#oneaday Day 152: Two things

Two things.

1. America, you fucked it up. After I specifically told you not to.

2. I did the thing. I hope reading it brings you some distraction.

I’m not sure what else there is to say, really, aside from that I really feel for my poor pals in the States right now. Knowing that a vile shitstain of a human being is going to be sitting in the big chair for one of the most powerful nations on Earth doesn’t feel good from here, let alone what it must feel like for actual residents of that country.

And it’s for the second time. It wasn’t a fluke accident, this has happened for a second time.

I think it’s long past time that the supposedly “civilised” world admits that we have a problem. A big one.

We’re regressing. You and I may not be, but collectively, as a society, we are regressing. After a lot of good work to improve tolerance and inclusion for those who aren’t straight cis white men, it feels like in the last few years we’ve taken more steps backward than we have done forwards. And Trump’s election to the White House would just seem to confirm that.

Because, like it or not, the fact he achieved this means that there is a significant portion of people who think that he “Has a Point” about at least some of the vile, odious rhetoric he has been spouting in the run-up to this election. It’s almost certainly the same people who think that projects having women or people who aren’t white in a leading role is a sign of “wokeness”.

Those people, for whatever reason, are furious about the world. And they see intolerance, abusiveness and voting for someone as transparently awful as Trump as a means of assuaging that anger. They hope he deports “all the immigrants”. They hope he takes rights away from people who have had to fight to be recognised. They hope he sends things spiralling backwards into attitudes even the mid-20th century would be ashamed to express.

And, honestly, sitting here observing from a distance, it’s frightening. It’s horrible to know we live in a world where such intolerance still exists; the appalling treatment of minority groups is supposed to be something we read about in history books, then think all smugly about how much better we are than “back then”.

But we’re not. We may not be putting black people on their own buses or denying women the vote, but the intolerance the supposedly “civilised” world is exhibiting right now — and the fact it goes unchallenged — is still painful to witness, and I’m not the one experiencing that intolerance first-hand. It’s not enough to “be a good person”, to “be the change you want to see in the world”, because no-one gives a shit.

What is it that one can do, though? It’s honestly hard to say at this point. But the world we live in today is a frightening one. And I’m afraid I have few words of comfort to share for those who are most likely to end up suffering because of all this.

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.

#oneaday Day 144: Are we fucked?

With each passing day, I feel like it’s getting harder and harder to ignore the feeling that we, the humans, are completely and utterly fucked.

And I mean this in a variety of ways. For one, it’s impossible to ignore the wilful ignorance “big tech” is demonstrating in the current “AI” gold rush. After years of getting things like carbon emissions and sustainable energy production into a good place — likely far too late, but still, the effort was happening — it seems all the big players in the tech space have just gone “haha! Fuck that, we’ve got a new toy, and bollocks to the frankly unnecessary amount of energy it consumes to power it”.

And this is about the third or fourth energy-inefficient tech gold rush at this point, after cryptocurrency and NFTs. The one thing those things and “AI” have in common is that they’re hawked by people who are completely unable to explain how their supposed benefits outweigh the absurd cost in resources required to use them. At worst, they’re used as outright scams.

AI is even worse at this point. In the last few weeks, I’ve seen several adverts for “AI”. Not an AI product, not a revolutionary and groundbreaking use case for AI… just adverts for “we are a tech company and we’re doing… something… with AI because every other fucker is”. It is absolutely telling that not one of these adverts has been able to depict AI doing anything remotely useful, and that none of them even attempt to explain why AI is a good thing. Because, as most people who have been paying attention will know at this point, there is no product.

Seriously. There is no compelling use case for AI that isn’t already covered in a more energy-efficient format by existing tech.

Want to find information? Search engines exist, both for the whole Web and within a single site.

Want to write code? Well, you’d better learn, because ChatGPT is going to spit out bullshit that is full of errors that you won’t know how to spot without knowing how to code.

