Posted on
by

When something seems to bother me an inordinate amount, I like to see it as an opportunity for self-reflection.  I ask myself just why it is that the thing bothers me so much?  What nerve is it touching and why is that a nerve for me?

I remember my first brush with social media websites all the way back in the olden times of MySpace.  By the time MySpace launched, I had already been online in one way or another for a decade.  I had built a bunch of personal websites and I was proto-blogging at sites like LiveJournal.  Somebody told me about this new site and I checked it out and it felt…  off.  Like taking a sniff from a bottle of milk that is just beginning to sour.  I did not feel compelled and, in truth, I didn’t want to use the site because of that initial gut reaction.  It took milliseconds for my brain to construct a picture of a future in which people didn’t make their own quirky expressions of creativity on their own websites but rather they just dumped themselves into a pre-existing mold, a templated website that collected all the ephemeral human content into a nice pen where it could be commodified and corralled and monetized.  I am not retroactively crediting myself with more foresight than I actually possessed. I had been a technology professional for a decade, and an enthusiast before that.  I had read all sorts of books about future directions of networks and technology.  I had been on closed community silos like AOL and CompuServe before I ever even heard the word “internet”.  I knew what I was looking at the moment I saw it and I didn’t like it.  It seemed like a harbinger of the end of the wild wild web.

Which, of course, it was.

I did put a few songs up on MySpace, at the urgings of others, but I felt really irritated by the ask.  I didn’t want to be in a silo, my songs were already available on my own site, and it seemed like an imposition to have to participate in this new stupid thing or else risk being completely outside of the social sphere.

Then, of course, it all got even worse.  People started prodding me to join some new site called Facebook.  Which I did.  And I hated.  And I unsubscribed from immediately.  And then people prodded me again and I did, again.  And then I got a “poke” and I immediately unsubscribed again which of course didn’t last.  Everything about the core idea behind “social media” sites and apps felt like an attempt to corral us all together in order to advertise at us and turn us from free thinking, free range, homo sapiens into a manageable network of predictable marketing demographics.

Which, of course, it is.

It was clear from day one that this new paradigm of social silos was going to create a flood of change that would almost entirely erase the antediluvian world of self-hosted websites, GeoCities pages, quirky web forums, webrings, and nutball creativity that had flourished on the web prior to their arrival.  No more would Mahir kiss you, no more would there be another Zombo.com to fulfill your every dream, it was time to monetize, monetize, monetize the web and it’s webdom.

I hated this shift.

I hated it because it was anti-creative.

I hated it because it was addictive.

I hated it because it was bad for relationships and society at large.

I hated it because it enforced a grid of conformity on human expression.

I hated it because it was closed and proprietary.

I hated it because it was antithetical to the entire concept of the internet in which information wants to be free and standards of interoperability need to be OPEN.

Nothing that has happened in the ensuing decades has changed my mind in the slightest.  The tingling of my spidey senses the first time I saw MySpace have been absolutely confirmed in every horrifying detail.

The web is a wasteland of low traffic, mostly ignored, little watering holes like this blog here that sit outside in the lonely dark while the majority of humanity spends their waking moments funneling their photos, videos, comments, relationships, experiences, hopes, dreams, ambitions, and souls into a tiny handful of dopamine dispensing closed-silo apps that are designed to aggregate humanity into big piles for ease of commercial exploitation.

But that’s old news.  The new news is the new thing that is tingling my spidey senses again.  “AI”.

My spidey sense about AI has been ringing louder and louder for a couple of years now.  It’s not for the reasons every techno-utopian seems to want to talk about.  They talk about the fear of a global super-intelligence arising or us “losing control” of the tech, big science fiction fears, and they then tell us all about how this tech will actually solve all of our problems, solve climate change, let us live forever, blah blah blah.  The people developing this technology, pushing this technology, are talking about it in the same glowing terms that they have previously talked about crypto, smartphones, virtual reality, and all sorts of other tech.  In every single case, the technology has arrived, disrupted, been incorporated into our lives to one degree or another, and proceeded to deliver on about 10% of the amazing world-changing life improvement that was promised.  Remember when Siri or Alexa or “Hey Google” were going to change your lives in so many ways and everybody got a smart speaker and now the only thing the technology gets used for is to reply to a text message hands free while driving?  Would that change if they were smarter?  Would you have an in-car conversation with an LLM instead of listening to the radio?  Would that make your life better in any way?

