#oneaday Day 384: Catio completio

Andie and I finished off our new "catio" today. I don't have any pictures to share because it's dark now and we didn't take any pictures when it was finished, but you'll have to take my word for it that it looks very good. I say "Andie and I" finished it off, but really 95% of the work was Andie, because she is handy and I am not, but I was slightly useful for holding things up and getting the roof on.

Okay, getting the roof on involved removing some of the guttering from the back of our house, but that's a problem we will confront tomorrow. And by we, I almost certainly mean Andie.

For the unfamiliar, a catio is an enclosed space designed for mostly indoor cats to be able to go outside without roaming. In less than charitable terms, it's a cage attached to the back of your house, but big enough for people to go in as well as cats. That sounds a bit wrong. We're not keeping prisoners, honest.

Anyway, yes, the aim was simply to provide a means for our cats Patti and Oliver to be able to go outside, but stay safe. After we lost one of our first cats, Ruby, on the road, we decided to keep our cats indoors. We don't live in a particularly busy area, but there are some absolute cunts who ride motorbikes up and down the street at all hours, plus we're not very far away from quite a busy main road. Plus none of the cats we've had have ever seemed too interested about roaming.

Both of them have been enjoying the ability to go outside, though. Oliver has been particularly interested in learning what Outside is like in recent weeks, and Patti took some tentative but interested steps out there this evening, too. Patti used to go out in the old catio before we tore it down, but Oliver has only ever been outside under heavy supervision from us. The completion of the catio means he'll be able to go out and enjoy himself unsupervised, which I think is going to be really good for the energetic little bugger.

Yes, we had a catio before, but it was something of an experimental project by Andie, more to prove she could do it than anything else. We tore it down after Meg passed, because Patti wasn't showing much interest in going outside, and it looked a bit shabby. Since then, we've revamped the garden quite a bit — the mostly dirt area that was enclosed by the old catio now actually has a patio under it, so it looks much nicer — and the new catio is of much more sturdy construction than the old one. I'd go so far as to say it looks very professional indeed; Andie has become an incredibly skilled handyperson over the course of the last 10 years, and I consider myself very lucky to be able to enjoy all her good work.

I'd make an effort to be handier myself if I lost some weight — which, as longstanding readers will know, has been pretty much a lifelong struggle — and if I didn't have a hernia — which, as longstanding readers will know, has been a problem for a while. The two are connected. If I fix one, I can get the other sorted, too. I am attempting to work on that. If I am ever successful, who knows? Maybe I will become someone who "potters around in the garden", as the cliché has it.

In the meantime, we now have a nice catio, a nice garden and two cats who appear to appreciate the hard work that has been done for them. I look forward to letting them out for some proper time in the sunshine tomorrow.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 383: Missed connections

I don't know if this is a side-effect of getting older, or if my thoughts and emotional state have changed, or whatever, but I've found myself missing my grandparents a lot recently, particularly those on my mother's side. This may sound a little harsh, but my family in general were always quite a bit closer with my maternal grandparents for various reasons — and this isn't to say I don't miss my grandparents on the Davison side, along with Bill, the lovely chap my Nan Davison married rather late in life — and thus I find it's them that my thoughts turn to with increasing frequency of late.

I feel a particular sense that I wish I'd gotten to know my Grandad a bit better. He was the first of my grandparents that we lost, but he was a beloved part of our family. He was always quite a character, and somewhat notorious to my parents for his famous "bodge jobs" on things that needed fixing or building. Since my wife, Andie, is rather handy (no jokes please) and good at improvising when things go sub-optimally, I find myself thinking that my Grandad would have got along well with her.

My Grandad was also always very supportive of things like my creativity and musical ability. Quite often when we made the trek from Cambridgeshire over to the West Midlands to visit the grandparents, both sets of whom were there, we'd take along a keyboard from home and I'd put on impromptu little "concerts" in their living room. Rather cheekily, I'd put up hand-made signs to make it look like we were in a real concert hall or theatre — I always used to find it particularly amusing to put signs up for the toilet — and I'm pretty sure on more than one occasion I put a modified tissue box on the door as a means of charging "admission". But my Nan and Grandad always humoured me, and they were always pretty generous with the pocket money, too.

