honey, what's this all about?

first written 01.30.25 2144est

    The first version of Dall-E came out in January of 2021. It predated Midjourney by a year and some change. In its' infancy it captured the imagination of many dim wit gawkers on Twitter creating crude images of people with melty faces and impossible ligaments, it really was funny. Which maybe we lost sight of in the on going cynicism towards AI that dominates those same spaces now (not that I'm unsympathetic to the despair either). It was a novelty; a fun toy that frankly at the time had no real repercussions. But from its' humble beginnings spun out a massive empire that makes a massive part of the U.S. economy. Where each major tech conglomerate is racing to build a model that they can sell to people as being the most sophisticated.

    This toy that was spitting out eldritch horrors when ever you simply asked for a "Sinful Obama" is now behind a blinding amount of internet content. People who have been exposed to AI for a long time have developed a set of discriminatory tools to spot images molested by the computers paint brush. I believe I have a pretty keen eye I think. But something kind of scary, is that the images have blended in with the rest of the content on the internet. People don't disclose their use of AI so a lot of the times you don't actually have feedback on if your evaluation is correct. This loss of feedback I think is a significant turning point in the existence of this technology for us.

    Sometime when I first came home from Japan last November my mom like she does, showed me a video of what some Republican said that ticked her off. This time it was a video of infamous do nothing Elon Musk saying some unprovoked racist remarks. Not that he was ever of an even and fair mind, but now I think those kind of remarks are much less jarring than when I heard them in November. She held her phone to my face and let the Facebook Tik-Tok style vertical video play thrice. Something I immediately noticed that the lips did not remotely match the bile that he was spewing. I pretty quickly clocked it as a fabrication, but my mom was hesitant to believe me (pretty reasonably). Parents falling for internet farces is probably one of the America's pass times we're best at, so I wasn't particularly shocked. I was also conditioned by both anonymous online anecdotes and accounts by my peers of their elderly family sharing obviously fake videos with them.

##  so your mom fell for ai.

    It had finally penetrated into the contentious mainstream. Appearing on that uncle's IPad and finding itself in your text messages with some frankly inappropriate caption. They have had no prior conditioning; they don't know how to spot, why someone would make it, or what ways they should adjust their scrutiny. They should be pointing it at Joe Blow on Facebook but instead their reticle of doubt will probably remain on how you dress and eat. But all the same these videos will continue to pile up either in your messages or worse: when you get home they're gonna wanna show you whats' his face said about Whoopi Goldberg (its' that she can get it).

    There is a lot of discussion about finally emerging on the other side of post truth. Just the writing the word is enough for me to vomit. I seriously hate begging the question like that, like the practice is already bad but when you use stupid buzzwords as your vehicle I just want those fools' to drive their metaphorical rhetorical device car off a symbolic bridge (Doom shotgun noise). To be post truth implies that objects are oriented around it, like its' the center piece of our living room. But that requires that their be times when truth is and isn't and simply I would raise you that there has never been a point in time where humans have dwelled on this rock where truth has been more or less existent. Truth is a tricky thing you see, some people say it hides; cruel people say that humans run from the truth. But the truth about the truth is that its' fickle. Less that it falls between your fingers and more so that its' air. 

    I am not mocking the pursuit of truth, I just want to us to have a more fair frame. AI's biggest power is that it just spews garbage at a rate that cannot be accounted for. Since man crawled out of their caves they have been spewing garbage from womb to grave. Like the adoption of the Loom before it AI has given man the tools to simply amplify beyond any good reason the ability to just make trash. In this ocean of trash we lose cohesion. Data is not destroyed, it is lost.

    Growing up we were told that the internet was written in ink. It was recited to us by nit wits who didn't quite understand what they were saying, but they tormented us all the same. Despite our scrutiny to those who didn't understand the internet, we grew discontent with the state of it all. Our videos of dancing to "Crank that" by Soulja Boy have finally been lost, but not to time to scope. 

