Entry 804: What Does The Fox Say?

No entry last weekend, you might have noticed, because I went to a crossword puzzle tournament and had no time for blogging. It went well, and I had a great time. I don't compete but rather help administer the competition. I also hang out with a bunch of people I quite like but only see once a year: my ami-puzzlers. I'm trying this new thing where I use the prefix "ami" to indicate a friendliness--actually beyond a friendliness, an adoration or bond, perhaps, there's no good word for it, which is the problem--for people I like a lot, but I'm not quite friends with. I've come to realize that the English language is completely bereft of words or succinct phrases to indicate a relationship between an acquaintance and a friend.

It's weird too, because we probably have way more people in our lives that fall into the "ami-" category than we have actual friends. I have a decent number of actual friends, people to whom I am not related (neither through blood nor marriage), whom I hang out with semi-regularly, whose phone numbers I have and could text anytime for trivial reasons without it seeming weird, whose children and spouses I know, whose careers and interests I'm familiar with, etc. But I have at least twice as many ami-folks in my life, people who don't fit the friend criteria I just laid out, but whom I still very much like and enjoying spending time with and wish nothing but the best for, people with whom I might very well be friends in the future or would have been friend with under slightly different circumstances. A lot of coworkers fall into this category, also a lot of neighbors and parents of my sons' friends. I've been going to the same gym for over seven years now, and I've gotten to know a lot of the instructors and other patrons, and it would be nice to have a way to convey this more elegantly than "this guy I'm friendly with who goes to the same gym as me."*

*Sometimes you can convey this by putting how you know the person before the word "friend," my "gym friend," my "work friend," etc. Weirdly, doing this indicates that you aren't actually friends. 

That's where "ami-" comes in. You can just attach it to the beginning of any relationship, and it instantly conveys a friendliness that goes beyond mere acquaintance. Oh, hey, there's my ami-barber... I was getting lunch with my ami-colleague... An ami-dad and I were talking at our kids' baseball game... It's beautiful, and I recommend you all start using it too, especially since there is a decent chance I will never mention this topic again. I'm very good at ideas; I'm not so great with the follow-through.

In other news, before I left, I had to retrieve a baby fox that had trapped itself in our window well. In our backyard deck, we have this little pit, about five feet deep, that leads to a basement window. It's usually covered with a iron grate and deck furniture, and we don't even think about it. But late one night, about a week and a half ago, I heard this weird noise--a sort of high pitched sound, somewhere between a screech and a yelp--and I couldn't figure out where it was coming from. I finally decided it was a weird bird call and went to sleep.

Then the next night I heard it again, but more intensely, and it was super clear right when I walked by that basement window. Thinking maybe it was an animal merely occupying the well, not stuck in it, I banged on the window to chase it away. It was silent for a bit, and then started making the noise again. So, I shined a flashlight through the window (which took a tiny bit of courage--shining a light into a dark area not knowing what you're going to see is a bit nerve-wracking) and saw a frightened little fox. It clearly was wandering around under our deck, had fallen into the pit, and now couldn't get back out. My first thought was Shit, now I'm gonna have to go get this thing, followed by so, that's what the fox says, it's not actually "hakki-hakki-hakki-ho".

Weirdly, S was still awake even though it was about 11:00pm, so I told her what was going on, and she got out of bed, and we went out to the deck together. It's an effort just to lift off the grate, but we (mostly I) managed to do so, and then I tried unsuccessfully to scoop up the kit (that's what you call a baby fox) with a snow shovel. It had the instincts to call for help, but also the instincts to evade that help at all costs. I was going to have to go in. It was visibly terrified and trying to run away from me, but it had nowhere to run. I was worried that it would try to bite me, so I kinda trapped it against the wall with a bucket and slid it up until it could reach the ledge, at which point it vanished under our house. We put the grate back and that was that.

Well, almost... The whole time I was doing all this, I was trying to remember who actually sings "The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?)," and I kept thinking it was The Elvi's, but I knew that wasn't right, because that was a local band I used to see flyers for in college. So, I had to look it up before I could sleep in peace. (Ylvis, that's right, so close.) I told this to S, but she couldn't have cared less and just wanted to be back in bed as quickly as possible. That's the difference between her and me.

