Culture and society – An Echo That's Reversing

The Year of Italy

I started at some point to give years names. This may have/probably has been inspired by the completely unfortunate aspect in the novel Infinite Jest where the US sells years to corporations in order to make money. After corporate purchase years would become: The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, or The Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster, etc. It’s a bleak mirror within a literary conceit of pretty much what we’ve become.

So, less bleakly, I started to give my years themes. This, 2025, is The Year of Italy.

No title

(it’s been almost a month)

Generative energy

Updated 23 Sep 2024

I’ve stopped using ChatGPT.

Well, not entirely… but I haven’t hit it in several weeks after the month-or-so ago pledge that I made promising, personally, that I’ll only use it for absolute emergencies when search fails me. And I hesitate even in those situations. (The last time I used it was for a SQL query that confounded me. It answered perfectly and I now understand how to solve that particular RDB situation.) My Mastodon feed is full of LLM haters who arrived at their position primarily because they think it produces too much garbage. Of those haters, 99% just misunderstand or misrepresent the capabilities and limitations–likely because our society is the Wild West of over-promising new technology–and the haters have taken to quoting the most absurdly iconoclastic views. In a word: insincere. There is a reasonable approach to take to approach reasonably new tech that is out there.

The loss of our prehistory

A few long time ago (a little over 12 years to be whatever) several geek websites posted a link to a site where photos of a sci-fi convention called Westercon from the 1980 event were posted. The people in the photos were so 80s and earnest and lo-fi that you couldn’t help but be jealous of them and the time they were living in. The geek sites posted additional links to other relevant parties who had valuable/interesting additions to the conversation or who had actually lived through those halcyon days, and each site had their own discussion threads where yet more links were posted and memories from those who had actually been at that convention were retold. It was one of those moments that, meta-wise, made you wish you were a sociologist 200 years from now because there was just so much those photos and discussions revealed about a certain group at a certain time in history along with how they themselves remembered that history.

Survivor’s guilt

The pandemic was good to me.

I thrive alone and so, even as the wife was not in her best place like most others in the world, though I was distraught by what the global “We” were going through, I could deal. Even before the pandemic I worked from home and spent many non-work hours in my office doing non-work things. Not necessarily a very guy thing but just a very introvert thing. I actually have fond memories of the isolation because within that isolation there was, without a better phrase to express it, a warm online camaraderie of artists who gave their time to create that warmth.

The 11th of this month was the four year anniversary of the start (as I noted here when it started).