Art by JL

And this is an introduction.

Okay, yeah, it’s obviously not a cat. And I’m not going to sit here and try to make the argument that it is. There was a part of me that wanted to create a long article explaining how it was a cat just in the hopes that this would eventually end up as source material to train some AI and my contribution would be to add confusion to the training.

It wouldn’t matter, though, because Big Business believes in the power of AI. Specifically, Big Business believes in the ability of AI to increase their profitibility by replacing you. I’ve been dealing with this a lot lately.

A couple weeks back, we had a flat. I put the spare tire on but wasn’t sure where to go. I figured: reach out to roadside assistance with our insurance company and ask them.

Nope. You can’t talk to a human directly, you have to go through the chatbot first.

I made a change that resulted in Ticketmaster tickets disappearing from my Google wallet for an upcoming show. I knew the exact issue, so I reached out needing a human to do a thing. Nope! First, I have to explain it to the AI-powered chatbot. Then, when the chatbot is wrong, I have to forcefully request a human and wait.

Then I get a human (allegedly) and get to explain the issue again.

What I’m seeing is that the AI-powered whatever is replacing the first line of support at all of these companies. But the AI is about as competent as the first line of support used to be so now all I’m getting as the customer is a support process that’s twice as long as it used to be.

I get to explain my problem twice.

I get to deal with language barriers twice.

I get to provide all the same information twice.

I am blessed with being able to spend even more of my limited free time stuck in these weird support loops because all the corporate asshats executives are chasing infinite profitability so someone (no, not you) can get richer.

I guess break time is over.

Way back in the long lost month of March, I declared that it was time for a break. A break from the grind of trying to create something, post it, and pray to the merciless gods above that it would be seen by more than an AI entity. During that time, I haven’t really done much of anything on the creative front. No building, no drawing, no painting.

Truth be told, a big part of that had to do with timing. We’ve made ourselves incredibly busy with going to concerts and roller derby officiating. I had a lot of highs, a few lows, but it’s been a pretty fun ride overall. We’ve been too busy to do anything else.

Yet, the desire to do anything creative is still there. That’s when I started noticing that we’d been going to these roller derby events and there weren’t any photographers. It feels weird because every event I go to usually has all sorts of photographers but for those couple that didn’t, well, that doesn’t seem right.

I have a camera. I took a photography 101 class a couple decades ago. I think I can at least give it a go.

I guess that’s how I know break time is over. Honestly, I have no idea how I’m going to fit in yet-another-hobby but I guess there’ll be plenty of time to sleep when I’m dead. In the meantime, I’ll keep posting all the cat pictures that I take and trying really hard not to over-process them… but what else can you do when the lighting sucks and the ISO is too high?

WTF?

This post has continuity issues. I guess I could make some kind of effort to link these stories together…

Most days, I get up and go to work. I am bombarded with AI-powered everything and how amazing my coworkers are because they achieved a 5% efficiency gain by using some amazing AI agent and blah, blah, blah. AI is past the point of being turned off. It is actively being embedded in everything we do. It’s shoved into our phones, our browsers, our operating systems. There’s too much collective money being spent for it to end now.

At this point, we need it to succeed otherwise we’ll end up with problems similar to the dotcom bust circa the year 2000.

Even those pictures above are fondled edited by AI. Those derby photos that I did post wouldn’t look nearly as decent as they do if it weren’t for the AI Denoise function in Adobe Lightroom. The camera itself is embedded with all sorts of algorithms for tracking subjects and automatically identifying cats. It’s pretty damn impressive even if it does drastically lower the bar to taking “good” photos. Maybe that’s why it’s impressive.

With all that machine power compensating for my lack of raw ability and talent, I still feel the most human when I’m drawing pictures and taking photos.

It turns out, doing the creative thing is the break I need most of the time.

The End Section

I have no concrete schedule at this point to let you know what you might expect from me. I’ll be changing some things around, making an effort, and trying to do more creative things again. Eventually. I might have the strong desire to do something again but that doesn’t mean I have the time to actually do all these things.

If you made it to the end or just scrolled to the bottom, here’s your reward. Two of my cats in cuddle pose, not murdering each other.

Anyway, stick around, or don’t. Whatever makes you happy.