Until next time...

Entry 803: Death and Taxes

There's a cliché that the only constants in life are death and taxes. I had my fill of both this week. Well, the death part might not have happened yet, but it seems imminent. My elderly neighbor collapsed twice in the past three days and is now in the hospital for some sort of emergency procedure. I'm no medical expert, but I feel confident stating that the recovery rate for a man in his mid-90s from whatever it is that ails him is not super high. And he was almost bedridden before this. He seemed to be chair-ridden. He would get up in the morning, make his way to a chair, and basically sit there the entire day. S and I are just waiting for the grim, inescapable word from his wife. He might be able to make it back home, but if he survives to see autumn, I'd be surprised.

And when he goes, there's a good chance his wife will join him shortly thereafter. She has already had a stroke, about a year ago, and I saw this with my own grandparents, where my grandma, who was hanging on decently, deteriorated extremely quickly after the death of my grandpa and died just a few months later. It's like she just didn't want her husband to be alone, and once that was no longer a possibility, she surrendered to the inevitable.   

I would say that all this is sad, but I think that's the wrong word. It's more hard. I don't feel melancholy; I feel a sort of helplessness. As the Flaming Lips put it, "Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?" (Great song, by the way.) Since moving into this neighborhood, inhabited by a lot of elderly people, I've definitely realized this. Two people in the house to one side of me have already died in the past five years (and a third one is close), and now, it seems, two more on the other side are well on their way. I lived the first 45 years of my life without ever once being asked to lift an old person who had fallen and couldn't get up, and now it seems to be a semi-regular occurrence.

It also doesn't help my general mindset on this matter that my parents just came out to visit last week, and my mom spent most the trip in her PJs lying in bed or on the sofa. She got hit with a bug, and although she recovered, it really laid her up, and it had me slightly concerned. My parents aren't yet at the same stage as my neighbors, but they probably aren't that far behind. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, I'm not that far behind, as I don't think we are going to crack immortality in the next 40 years, despite what you might find from "life maxxers" on YouTube.

Maybe that's a silver-lining of being focused on the nonexistence of others. It distracts me from thinking about from my own departure from this mortal coil. It is so much worse to think about your own death, not just because it's your death (though of course that's part of it), but because you lose your frame of reference. There's still something when somebody else dies. When you die there's a good chance there's just nothing, and contemplating nothing will mess your head, even if it's not in the context of your own demise. An existential freakout is a double-whammy: You are going to die, and you will never understand why you (or anything else) ever even existed in the first place. It's no wonder religion is still pretty popular these days.

Well, at least I'm gainfully employed while I still exist, as I was reminded when I did our taxes a few days ago. As I've said before, I get so resentful every tax season, not because of the amount we pay, but because of how ridiculously confusing and time-consuming it is to figure out how much you owe. I used TurboTax, and the estimated time was one hour and 45 minutes. It's been over twice that, and I'm not even completely finished yet. Maybe we need to go back to having somebody do our taxes for us, like we did last year. But the thing there is that you still have to spend the time gathering all the necessary documents, which is a large part of the overall workload. I imagine the CPA is basically just entering all the stuff into a computer program the same way we are. That's not nothing, but it's also probably not worth the relatively hefty fee, especially considering we paid almost the exact amount last year as we did the year prior when we did our taxes ourselves. Also, if I do our taxes it gains me some emotional capital with S. That's also not nothing.

Well, that about does it for this morbid entry. Until next time... 

Entry 802: King Of Pain

I learned something about myself recently, something that has been true for a long time, but I just never realized it: I'm a Sting fan. Like a legit, sing-along-with-all-his-songs admirer.* I've long had what I thought was a casual fondness for Sting. Somewhere in my basement I have a CD box set of The Police and his solo album Ten Summoner's Tales, but both of those were given to me as gifts. I never would have thought myself a full-fledged fan of Sting's music, and I found his affect--the falsetto, the tantric woo, the constant feuding with his ex-bandmates--more than a little pretentious. But recently I've had my mind opened--opened like that book by Nabokov--and I've come to the conclusion that when it comes to the toe-headed Brit né Gordon Sumner, just about everything he does is magic.

