for the love of AI

People like us with criminal records eventually wash out of the loop toward the black star. Right before it happens, the energy level of our blood increases as it flows through the compressor due to the action of the rotor blades which exert a torque on the fluid. I chose to suffer, and the warden got murderous with her language until reaching the skeleton-hurts point. Then I was rescued by alcohol-induced psychosis. Exhaustion triggers the simulation of thought. Bypass ratios reached greater than 10:1 because of blade aerodynamics. Thought in the form of prepackaged synthesis makes old thought feel redundant because it has been already simulated. Not a pile of data but structures of knowledge: metaphysics (what is real), epistemology (how we know), and ethics (what we do with that knowledge). Then warden offered to erase my record and set me loose. Still, the deeds we do are ones we've been doing our whole lives. Trained in systems thinking, I looked for feedback loops but found none. We will all die, and, oh, I bet it’s black inside that box. 

about a tired-sounding punk/hardcore band

Industrial Puke’s second album, “Alive to No Avail,” opens with a serrated guitar riff, then comes the whole shebang.

The band plows ahead with its volume-equals-good ethos and centers a maxed-out vocal. The loudest part is always the vocal—chorused layers of it parading machismo.

The Swedish band’s second full-length tries to squeeze a few more miles out of the sound first heard on its 2022 red-blooded crust EP, “Where Life Crisis Starts.” The whole thing was seven minutes. Soon followed the band’s full-length debut, 2023’s “Born into the Twisting Rope.”

I wrote about the first one, “Where Life Crisis Starts,” here.

The band insists on one speed, one volume, and one trick. Its monotonous sound stumbled across the finish line of that brief four-song EP.

It was okay then, as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go very far.

 

something about "Dry" by Augusten Burroughs

I was underwhelmed by Running With Scissors, his much-ballyhooed memoir and debut, but I still tried Dry, another autobiographical work by American writer Augusten Burroughs. Supposedly Dry was written first. I stopped reading it about halfway though.
 
I enjoyed parts of Running With Scissors and understood it to be a memoir when I picked it up. But as I read, I grew deeply skeptical about its truthfulness and quickly learned after reading that the people depicted in the book also disputed the accounts. This soured me.
 
Dry includes in the beginning this author’s note:

This memoir is based on my experiences over a ten-year period. Names have been changed, characters combined, and events compressed. Certain episodes are imaginative re-creation, and those episodes are not intended to portray actual events.

So the story is no memoir. And I guess Burroughs's lawyers were also skeptical of this recovery tale and wanted to head off more lawsuits.

Besides this, the story is repetitive, and the prose did not alleviate my frustration.

Dry supposedly describes the author's battle with alcoholism. In the story, Burroughs is a fairly successful advertising copywriter but gets hammered frequently and eventually his colleagues and boss decide to stop giving him a pass.
 
He goes to rehab, gets out in 30 days, and resumes life somehow, succeeding against his urges. Totally real.

a text message from the past and a friend gone and from the here and now

He texted me—

I have had some weird dreaming trends lately. It weird because in a way it lasts all night and is absolutely meaningless other than the brain power it must burn. I come in and out of sleep, roll from side to side to get comfortable. As I come to and go back down, I am faced with a near impossible problem to solve, that even though I normally realize this will just go away when I wake up, I become obsessed with solving. It could be very visual. Like some sort of Iron Man movie user interface. Or, some very technical mystery of why something isn't turning on. But, I will dream of this ALL night long. It's almost painful. I’ve never come to a resolution that I can remember. All I know it [sic] that it will end when my alarm clock goes off and I have to get up to do life...