My Nan was a nice person, too. Every time we went to visit, she'd make me jelly and ice cream and make sure she had Jammy Dodger biscuits in because she knew I liked them. I have odd little flashes of memory of my time spent with her, like attempting to draw Asterix in my sketch books while listening to the tape of '80s chart hits that felt strangely out of place in my grandparents' house. I remember playing Super NES on the ratty old portable television in the dining room. And I have regrets over occasionally being a moody adolescent on certain visits. I don't even remember why I was upset or angry; I just feel a bit ashamed when I look back on those moments, which occasionally, likewise, pop into my mind unbidden.

It's an odd thing, really, isn't it. As you grow older, you have a better sense of who you are, and who you feel you might get along with. As I've grown older, I feel like I would have enjoyed spending more time with my grandparents, and I'm pretty sure they would have liked Andie a lot, too. There are times when I almost feel like my Grandad is watching over me from wherever he is, even. And as he watches, he never judges; he's just there, a comforting presence.

Perhaps that's enough. Well, it kind of has to be, doesn't it? Because you can't turn back the clock. Sometimes it's just a bit of a shame that you feel like you understand the importance of certain people in your life long after they've departed it.

Perhaps I'll see my grandparents again someday. No-one really knows. But it's kind of a comforting thought to feel like they might be there waiting to see me again.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 380: My Flawless Every Time (Unless You Burn It) Chilli con Carne Recipe

We all have a Thing That We Can Cook, even if you're not someone who is particularly culinarily minded. If you're really good at doing omelettes or fried eggs or bacon sandwiches, that 100% counts; even a cheese toastie can be your one Thing That You Can Cook really well.

For me, it's a chilli con carne. This was one of the first things my mother taught me to make, and wrote, by hand, in a little red notebook that she gave me to take to university with a bunch of her recipes. My mum is a good cook, though to my shame I only cooked a few of the things in that little red book, and I'm not entirely sure where it eventually ended up.

Anyway, my Flawless Every Time (Unless You Burn It) Chilli con Carne recipe is probably loosely based on what my mother taught me, but it's been adapted and refined over the course of probably the last ten years or so in particular. So I thought I would share it with you today. You may note the absence of some ingredients such as onions and garlic; I don't put onions in 'cause I don't like them, and I don't put garlic in because I don't think it's necessary. Aside from that, this should be fairly as-you-expect, but read on anyway:

Ingredients

500g minced beef. If you're trying to be vaguely healthy, go for the 5% fat option. It works just fine.
1 x 400g can of kidney beans in chilli sauce
1 x 400g can of chopped tomatoes
1-2 teaspoons of red chillies in a jar (or you can use fresh if you can be arsed)
1-2 teaspoons of chipotle paste
1 teaspoon of cumin
1 teaspoon of paprika
2 teaspoons of smoked paprika
1 teaspoon of cayenne pepper
1 teaspoon of chilli powder
Pinch of salt and black pepper
Rice to serve

Method

Mix all the spices together in a little bowl and set them to one side.
Begin frying the minced beef in a little oil. When it starts to brown, dump in the spice mix and stir well so the beef is nicely coated in it. It should go from grey-brown to having a nice red-orange tint.
When most of the red of the beef has turned brown add the chillies and stir well.
After 1-2 minutes, add the chipotle paste and stir well again.
After 1-2 minutes, add the kidney beans and sauce and stir well yet again.
After another 1-2 minutes, add the chopped tomatoes and stir well.
Once everything is mixed together nicely, lower the heat a bit and simmer for about 20 minutes.
While the chilli is cooking, cook the rice. If you're using a rice cooker, allow about 1.5 cups of rice for 2 people and add about 3 cups of water. Use the rice paddle to agitate the rice off the bottom of the rice cooker to minimise it burning/toasting on the bottom.
Serve.