    There is one more insidious quality to the exponential growth of shit that occupies the internet. In some cruel joke we have selected for only the most malicious actors and the most sophisticated tools to find those lost pieces of time. So when someone does find your stupid Soundcloud account there's a ~13% chance that it is literally Satan and you're already fucking dead you moron.

something not about the scott pilgrim anime.

first written 01.24.25 0113est. edited 04.08.25 1323est.
    short preface: like most of my posts here, this is steeped in accounts of my past. the post itself is about scott pilgrim's little life and how it affected my dead end life. but it is about me foremost. which is to warn any readers seeking a more firm analysis about the comic that this is more of a vague meandering about my life as a dirt bag middle-schooler.

    In my second year of middle-school when we were first issued MacBooks and I got that Game Grumps wallpaper is when I first read Scott Pilgrim. The comic had a lot of cultural access points into my mind. so I was familiar with many of the internet's screenshots of it, and I was aware that there was a movie the fans were then so-so about. Some people who would later say shit like "Bazinga" ironically would say it betrayed the original comic's vision. But all the same it was spoken as though it was something made for us teenager scum bags on the net. Because of that I imagined Scott to be a talent-less neet a la Watamote's Tomoko, which I had watched by that point on my Pikachu 3DS XL which I had earned for achieving the honor roll in my first year of middle school. I liked Scott's hair and his girlfriend's hair. I really wanted to wear my hair long for all my life until I turned 21. But my parent's perfectly normal hair cut schedule for dirt bag youth didn't permit me to grow it any longer than  past my ears really.

fuck i didn't do it right.

    There wasn't quite a fandom like there is now. Which isn't a comment about scope but more about the existing infrastructure. I am sure on 4channel's /co/ or some forum unknown to me there was discussion and community. But to my eyes Scott Pilgrim was just a thing casually mentioned in web comics and Youtube videos. A covert way to signal: you too were uncomfortable with women.

    I sought out the fist volume on an aptly named website promoting free manga you could read in your damn browser. I read it on my dad's computer in his office. He wouldn't get home until 6:30pm -ish and I wouldn't get home from school until 3pm-ish, leaving me a cool 3 hours to use his computer. I had my own computer and even a laptop. But his computer played games better than either of mine. The irony is that most of my time spent on the device was just web browsing; something my laptop was perfectly capable of. When I finished that last page of volume I didn't really get it. I think I was more relieved to just say I had actually read it.

    I was confronted with this kind skewed semi ironic tone of Canada. A place which I was familiar with only on a very surface level because I told my middle-school peers that I was born in Toronto. Basically my only friend at the time besides the girl I loved, was this kid named Mason. He was a liar. Like me. We both knew it, and we indulged each other, I'm not sure why. He made an auto biographical YouTube video for his channel that would be called Mason the Talented (though what it was called then is lost to me) in the video he discussed also being born and raised in Toronto. We talked extensively via the Wii U video chat app about how much we liked Toronto and also how much we wanted to make an RPG together. A cute dance where we would dip and catch each other if either of  us dared to make a statement that could be retorted with any scrutiny.

    Which is to say that Canada to me was not different from Scott Pilgrim's depiction; the non existing contrast put me on heels. Basically I could smell my own shit. I stuck with the comic because of  its' cultural legacy alone. I read until the 2nd volume where after completing it my attention was sooner caught by Smash Brothers Melee. Some time later I watched the movie as an oh yeah something i read before kinda. I felt strangely ambivalent about it. It felt like something different, it felt like it wasn't for me. It felt like it was for guys who played guitar. Which maybe a more astute middle-schooler of the time would of correctly identified was also very true about the comic.

    Sometime later, which I cannot say with high certainty but in this moment I feel like that time later was after I had given up that the girl would ever love me, is when I read scott pilgrim in its' entirety. Which I sourced from a blogspot blog in the form of a FTP download for a PDF of each volume. I read through it in chunks each night, but never at school to my memory even though I had that MacBook with me. When I read it, I read it in my then bed. Which was setup out of a closet. The closet was out of the strange contraption that was my bed, desk, closet thing. I had a normal mattress bed that had just been moved into my room a few weeks before but I chose to sleep in that closet. I am not sure specifically why I did. Basically it's because I wanted to feel like the shape of unloved and relegated to a closet like Harry Potter, or it could of been some other compulsion to be sealed in. But in that closet with my LEGO blanket (its' consisting of bricks that were blue, yellow, red, and green) and plastic blue lamp that projected a blue tint to everything in that closet, I opened myself up to Scott Pilgrim's sad little life.