*Well, not all his songs, but most of them. Well, most them before, like, 1995. I must admit, I'm not at all familiar with his later catalog. I mean, he did an album with Shaggy?

It was an episode of the podcast Hit Parade that really elicited my Sting love. I've been catching up on past episodes, and I also listened to one about David Bowie recently, and if you asked me beforehand whose music I like more, I would have said Bowie's without question. But after listening to these episodes, I realized that it's actually Sting I like more and by a nontrivial margin. Bowie has some amazing songs, but actually not all that many, in my opinion. By contrast, listening to Sting's episode, I was like, Oh, yeah, that song is a banger, and that one, and that one... I mean check out this list:

The Police 

• "Next to You"
• "So Lonely"
• "Can't Stand Losing You"
• "The Bed's Too Big Without You"
• "Message in a Bottle"
• "Walking on the Moon"
• "On Any Other Day" (Great deep cut)
• "Don't Stand So Close to Me"
• "Driven to Tears"
• "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da"
• "Spirits in the Material World"
• "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic"
• "Invisible Sun"
• "Re-Humanise Yourself"
• "Secret Journey" 
• "Synchronicity I"
• "Walking in Your Footsteps" 
• "Synchronicity II"
• "King of Pain" (bonus points for inspiring "Weird Al"'s "King of Suede")
• "Wrapped Around Your Finger" 

Solo 

• "If You Love Somebody Set Them Free"
• "Englishman In New York" (sneaky good) 
• "It's Probably Me"
• "Desert Rose"

That's like 25 bops right there, most of them with The Police, but a few solo tracks as well. He also provides back up vocals on "Money For Nothing" (total guilty pleasure song for me), and his song "Shape of My Heart," which I don't love (it's fine), is the backbone for Juice WRLD's "Lucid Dreams," which Lil' S2 and his friend used to ask me to play in the car all the time.

You might have noticed that I did not include either "Roxanne" or "Every Breath You Take" in the list above. I've never really liked the former, and the latter is a tremendous song, an absolute tour de force, that has been almost completely ruined for me because it's been so overplayed. It is, perhaps literally, the most played song in radio history. Like, if I had never heard "Every Breath You Take," and I listened to it for the first time, I would probably be thinking, Wow, this is absolutely amazing! (The Puffy remix is awesome too, if you can separate the artist from the art.) But I've now heard it so many times, it's hard for me to enjoy it. A few other songs that reached this level for me: "Stairway to Heaven," "Losing My Religion," "Longview," "Gangnam Style," "Old Town Road."

In the Hit Parade episode about Sting, one thing that host Chris Molanphy mentions is that Sting was a musical chameleon, who always seemed to find the right style to chart a hit--punk when punk was the thing in the early '70s, reggae when that was hot in the late '70s, synth-heavy in the '80s, ballad-y in the early '90s, and he even dipped his toe into hip-hop and country in the late '90s. This was often used as a knock against him, like he's phony or something, but really what's wrong with it? What's wrong with wanting to make the type of music that's popular at the time?

Maybe I'm just sensitive to this charge because I always felt like I was a chameleon coming of age at a time when authenticity was of the utmost importance and being a poseur was an insult of the highest degree.

Anyway, gotta run. Until next time... Zenyatta Mondatta.       

Entry 801: Fine Con

Almost no time to blog this weekend. The past three days have been action packed. Friday immediately after work I had to take Lil' S2 to baseball practice, and then I kinda crashed out from a long work week. Then Lil' S2 had a baseball game Saturday afternoon and then we had drinks with friends after that and then we had a St. Patrick's Day party after that. Today, Sunday, we spent almost the entire day at Awesome Con, which I would characterize more as Fine Con. Truth be told, I didn't find it awesome, but it's not really for people like me. It's a lot of anime/comic book/fantasy stuff, and that's not the type of nerd I am. If it was about, say, sports or crossword puzzles, then its status would have been elevated to awesome for sure. Actually, the vibe reminded me a lot of going to Cooperstown for Ken Griffey Jr.'s Hall of Fame Induction, even though the focuses of the two events were very different.

