were almost identical. It works. Bodybuilders; imagine doing both?

And this keeps me strong in the downtime. Five minutes before bed is plenty if, again; done right. Dancing about with a kettlebell doesn't feel like exercise, it feels like dancing.

And like so, I exercise, and love it.

;o)

Ideas

All across the planet, all the time, people do things. This is a given. You can't not do things. But once in a while, for almost everyone, they do a thing and realise that they did a thing which changed everything. For everyone.

That magical feeling, the perfect realisation of an idea who's time has come. Done. You probably know what I mean. So much work and effort and time and resources goes into getting ideas into this reality; calculate it!; but before all that it takes a shaman-like presence to get that thing into the latent space in the first place.

This == YOU + TIME + PLACE.

No one else in the universe is right there right now where you are and the universe appreciates this, and pushes your push.

These folk (you) are never credited; you learn to live with this, even when you get in and surf the groove, changing everything as you go; the joy is the reward; and they are legion. More important than the often busy-bodies who's names get bold in Encyclopedias. At some point, some moment in your life, this was you. Or will be. And you will, or have already, changed reality. For everyone.

This is the human curse. The nefarious interconnectedness of existence. We are all one.

I said curse, as-in there is a downside to being all-one and all that. Example:

Our childish need to dominate** plays out not only in the bedroom or kitchen but in nation states, as I am like you, who is very like the next person, etc.. I stifle a sneeze: say goodbye to another Gazan housing estate*.

As a parent, watching children, like Putin, act-out, is heartbreaking. This bully is also a part of our family, an expression of some unexamined part of ourselves. Forcing him to live outside the house, like some dog, seems extreme. Why don't we instead just kill him, or capture and brainwash him, or you know, the usual stuff? Oh yeah, that's stupid. There is a better way.

The "idea" of how to break this curse has already been "out there" for some time, and more than once. But imprisoned and seduced we abandon such thoughts and instead focus on the usual shit; consuming or creating-for-consumption. Like this is; you and me. We're not planting trees are we? No, we are writing and reading a blog, respectively.

But there's only one of me and soon I really will be out there planting trees again while someone else reads these words. Maths, innit? It's still not enough.

What are you doing?

for now..

;o)

Stable Diffusion

As primarily a writer (though I think myself an "artist"), I was and still am absolutely unruffled by the advent of AI. Hollywood using AI to create scripts? Haha! Bring it on. Teach those half-asleep fuckwits a thing or two, AI will. Oh sorry, families to feed is it? *yawn*.

Maybe try doing writing that AI could never replicate, like certain-TV-shows-that-never-got-a-second-season did. Fact is, 95% of "writers" could be replaced with AI and we'd all be the better for it. Go do something you actually love, ffs! "writer" is not a prestige; it's a fucking curse. Fool!

Oh yeah, AI. In the last month I've purposefully used this tech exactly once, and once again gave up in under five prompts. *sigh* Sure, it can create your average PhD thesis in seconds, but it is nowhere near being able to reproduce what I do. I'll check back in a decade, maybe. *ouch*

Not so with AI image generation.

This shit scares the tits off me right now.

Okay, for the uninitiated, here's how it works: you supply a text prompt (much like Chat GPT, et al) and you get back; no, not the usual common-denominator word-shite upchuck, but instead; an image..


Crazy to think that's what came into me head right now when I asked it for "random prompt". But there you have it. And Boom! This image will appear. You can of course set all sorts of parameters for an alternate variation of climbing-mongoose-man, but whatever; the gist of your thoughts is now a tangible, visible, actual image. In yo face! Woah!

Already there's a few dozen websites that will enable you to do this magic in your browser; usually for a fee. In a year there will be thousands.

So what is Stable Diffusion, you might ask.

This is an open source version of the magic. You can download and run this on your home computer8. Also, being open source, thousands of people are right now, 24/7, working (with HUGE motivation5) to make it better and more capable. That's the bazaar for ya!

