I’ve finally reached the age where….meh…I just don’t care that much about catching the attention of “celebrities.” The point is *I* want to be a celebrity. I just don’t care about the rather mundane idea of catching the attention of a celebrity.
So what.
But what I AM interested in, is celebrity burner accounts.
I find the idea endlessly intriguing because there’s something of a kabuki dance to the whole thing. As a celebrity, you have two choices when it comes to social media. Totally ignore it, or use lots of burner accounts.
What’s even more crazy is there are some celebrities who are SO well known that they could open a burner account under their own name and….no one would believe it was them unless it was verified.
Anyway. If I was younger –significantly younger — I would find a random celebrity to grow obsessed with as part of a running gag. But, as I learned with Alexa Chung, it’s just not worth it. We live in an age where anyone doing anything weird is automatically assumed to be a psycho killer.
So. No. It’s just not worth it.
I’ve really grown more focused on being as productive as possible these days. I have not one must several novels I’m working on at the moment. So, lulz, maybe, if I make it big, I will be one of those celebrities who lives on social media through a bunch of burner accounts.
I’m kind of in a weird halfway spot in the process of writing and ultimately querying this novel. I’m pretty much done with the novel…but I know I need to work on it some before I begin the process of querying.
But when I go through the novel to edit it, I struggle to find any scenes that REALLY need to be rewritten. So, I’m torn. I think what I’m going to do is try to focus on improving scenes in the second half of the novel.
It’s in the second half where the quality really gets a lot more shoddy. So, I need to focus my energy on improve scene quality there.
One problem is I’ve read and re-read the entirety of the novel so many fucking times that I’m a little bit burnt out. As such, that’s one of the reasons why I’m kind of chilling out for a little bit.
I want to look over the novel one last time before I turn it over to SOMEONE who will read it for me. THAT will be the last step before I really piviot towards querying in a serious fashion.
And I’m really working on the new scifi backup novel I’ve come up with. I’m actually doing some writing on that these days and it’s going well.
While America has gradually freaked out over the last 20 years about declining birth rates by leaning into racism in the guise of MAGA, the Japanese 40 years ago started working on robotics. Many of the same problems that America faces, the Japanese face, too, only more so because they aren’t as cool with immigration as the States.
Here are three really profound uses of AI enabled androids going forward.
Elder Care The moment there are $10,000 AI-enabled androids on the market, they probably are going to be used to take care of old people in some capacity. Not only is America growing older — a lot of GenX people don’t have any children or grandchildren to take care of them. As such, it would make a lot of economic sense to throw money into androids that would take care of old people. This, of course, will throw the economy out of whack because a lot people make a good living off providing the elder care service. And if androids are smart enough and good enough to do elder care, then, of course, those same androids will start to come after nursing jobs, too.
Child Care This is a lot more tricky because it deals with the far more intangible issues of emotional and mental development. But I’ve been really shocked at how well AI has managed to do things that we all thought was exclusively the domain of humans in the arts, so, lulz? It seems possible that some future version of chatbots might have enough empathy and dexterity to keep an eye on a young human for a few hours. It is possible that in the near future, there will be a lot of talk not of “latchkey kids” but “android kids” who have been raised by androids for much of their lives.
Security This is just as tricky as child care, but it seems inevitable. It is seems inevitable that domestic androids will be programmed at some point in the near future to do basic home security. Now what happens if they actually get into a fight with someone breaking into a home is something pretty profound.
There remains a lingering demographic problem across the Western world — people just aren’t having enough babies. In the United States, this “birth dearth” has led the Right to lose its fucking mind. So, I suppose it’s at least POSSIBLE that as part of the shift towards an android-based economy that there is a chance that MAGA will evaporate.
From what I can tell of the discourse on Twitter within the AI community, a lot of people won’t be happy unless OpenAI announces an AGI that will end humanity. A lot of people sound like fucking spoiled brats.
Now, I understand what’s going on.
The release of ChatGPT 4 was such a revelation that people had no expectations. For a few days, they we happy with ChatGPT 4 because they had not yet developed any expectations.