The fact is that an LLM can have a human like conversation and it has a lot of information to back it up but it’s not an enjoyable conversation.  It is boring.  A generative image pooper can make 25 images of a pretty lady in the time it takes to type “make me 25 images of a pretty lady” but they are all boring.  A song generator can create three country songs that sound just like Shania Twain in response to a single prompt for a “make me a country western song about my cat” but they are all boring too.  It’s all boring because there is no “there” there.  If you like the song, can you go see the artist play live, learn about their lives, relate to their story?  Nope, there is no artist.  AI creations are hollow, they mean nothing.  They are not art, they are content.

Why on earth would I as a sentient being want to have a conversation with an echo box beyond (maybe) asking it for directions?  Why would I want to contemplate a machine-generated video or image?  There is no meaning there, no creative choices were made, no intentionality is expressed.  It can’t be beautiful even to the level that a child’s crayon drawing can be beautiful.  It can’t even be ugly in an interesting way.  It’s just pixels.

This is a shallow critique and I realize it is not really what’s bothering me, when I probe my own thoughts a bit deeper.  The core thing that’s bothering me is that generators are already teaching people to short-circuit the creative process and in so doing, removing about 99% of the value of creating to the person themselves, never mind the end product.

Here is what I mean by this.

Let’s just say I am feeling something.  I am sleeping badly.  I’m angry when I have no obvious reason to be.  I’m sad and I don’t know why.  I sit down to write about it with the hope that by doing so I might be able to put into words what I am feeling.  I journal, I think, I take a break after 20 minutes and go sit and drink a cup of coffee and stare out the window, pet my dog, meditate, eat an apple.  An hour later my thoughts have crystalized a bit.  My first thoughts have been flushed and my second thoughts have come to the fore.  I have discovered a way to say what I’m feeling and I have written something in the process, a creative piece, but I don’t share it with anybody, no matter how beautifully written it may be.  The point of the exercise was the personal process.  It wasn’t about output, it was about personal exploration.  The technology required to go through this process?  A notepad.  A writing utensil.  A cup of coffee.  An apple.  A canine.  People have done this for millennia.  This is creativity even if nobody ever reads it.  This is a practice, a process.

That night I go to sleep and my mind processes the days inputs during REM sleep, I have vivid dreams in which pieces of my past and present intermingle in unexpected ways.  When the alarm clock goes off, I’m engaged in a conversation that I don’t want to leave.  Something important is about to be said.  But the dream dissipates after the second hit of the snooze button and I wake up to feed the dog and make a pot of coffee.  Images from the dream linger in my mind, snatches of words, I head straight to the notepad again and write it down before it burns off like morning fog.  As I write the words start to transform from prose into poetry.  Pretty soon I’m writing metaphorically, I’m making allusions, I’m finding something new to say that I didn’t even know I wanted to say.  My subconscious processes have combined with my creative practice and now new perspectives are being found, I’m thinking laterally, I’m less sad, and something is emerging.  It has a sound, it has a color, it has a shape, it has a smell.

Then, snap, I hear a symphony in my mind.  There is a song, the words are there, I’m plugged back into my subconscious, the process, the practice, the persistence, they have led me to a creative moment that feels like it comes from somewhere out in the sky, like I’m channeling something, I’m just writing it down.  The lyrics and melody and structure of the song are all there, I’m just transcribing them.  I write the last line of the last verse and I sit back feeling giddy and a little high although I never managed to get to the coffee cup.  It feels like magic.  It feels supernatural.  I can understand why people believe in god.