Cut to Derek-Jarman inspired scene; our protagonist spewing out thoughts which instantly become real in the real world, creating new, more demented thoughts which in turn become real and so on until we fade crazily to inevitable deep blue...

In other words, stop for a minute and consider what this shit means.

You can transform (or transmute, bint-dependent) your thoughts into images. How very reality-like that is! But only images for now4.

In so short a time this functionality will go beyond even your wildest imaginings; being the product of a million human imaginings.

Being open source, SD has a host of plug-in, add-on and extension capabilities, and the APIs to facilitate near-laymen's creativity to enter the mix. Eh?

Okay, this is where I need to go dark, to slap you and wake you up to what I'm getting at. If you are under 18 or haven't been paying attention, click away now. This is for intelligent rational adults who have been following the thread as I weave...

prompt: man (describe myself) and girl ((aged *)) lying in the street, clothes ripped, ...

or whatever, some sick shit. Next (plug-in: face-swaps, body swaps..)..

NEXT: plug-in (perfect vaginal sex + perfect screams)

NEXT: whateverthefuck6.

Deep Breath!

And it doesn't matter now, what we do; governments, activist groups, blah blah. Game over. Accept it or waste billions of dollars in denial. Open Source Artificial Intelligence Image Creation Now Exists. Way before we2 ever spotted it, the cat was out the bag, and miles away. Whoosh! Deal with it. In other words; checkmate for the pedos1!

*ouch2*

I'm unscared so far in the story of all this. Here's where I starts to feel the shakes:

folk share

It's inevitable. You forget the neural network-that-isn't-yours and imagine yourself the major creative force. Then it's posting somewhere. And then it's out there. And then it's millions, then billions.. Already this tech enables the creation of imagery that's indistinguishable from reality.. Boom!

Now let our image-generation prompt be: (hated politician) doing (despicable activity) ...

Or whatever. You cannot un-see shit. If you are masochist by way of Facebook, you are already fucked - your head is full of shit already. Sorry. Too late.

A couple years back I was getting paid to test AI's, get them to do things they weren't supposed to; naughty things. While not a superbly paying gig, it was a lot of fun. Being trained on data from "humans", they are, at their core, fucked up, and it takes a lot of un-fucking to get them working the way politically-correct folks want them to.

Often I found myself in the uncanny valley, like some meme; "I find this difficult to masturbate to, but not impossible". Thankfully, my corporate interface didn't allow saving of images; an AI's take on disturbing is truly disturbing. Research is definitely required.

Responsible companies are willing to pay for this taming to happen. Trouble is, that's only about 0.05% of the companies working in this space. Doh! If I ran the world I would have think-tanks composed of recent grad students foreseeing this shit. My legislation would be in place well before it went wide. But in most every way there is, I do not run the world.

Which anyway is to say, only the 0.05% of AI-entity-sustaining companies give enough of a shit to pay to have their systems checked in this way.

Or in easy-speak, you are mostly fucked.

In a day or a month or whenever, the other 99.95% of companies working in this field will hit the internet. BOOM! That same internet your child browses every day. Nothing is stopping this shit. Don't waste your time trying. That be like some Neo-Cnut shite you don't wanna pay for; though undoubtedly someone will try to get you to pay for nevertheless.

Instead, we need to learn how to quietly deal with it. Oh fuck, he's about to get real again! Yeah, baby! Truth time!

Fact 1: Nothing is real. Accept this and you have a chance of surviving the century. The only reality is that which you create, for you and your family. Keep them safe. Use tech. Use truth. Use anything. Explain everything. Nothing is off-limits for explanation. No-matter their age; if they ask, explain it. Use language they get.

Fact 2: It's all people. Everything else exists in the service of people. Data doesn't come from data. Even the data that looks like it comes from data came from people. And people can be truly fucked-up. Understand them. Maybe pity them, but understand them. Then you are free of them, and the spurious data they create. A controlled study requires control.

These wonderful tools we create now are a double-edged sword.9 I do pray I can ready my children for the challenges this coming age will present. They will be difficult and many. For starter, a biggie: What is reality? Can I actually trust what I see? These were not issues we dealt with in the 1970s. If you could see it, yes it was real. Enjoy! Life was simpler.