Need an image? There are billions of images online, many of which are royalty free or suitable for use via fair use provisions. There are free art packages available. And there are lots of artists who will draw whatever the hell you want — yes, even that — if you give them some money.

Can’t write an email? Bullshit you can’t. If you can write a ChatGPT prompt you can write a fucking email. Stop being a lazy cunt.

Need AI to “summarise” something for you? Just read the fucking thing, it’s not hard, and as a species we’ve spent several thousand years mastering that basic skill.

So that’s a concern, both for the environmental impact and for how it will affect the job market. I’m also rather concerned about how medicine seems to be super-keen to use AI rather than, you know, human doctors. I’m sure that’s going to be a fun few lawsuits in the near future.

And outside of all this nonsense, we have the current state of world politics, particularly the US. I have friends in the States who are — quite rightly, I feel — legitimately terrified about what the upcoming election will result in. And while I thought people were overreacting somewhat back in 2016 when this situation last presented itself, having seen how utterly deranged Trump and his most obsequious sycophants are behaving in the run-up to this election… yeah. I get it.

So the inevitable conclusion to all this is to find myself sitting alone in a hotel room asking myself “are we fucked?” Cause I think we might be, y’know. I think we might be.

#oneaday Day 27: Time for Change?

As I type this, the results for the General Election in this country are being announced. It looks likely that Labour are going to win a landslide victory, giving the Conservatives a seriously bloody nose in the process, but it also looks like the Reform party are going to make a few gains along the way, too.

I’m not going to pretend to know enough about politics to provide any more in-depth commentary than that, but I am relieved that we are at least looking likely to have a change of government. The last 14 years have been pretty rough for the UK, and some change is what we need. The question is, of course, whether the incoming new government are willing to do anything noteworthy or, as is probably more likely, they will continue to let things just tick along and gradually slide further and further into enshittification.

The rise of Reform is a little worrying, though I suspect their gains will be less noteworthy than the somewhat exaggerated hyperbole suggests. We’ve already heard some Reform representatives on the BBC’s coverage of the election complaining about “woke nonsense” without actually saying what they believe “woke nonsense” to be, and very carefully taking care to not say that they hate immigrants and transgender people.

The BBC has been pulling its punches a bit, though. It looked like the Reform candidate was going to be questioned on the “woke nonsense” line, but the presenters pulled back after she pretty much ignored the question. There was also some confrontation of “vile” comments made by some Reform candidates, but those weren’t pursued either. It’s a little frustrating to see coverage that is just on the cusp of doing some interesting journalism, but then pulling back in the name of… what? Impartiality? Perhaps.

Looking into it, it appears that the BBC did actually do some journalism into this back when it happened. And yeah, there is some pretty bad stuff in there. Naturally, Reform leader Nigel Farage claimed that the comments were being “taken out of context”, but there’s really only so many contexts in which you can take someone complaining about “the cultural feminisation of the west”, as Bexhill and Battle candidate Ian Gribbin did, and none of them are particularly complimentary. Same for Ynys Mon candidate Emmett Jenner’s obviously transphobic comments from 2018, though he claims his now-deleted Twitter account was a “parody”. (Of what, he didn’t say.)

There was an interesting point made on the BBC’s coverage, though, which is that there are quite possibly some voters out there who genuinely have no idea that Reform candidates have said some truly horrible things in the past, and simply voted for Reform as a “protest vote”. These days, I’m inclined to say that there’s not a lot of excuse for not knowing the true colours of various public figures, even if you’re not on social media, but I guess it is possible, particularly among the older generation.

But anyway. I’m not going to stay up and watch too much more of the coverage, but I do find it quite interesting for a little while. It’s going to be going on for about 10 hours, though, so we won’t have an absolutely final answer on what’s happening to the country until tomorrow morning. The exit polls would seem pretty damning for the Conservative government, though, and I am 100% fine with that. We’ll just have to wait and see what that really means.