After this magical moment, I have a choice.  I can stop there.  I can keep the art to myself, hum the song when I want, it’s mine, it’s personal, it’s uniquely a product of my experiences, my practice, my process, my brain, my feelings, my heart.  I could keep it, nothing wrong with that.  But, I also have the option to share it.  I could take the time to create a representation, to polish the rough edges, to refine the words, maybe expand the song structure, spend hours, days, weeks, crafting a representation of the song so I can share it with others in case, in so doing, those other people will resonate with it.  That takes a lot of work.  Technical work.  Craft work.  Artisan work.  But it’s also social work.  Maybe the song is beyond my ability to play.  Maybe I hear a violin part and I don’t play the violin so I have to involve a friend who plays violin.  I need a drummer and a piano player, I have friends who do that.  We spend time in the studio together, we collaborate on the song.  They resonate with it and bring some of their own perspectives, their own thoughts and feelings, their own musical riffs and ideas.  As the song is born, multiple voices are brought in, it connects minds and hearts in the very act of crafting the work.

I am months beyond that initial restless feeling at this point.  I am now sitting in a recording studio with a bass guitar trying to get through a couple of takes without any flubs and listening to the song via playback and, between takes, I am suddenly hit by just how COOL this is.  How something I was feeling that I didn’t even have a name for was now this THING that didn’t exist before and this THING is not just the resulting 5 minutes of audio, it’s everything involved in getting to this point.  The journaling, the dreaming, the moment of inspiration, the choice to share, the crafting, the collaborating, and then, at the end there are two things.  There is a creative journey and there is a song.  When I listen to the song, I relive the journey.  During the journey, I have grown as a person.

Art isn’t merely the song.  Art is also the process that leads to the song.  Art is the practice of introspection, the use of creative tools of expression as tools to explore experiences, and the continual commitment to personal exploration and growth.  The song is the tip of a very large iceberg that the listener never sees but it is the process of living with an artistic practice, writing, painting, music, whichever language the artist uses, that enriches the life of the artist.

Let’s now compare this experience, one I have had countless times over the course of my creative life, and compare that to “AI” based “creativity”.

Let’s just say I am feeling something.  I am sleeping badly.  I’m angry when I have no obvious reason to be.  I’m sad and I don’t know why.  I try to use an LLM-based therapy bot app which gives me some emulated empathy and regurgitated and remixed self-help information and suggestions but I feel pretty much the same and I’m no closer to understanding why or transforming those emotions into anything.  I decide to write about it on my computer and the AI assistant starts suggesting what it thinks I might want to say, rewriting my raw thoughts into something “better” but it no longer sounds like me and the whole exercise is getting me no closer to any sense of self-discovery.  I’m being course-corrected and guided towards the statistical norm, pushed to the hump of the bell curve by an inscrutable algorithm that is trained on the collectively homogenized writing of every text every human has published online.  I give up and spend an hour doomscrolling.

I sleep badly, I can’t remember if I had any dreams or not.  I feel like shit the next morning.  I heard about this cool new AI music generator while doomscrolling before bed.  I install the app and I type in “make an angry song about being confused about my life” and it generates three options.  The lyrics are angry.  The songs sound like a cover band that are playing familiar songs from faulty memories, accidentally morphing them into new songs that seem oddly familiar although they are not exactly bangers.  Still, it’s amusing, for a minute.  I am impressed by how “realistic” the result is.  I click regenerate a few times to hear the variants until I like one a little better than the others and I pat myself on the back for “creating a song”.  I click a button that shares it with other users of the platform.  I go pour myself a bowl of cereal, I’m still angry, two days from now I will forget this ever happened and I will still feel like shit.

I have successfully avoided the journey, I have made a “professional” sounding song without growing, without crafting, without any personal benefit.  It’s like showing up at the trailhead of a 2000 mile hiking trail, taking a selfie with the sign, and then taking a helicopter to the end of the trail and taking a selfie with the other sign as a method to experience the trail.  Is it faster?  Sure.  Does it serve you in the same way?  Absolutely not.