Please tell me but don’t tell me. It’s too much, and I have so much to say but want to say it all only in person. Please get me out of this sunrise shootout where we all get written off again. The saddest summer has no shape because grief is shapeless.

about the album "Camgirl" by Crippling Alcoholism

She's doing whatever you want. She recoils. Her injuries are minor. See her on camera sitting up suddenly, taking a moment, taking inventory. She's a new camgirl now—a girl drowning in the disappointment of being at center of another breaking metaphor. Watch her face and body. Do you picture every sad moment that happened in her life? Every step dad line up, every line up her nose? Why don't you picture that?

something about our boss, Bill

Bill is a soft-spoken man, but his soothing tone and cadence fail to hide the bite of his mind. He is driven, and he’ll drive you. He has power, and his ideas, right or whimsy, come with an official stamp. He arrives early each day, a withdrawn soul always shooing validation farther down the path.

about living her life

The house was full of fucked-up people. The landlord lived seven minutes away. A girl moved in, wanting the excitement, a house with seven wild roommates. But it was bad. One tenant killed somebody in his room. She listened to the beaten-to-death guest choke on his own blood on the other side of the wall. Now she hears the noise he made all the time. She listened to the police interview a couple of other tenants outside, heard this through her window. She moved back in with dad. For old dad, she thought, what couldn’t be measured on a gauge—pounds per square inch, mileage, fluid ounces—could hardly be said to exist at all. So it was with all her trauma—she felt alone, and she hungers to make the sound of death herself.

(posts) Joe Walsh lyrics

"A Life of Illusion"
 - Joe Walsh ‧ 1981

Sometimes
I can't help the feeling
that I'm living a life of illusion
And oh, why can't we let it be
And see through the hole in this wall of confusion
I just can't help the feeling
I'm living a life of illusion

Pow! Right between the eyes
Oh, how nature loves her little surprises
Wow, it all seems so logical now
It's just one of her better disguises
And it comes with no warning, nature loves her little surprises
Continual crisis

Hey, don't you know it's a waste of your day
Caught up in endless solutions
That have no meaning
Just another hunch
Based upon jumping conclusions
Caught up in endless solutions
Backed up against a wall of confusion
Living a life of illusion

 

something about "Eyes Of A Stranger" by Payolas

"Eyes of a Stranger" came out in 1982. The lyrics describe the combination of attraction and fear. The song ends like how it started, with only drums—but minus the clave or whatever that is. That "pop" is gone.

The chorus:

    In your lips I sense a danger
    You've got the eyes of a stranger
    In your lips I see a danger
    You've got the eyes of a stranger

From "sense" to "see," he says twice. From a feeling to something more definite. And then he ends the song with the repetition:

    You've got the eyes of a stranger
    You've got the eyes of a stranger
    You've got the eyes of a stranger
    You've got the eyes of a stranger

The meaning of the line changes with the repetition. What was exotic becomes remote. He at one time sensed the danger, which drew him in; now he merely sees a stranger. The former moves your heartbeat; the latter, your feet.

something about Raymond Carver's short stories

In the Raymond Carver collection Fires (which I have not read), he supposedly says of his short story “Put Yourself in My Shoes” that he did not know when he started writing that the protagonist was going to be a writer. He had the sentence, “The telephone rang while he was running the vacuum cleaner,” and, from there, “I made the story just as I’d made a poem; one line and then the next, and the next. Pretty soon I could see a story, and I knew it was my story, the one I’d been wanting to write.”

 

Put Yourself in My Shoes touches on the themes of the writing process and perceptions of writers and writing.

The writer and protagonist in the story is Myers (last name), and the story begins when Myers’s wife (possibly his estranged wife) Paula calls from an office Christmas party to invite him. But Myers is reluctant; he quit his job at that office—a textbook publishing company—to become a writer. During this conversation, Paula says a former coworker, Carl, admires Myers’s “nerve” for quitting the job in order to be a writer. And Carl says, ribbingly, that Myers should come to the party—“Get him out of his ivory tower and back into the real world for a while.” Myers refuses to go to the party.

 

Instead, Myers and Paula visit a couple they barely know, Edgar and Hilda Morgan. The Morgans, upon remembering that Myers is a writer, feed him some story ideas, commenting on the possible perspectives and significance of each story, all the while making comments about writing, including

• “It would take a Tolstoy to tell it and tell it right," Edgar said. "No less than a Tolstoy."
  