Easy, right? The only way you can feasibly fuck this up is if you forget to turn the heat down a bit and you burn the damn thing. You can optionally tweak it a bit, also; add 2 tins of tomatoes and simmer for twice as long for a richer sauce, but if you can't be arsed to wait that long, this method makes a nicely flavourful, spicy and probably not-at-all authentic chilli con carne with ingredients you can easily find on supermarket shelves.

Gourmet? God no. But it is tasty and comforting. And that's what you want from a quick and easy meal, right?

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 379: I watched A Good Girl's Guide to Murder

After enjoying Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators recently, I found myself hankering after another murder mystery type thing, and BBC iPlayer was good enough to recommend a show called A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, which sounded intriguing. I hadn't heard of the show before but I liked the premise and it sounded like an interesting contrast to the somewhat comedic tone of Shakespeare & Hathaway, so I took a chance on it.

A couple of days later, I've finished watching the full series of six episodes, and I really enjoyed it, so I thought I'd talk about it a bit today.

A Good Girl's Guide to Murder is apparently based on a novel of the same name by Holly Jackson. Specifically, it's an adaptation of the first novel in a series of three and a bit — I say this because the last one is described as a "novella" rather than a "novel" — and it looks as if the show has been renewed for a second season, so presumably the plan, long-term, is to adapt the whole series.

The premise of the show is that A-grade and possibly autistic student Pip is preparing for university admissions, and part of this process involves the preparation of an "EPQ" — an Extended Project Qualification, which some students in England and Wales do to add to their "UCAS Points" total. I'd never heard of this, as it was introduced after my time in the classroom as both student and teacher, but apparently it adds up to about half an A-level points-wise. But I digress.

Pip decides to do her EPQ on a notorious local incident in which a young woman named Andie Bell went missing and was assumed to have been murdered, but her body was never found. Her boyfriend at the time, Sal Singh, was assumed to be the murderer because he was found to have committed suicide shortly after Andie went missing, but something didn't seem right to Pip. She starts investigating and — spoilers, I guess — eventually brings the full truth of the situation to light, though not without encountering numerous roadblocks and a lot of soul-searching along the way.

Being a 17 year old girl, Pip doesn't go about her investigation as a policeman or private detective would. Instead, she engages in the sort of subterfuge only a teenage girl is capable of, aided and abetted in most circumstances by Sal's brother Ravi, who also has doubts about whether his brother was really a murderer. Over the course of the series, she breaks into houses, steals evidence, attends illicit raves, puts herself in mortal peril on multiple occasions and somehow manages to survive the whole experience.

It's very much a "suspension of disbelief" kind of show, because a lot of things just sort of seem to work out quite conveniently for Pip, and there are several instances where she almost gets caught and could quite clearly have been collared after the fact, but manages to escape any real consequences. But once you're immersed in the show, none of this really matters, because it's a really fun ride; you root for the plucky Pip as she repeatedly gets into things well over her head, and come out cheering for her when she finally manages to uncover something missed when the case was originally investigated.

Part of Pip not suffering any real consequences for the things she does stems from the "Good Girl" part of the title; Pip is renowned as a good girl, a straight-A student and someone who has always been well-behaved and sensible. As such, she can get away with a lot of things, even when her parents expressly forbid her from continuing to work on the case on the grounds that it's dangerous and threatens to dredge up terrible memories for several local families.

Towards the end of the series, the show really gets into this theme in a somewhat literary manner: the concept that someone can appear to be a "good person" on the outside, but actually harbour darkness in their heart. Exactly what form this "darkness" can take varies from person to person; in Pip's case, it manifests both through her willingness to flout the "rules" of society to get the job done, and her own sense of guilt over the past. She believes that a chance encounter shortly before Andie's disappearance may have indirectly been a catalyst for all this, so part of her initially altruistic-seeming investigation is to absolve herself of that guilt.

In the case of other characters, the darkness is more obvious. One character, crucial to the eventual outcome of the case, describes himself as being fundamentally a "good person" but having a "dark seed" inside himself; he believes that everyone has such a "seed" inside themselves, and it just takes "the right conditions for it to grow". In his case, it most certainly did grow, leading him to commit unforgivable, unconscionable acts — though to his credit, once he's caught he does appear to be legitimately remorseful — and surprise everyone around him that he was capable of such things.