This is the concern that really gets to me.  I worry about people taking this shortcut because it’s so ubiquitous, so pervasive, that it never occurs to them that they are shorting themselves, stunting their own growth.  Creative practice deepens your understanding of yourself. Creative collaboration creates powerful interpersonal connections. Being “bad” at writing, painting, playing the guitar, singing, sculpting, or poetry is not a sin that needs to be “corrected” by a computer, it’s merely a stage in learning.  Some of the best art in terms of humanity, relatability, and resonance is raw, unpolished, unprofessional, voices cracking, colors blurry, message unclear.  When a pitch corrector “fixes” my singing, it’s no longer really my voice.  When an LLM “fixes” my prose, they are no longer really my words.  When an image or audio generator creates, from whole cloth, the thing I ask for from a prompt, none of that is actually me.  No wonder it feels beige, benign, hollow, dull, polished but pointless.  If this is the way of the future, people taking shortcuts to create digital artifacts that are shiny but vapid, the artistic equivalent of cotton candy, and real creative process is considered to be too hard, too slow, too cumbersome, and too inefficient, well, that’s just a fucking tragedy.  For the creators themselves.  I fail to see how it is possible to reap the benefits of creative work if you don’t actually do any creative WORK.

My advice to anybody who thinks they want to be creative is to be very mindful about how/if you make use of these tools because you might find that they become a barrier to actual creativity, a substance-free substitute for being an artist, finding your own voice, and inhabiting a creative process.

I’m honestly struggling to see an upside to generative LLM-based technologies.  The further we get from living in real space with each other, working in real space with each other, and interacting in real time with each other, the lonelier we get, the sadder we get, the more disconnected and fragile we feel.  Now tech companies are going to augment this reality with these digital simulacrums of intelligence that try to trick us into feeling less alone and give us the ability to “create” without reaping any of the benefits of creating.  The obvious beneficiaries are the companies running the server farms that run the code that powers these “AI” products and the companies that sell information about us to each other so they can sell products to us.  Our human experience, our quality of life, our depth of personal understanding?  These are necessary grist for the mills of the algorithms but they are also being starved by the very technologies that rely on them.

We are already seeing the beginning of a sort of “AI” Ouroboros, with new models being trained on the output from previous models, trending towards a polished mediocrity, a sort of bland vanilla soft-serve of images, audio, video, and text that has no ability to inspire, to infuriate, or to improve us.  Actual humans must continue to sit with actual feelings and do actual creative practice.  They must share this with each other in real life, in real space, in the real world, in real time.  Actual creativity must continue, and it will, because humans are awesome.

My prediction: the trash flood that happened in the wake of the rise of social media was NOTHING like the trash flood that is coming for us now with this tech.  Pointless “art”, fake news and misinformation, the end of the internet being enjoyable in any way, shape, or form, integrated LLM bullshit in every tech product that cannot be disabled, and a never ending temptation to short circuit the creative process to get that sweet dopamine hit without doing all that pesky personal growth.

The 10% that is good that will come from this tech?  Smarter GPS route guidance.  Occasional useful suggestions when doing advanced technical tasks with lots of details (like writing software, for example).  Deeper understandings of how biochemistry works.  Better real time language translation between people who speak different languages.  There are, clearly, some very useful and helpful applications of this technology, but that’s not what is happening.  That’s not what is going to make big money for big tech companies.  They want pervasive “AI” everywhere because they have a lot of spare server cycles and stockholders to please. They want it to serve them and their commercial interests.

In his book “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man” Marshall McLuhan argued that “the media is the message”.  In other words, that it is perhaps more important to focus on the medium by which something is expressed than on the message itself.  If the message is “Hello, Bob” and it is verbally uttered face to face that is different than if it were communicated via skywriting, or a letter in the mail, or an email, or broadcast on television, or by tattooing it on a body part.  The message is the same, the media is different, and the choice of media provides the all important context that makes the words mean whatever they mean to Bob.  The media is, in fact, the message.  If most of the messages in the future will be delivered via LLM/GA, those messages will feel hollow, untrustworthy, soulless, empty, bland, boring, and lazy.