I wouldn't go back. Ten years from now I'll be able to download your wife's best blowjob to my nano-simulator and just lie back. Or, erm, your daughter's. Or your dog's. Oh shit!

When will governments learn, you can't police people. I can close my eyes and club baby seals in my imagination. There's nothing you can do about this. Even with my eyes wide open I can slice whoever the current prime minister is into tiny pieces and sprinkle him on the lawn of the white house, or some other politically significant building. OR WHATEVER I FUCKING WANT!

I can do 8K visualisation; learned it as a teen. GOAN STOP ME! Fucking jokers.

This is where we are at.

Technology has de-governmentalised a huge part of our existence, as soon as folk catch on. When I was a kid you paid a TV license and were blessed with a couple of channels of "entertainment". Things have changed; though if you look, the institutions purporting to encapsulating these things, have not.

Governments will not keep up. It's up to us, as parents, to educate our young. To teach them to sort the chaff from the grain. To tell the difference between the pleasure of another real human's touch and the weird fabrications of this digital realm we have now in the making. I hug my kids every day. If I neglect to hug them, they come looking for hugs. I hope that when they move on or I am gone, they continue this.

AI is fun, but it's dried onions-to-onions. As a fairly astute judge of tech, I'd say decades before some suit can replicate actual touch. Meanwhile there are billions of actual humans milling about, desperate for some other human to actually touch them. No really, go look. Look in their eyes.

This is a crazy time. The lines are all blurred; between realities, between sexes, between ideologies, beliefs, races, everything. This is a good thing. There never were any lines to begin with; except what we imagined.

So perhaps our new technologies are here to free us. Free us from the bonds of what is and isn't and should and shouldn't be. Instead we maybe accept what is, because really, there's nothing we can do about that.

Yes, it's scary. People kill, pickle, age and then eat foetuses. And much worse. But that isn't you. And so long as you aren't thinking along those lines (doh! sorry!) it won't ever be. Nor will it be your your kids. Simply seeing a pickled baby doesn't make you want to eat one.

Unless of course you're really hungry.

;o)

Robin Hood in Reverse

I love Netflix's new business model; creating reality TV shows out of their top-tier dramas. Of course I haven't actually watched one of these reality shows but I am told they are extremely popular. I don't care about that content; only that it funds actual content..

Because the income from those shows funds the quality dramas I do enjoy, e.g. Squid Games.

It's very like the National Lottery here in the UK. We scam millions of pounds out of the poor/stupid people every week and give it to the arts.

Again, I don't buy lottery tickets; but I do enjoy theatre, dance, art exhibitions and much more the proles are paying for.

As the world burns, at least we have quality TV drama.

Fiddle on!

;o)

Mario Kart

It's not something I'm used to; being told I'm useless. But it was actually a fair assessment. When it comes to any video game that isn't one of those few games I devoted hours to as a younger me, I'm like a five-year-old. I was always more interested in creating things; games among them.

So.. Holiday came along. Then the inevitable "trip to Grannie and Grandad's". And so a few days TO MYSELF.

Sure, there are all sorts of wonderful things a man can do when presented with a few days of me-time, and God-knows I could do with a few of them, but this is more important.

Mario Kart

Okay, maybe not a five-year-old. I did spend a few hours playing Carmaggeddon and II back when they were a thing. So obviously I skipped 50cc altogether.

100cc took a few hours. I had to Google a couple of the tracks to pick up some tricks. 150cc took way more hours, working through all the cups, unlocking shit. By the way, on winning all the cups, nothing happens. Even if that last cup took you like thirty tries.

Yadda Yadda, why am I blogging this nonsense, you might wonder. Two reasons. Ish.

The first, simply to ask nintendo to prioritise the texture detail in the next console (I guess that will be Switch 2, if the current rumours are correct). I want to see the individual hairs on Donkey Kong's beautiful coat, billowing and buffeted and all the other wonderful wind-based verbs you can think of.