I don't want to get too much into the details of the story because I think it's worth watching and the twists and turns of the narrative are, of course, part of the appeal. So instead I'll talk a bit about the overall presentation of the show, which is excellent.

The visual direction is striking and dynamic; no scene is truly static, and the show makes great use of close-ups to highlight both characters' emotions and the danger and discomfort Pip finds herself in when getting a little too close to the truth. The actors are all very well-cast — Emma Myers as Pip is particularly excellent, as one would hope for the lead — and manage to nail a feeling of realistic diversity without feeling tokenistic. This is relevant, because matters of racism do play a part in the narrative; as Ravi points out, as enlightened as we might wish we all were, the fact is that certain types of people — particularly middle-class people who live in a small, affluent town — are inclined to believe that a "brown boy" (as he puts it) might not have the best interests of a "blonde white girl" at heart.

The show isn't obnoxious about this message; it only brings it up a couple of times, and it is a worthwhile contemporary talking point. The sort of small town in which the majority of the narrative unfolds is the kind that would be inextricably associated with white, middle-class England, but Pip in particular, as a thoroughly modern Good Girl, is above such things. Part of this is down to the fact that her mother married a Nigerian man after Pip's biological father passed away when she was just a year old, and as such, she has always been exposed to the idea of diversity and tolerance on a daily basis. But it's also a reflection of the modern youth: conscious of social issues, aware that society still has problems, and open about wanting to do their part in making things a little bit better.

Where the show is really striking, though, is in its use of music. There's a lot of contemporary music used on the soundtrack, and it is often used to emphasise powerfully emotional moments; it's always very loud compared to the relatively quiet dialogue sequences, though, making for an attention-grabbing contrast between the more personal, intimate moments and the bigger picture of what is going on.

The contemporary popular music is contrasted with an excellent original score that highlights the tension of numerous scenes, in some cases mimicking "sound effects" to reflect what is going on. During a sequence where Pip's beloved dog Barney goes missing, for example, the soundtrack makes use of a somewhat "sonar"-style motif to reflect the search that is going on; initially, it's almost hard to determine whether the sound is diegetic or not, but as the texture of the track builds up as the tension increases, it becomes clear that it's part of the overall soundscape of the show.

I really enjoyed A Good Girl's Guide to Murder overall. After finishing one episode, I was keen to immediately watch the next, and I must confess I have spent my whole morning watching the final three episodes because I really wanted to see how things turned out. It's compelling, well-crafted and exceedingly well-presented viewing, and while it's perhaps not particularly realistic if you stop to think about things too much, it doesn't take long for that to cease mattering and for you to be drawn in to the narrative.

Yes, it may primarily be aimed at teens — it was a BBC Three show, after all — but don't let that put you off if you're a little older and still enjoy a good murder mystery. I found myself thinking as I watched that it would make a good anime, and I think that's testament to what makes it good — like the best anime series, it's a show that all ages can get something out of; it doesn't talk down to its core audience, and it doesn't feel cringeworthy and insincere to older viewers.

Definite recommend, then. Here's hoping that second series materialises!

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 378: How to win at the dishwasher

If you are fortunate enough to own a dishwasher — and I suspect the proportion of you for which this is true is somewhat greater than it would have been maybe 20 years ago — then you have probably encountered The Great Dishwasher Paradox, which is that you've bought an appliance designed to save you time, effort and getting gross old food gunk all over your hands, but where somehow you can't quite bring yourself to do the simple task of loading and unloading it.

Loading and unloading the dishwasher becomes a mission of Sisyphean proportions, far worse than you ever felt about Doing The Washing Up, and so inevitably it happens: a dishwasher full of clean stuff sits around for about a week, while a veritable mountain of dirty plates, cutlery, cups, pots and other kitchen miscellanea builds up atop it, gradually reaching a point where it starts blocking access to other kitchen appliances such as, in our kitchen, the microwave.

