Yeah that tracks. Nosferatu brings some big Boomer energy, and Miller can play that to the core MAGA crowd based on that. Fear of technology, outdated fashion sense, strict diet requirements, sounds like Boomer land to me. Just don’t invite Miller into your house.

I’m with you. Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story.

The other good idea I have seen was from Douglas Rushkof. He would write a chapter of his fiction book. Then he would feed the rough details of this into a generative AI story service and them compare the outputs. If the AI version was similar or better, then we would do a complete re-write. Because you can consider generative AI to be a revision to the mean/average, if your work reads like that, you have to try to be better.

To be fair to figures and models, they are probably only a problem when you are moving them, otherwise it isn’t a huge burden. It is more about ongoing dependence. Now this isn’t an anti-children take BUT if you don’t have kids, you don’t have to worry about raising kids. Things go much easier in that sense. That said if you want kids, go for it, just be aware that it will make for a more difficult life. Just take the wins were you can.

As for the Dalai Lama, it is difficult to figure out were he stands as a person. Yes, there was the tongue sucking thing which, from asking folks familiar with it the culture, does seem to be an odd cultural joke/saying that is way to easy to misinterpret through western eyes. If you aren’t familiar with it, you look mentally deranged. But the phrase is meant to be “Eat my tongue”, as in ‘I have told you everything, the only thing left to do is to eat my tongue.’. Like in Japanese they have Neko wo kaburu “To wear a cat on one’s head” or in Finland Hevosenkenkä pyllyssä “To have a horseshoe in one’s butt”.

But then there is him being mentioned in the Epstein files 150+ times, but also is largely though to have not had any direct interaction with Jeff. How much of that is damage control and his handlers trying to keep the game rolling, it is difficult to tell. The one thing with the Epstein thing is just how many famous people’s names are in it even in passing. Like George W bush, is in it loads but there was never any direct contact, that is just funny in a way.

It seems like there is a lot of stuff pointing at him, but nothing concrete. It is a, keep an eye on him situation but it also could be an embarrassing situation worthy of Seinfeld.

Economically, things were already turning downwards but it was still so close to the peak that it wasn’t really that noticeable. But because of the rapidly reducing price of technology it looked as though things were still progressing just fine.

The general vibe however was a largely positive one. The cold war was over, the new “war on terror” had not yet begun. The pace of computer technology was moving at an astounding pace that even if you didn’t like what it was today, tomorrow there will be a newer faster and cheaper one available of whatever it is. The idea of online shopping was new, now you can see the whole catalog. Video on a disc that doesn’t wear out and has “cinema grade” audio, wild! The internet had just gone mainstream leading to the interconnected global village and the prospect of a new digital utopia. Democracy of information and the end of censorship… yeah.

Computing had been liberated into the general populace and the panopticon of surveillance hadn’t been constructed in depth yet.

Mobiles phones started to become common but were so dumb that they didn’t intrude much except for some people. We didn’t have unlimited plans and it wasn’t uncommon for you to just forget to charge the thing for days at a time because you forgot about it for the most part.

The larger messaging and general visible signal of global warming/environmental blowback wasn’t much of thing and even then it was seen as something that we could unify on an tackle. There was still the attitude of, the present is pretty good and the future will be a better place and that we will address the issues as we are aware of them and there is enough time to address them.

Just look at anything design wise and you can see what it was like. Many designs of the 80’s/90’s by today’s standards are kind of ulgy but the reason why it looked like that because it felt like the chains holding back progress had finally been removed. Some magazines would have a new style on every single page, they did that simply because they could. No longer were they constricted by the limits of traditional print and the end result was fairly rough most of the time. But it was never boring in that sense.

That lack of constraint permeated everything. It was a time of being bombarded with novelty.

In retrospect, it was a time of pleasant delusion. The foundation for all the issues of today were being laid down but we weren’t at the point of it being activated. Speed high on a credit card is fun, the payback however is rough.

There has always been a element of this in places but it has grown significantly in the last few decades.

Funnily enough my example is the film Grease. The dialog is astoundingly plain but presented well enough. Maybe this is why it is seen as a mainstream classic because of this simple language.

But then I see the works of some like Charlie Kaufman that was just wonderful but has rarely broken into the main stream.

Those at the top need to start looking smaller scale. If I was at Microsoft, Halo/COD can have its big budgets, whatever. But also loosen the chains on smaller teams to try new things. Games that have similar budget and finish turn around times of the Ps2/Xbox/GC era only now you have modern engine tech at your hands.

Budgets decent enough to have the chance to do it well but not so big that it comes up in the next share holders call as the reason for 500 laid off.

Sony used to do this in the Ps1 era, games would be given a change on the market and even if it wasn’t a huge hit, they would give them another chance. Silly ideas like Katamari Damacy came out of this thinking at Namco and that paid of big time.

I think this is the big issue of the next few years. Large AAA studios have budgets so high that they are completely risk adverse. The low end of the indie scene is flooded with vibe coded Unity junk. And the gooey middle goodness with the awesome stuff is being squeezed by those two.

I suspect we will correct back to some form of sanity but it is a few years away and the interim period will be rough.

Not were I thought that would go but all good advice.

Ignorance is bliss but the consequences are dyer.

I do miss the same abundance of free time but that is about it. That is what most people seem to miss, the lack of responsibilities or as strict schedules.

The secret to a more comfortable life is to reduce your dependence on systems/things/some people, where possible at least. If a small house leads to small rent/mortgage. Can live without a car, that is a few weeks a year of earnings freed up. You don’t need to purchase a thousand books you are unlikely to read if you use the library.

That kind of thinking. It doesn’t mean become minimalist to the point of fault, just figure out were you can introduce more slack into your life.

That tracks. I say this because of all the things Trump has done, going with Dana barely moves the needle in terms of what we expect out of him.

I will steal a joke from Beavis and Butt Head.

“I see you have already given yourself military rankings, Major Woody and Private Parts!!!”

I know someone who in the 1980’s/90’s used to run a society for the abolishment of TV because he saw it as the worst things that could have happened to society. Nowadays he is absolutely beached on the shores of social media slop beyond reason.

Dodged one bullet but took the next.

And they say spotting Psychopaths is difficult.

David Graeber might have something to contribute to this subject.

We could call it the Intel Principle. ;)

To be pedantic, value is in the eye of the beholder. Cost is how much goes into something, Price is how much someone wants to pay, Value… that is much more subjective.

Oil costs $50 a barrel to pump, priced at $100 on the market but when it comes to value could be seen as providing $20,000 of human labor.

Not trying to defend AI junk, like seriously people, just do the work yourself. But value is such a hard thing to quantify.

About the only time I have been like ‘Yeah alright, I get it’ is if you have a sort of writers block. Get a rough draft spat out but then bounce of that, but do not rely on LLM junk for anything more than that.

Five figure!? That’s a bargain. many are going well into six figure territory nowadays.