The main thing for the day was getting Lil' S2 a selfie with Nathan Fillion. I stood in line mostly by myself for two hours to do this, even though I didn't know who this guy was until like a week ago. Actually, I did, but I just didn't know that I knew him. Upon looking him up, I recognized him as the guy who played Green Lantern in the new Superman movie. He apparently was on a show called Firefly, which I've never seen, but I know is very popular in nerd culture, and so he and many of his costars from the show were signing autographs and taking selfies at this event. Lil' S2 knows him from this show The Rookie that he randomly watched the entire series of, so once he found out he was going to be at Awesome Con, he wanted a selfie.

Of course, Mr. Fillion so happened to be the most popular celebrity there (at least today), so his line was super long, and I, being the one who cared the least about actually seeing the exhibits, volunteered to wait in it. I got there at 12:45p, and we finally got the selfie at 2:45p. It was a legit two hours. I did most of it alone, and another dad took Lil' S2 and a few friends around to spend whatever money they had on swords and figurines and Monkey D. Luffy hats. (S had the big kids, Lil' S1 and his buddies, who just insisted they didn't need a chaperone, until she final relented and got a coffee and sat in the food court.) The wait would have been much longer too, at least another hour, probably even longer still, but this guy randomly came up to the other dad I was with and gave him a VIP pass that let us all skip the line. He said somebody did it for him once and he vowed to pay it forward one day, and we just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

The selfie, or selfies rather, we got a few, came out pretty good too. I'm not in any of them, by choice. There's something weird to me about paying somebody to be in a picture with them. It's fine for children, but it just doesn't seem like something becoming of a grown man. Like, if you know a celebrity personally, or you do something with them and get a picture with them, then that's cool. But it's much less cool to pay somebody to pose with you like they're your friend--to me, anyway. If that's your thing, like it is for the very chatty woman standing in line behind me, who was showing everybody around her all the photos she had with various celebrities, then more power to you. It's just not for me is all. Although, I say that, but the chick from Homeland was there also, and I did briefly think that it would be very cool to get a selfie with her, so maybe I have a double-standard about the whole thing. Well, I'm not alone. I overheard a conversation in which a woman somebody said to the effect of "The only selfie I've ever gotten was with Thomas Jane, because he's just really good looking."

Alright, that's all for tonight. Until next time... 

Entry 800: I Don't Want To Talk About It

We are still bombing Iran, and it still doesn't make sense to me. I don't understand how destabilizing an entire region of the world makes us safer in the long run. Violence begets violence begets violence. At some point somebody has to break the loop. I know two Iranian-Americans pretty well. One of them I haven't talked to in a few months. I asked the other one the other day how she was doing, and she said, "It's horrifying. I don't want to talk about it." Maybe that's the best approach for now. I don't want to talk about it.

I spent a large portion of this weekend doing dishes and cleaning the kitchen and there is more awaiting me right now. Lil' S1 loves to bake and cook, but it's like a cyclone comes through our kitchen every time he does. He uses seemingly every utensil in the drawer, every bowl in the cabinet, and every ingredient in the pantry. And I'm somehow always on the hook for cleanup. Actually, I kinda volunteer for it. I would rather do it than have somebody else do it. For one thing, I'm the only one in this house who can do an adequate job. S loads the dishwasher so inefficiently it drives me mad (and it often takes multiple runs or a post-scrub to actually get the dishes clean), and when the kids "clean up," I find dough all over the cabinet handles, a trail of flour on the floor, oil spatterings everywhere, etc. For another thing, this is one of the few things Lil' S1 likes to do that doesn't involve a screen, so I want to encourage it, and forcing him to clean up--really clean up--would be doing the exact opposite.