Last time my wife took a trip away with some of her friends and family without me, I conquered the dishwasher. I wasn't deliberately trying to conquer the dishwasher, but I did. As soon as my wife returned, it all went to shit again, and I've been trying to recapture that conquest ever since. And I think I've nailed it.

The secret, dear reader, is to ensure that at no point does the dishwasher ever become so full of plates, cutlery, pots and other kitchen miscellanea that it becomes an undesirable amount of effort to unload it. What this means in practice is that you put a few things in the dishwasher immediately when they're dirty and, at an arbitrarily chosen checkpoint for yourself — just before going to bed is a good one — you put the dishwasher on, regardless of whether or not it's full.

Then, the next day when you open it up, there's not very much stuff to put away at all, so it takes less than five minutes to sort it all out, and then you can just put dirty stuff straight into the dishwasher the moment you're done with it. This all but eliminates the Filth Mountain problem, ensures you always have Clean Stuff ready to go, and once you get yourself into this cycle and stick to it, everything suddenly becomes a lot more manageable.

There are risks. The moment you cook something elaborate that involves lots of pots, pans and utensils, you run the risk of crossing that invisible threshold where emptying the dishwasher becomes A Pain. One can prepare for this eventuality by ensuring the dishwasher is completely empty before such a cooking adventure takes place. Then, even the most elaborate dinner service will probably not fill the dishwasher to bursting point, and you should be able to maintain the rhythm of this process.

One might say it is wasteful to run the dishwasher when it's not full. And perhaps it is. But then I think about the number of times we've crammed the dishwasher to breaking point because we'd allowed Filth Mountain to accumulate once again, and how the stuff inside then didn't come out clean, so we had to either run it again or wash stuff by hand, and it doesn't feel like that much of a problem.

Besides, I think we can probably agree that there are much more wasteful things going on in the world today than running a not-full dishwasher each day.

So there you have it. How to win at the dishwasher. I'm disappointed in myself that it's taken 44 years on this Earth to nail this, but at least it's done now. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a dishwasher to load.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 375: So very very tired

Earlier today, someone shared a photo of a packet of Uncle Ben's instant noodles or something, which came with a disclaimer on the front that the image of the supposed product festering inside the pouch had been "generated with AI". And I think I felt something actually snap in my brain.

What are we doing. What are we actually doing. I am absolutely beyond sick of this garbage being force-fed to us from every possible angle, and for breathless ball-gargling apologists to come out with all the usual "oh, it's a tool, a tool can't be bad".

No. Fuck off. Generative AI is hot garbage, and I think we've proven that beyond every reasonable doubt at this point. "It hallucinates a bit" should be enough to put absolutely fucking everyone off ever even thinking about using it for research and analysis, and the fact that the companies who trained these models have had to go about it in the most underhanded means possible, potentially destroying creators' rights over their own work in the process, should be enough to ward everyone off. And to cap it all, these people spend billions every month to achieve nothing. Several years into this shit and we're still yet to see convincing use cases that don't have hefty caveats. And still the rich get richer, somehow, and the world, as a whole, gets worse and worse off.

Is the fact that people have been driven to suicide by "conversations" with AI bots not enough? Is the fact that multiple social media platforms are now pretty much unusable and a privacy nightmare due to the flood of AI not enough? Does the prospect of people not actually being able to perform necessary skills — like, say, coding to hold the world's infrastructure together — not absolutely terrify you? And do you not see anything even a little bit wrong with ChatGPT offering to modify an existing piece of writing "in the style of" another magazine so you can successfully pitch something you didn't write a single word of?

Every day, the world gets worse and worse, and frankly, I'm reaching a point where it is becoming less and less desirable to live in it. Couple all this inescapable AI shit with what's going on in America, the looming war in the Middle East (again) and the frankly frightening regressions the world has seemingly been going through with regard to acceptance, tolerance and inclusion, and it's not a pretty sight. It's no wonder that everyone in the world seems to be so argumentative, aggressive and confrontational all the time these days. This is a problem, but it's also a symptom.