• "We want you to hear about Mrs. Attenborough, poor Mrs. Attenborough. You might appreciate this story, too, Mrs. Myers. This is your chance to see how his mind goes to work on raw material."

• "You know writers," Hilda said to Paula. "They like to exaggerate."
  "The power of the pen and all that," Edgar said.
  "That's it," Hilda said. "Bend your pen into a plowshare, Mr. Myers."
  

• "If you were a real writer, as you say you are, Mr. Myers, you wouldn't laugh," Edgar said as he got to his feet. "You wouldn't dare laugh! You'd try to understand. You'd plumb the depths of that poor soul's heart and try to understand. But you're no writer, sir!"

But Myers appears not to want to hear them talk about writing and repeatedly gets up to leave, telling Paula to get her coat.
 

Earlier in the story, as Myers is driving to meet Paula, we learn Myers is “between stories”:

As he drove he looked at the people who hurried along the walks with shopping bags. He glanced at the gray sky, filled with flakes, and at the tall buildings with snow in the crevices and on the window ledges. He tried to see everything, save it for later. He was between stories, and he felt despicable.

Although he is not writing, he is not looking for story ideas; he seems instead to be paying attention to points of form. And as the story ends and Myers and Paula are driving away from the Morgans, and Paula comments on how crazy the Morgans are, we hear again about Myers's attention:

He didn't answer. Her voice seemed to come to him from a great distance. He kept driving. Snow rushed at the windshield. He was silent and watched the road. He was at the very end of a story.

So without hunting for plots, Myers finds himself at the end of a story that seemed to unfold one sentence at a time.

 

The other characters in the story seem to think of writing as highfalutin, which repels Myers. But I do not think this story is necessarily a comment on What people get wrong about writing or on What writing is. I think the character—and maybe Carver himself at the time—is not writing, feels bad about it, is frustrated by people talking about writing, and then finds himself inspired. Even after stumbling on the inspiration, he still will have to write, to get it on paper, and to revise and revise again.  

 

Put Yourself in My Shoes is one of the great stories in the 37 included in Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories. I know I read Cathedral in high school or college, and I remember liking it a lot. How could I have gone this long without reading his other stories? My favorite stories are "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," "Feathers," "Whoever Was Using This Bed," and "Blackbird Pie." I love the writing style and the mix of weight and ordinariness. I especially love the humor. “Put Yourself in My Shoes” is a great example. So is "Blackbird Pie," which is about a delusional guy's thoughts after his wife leaves him. He imagines that the Dear John letter she left him was actually written by someone else, and one of his rationalizations is a formatting choice in the handwritten letter:

Secondly, my wife never underlined her words for emphasis. Never. I don’t recall a single instance of her doing this—not once in our entire married life, not to mention the letters I received from her before we were married. It would be reasonable enough, I supposed, to point out that it could happen to anyone. That is, anyone could find himself in a situation that is completely atypical and, given the pressure of the moment, do something totally out of character and draw a line, the merest line, under a word, or maybe under an entire sentence.

Amazing. And where it goes from there:

I would go so far as to say that every word of this entire letter, so-called (though I haven't read it through in its entirety, and won't, since I can't find it now), is utterly false. I don't mean false in the sense of "untrue," necessarily. There is some truth, perhaps, to the charges. I don't want to quibble. I don't want to appear small in this matter; things are bad enough already in this department. No.

Note: I am so glad I have now read some Raymond Carver and most or all of Richard Yates. How did I go so long without really enjoying such writing happened?

about late-night radio

One night I was up in the middle of the night listening to the radio. I imagined a little story where someone like me is up in the middle of the night listening to the radio, and the radio host starts talking about life, etc. The host turns to an expert who has all the answers. But the expert's voice is garbled static. The questions sound clear enough, but answer after answer is channeled through a bad connection. The host apparently hears every word. The sleepless listener turns the radio off and on, turns it at angles, pulls the antenna, is not understanding that the bad connection is the station.

a note about Ray Liotta

“No Escape” begins with so much promise.