My spidey sense says that this is going to be a net negative for our species and our general enjoyment of life.

Posted on
by

I just watched this:



I will one say that one person’s “amazing” and “hopeful” future is another person’s dystopian hellscape and this, to me, is a horror show. Nearly everything about “AI” sucks and I hate it because it’s already making things worse. There is more misinformation, more confusion, less creativity and thinking, more reliance on giant pirating remix engines instead of developing personal skills and intelligence. It’s not fear of Skynet happening that I find so awful, we’re still a millennium away from sentience, it’s the absolute shit show of what is happening with this technology right now. Namely, the marketing hype that is trying to sell us all on the idea that ChatGPT and generative image poopers are some sort of intelligence and that we need/want to have this intelligence embedded in every piece of technology we ever interact with. What the “AI” people have actually created are computationally massive software algorithms that can mimic human behaviors well enough (by stealing and remixing actual human creativity) that they can give the illusion of intelligence, sometimes, as long as you don’t examine them too closely. The AI techno-utopians have created the world’s most expensive and well-informed blind and dispassionate sociopaths. Code that is possessed of no awareness, no mind, no thoughts which is already enshittifying everything it touches. This is easily my least favorite technology development of all time.  It’s auto-tune for your brain and what could be worse than that?

Got yer answer right here:

Posted on
by

Today, April 14 2024, I finished recording my new album, Capistrano.  The album runs 38 minutes and 40 seconds.

I started working on the album on November 23, 2014 so that means that this one album of 39-ish minutes of music took me a grand total of 9 years, 4 months, and 23 days to create meaning this is officially the longest gestated album I’ve ever worked on, beating The Lavone’s 1999 album “The Hiatus” by about three years.

There is still mixing and mastering to do, artwork to create, etc., but no more recording.  I tracked the last bits this afternoon and made the first test mix of the album and just listened to it twice.  I pronounce it good.  I will attempt to take less time on the next one but apparently this is what needed to happen for this one to be born.  To quote Captain Kirk, “Who am I to argue with history?”

Posted on
by

For 30 years I’ve made my living in this world, paid my bills and my taxes, raised my kid, almost entirely from the writing of computer software.  It’s a solid skill, always in demand, and I’m good at it.  Both before and throughout that entire professional career I have also had a (far less lucrative but infinitely more satisfying) shadow career as an independent musician, writer, filmmaker and creator.  I have a resume that details the technology career, but not really one that details my career as a creator.  This is that resume.  Kind of…

I was born into a family of musicians and singers and raised with access to instruments and primitive recording technology but never had any formal training with two exceptions: I played french horn in school band for a few months in elementary school and I took a 6-week crash course in guitar when I was 12.  I didn’t consider that music was something that required training if you had an ear, and I had that, so, I figured I could work it out for myself.

Music was not my first creative passion.  The first was visual art.  I liked to draw and paint.  My mom was a singer in a band and my dad painted wildlife watercolors and could draw exceptionally well so I had my pick of parents to emulate and older brother Rhett was already obsessed with music so I wound up glued to my sketchbook.   As I got a little older I decided that even though I was good at drawing and enjoyed it what I really wanted to be was a writer.

By early adolescence I had broadened my interests still further, having taught myself how to write software for the home computers of the era and also having developed a rabid obsession with cars.  The first three years after I bought my first guitar I rarely practiced and was much more interested in the 0-60 times of the Porsche 959 and drawing and designing imaginary cars than I was in music making.  Then puberty hit and some switch in my brain went musical.

Rhett and I had our band, The Lavone, and we had recorded a lot of music, but I was a fairly passive participant until suddenly I wasn’t.  I started having musical ideas and interests and really learning what to do with them around the age of 15.  I upgraded my guitar and got some cool glasses and turned into one of those High School Art Kids.