When I was growing up, it felt like I was living through one of the most exciting periods in cultural, societal and technological history. Now I'm just embarrassed to be on the same planet as a frankly terrifying proportion of the population, who seem to think that everything we're doing right now is just fine, and we should definitely continue on this course, it absolutely won't cause terrible problems down the line.

I don't know what to do any more. I feel powerless, helpless, alone. And I'm sure I'm not the only one feeling that way.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 374: Afternoon nap

I've been exceedingly tired today and I'm not really sure why. Possibly it's because I went to bed pretty late last night, and possibly it's because I might be coming down with whatever it is my wife has right now (it's not COVID, we checked) but, regardless, I felt the need to spend my lunch break today just having a nap.

A daytime nap can be thoroughly pleasant. I've mentioned here on this blog numerous times that I tend to have my most vivid dreams after I've woken up for the first time each day and then fallen asleep again, and this remains true for daytime naps, too; they tend to involve vivid, interesting dreams that, more often than not, I find myself wanting to "finish" before I wake up.

This is silly, of course, because you can't "finish" a dream, and the relatively nonsensical nature of your average dream means that even if you could, there's no guarantee you could find whatever the trigger for the "end point" is.

For example, this morning when I was snoozing my alarm and not wanting to get up, I had a dream that I was at a station and needed to catch a train. I was supposed to meet some people and get on the train with them, but by the time I reached the platform the train was on, I could see said people waving to me from the train, which was just pulling out of the station.

Strangely, the last carriage of the train remained where it was, and became a bus going somewhere completely different as soon as I got on. I knew that the place the bus was going was a fair distance from the train's eventual destination, but I figured I would just get off at the next stop and figure things out from there. The next stop was a large and lively city — I didn't recognise it specifically, but it was relatively pleasant — so, as planned, I got off and attempted to decide what to do next, eventually settling on hiring a car to drive to the train's eventual destination, dropping it off at a branch of the car hire place that would inevitably be there.

I woke up around that point, realising I'd overslept somewhat, and thus I will never know if I 1) successfully hired a car, 2) if it was possible to drop said car back at a different branch of the agency to the one I hired it from, and 3) if I ever made it to wherever the train was going. And there are, of course, plenty of unanswered questions posed by the things I did experience, because dreams make no sense.

I mean, sure, you can interpret them in various ways — perhaps this dream is a manifestation of subconscious worries about being "left behind" in some way or another — but ultimately, a dream is always something your subconscious decided to conjure up for reasons that we still don't entirely understand, despite there being numerous theories about it.

I wonder what would happen if you did ever manage to "finish" a dream, whatever that means. What are the odds on it causing immediate and complete brain death? With everything we've had to put up with in the world up until this point, it wouldn't surprise me one bit. And it might even be a nice escape; the universe saying that you've survived enough, so now it's time to be set free.

Cheery thought, huh? Sweet dreams!

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 372: In which my neighbour determines voice assistants are useless

I was having a poo earlier, as you do, and since our toilet is like sitting inside an actual blast furnace during the summer months, I had the window open as wide as it could go to let some air in. A side-effect of this is that I can hear what is going on outside (and quite possibly that anyone outside can hear what is going on inside the toilet, but I've never tested that theory) and, more often than not, I hear my neighbours going about various business in their garden.

Our neighbours have a couple of kids, and the kids are often out the back using their trampoline. This evening it sounded like there was some sort of family meal or gathering outside, and there was music playing, evidently via some sort of Alexa-based smart speaker, because every couple of minutes — and inevitably well before a song had played to its conclusion, because who has time to listen to music in its entirety any more? — I heard one of my neighbours going "Alexa, next one". And, on multiple occasions, repeating this command at least once before Alexa actually played the "next one".

After several failed attempts to get Alexa to stop playing the Electric Light Orchestra, I heard some frustrated-sounding swearing coming from the garden, then the music stopped suddenly. A few moments later, it started again, but with no voice commands required. I imagine my neighbour had given up on trying to control the music with his voice and just gone back to good "old-fashioned" streaming from his phone.