Now, however, people have some very cold, hard expectations. They want not just Artificial General Intelligence — NOW — they want absolutely no guardrails to the point that if any user told AGI to blow the world up, it would.
Anything less than those metrics and “it’s so over” to use the parlance of AI Twitter.
It’s all very annoying. I mean, I want AGI just as much as the next tech nerd, but I would prefer that it didn’t end all of humanity. I would like there to be SOME guardrails.
Anyway, I suppose AGI will be invented soon enough and it will destroy us all.
I began the long, long, long, long journey to writing my first novel because of a curious situation with Trump and a Playboy bunny. At the time, it seemed CLEAR that someone was playing fall guy for Trump having an affair with the woman.
But, alas, after much excitement –and a few phone calls with a reporter from The New York Times — it all collapsed. Trump had nothing to do it with it. I wrote a shit ton about this particular situation on this blog that I ultimately deleted.
I realized the poor woman had gone through enough and there just wasn’t any reason to keep it around. And, besides, I had begun my personal journey towards writing a novel and I had better things to do than worry about people asking me a lot of already-answered questions about something that did not, in fact, happen.
My only question is what specific event has caused a flood of people coming to this site just recently looking for information about this particular non-issue. They’re all coming from Twitter, as if they were searching for what happened and saw a link to one of my many now-deleted posts on this site.
I have to say that I low-key think it would be amusing if somehow “the truth” of what happened came out because of the Stormy Daniels trial happening at the moment.
So. Now that I’m kind of chilling out on my first novel so I can look at it with fresh eyes in a bit, I’ve decided to piviot to working on the scifi novel I’ve been developing. I have a complete outline that I’ve fleshed out.
Now, I’ve begun to actually write scenes out.
But I think I’m going be really self-conscious about the need to lean into character with this novel from the get-go. A story that’s all plot is just not very interesting. So, as such, I’m going to maybe TRY to sketch out character studies of all the major characters before I really get into writing the first draft.
And, yet, having said that, things at the moment seem to be moving really fast because I really understand what the novel is about. If I keep going at this clip — and the world doesn’t end because of fucking Trump — I SHOULD be in a position to query this novel at some point in 2025.
There are a few things we have to take into consideration before we think about Trump’s second term. The first is, we have to work on the basic assumption that Trump is simply going to ignore the Supreme Court if they rule in any way he doesn’t like.
So, if he fires several hundred thousand civil servants using his Schedule F idea, then, lulz, he’ll just do it no matter how much SCOTUS rules against him. He will invoke Andrew Jackson and go about his business.
Another issue we have to think about is the total fucking chaos Trump is going to cause when he begins to build out the infrastructure necessary to put millions of undocumented people in concentration camps. Just providing these people with food and housing will be a logistical nightmare.
What’s more, I have serious doubts with the idea that a variety of other people that Trump doesn’t like — everyone from trans people to loudmouth cranks like me — won’t find themselves in any sort of dragnet that Trump begins to employ across the country.
And I’m sure there are all sorts of bonkers counter-revolution things that Trump will do as early as possible in 2025. One key issue for me is if Trump will have the abstract thinking ability to propose a Constitutional Convention that would pass Amendments that would make America a white Christian ethnostate. It could be he will be so stupid that he just announces that he’s going to stay in office the rest of his life because “he deserves it.”
No matter what happens if Trump wins in 2024, we have to accept that the U.S. Military will ultimately decide the country’s fate. If the country collapses into chaos, whomever can convince the U.S. Military to take their side will determine who has power.
Of course, there’s a non-zero chance that not even the U.S. Military will stay stable. It, too, could collapse for a variety of reasons. Then you have WMD that might begin to be lobbed here and there across the country in the context of a global WW3 erupting.
Good times!
I just don’t know what to tell you. It could be that Biden wins and we muddle through another four years. But….I have my doubts.
I don’t really know enough to give you any sort of realistic, detailed counterfactual on what might have happend had Vice President Mike Pence gone along with Trump’s January 6th coup attempt, but let’s do some thinking about it.
