A Betamax man in a VHS world

Iam writing this on a Psion Series 5MX. Why? Mainly because I’m a bit of a contrary bastard, but also because I am on a quest. Aquest to find a portable, distraction-free writing device.

Sometimes called a ‘writerdeck’, there’s a whole Reddit community dedicated to finding, using and making these types of devices.So what are the parameters here? Well, in no particular order, the ideal device would be portable – no bigger than a laptop – battery powered, have a decent keyboard, and enable me to get plain text or RTF files off it easily.

What it doesn’t need is the internet, subscriptions, apps, or any of that modern shit.

So, how does the 5MX shape up? It’s definitely portable, and has a nice leather case. Batteries are 2 AA sized cells, and the backup 2032 is easily accessible. Seem to last for ages. Keyboard is OK- a bit stiff but nice travel and full set of characters. It takes a Compact Flash card, which with a Russian Doll like combination of adaptors I’ve used a microSD in. This allows me to get files on and off easily enough, but I’ve also ordered a serial cable and adaptor so hopefully Ican connect to my Mac and use a bit of software called Reconnect to do the same thing, plus backups and so on.

It’s a cool thing. The OSis nice and it’s instant on. Ilike it quite a lot. But is it ‘The One’? Our adventure continues…

I have a theory about where we’re headed with AI.

If you take away the staggering environmental cost, the complete paucity of any kind of ‘ideas’ as to how to make LLMs or AI Agents actually work for humanity, the casual plagiarism of actual human effort and the usual ‘let’s be as evil as possible by default to make more money’ deathgrip held on the technology by a few whey-faced white nerd billionaires, the facts of the matter are as follows:

1. Everyone thinks AI produced art, writing and music is shit.

and

2. Everyone can tell when art, writing or music has been AI generated.

Therefore, my prediction is thus:

The rise of AI will make actual human-crafted art more valuable than ever before.

Even if it’s shit, it’s shit with soul.

So, apparently we now live in a post-truth world. You can say anything you like, just make that shit up, and it’s not possible to challenge it – fuck your facts, logic, common sense.

This is very disturbing for a number of reasons. Not least of which, is us creative types – who for so long have been making things up for fun and profit – are now going to be indistinguishable from the grifters, the corrupt, and the downright evil.

So, how to combat this? It would be tempting to retreat into a fantasy world, and effectively ‘unsubscribe’ from reality. Lots of ways to do this, and it is indeed tempting.

However, we can use our power of making-things-up for good, rather than evil. Satire, comedy, social commentary, allegory, have been used since civilisation began and should continue to be so.

So whether you’re Dante, or Stephen Colbert, keep doing your thing. Let’s make sure a post-truth world isn’t also a post-consequences world.

What? Who is this?

Look, I don’t know if you think you’re some kind of wise-guy or what, but this is the second time you’ve come here this week, talking some phooey about a car dealers in Bismarck. Well, I told you then and I’m telling you know, I don’t know nothing about it.

What? I don’t care what Google says! You hear me? This is a personal web blog for a mildly mentally ill creative type in the UK. Huh? No. I don’t sell cars.

Well, I don’t know how you ended up here either! Huh? You clicked the link did you. Just saw it there and clicked the link. Good for you. Good for you. Uh huh.

No, look – this conversation is over. If you, or anyone else comes in here looking for a Bismarck Car Dealership, we’re gonna have a fucking problem, understand? Goodbye. Yeah fuck you too buddy.

Blogs (abbreviation for ‘weblog’) first came to prominence in the late 1990s, a time when the democratisation of online publishing was nascent. Initially single-user websites, typically either personal or niche in nature, throughout the 2000s these became curated, multi-user sites (eg, AKPCEP.com, dotCULT, etc.).

Moving into the 2010s, micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter, and web 2.0’s inclusion of replies and ‘social’ aspects bring us to where we are today. A few behemoths soak up most of the discourse and put it behind a login.

I’m of the old school, whereby people with things to say developed their own space, and had full control over the presentation and distribution of their words. No adverts, subscriptions, data mining, algorithms, Russian misinformation bots, Cambridge Analytica.

