I am not a Democrat. But I fly pretty close to that political sun, so I listen to a lot of center-Left podcasts and when former Obama era Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was on Pod Save America, I found myself nodding in agreement a lot.
The core problem for Blues is what people want — an infotainment figure who makes politics “fun” and a blood sport, comes exclusively from the center-Right. The only person who comes close on the center-Left who could be a Trump-like figure for Blues is Stephen Colbert and he just won’t do it.
So, as such, Blues have to hunker down on good policy.
And I think Emanuel’s policy views are pretty good. Things like telling Democrats to de-emphasize “project trans kids” and also pass legislation that would bar under 16 children from using social media makes a lot of sense to me.
But we will have a long ways to go. A very long ways. We still don’t know if we’re even enough of a democracy still to ever have free-and-fair elections.
What the fuck is going on with Crooked Media’s Jon Lovett. He seems…cranky. He seems like he’s not very happy with his position at the organization. It seems, if you reverse engineer things, that he keeps demanding in-house side projects for some reason.
He’s currently got a Bravo in-house side project that I assume he was given to placate him for some reason.
I just get the sense that a lot more is going on with Lovett at Crooked Media than we’re being told. It’s just it’s such low stakes that it’s not like Page Six gives enough of a shit to investigate exactly what’s going on.
And while we’re on the topic of Crooked Media, those guys keep reminding me that I think they’ve jumped the shark. They’ve grown kind of full of themselves and they’re not longer the plucky upstart outsiders to the Democratic Establishement.
They ARE the Democratic Establishment (or at least the center-Left Establishment) and, as such, some of their policy views are pretty self-defeating. Especially when it comes to trans Rights.
Let me be clear again — I support trans rights, I just think the whole “protect trans kids” (because there are so few “trans kids” in reality) is kind of self-defeating and hands a loaded gun to fucking MAGA fascists who swoop up and collect “normal” people who feel aliened by such rhetoric.
Anyway. It will be interesting to see what happens with Lovett and Crooked Media in 2026.
I don’t know what to make of Dave Chappelle these days. He’s still the GOAT as they say, but…is he MAGA now? Or at least MAGA adjacent? I’ve been viewing his latest Netflix special in dribs and drabs on Tik-Tok and…I’m not impressed.
He seems to make up a lot excuses for performing in Saudi Arabia when he should have just stuck to the truth: he did it for the money.
And he shouldn’t give any mealy mouth “whataboutism” answers to questions about why he did it, or whatever. Just admit he has a lot less principles that we thought he had and he did a gig in a country ruled by a murderous thug for cold hard cash.
This is just about the nadir of winter because it’s not Christmas Eve, but it also is when you can feel the world grind to a halt. The next week or so is just going to be a bunch of static I suspect.
Unless something big and unexpected happens.
I tried to play the lottery in hopes of a Christmas miracle, but the damn machine simply could not, world not work. So, I think I’ve wasted enough money on that particular fantastical dream.
I rarely play the lottery, but when it gets up there, I grow weak and actually dabble in that particular “sin.”
Just as I was celebrating being at the mid-point of the second draft of the scifi dramedy novel I’m working on, I rebooted my chat windows with the AIs I’m using and the panned much of the novel because the hero is “too passive.”
So.
I’ve decided to go through the entirety of the novel to see how I can improve the agency of my hero as much as possible. I’ve totally revamped the beginning of the novel because of that.
But I’m hoping that I can save at least much of the first act. The first half of the second act “the fun and games” part of the novel, may not be as lucky.
Which, of course, is going to slow me down a great deal. But if the over all effect is that the novel is better, then huzzah.
I’m cruising towards the midpoint of the scifi dramedy novel I’m writing. And, I have to admit, the speed I’ve had doing all of this comes in no small part to being “AI First.”
I’m doing a lot — A LOT — of work, but I am amplifying and enhancing all that hard work with AI. I continue to do most, if not all, of the actual writing, but on a structural basis AI has really helped.
And that doesn’t even begin to account for the fact that I’m going to make one last pass on the second draft to make sure absolutely as much as possible of the actual written text of the novel is mine and now AI.