The key thing we have to contemplate is how close we came to a civil war on January 6th, 2021. Given what we know of what the coup plotters wanted to do once they got Pence to punt on the certification of Electoral votes….oh boy. It seems as though they believed they wanted to use the extra time to get state Republicans to approve rival Electors that they could use the muddy the waters.
And, remember, there would have been a ticking clock to all of this — January 20th would be just days away. And the moment January 20th rolled around and we STILL didn’t know who POTUS is — especially in the context of the Insurrection Act having been invoked — then, well, it seems clear the country probably would have devolved into chaos.
At this point, it’s possible that the U.S. Military might have stepped in to sort things out. But the point is — Pence bought us all time by destroying his political career and we’ve squandered it.
Now, we’re careening towards a disaster just as big, if not bigger.
One sign that the country is in deep, deep trouble is how the Right has constructed out of whole cloth all these conspiracies about how “woke” corporations are going to do all these horrible things to them at some point in the near future.
It is now gospel within far Right podcasts that unless Trump becomes POTUS again, that “woke” banks will deny them services simply because of their political views. And the list goes on. They have convinced themselves that just by being conservative, the “woke cancel culture mob” is going to destroy their lives and drive they and their families into the streets.
They have only the vaguest proof that this is going to happen. In short — they have vibes.
MEANWHILE, these very same MAGA Republicans totally ignore a growing amount of evidence that suggests that in cold, hard ways all the tyrannical things that Trump plans to do the moment he can. And it’s not like he’s hiding it. All he does is talk about the tyrannical things he wants to do.
Whenever you bring up any of these tyrannical things to a MAGA Republican, they piviot to all the weird conspiracy theories they’ve heard from far Right podcasts about what they believe “woke” corporations are planning to do. They either do that, or they try to mitigate or rationalize out of existence the dangers posed by things like Project 2025 by saying, “I look at Project 2024 and it just looks like a regular policy agenda to me.”
Oh boy.
All of this yet again makes me think about what will happen if Trump goes full tyrant on us in 2025. The key issue is — Trump is so lazy and stupid that he just doesn’t have the political chops to transition the United States into a Russian-style autocracy without there being SOME backlash. Even Putin, who had a tradition of autocracy and a nation in chaos, gradually transitioned the country into an autocracy.
So if Trump goes nuts and goes full tyrant the moment he’s in office again — the shit is going to hit the fan. I can only assume there will be a spectrum of far Right podcasts listeners should this happen.
On one end of the spectrum will be people who are all-in to Trump’s tyranny. They will be proactive Good Germans who cheer on the country’s transition into a white Christian ethnostate — they will be getting what they have longed for and there will, at last, no chance that a “woke” bank will come after them for listening to Joe Rogan.
MEANWHILE, ON THE OTHER END of the spectrum, there will be people who will blanch at the tyranny and chaos that Trump will cause. It is these people that we have to keep an eye on. If these Traditionalists simply sit on their hands should their be a Blue General Strike, then maybe, just maybe, we might be able to depose Trump in some way.
But, plot twist, if that happens, then there probably will be a civil war as Red States leave the Union in rage that Trump has been deposed.
It’s going to be a while still, but I’m definitely in the process of transitioning into the querying process for my first novel. There are two things that I want to do before really get into querying.
One is, I want to hand the novel over to some sort of beta reader, one who doesn’t know anything about me or the novel. Once THAT process is finished, then I’m going to go through and make one last pass through the novel to make sure everything is good enough.
THEN I will really start to think about the nitty-gritty of querying my first novel.
But even as I’m doing that, I’m also going to work on the second novel in the series that my first novel is a meant to be a part of as well as a scifi novel.
All of this is happening, of course, with the looming possibility that Something Bad will happen in late 2024, early 2025. If we manage to avoid the end of the world around that time then, well, I’m hoping that I will sell my first novel at some point in late 2024, early 2025.
But I’m realistic.
I’m so fucking old and bonkers that it could be that either it’s years before I get published — even if we avoid blowing the world up because of Trump — OR I never get published at all, ever.
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