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?