Visual arts and explorations into videography and photography were of nearly as much interest as the music.  When I was in high school I was always creating one thing or another.  I wrote a few bad novels, created sculptures and jewelry and pottery and learned basic woodworking, made some paintings, all the usual stuff that a teenager does to look for ways to express themselves.  Rhett and I started our little basement record label, Nuclear Gopher, and music became a core part of my identity even as I started doing less writing, less painting, less drawing, etc.

Post high-school I got married and my time for creative work trended downward but my need for it didn’t.  I started coming up with ways to give myself excuses to keep recording albums with The Lavone and creating visual art even as my software engineering career began.  Since the internet was a new phenomenon at the time, that meant building a website for the Nuclear Gopher as well as making music videos and short films.  I can honestly say, however, that my 20’s were a period of creative challenge.  I made some great songs with The Lavone and the Nuclear Gopher turned into it’s own amazing thing, but I found a role for myself as more of a producer, a technician, a documenter, an archivist, and an enabler than as a musician.

As I was approaching 30 I was getting nervous that the life of a creative person was becoming too inaccessible for me.  I had a young child to raise, my other career was time consuming, and I often wondered if I was just deluding myself that I had anything worth creating inside me.  I started to turn my attention more towards filmmaking and writing.  I taught myself digital video editing and the basics of cinematography.  I made some shorts and started planning to make an indie feature film.

But, as John Lennon once sang, life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.  My 30’s started with the general disruption of my entire family, life, and self.  A lost religion, a failed marriage, and estrangement from my family and friends.  I had nothing really to fall back on except music.

I realized that I wanted to, NEEDED to, make music, and I started my solo music career at the grand old age of 30.

At first I had a lot to learn.  Despite spending over half my life in and around bands and recording studios, I had never really engineered or produced my own music.  I could play guitar and sing but I couldn’t drum worth a damn and keyboards were a mystery.  Regardless, I tracked an album that I didn’t share with anybody and then I tracked an EP called The Context in 2004 and then my first proper album, Songs of Be Redoubt, the following year.  I wrote the songs, engineered the tracks, played all the instruments, designed the cover art, mixed and mastered it, the whole thing was a learning process.  By the end of working on Bo Redoubt, I was quite a bit better at the whole solo music making thing but I was still missing some of the polish that would come from playing in a band that had regular practices, live shows, and opportunities to hone my skills.

An opportunity soon arose to do so and I decided to join a band called The Eclectics, a Unitarian Universalist church band that played at Sunday services.  I played the guitar and sang, we played in front of the congregation, and after a year or so I was feeling a lot more confident musically.  In February of 2007 this lead to the formation of my (to date only) post-Lavone band, Trumpet Marine with three other members of The Eclectics.  We tracked an album called Longer, Louder, Lobster and it was arguably the best thing I had ever done up to that point.  I felt like I had arrived, at least a little, enough to try my hand at fronting the band on stage for some gigs.

Trumpet Marine was short lived, however.  Competing commitments caused members to come and go, we were constantly relearning the songs with new people, I just couldn’t hold it together and by early 2009 I gave up the idea.  I had recorded another solo album in the meantime and it was…  OK… but I was not yet a confident musical artist.

The next year or two involved some personal drama and my bandwidth was once again limited to really reach for what I wanted to do musically.  I was almost ready to give up on music but then I wrote a song called “I Sleep With My Hands In Fists” and it rallied me to get up off the mat and come out swinging again.  I had my studio and I was recording and writing, I had also played here and there in another few short lived bands, but it wasn’t clicking.  If I wanted to get things to click I needed to change something.

In early 2012 I struck some creative gold with an album called Blood and Scotch/Valentine, which I tracked in a couple of weeks all on my own.  I even broke out the art supplies and painted the cover, a bright yellow heart amidst a haze of chaos.  I knew I didn’t want to give up after that record.  I just didn’t know exactly what happened next.