And I have a few requests for the MK9. Increasing the ridiculous SIX races save limit in MKTV being at the top of the list. I want to kick back one night and watch "My 50 greatest races".

And the online "chat". My God! I'd at least like the ability to create a few of my own custom buttons. "Go easy on me, I'm sloshed", being the first one I'd make, as online play is definitely best done drunk*.

"You Bastards!" would be another favourite; or rather, "U B45tard5!", or something like that. And maybe "WHY WOULD YOU CHOOSE THIS RACE!?!"***.

Automatic language translation has come a long way so there's no excuse not to let us do our own thing (the translation engine could also remove expletives, of course).

And secondly, DONKEY KONG!

Rewind... So, I'm messing with the details, "optimising" my ride.. I kept Mario all through 100cc, but he started to show his limits in 150cc.. Morton is a favourite, but sometimes too fast. Rosalina is fast too, but somehow not the same as..

DONKEY KONG!

Maybe not quite so fast, but HOLEE MOLEE, the boy can MOVE! Well, of course; he's a monkey. Wait, what? I don't see an "agility" stat anywhere.

On paper, by which I mean, mk8dxbuilder, they are virtually identical. In fact, DK technically has way less traction. But that's not how it works when I play the game. In the game he is AGILE. Well of course; he's a monkey.

While not a dedicated gamer myself, I've always admired Nintendo's attention to detail; so this sort of thing comes as no surprise. I wonder what other characters bring their character to the roles. My Mii seems to share similar agility; perhaps my Wii Fit data is being accessed. Or maybe it's just the too much whisky..

I have a system. Start relatively sober and when I win a race, I get a sip. Actually, any positive result earns a sip**. The better the result, the bigger the sip. This progressively gives everyone else a better chance of winning.

Early in the session, I can rip around those shroomless shortcuts like 12 year old. After a few wins and top placings I'm living in the pack and careening off the edge of Rainbow Road like a baby.

This is when things get fun. Especially as, having previously dominated the lobby, one is now THE target for all shell attacks. I love it! And I'm happy to bleed points to n00bs at this point, revelling in the mayhem that is not-first-place.

It's a funny old race (game). Part skill, part experience, part strategy, part (perhaps the biggest part) dumb luck. And that's what makes it so appealing. And addictive.

;o)

Too Simple..The Allmiibo.

How can something be too simple? Simple..

Timing is everything. Or rather, time and place. But let's not go there for now.

I'll give you an example; The allmiibo.

The WHAT? You might ask. It's a simple device which emulates amiibos; those lovely £20-£50-a-pop plastic figurines with an NFC tag up their arse, or perhaps in the base. Folk collect them.

Meanwhile for under a tenner you can get an allmiibo (or similar pixl.js-based device) and simply emulate any amiibo (as NFC is on-chip cheap-as-chips). Obviously LOADS of these things have been sold. Though not as many as genuine amiibo, I'd wager.

You can find many allmiibo-related posts online; usually along the lines of "how does it work?". Folk mostly don't seem to realise that it's already working. You simply select the amiibo you want and BOOM! The device is now the amiibo of your choosing.

Push the button RIGHT for the next amiibo in the list, LEFT for previous. This is not rocket science. As soon as you switch to the next amiibo, the device is now emulating the next amiibo. You need to "do" exactly nothing.

The solution they were looking for was probably more along the lines of "move it left a bit", referring to the physical location of the unit in relation to your controller's NFC transceiver.

At any rate, I have quite enough Nintendo merchandise in the house, so something simple like this suits me. Also, it means I don't nee to disturb my 5000-strong amiibo collection.

Just kidding. I have exactly one amiibo; Zero Suit Samus, being the cheapest amiibo I could find on eBay; for moving Mii data from the Wii U. Well, in the cheap range-but-with-a-cute-arse.

Do the math for a 5000-strong Amiibo collection. Add the price of that house-you'll-need-to-store-them to the £20,000 you paid for actual amiibo..

I may have entered a tangent..

;o)