I honestly have never seen the point of voice assistants. It is several orders of magnitude less convenient to do things with your voice than it is to just click on something on a computer or tap on it on a phone — with one of the chief reasons being, as demonstrated by my neighbour's frustrations, the fact that on a statistically significant number of occasions, you probably have to correct the device's misunderstanding of what you said, by which point you may as well have just fished your phone out of your pocket and typed what you were looking for into Google (not that Google is a great help these days with those fucking AI summaries) or opened your music app and pressed "Next".

I don't know. It's been said many times before, but it feels like a lot of today's tech is being built to solve problems that never existed in the first place. If I run out of milk, the last thing on my mind is telling a robot that fact; I either go out and get some milk myself, or I do what a normal person does and write it on a bit of paper on the fridge, forget about it until 10.48pm, then have to brave the mean streets of Southampton to walk to Tesco Express just so I can have a coffee the following morning. If I tell Alexa, or Google, or whatever, that I'm out of milk, sure, that fact is recorded somewhere, but it doesn't achieve anything. I could probably make it so that it ordered some milk from Amazon or something, but what an absolute faff. Shopping with a voice assistant is an absolutely alien concept to me, because it completely eliminates the ability to look at what's available, the prices and suchlike. So why would you bother?

Answer is, we don't. We have a couple of smart speakers, but all they get used for is finding our phones if we've forgotten where we put them down, and occasionally streaming some music, which we do via the "cast" button in our music apps rather than attempting to talk to them. I think our Alexa thing also controls our smart light switches, but again, no voice controls are involved there, and it could probably be done via another means.

When I did a very brief stint working for a courier company, it was vaguely useful to say "okay Google, take me to [postcode]" and it be able to navigate me there, but I'm not sure it was actually any quicker or better to do that than just typing said postcode into Google Maps. And if I'd typed it in, at least I knew it was right.

As tech critic Ed Zitron frequently notes, tech used to be fun and exciting, but these days it just seems to be finding new and exciting ways to make things less convenient and more annoying. And, of course, this isn't even getting into the "AI" garbage.

I hope that one day very soon the tech industry manages to wake up and realise that it's doing both itself and its customers a great disservice. Unfortunately, I am very concerned that process isn't going to be a pretty one, with the obscene amounts of money being thrown around for what, to the layman, very much appears to be products that don't actually exist.

What are we even doing any more?

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 370: Where's the breaking point?

Watching the shit going down in the United States, and seeing the general state of the world today, I have to ask… how far, really, is too far for humanity to put up with? Because part of me thinks that "too far" is, at this point, a distant speck behind us, and yet not an awful lot appears to be Getting Done.

Granted, there have been some big protests in LA recently, and justifiably so. This very much counts as Getting Something Done, particularly as it's making the authoritarian nature of the current U.S. government readily apparent through its response to said protests. But a lot of the people in the States with the actual power to Get Something Done — like, say, the Governor of California, or any number of other politicians with a platform — appear to be doing little more than writing sternly worded letters and posting them on social media, when they should be… well, doing more than that.

It's a similar situation, albeit from a wildly different perspective, with the generative AI thing. The general public doesn't want this. The people whose jobs are being put at risk don't want this. The people who just want "going on the computer" to carry the joy it once had around the turn of the century don't want this. And yet every day I read about huge companies like Google stubbornly digging their heels in, even going so far as to lay people off in an attempt to fund something which, at this point, has proven itself beyond a doubt to be inherently unsustainable, unprofitable and, moreover, useless.

And no, I don't want to hear any AI apologists giving me the "oh but it's great for coding and medicine!" spiel. In both of those instances, the prospect of zero human involvement is, frankly, horrifying. With the amount of bullshit generative AI still makes up on the regular, I wouldn't trust it to code anything without intense human supervision, and the second I see a doctor consulting ChatGPT is the second I report that fucker for malpractice.