I’m already feeling a little insecure from everyone who’s read the first chapter saying how great it is. Usually, people either don’t tell me what they think or say it sucks. But, like I said, I am actually doing all the heavy lifting and AI is more like an enhance spell checker than anything else.
I think very soon, once Christmas is actually here, I’m probably going to be in neutral for a few days then bounce back into writing again. But I really am going to have to work hard in the second half of the novel — the second half is not nearly as actually written out as the first.
So that is going to slow me down.
I still hope to wrap the beta draft of the novel up by spring 2026, and, yet, even if I do that, because of post-production issues, it could be Sept 1st, 2026 before I actually start to query.
That will suck, but, lulz. I just want to see how far I can get in the querying process.
And, yet, explain this to me. Recently, in the last few days, I was looking at a video on Tik-Tok about trench warfare in WW1. I idly thought *to myself* about what happened when the trenches came to the sea.
Would you believe, today, a video about that VERY THING was pushed to me on Tik-Tok? It even began, “You may have thought about…” That was pretty eerie unto itself.
It really makes you wonder what the implications would be if such a technology — the ability to read people’s minds via their phones — actually, in fact, did exist. It doesn’t obviously, but it is a curious possibility.
If there’s one thing that MAGA loves to do, it’s be bigoted towards trans people. It’s like MAGA’s original sin. Trump will simply not shut up about how he thinks the center-Left wants everyone to be trans.
He literally will say the Left wants “transgender for everyone.” It’s a consistent theme of his messaging and that’s probably because it is one of the central beliefs of the MAGA base. The center Left, of course, does itself no favors by being so twitchy about something that not only doesn’t even happen that much, but is EXTREMELY UNPOPULAR with “normal people” — underage trans people.
While I totally validate the whole “protect trans kids” concept, that doesn’t mean it’s not a hard sell for “normal” people who struggle to understand the idea of a really young person, who maybe hasn’t even gone through puberty yet, even understanding what sexuality is, much less their own.
And, yet, a certain vocal subset of the Leftist movement simply will not shut the fuck up about something that as far as I can tell, barely ever happens at all.
So. why bring this up?
The looming prospect of conscious AI.
Right now, we don’t really have to think about conscious AI because even if they could be proven to have consciousness, they don’t have a body. So, any sexual or romantic shenanigans that happen between Man and Machine can only be done via text and metaphor.
So, we’re kind of punting a major societal issue down the road until there’s a fusion of AI and robotics so AI is “embodied.” When we have demonstrable conscious AIs being the minds of androids, we may have a serious, serious social and political issue on our hands.
To the point that the very MAGA people who now have their regular one or two minute of hate for hapless trans people will, in turn start to do the same thing for conscious AI in robots. Or, more specifically, they will explode into a rage collectively at the idea of a human becoming romantically involved with — to the point of marrying — an AI android.
They will rant and scream about how AI “has no soul” and, as such, AI androids marrying a human is even MORE an “abomination” than gay marriage is to the average Christian.
So, in short, we’re fucked. I think all of this, from a “megatrends” point of view, probably comes to a head in five to ten years. Buckle up.
I continue to get pretty good feed back about the novel after having given the first chapter to some people to read. I’m probably going to futz with the beginning of the novel some more, but I’m pleased that people seem to like what they’ve seen.
My plan is to really flesh out the novel over the course of the next few months then make on more pass through it to make sure there’s no lingering evidence that I used AI. I’m really, really worried that my laziness in the past will show up and people will dismiss the whole endeavor as “written by AI” when I’ve done A LOT OF HARD WORK.
Whenever I get too worried about using AI, I just think of how I use it as a spell checker. I’m still doing a lot of hard work, but using AI smooths out some of the edges and helps take things to the next level on a structural basis.
It seems as though AI development — at least that involving LLMs — has finally reached something of a wall. All the new developments are a variation on a theme. There’s not really been a “wow” moment in some time.
Of course, Gemini 3.0 is really good, but it’s not good enough for people to be thinking we’ve attained the magical, mystery “AGI.” It’s just a really good chatbot.
So, I don’t know what to tell you. I do think that if this keeps up, we may see LLMs put natively into a lot more things because society will be able to catch up to LLM development in more practical ways.
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