I remembered that playing in other bands had helped me develop my skills and increase my passion for music so I decided to try that again.  I joined a local Ween-meets-Devo group called Robots From the Future as their keyboardist despite being pretty bad at keys.  I figured I wouldn’t get better unless I had a good reason to do so.  We played shows and practiced and I did get better.  There was no real pressure because I wasn’t the front man and they weren’t my songs.  I could just focus on playing.  Robots music wasn’t really my best fit, though, so I left the band and started making plans for the album I really wanted to make.  I had a sort of “back to basics” idea where I would record a few short EPs and then get serious about making a record that I would be totally happy with.  I figured that might take me a year or two.  I released the first of the EPs, The Coal Room, on Christmas of 2014.

I also joined another band, a 90’s cover band called Fistful of Datas, but this time on bass guitar and occasional auxiliary keys.  One of the Robots, Keith Lodermeier, was in that band and through that band I also met some other fantastic people, his wife Liz, Cris Arias-Romero, Maya Burroughs, and Mackenzie Lahren.  Another one of the Robots, Reynold Kissling, came on board near the tail end of my tenure with the group.

During the couple of years I played with that band I had a blast, met a lot of people, and improved my skills but that solo album I had committed to sort of went into development hell.  I just didn’t have the time to devote to solo studio work while also living the grown up life of a married career man in his 40’s.  I was having fun but I wasn’t creative.  Somehow the years were slipping by without much progress, even though I kept locking myself in the studio now and then.

I played a solo set at a now defunct space in St. Paul to try out some of my new album material in front of an audience and that led to an invite to join yet another band, Awkward Bodies, as a bass player.  The music of Awkward Bodies was definitely more up my alley than 90’s cover songs so I was really excited to join them and more shows followed.  Things were going pretty good and my spirits were high, I thought I might finally get my new album done, but then John Lennon happened again.

I don’t know what it was, exactly, but the world seemed to go nuts starting in 2016.  An orange sociopath was somehow put in power in my country and I became too obsessed with the fallout.  Social media and podcasts and news feeds and negativity took over my headspace.  My creative output dwindled to nearly nothing, despite having a great studio sitting in my own damn basement.  At least I was playing in Awkward Bodies and enjoying that but musically I was closer than I had ever been to hanging it up.  The world seemed too stupid to want to create within it.  It seemed like every day there was some outrage or insanity and playing cool indie rock was just not enough.  My software career had changed from writing code to running the department so I spent none of my day doing hands-on work, instead getting enmeshed in emails and meetings and exhaustion.

Then something weird happened in 2018.  A filmmaker named Scott Homan contacted me about telling my story for a documentary.  We met.  I told him my story.  I had no expectation that this would lead anywhere bigger than a short on YouTube, if that.  I didn’t know him or how serious and committed he turned out to be.  That event changed my life.

The world descended further into chaos with a global pandemic and my beloved Minneapolis being torn apart in the wake of the George Floyd riots.  Awkward Bodies struggled to hold the band together and keep some sort of momentum.  I continued to struggle to find personal creative traction.  But Scott and his editor, Sian Walmsley, just kept hacking away at making a movie and as it took shape I started to see my creative career differently.  It had not been a success but had also not been a failure.  I had struggled, sure, but so does everybody else who creates.  I was no longer in my 20’s but I had improved at every aspect of making music and art in the meantime.  And, most importantly, I had made a positive difference in the world with Nuclear Gopher and with my writing and my art.  When I saw the movie for the first time I woke up and knew what I needed to do.  I saw a possible future.  Not commercially, but artistically.  And I felt inspired again.

I got serious about finishing my slowly developing album.  I started planning for a new chapter in the Nuclear Gopher story.  I came to the realization that my time spent wandering in the creative wilderness, taking my licks, getting better at my craft, making mistakes, failing at plans, meeting people, playing Spice Girls covers while dressed as a zombie, and just generally living my life had made me stronger and more self-aware.  Sure, I’m older now, oldest I’ve ever been, but I’m not slow, I’m not tired, I’m not out of ideas, and I’m not ready to hang it up, not just yet.