     I was captured. I am not sure if it was because I was finally more familiar with rejection or if more so being captured by the fear of rejection but It had finally lodged itself into me. The MacBook was held up by a pedestal of two books at the end of that closet and I would lay on my stomach with my elbows on the floor and my hands were a rest for my chin. It was rough on my elbows because the closet part wasn't sanded and was littered with uneven spikes of wood sticking out.

    After I read it in middle-school I cannot recall reading Scott Pilgrim again. Though I did really enjoy the demo for the Xbox Live Arcade game. I did play through that demo 7 times. I credit Scott Pilgrim (the comic) with helping me get over the fact that she didn't love me. I am not sure why it helped me, it wasn't really an escape. I think maybe it was just like Scott had Romana: this girl who was sooooo cool but he also had that killer ass ex played by Bri Larson in the movie and I guess it just gave me perspective, and maybe even the confidence to believe I could love someone more than I loved this girl in middle school.

    We often look down at how small our conflicts were in our childhood. But some perspective that can be lost on us now is that when we experienced loss as kids, that was often the most loss we have had ever felt at that point in our lives. Something as silly as a girl not liking you was maybe literally the worst thing that had happened to you yet.     

bb

headaches.

first written 01.23.25 19:13est

     I frequently experience something I describe to people as migraines. What I experience are not migraines. My mom frequently experiences migraines, she has for most of my life. She takes prescription pain relievers maybe every 3 days. In between she takes Advil. For all of my life she has carried around a little Advil bottle that I would be summoned to fetch out of her purse. I hated digging in her purse, there was always so many dividers. I could suffer through the clutter of the bag, but the dividers pushed me over the edge. Something explicitly designed to inhibit my navigation through the bag.

    I don't really feel that guilty about lying about migraines. I explain it to myself as a form of short hand. They aren't quite headaches, as they inhibit my senses; my vision goes blurry, infrequently I hallucinate, but each time I have an oppressive pain on my forehead. I have come to understand that when people evoke the term migraine it basically means you're incapacitated, my mom often experiences migraines like that. She has to lay in a completely silent and dark room until her body can evict the Migraine out of her. I like to imagine it comes out through sweat. Those little migraine droplets collect into the sheets and pillow and get absorbed through the skin again for later migraine purposes.

    Migraines to my knowledge while being influenced by multiple genes are not explicitly hereditary. But all the same I have surrendered myself to the idea that just over some hill lies the world of laying down for hours and being angry all the time at everyone who comes into your bedroom just to fuck with you even though just fucking thinking hurts you. I compulsively ruminated, and I have tricked myself into believing a lot of things like that. After a lot of regimented thinking I have been able to unlearn a lot of those things.

from The Social Network (2010) Eduardo Saverin's New York dark apartment moments before being assaulted by his then girlfriend.

    People feeling bad for my self described migraines makes me feel better. A writer I really covet and envy is Max Karson; mrgirl. He takes a very stoic disposition towards pity, something I think maybe granted to him by a dismissal of all things out side of his control. For a few years in my life I sought to adopt that kind of disposition, but I have found myself returning to the comfort of pity and vanity regularly. Sometimes when I am too comfortable; too incognizant, and often when I am my wit's end; when I am laying face down into my pillow in a dark room and when I yell at anyone trying to ask me a good faith question. I think it's reductive to label that kind of disposition (one of forfeiting other's people burdens) as stoic. Sincere selfishness is something too quickly stigmatized. Take any confident guy off the street who speaks without caution, he doesn't care about himself. If he did he would employ more discretion with his words, maybe endorse figures and ideas only when he's familiar with them. In that way he is foolishly trusting.

    Drink more water is such an annoying phrase. It's very judgemental, it carries with the assumption not just that you don't already drink enough water it is a judgement of your ability to even live inside your body. As if I can't know when my body isn't hydrated; as if I'm not responsible enough to walk around inside my fucking skin.

    i don't have a migraine

 

 

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