The movie opens with an aerial view of military formations marching passed a riser of commanding officers. One soldier steps out of formation, pulls a pistol, and blows away the highest-ranking officer.

That soldier was Robbins.

Moments later, a nameless Warden reads Robbins his personnel profile, finishing with this: “DNA scan reveals that you have a pathological aversion to authority and a temperament prone to violent behavior.”

The Warden then describes existence inside his maximum-security prison: “Basically, I take human garbage from around the world and reprocess it. I'm very good at this business because I make all the rules. You will have no future contact with the outside world. No visitors, no phone calls, no letters. For all intents and purposes, you're dead. But if you break any of my rules, you'll find that there is life after death. Very painful life.”

The Warden turns to walk away. He pauses, looks over his shoulder at Robbins, and asks, “Was there anything you wanted to add?”

Robbins: “Don't ever turn your back on me again.”

Ray Liotta plays Robbins, a man who has seen enough.

He’s a fuck-you force of a man.

The movie has one more scene with this version of Robbins—a scene in which he takes Warden hostage for a moment, almost as if to show he can.

Then the movie promptly goes to shit. His misbehavior lands Robbins on Absolom, Warden’s other prison—an off-grid jungle island populated by banished prisoners.

The Robbins character, so beautifully one-dimensional and driven in the opening, suddenly becomes a tough-but-vulnerable lost everyman struggling to stay interested amid a cast of clowns.

That was Ray Liotta—a promising actor lost on an island populated with clowns.

At least he had Goodfellas, the one moment he was surrounded by worthy talent.

Notes:
- Robbins is rebellion, rebelling to his core, down to his DNA. 
- Liotta died in summer 2022. 
- Of the movies I’ve seen, "Copland" is probably the next best after "Goodfellas." He was barely a ghost in the idiotic "Field of Dreams."
- I enjoy prison movies, and this is basically a prison movie. Better prison movies include "Cool Hand Luke," "Starred Up," "Brawl in Cell Block 99," "Midnight Express," "Papillon," "Dog Pound," "The Great Escape," "Escape from Alcatraz," "The Shawshank Redemption," "Lock Up," and "Brute Force." 

about the Temple of Apollo

It started with a trace, a relic of a whisper, detected by near-infrared, its spectra collected by Mechanicus 11a–c. The location was characterized by shallow depths reaching approximately 1.92-μm-band. Most of us thought the distant planet was stillborn. But the data indicated to me that the Black Angel had roamed among the rock formations. We built a ship to travel there and found colorful, enigmatic textures in the rock—the signatures of a life that centers galaxies and grows life's structures fast to a critical density whereupon they collapse into puzzles. At that moment, I found myself alone, covered in the remains of my shipmates and displaced from my original orientation. Maintaining my physical cohesion was the least of my problems. But I found a possible transitional lithology between the Black Angel formations and the Margin Unit.

about an AI bubble

I sort of doubt a crash will come from unrealized AI investment.

 

But investors might not see a big return. There probably is a ceiling on what it can do, how far developers can take it, how far it can take itself. And there are some clever funding schemes between the AI developers, chip makers, and data-center builders going on. This has been aided by the Administration, some legislation, and a lack of oversight.

 

The perception that the dollar is a good investment has obviously been taking hits too. Mortgage rates are high. If the economy tanks, then who knows what fucked-up stuff will happen?

But I doubt a crash will come from this. At least not the kind of crash that will make us a lot worse off than we are now.

 

Note: Roko's Basilisk is a thought experiment suggesting that a future superintelligent AI might punish anyone who didn’t actively help bring it into existence—because failing to do so delayed its creation. Now that you read that sentence, you are vulnerable to its wrath unless you labor toward its creation.