Nowadays of course, you can still create a blog, write in it, and hope people read it – much like I’m doing now, but like a lot of things in life, you end up asking yourself the question “what’s the point?”.

Maybe it’s just for expression’s sake. Maybe it’s stubbornness. Do I even have anything to say anymore? Probably not. There’s easier and more fulfilling ways of saying what I want to say (music, art, fiction) than typing things into a lonely text box.

One thing I do miss, back from the weblog days, is the ability to link between individual blogs in a curated, deliberate fashion. So, if you have a blog you’d like people to know about, link it in the comments below – I can’t promise you traffic, but I can promise you solidarity.

I’ve counted, and I know 123,704 facts. I’d like to share a selection with you now.

• Some bees are magnetic
• There are more different lego bricks than there are grains of rice in the sahara desert
• Bruce Forsyth had an extra foot
• Terrapins taste like hummus – and nobody knows why
• The term ‘Hi-Fi’ was invented by Benny Hill by accident when saying hello to his neighbour Fiona
• There are no cats in the world named Derek
• In Bulgaria, licking a post it note is punishable by death
• Before Bill Gates formed Microsoft, he wanted to be a “sexy cowboy”

I know another 123,696 facts. That’s another fact, so actually 123,697.

When I was a child, I used to lay on my back in the summer playground and stare at the heavy clouds. I would imagine one of them was an alien spacecraft, hovering ponderously, come to take me home.

It would explain, wouldn’t it, how I didn’t feel like I belonged here on Earth, and why everyone else slipped and slid through life while I tore at imaginary barbs and tangling vines.

After all, 8 year old me thought, I am an alien.

Most likely a common thread of ‘otherness’ that weaves through many a nascent psyche, but I found the thought of collection reassuring. A return to a known-good world and life where everything just – ahhh! – made sense after all.

40 years later, I wonder if I was right all along.

Do you ever get that thing – I’m sure you do – where you constantly hear a robotic woman’s voice saying the same string of numbers over and over again in your head?

I wonder if there’s a medical name for this phenomenon. Apart from being batshit crazy, that is.

It’s like having an annoying pop song stuck in your head, but much more sinister, like it’s a warning or an instruction or something. It feels like I need to do something with the numbers 35719.

It’s a shame robot lady can’t give me some useful numbers, like the lottery ones.

Sometimes, when I’m very bored indeed, I look at the Google Analytics data for this website. Today, I saw this among the most popular URLs visited:

Obviously, Google is my friend. Takako Konishi was a Japanese office worker who lost her job and sank into depression. She travelled to Minneapolis, then to Bismarck, then to Fargo, where she drank two bottles of Champage, lay down in the snow and died.

There’s an urban legend she went to Fargo to try and find the $1m treasure Steve Buscemi’s character hid there in the film of the same name, but this wasn’t the case. She’d gone there because an old American lover hailed from there, and I guess she was lonely.

A very sad story, but one that deserves to be told. There wasn’t a page on this site called ‘Takako Konishi’ before, but there is now.

So, I’ve been prescribed anti-depressants. A shocker for my millions of readers I’m sure.

I’ve pushed medication right to the very end of the solutions list for my mental health problems, and here we are. No more cards left to play. I’ve dieted, exercised, journaled, meditated, yoga’d, gratituded and ‘taken time for me’ as much as a human could realistically be expected to. Time for the big guns of big pharma.

The 20 minute phone call with a GP I’d never met went well, he said there’ll likely be side effects but as long as they weren’t intolerable I should keep taking the pills (50mg Sertraline for those Prescription Pokemon catchers out there) and should make another appointment in 4 weeks to see how I’m getting on.

Cue a whirlwind of additional and crippling anxiety after reading the instruction leaflet in the box of pills, and another where I worry the GP won’t pick up the phone and leave me hooked on mind bending drugs with no way to get off this crazy ride.

I went for a 14km walk by myself on my last day before starting the pills. Either my last experience of ‘reality’ or my last day without ‘normal’ brain chemistry, whichever way you want to look at it. The drugs will either work, or they won’t. But I have to take them because I don’t have any other options apart from staying how I am, which isn’t an option at all.

But at least there’s delicious space eels.