It's so funny how different my sons are with their friends. Lil' S1 had his D&D buddies come over yesterday, and it turned into an impromptu sleepover, and Lil' S1 made a pecan pie for the occasion (which was delicious, by the way; it wasn't cloyingly sweet, like most pecan pies I've had) with homemade whipped cream. Then this morning, he made everybody eggs and chocolate chip waffles with fresh cut strawberries and blueberries, and he fixed them all sandwiches for a hike they are on right now. Lil' S2 would never do anything like any of this. It wouldn't even occur to him. When he has sleepovers, fixing breakfast for him and his friends consists asking S or I to make them something, or getting bowls of Honey Nut Cheerios from a bag that has been mutilated open, so when you pour from it Cheerios scatter every which way. So, I guess the mess is one thing they have in common.

I doubt Lil' S2 and his friends would ever go on a hike together either, unless their parents were going and dragged them along. They are all actually skiing right now. It's one of his pal's birthday, so this kid's parents took a little crew to the mountain. They all went a few weeks ago for a class trip. It was Lil' S2's first time, and he said he really liked it. So, it's good that he gets to go again, as it's unlikely that S or I will take him much (at all) in the future. Neither of us know how to ski, and I'm not particularly inclined to learn pushing 50, and I don't think S is either. She did say, however, that she would go up and sit in the lodge if he wants to go sometime.

It's kinda strange that I never learned to ski being that I grew up near the Cascade Mountains and some pretty good recreational ski resorts (from what I hear). I just was never really into the outdoorsy sports--skiing, kayaking, rock climbing, etc. My parents weren't into this stuff,* so I didn't do it when I was little, and then when I got old enough to go on my own or with just my friends, I was too preoccupied with other activities. Wrestling was the big one. It was the same season as ski season, and my weekends were frequently spent at tournaments. You couldn't really do both. In fact, I remember one of my teammates lamenting the fact that his parents sold his skis, because he wasn't using them frequently enough to justify keeping them because of wrestling.

*My dad did cross-country skiing a bit later in life, and he took me once when I was in my early twenties. I liked it, but I didn't like it any more than trail running or hiking, both of which require so much less time and gear. 

Another, very petty reason I didn't get into outdoorsy sports as an older teenager is because I didn't like the culture. There was this group of kids who always wore Gor-tex and caps with bands around them and used carabiners on their school backpacks, and even though I was friends with a lot of them, I found the whole thing over the top and pretentious in a way. In retrospect, it was just young people finding their niche and expressing themselves, the same thing I, and everybody else my age, was doing, but at the time I found it to be something mockable.

There was also surely some sour grapes mixed into the batter, as the type of girl I went to college with was much more likely to be into the outdoorsy guy than she was to me. I remember once hanging out with some folks, and we were talking about our best New Year's Eves, and one of my North Face-clad buddies said, "When I was rock climbing [some surely awesome rock face somewhere in Colorado or Utah]. I rang in the New Year all by myself, hundreds of feet in the air, hanging in a tent, looking at the stars light up the desert landscape." I couldn't have rolled my eyes any harder, and yet this dude consistently dated the hottest girls on our campus. 

Alright, the pile of dishes in the sink beckons. I can't put it off any longer.

Until next time...  

 

Entry 799: Forever Instability

So, I guess we are at war with Iran now... or not? Maybe this will sprawl into yet another forever war in the Middle East, or maybe the bombings are going to stop in a few days, and we will look back on this in two months and be like, "Remember when we killed the Ayatollah? That was wild, huh?" the way we are now with the capture of Nicolás Maduro. I could see it going either way, with the latter being the more preferable of the two, by far.

Whatever the case, it certainly adds to the already unsustainably high instability in not just that region, but the world at large, and that is not a good thing. I don't see how this advances American interests. Iran, under its current (former?) regime, poses a threat in spirit to the US (they definitely hate us and often wish death upon us), but they're on the other side of the globe, and by all reports they don't have the weaponry to reach us. Of course, they could develop such weaponry, which would be very bad for us, so I understand bombing their military infrastructure, but killing their top leaders and telling the Iranian people to overthrow the government is a whole other animal. How is this going to be different from the other three times we've tried and failed at this in the past 40 years?