But outside of outspoken critics like the previously linked Ed Zitron, not a lot seems to be getting done about the AI problem, either. I suspect a lot of people are scared to be the one to speak up at their workplace if their boss suddenly decides that they're going "all-in" on AI, whatever the fuck that means. (Don't worry, this hasn't happened at my place of work, thankfully.) And I think they're probably right to be nervous; I can see people getting shitcanned for spurious reasons like "not being a team player" if they object to their organisation's use of AI — and no, the irony of that would not be lost on me, given AI's potential to break up efficient, quality teams — and we are probably yet to see the true legal ramifications of someone who decides to challenge an employer who let them go in order to replace them with a hallucinating plagiarism machine.

So is that it? Is the answer that very few people are actually doing anything to resist the absolute bullshit that is happening in our because they are scared? If that's the case… yeah. I kind of get it. The stuff coming out of the States is terrifying to see unfold, even as someone an ocean away from where it's actually happening. And I won't lie, the prospect of losing my job to AI is a concern — one that sits at the back of my mind as a near-constant anxiety right now.

I miss being able to enjoy existence. Because it feels like a very long time since I've been proud to be a human being on this Earth at this particular time in history. Instead, it's an embarrassment. A terrifying embarrassment. And I sincerely hope that the day we look back on this and go "Never a-fucking-gain" is sooner rather than later. Because I'm certainly not going to look back on these days and laugh.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 369: What is going vrrrrrr

Something in my house has been going vrrrrrrrr… vrr vrr vrr vrrrrrrrr all day and it's driving me bonkers. I have no idea what it is. I thought I was hearing the vibration of my fan on my desk (upstairs) through the ceiling of the lounge (directly beneath it) but having turned said fan off and moved it, I don't think it's that.

Actually, it might be that. If it has been that all day, and all it took to stop it going vrrrrrr… vrr vrr vrr vrrrrrrrr was to move it an inch, I'm going to be… well, not annoyed as such, but mildly frustrated that I didn't just follow my first instinct and investigate further.

I've always had quite sharp hearing for stuff like this. It can be irritating at times, but back when I was younger my friends used to think I had magical powers for being able to tell a TV was turned on somewhere nearby (with its volume down, obviously, anyone can tell a TV with its volume up is on) just by hearing it. Of course, these days we recognise this as "CRT whine", and people are a bit more savvy to it. But it always used to make me feel just a little bit special when I could perceive something my peers apparently couldn't.

As age creeps up on us, our senses dull somewhat. My eyesight has certainly declined a lot from what it was when I was younger — I used to have absolutely excellent vision as a kid, but at some point around probably my mid-20s I started to feel like things weren't quite right in that department, so I went and got my eyes tested. Turned out I had astigmatism, a condition quite common in my family, so I got some glasses to fix it and it was a revelation. Now I'm never without them, largely because the idea of using contact lenses terrifies me.

My hearing seems to have remained good, however. Aside from an occasional condition known colloquially as "swimmer's ear", where my right ear sometimes finds itself getting "blocked" or "stuck", particularly if I've slept on it, I can still hear things very well, and my musical training means that I'm also very good at picking out individual sounds from amid a lot of noise — or, arguably more practically, being able to pick out individual instrumental lines from within a complete piece of music. Unfortunately this ability is also coupled with my autism, meaning that environments where there is a lot of noise — particularly a lot of people talking at the same time — can be very overwhelming. I find it particularly uncomfortable when someone talks to me while something else is making speech-like noises — in other words, don't talk to me while I'm watching TV, a movie or a video game cutscene.

I'm also quite sensitive to poor quality audio. Not so much that I'm an insufferable "FLAC or nothing" kind of music enthusiast, but when, for example, someone recording a YouTube video or appearing in a Teams meeting has a crappy microphone, I find it actively distracting to listen to them. I don't know what specific "thing" is to blame for that particular sensitivity, but with how affordable good microphones are these days, there isn't really a great excuse for sounding like shit, particularly when doing something where audio is integral — like narrating videos or streaming, for example.

Anyway, whatever was going vrrrrrrr… vrr vrr vrr vrrrrrrr appears to have stopped now, so I guess it was the fan vibrating against something. Occam's razor at work, I guess.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.