To be clear, I'm not exactly an expert on the geopolitics of the Middle East, but neither, I think it's safe to say, is our president. And that's another reason I don't like this. I don't trust the manchild in the White House to put the interests of the American people first and foremost. He does things almost completely based on his own self-interest and his own warped perception of how he's perceived by the rest of the world. And I suspect/fear that that's what is going on here also. In his first term, he tore up Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, I suspect, not because he thought the terms were unfavorable to the US (I honestly don't think he could describe the terms), but because it was Obama's deal. If it was the exact same thing, but he got credit for it, he surely would have been touting how great it was.

So, then he tried to broker a different deal with Iran, and he got nowhere, because Iran's government is largely fueled by obstinacy and hostility toward the US. They would rather die than accept anything that makes them look subservient to the infidels (and for some of them that is exactly what happened). I imagine the president took this all very personally, because that's the only way he ever takes anything, and he lost his patience, and when a guy with the temperament and insecurities of a middle school bully has the backing of a very powerful army (and a Netanyahu in his ear), this is the result we're all gonna get. One of the few things I liked about our president is that he seemed to not be a warmonger. Now, even that minutely redeeming quality is gone. It's not great.

To end on a positive note, it is genuinely heartwarming to see all these Iranian citizens and expats, who have been oppressed and terrorized by the government for years, to celebrate their freedom, fleeting though it may be. It makes me look at everything I've written above, and think to myself, But who am I to say to these people, "No, actually this is a bad thing"? But then I think about what lies ahead and wonder will it actually be any better for them. I don't have great responses to any of this. It's almost as if life is full of unanswerable questions, impossible tradeoffs, and moral ambiguities. The only thing I know for sure is that I don't really know anything and neither does anybody else. I'm very Socratic that way.

Until next time...    

 

Entry 798: What Can't DG Complain About?

I used to listen daily to The Adam Carolla Show. I haven't listened in, jeez, probably over a decade now, because it got way too repetitive. This happens to pretty much all podcasts, by they way, in which the hosts' pontifications about their personal lives are central aspects of the show. An individual person only has so many stories and so many jokes and so many stories to set up those so many jokes, and if you listen for long enough, you get to the point where it's like, Do I really need to listen to Adam do his bit on canned cranberry sauce for the one millionth time? And then you hit unsubscribed. This also happened to me with Sarah Silverman's podcast, and it preemptively happened with Dax Shepard's. My sister-in-law told me how good it was, so I was thinking of adding it to my rotation, but then a few months later she said she stopped listening, because he just told the same stories and jokes over and over, so I decided against it.

But one of the bits I used to really like on ACS was "What Can't Adam Complain About?" where Adam's producer would throw out a topic, and he would find something about it he didn't like and then just riff on it for a few minutes. I always thought I would be good at this segment because I'm a world class complainer. It's one of my finer qualities. Although, I get the feeling S doesn't feel that way about it. In fact, she seems to be more annoyed by my constant carping than amused. Fine art always goes over some people's heads.

Here's a sample from my latest list of complaints.

Microsoft Office Licenses
One of my least favorite technology trends is the nearly universal adoption of the software subscription model. You can't just buy software now and have it forever. You have to, in effect, buy it over and over again every year. My personal Microsoft Office subscription lapsed recently, but that's okay, because I found out that at my company, we can use our work license on up to five machines, including personal computers. So, I registered Microsoft Office through work on my laptop, and all was well. 

Until I tried to save something. Turns out Microsoft is so fucking petty, they won't let me save any Office documents to my laptop or personal One Drive account, and the documents that are already saved there are read-only. I have to use my work drive, even when I'm using my laptop. It's not the end of the world, but it is irritating, and it's like why? I'm not renewing, so they're going to punish me by making their product more annoying? If anything, that makes me want to get a Mac. It doesn't seem like the greatest business strategy to me.

The worst part about it is that I like to keep work and personal things separate. But I think that's already a losing battle. I started using my personal phone (the only phone I have) to authenticate certain work credentials a long time ago, and I just discovered it's easier to schedule work meetings through my phone than on my work laptop. The work/personal firewall as already been breached. Also, we get most our revenue at my company by selling software as a service, including subscriptions, so, yeah...

AI
I'm not going to complain about AI, so much as I am AI mania. AI itself is fine, but it's just that, fine. It's not the godlike omnipotence it's being hyped as. Maybe it will get there someday, maybe someday relatively soon, but can we pump the brakes a little until it does? We're now at a point were every company has to put the term AI in their mission statements just to seem relevant; everybody looking for a job has to tout their AI credentials (even if they don't really have any); and seemingly every podcast has to be about what AI holds for the future of whatever field the podcast deals in. I'm now kinda rooting for AI to render human thought completely obsolete within the next few decades, as if it doesn't, we are presently wasting a whole lot of time discussing how it is going to do so. 

Personally, I like using AI as a check on me. We use it at work for code review to identify potential issues and like ten percent of the time it finds something that requires a fix. It's rarely something major, but still it's legitimately helpful. What I don't find AI useful for is how it's being marketed, as a creator whose product I'm supposed to check. For work, I had to take these AI training modules, and they were very pro AI, but also very insistent that AI was only going to augment human labor, not replace it, so they would say things like: You can use AI to draft emails, because that's something AI is very good at doing very quickly! But then it's your job to make sure your message conveys all the information you want and that the tone is appropriate for the intended audience. That's something that requires a human touch! And I was thinking to myself, that "human touch" is what I spend 95% of my time on when writing an email, particularly getting the tone right. The longer I watched, the more I thought to myself that AI sounds a lot like a bad employee whose work you constantly have to monitor.

Of course, it will get better. That's the obvious retort to all this. But how much better and how quickly? And is better actually better? Right now AI tells you things that are obviously incorrect*, and so you know not to believe it. But if it told you things that looked correct, but still weren't, it could be more harmful. Like, if using AI becomes finding the needles that are its errors in a haystack of content, is that better? For me, it's more efficient to build the haystack myself and keep the needles out along a way. (And then an AI can check if I succeeded or not.) But maybe I'm just getting old--this century's version of the guy who looks up things in the encyclopedia because he insists it's faster than googling them. That's definitely a possibility, and I'm mostly okay with it. 

*Case in point, I googled "colleges with presidents and a super bowl winning quarterbacks," and this is the result that the AI gave me. It did get 1-3 correct, which is impressive, but neither Franklin Pierce nor Matt Ryan went to Harvard, and the notion of Mitchell Trubisky winning a Super Bowl is patently absurd to anybody who follows the NFL at all.

 

 

Back to the Future:
As I mentioned in a previous entry, we recently cranked out the Back to the Future trilogy. I like it quite a bit, but something about it rubbed me the wrong way this time around. It's not any of the evident time-travel paradoxes, or the fact that the successful McFlys at the end of the movie live in the same house as the dysfunctional McFlys at the beginning (including Marty's brother, even though he's portrayed as somebody who could afford his own place), or the weirdness of Doc's best friend being a teenage boy. It's none of that. It's the contrived plot point that Marty's Achilles' heel is being called chicken.

I remembered this from the first time I saw the movies, way back when, but I didn't remember the back story, and then when we watched them this time around, I realize there is no back story. They just invented it out of thin air. In Part II, Griff Tannen calls Marty chicken, and he reacts to it as if it's an established part of the canon that he has a pathological aversion to this, but it's not. It's not even alluded to in the first movie. Then, future Marty gets fired from his job after getting goaded into a shady scheme by getting called chicken, and future Jennifer tells their kids, something to the effect of, "You know your father's one weakness is being called chicken." And it's like, Oh, okay, I guess this is a thing that the audience is supposed to know now.

It's pretty weak character development, to be honest, and I don't see why it's necessary to the story. Surely, the movie makers could have come up with a different way to make Marty's future go south. Also, in the scene in which he doesn't get baited into racing Flea ("Needles"), and thus avoids his life-altering accident, why does he gun it backwards and do a half-donut, instead of not moving at all, or just going forward at the speed limit in a safe manner? What Marty does actually seems more dangerous to me than racing forward.

Anyway, this has been "What Can't DG Complain About?"

Until next time...