The last couple of years have involved a LOT of work below the waterline.  Renovated my studio for future commercial use, making plans for the new Gopher, several revisions of the album (which is now practically done), and a new attitude towards the work I am doing that has really put me in a good place mentally.

My creative career could be counted in how many albums I’ve contributed to, how many shows I’ve played, how many films and videos I’ve made, etc, but I don’t even know the answers to those questions.  I guess I don’t care or I would keep track.  What I do know is that I’ve been dedicated to a life of making whatever art I can manage for as long as I can remember and for helping others do the same.  That’s my career.  That’s what I want to be remembered for when I die.  If nothing else, I’m leaving behind artifacts that prove I was here and that I did my best.  What else can a person do?

Skills and Experience:

I have demonstrated proficiency with:

  • audio engineering and production (both digital and analog)
  • digital video editing using Final Cut Pro and Davinci Resolve
  • guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, vocals, and other instruments
  • photography (both film and digital)
  • graphic design, painting, drawing
  • website development
  • writing

Salary Requirements:

Happiness.

Posted on
by

I’ve been threatening to relaunch NuclearGopher.com for years.  One rather ridiculous reason I have struggled to make this happen is that I truly and deeply find the modern style of website building to be boring, annoying, and uninspiring.

  1. Setup a content management system (probably WordPress but if you’re really unsure of what to do you can use something like Bandzoogle or Wix or Strikingly or something)
  2. Install one of the myriad number of available responsive “beautiful” themes and change some colors and logos
  3. Start cranking out “content”
  4. For every special feature you want (comments, newsletter signup, blah blah blah) install a plugin and probably signup for some cloud based subscription service
  5. To get statistics or visitor info add in Google Analytics or use an SEO optimizer service so your site can secretly track visitors and report the data to marketing firms

Congratulations, you now have a website that looks just like every other site on the internet and you are likely going to pay multiple monthly fees to keep it online!

It’s really not that hard.  I’ve built such sites dozens of times.  But…  honestly?  I hate them.  They are not memorable or distinctive, they are intrusive and heavy, and they are BORING AS HELL.

I didn’t want to build a site like that.  Not for my favorite little site of all time.  The thought of doing so was dispiriting.  But what was the alternative in the modern era?  Surely that is what people expect of websites these days?  The entire internet is made up of Every Fucking Bootstrap Site Ever these days, right?

I want a website that is quirky and weird, a site that is memorable, the kind of website that existed during the Old Weird Internet Era.  I have nothing against modern web standards, CSS and HTML5 are so much nicer to work with than the primitive Web 1.0 iterations of those technologies, but I want to make something that meets the following criteria:

  1. No tracking or spying on visitors
  2. No dependence on Big Tech companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook, X, etc..)
  3. A unique flavor that changes over time
  4. No dependence on third-party external cloud services

In other words, I want to build a website with modern tools that is indie.  Indie in design, indie in spirit, indie in execution, and uniquely it’s own beast.

In theory this is straightforward.  All you need is:

  1. A webserver
  2. Web pages and other content
  3. Ideas and know how

The problem I was facing as I contemplated this was that the simple, straightforward, “old school” path to building websites is almost non-existent these days and the companies that run traditional web hosting go out of their way to make the creation and administration of such sites challenging.  They want you to buy rather than build and since so few people try to build this sort of website anymore they often provide very little support or guidance to help people do so.

But, moron that I am, I put a stake in the ground a few years back and made a landing page at nucleargopher.com that merely rendered our old logo in the middle of the page and held down the fort while I went and educated myself.

I had MANY false starts.  I thought I might be able to wrangle WordPress into a shape that made me happy but after half a dozen attempts in which I was just sad about the result I ditched that.  I next took a look at a series of “static site generators” which create nicely styled and “plain old HTML” sites without databases and all that and that was closer to what I wanted.  Plain text, full control, host anywhere.  I fell in love with one in particular.  Still, time kept on timing and I was getting no closer to a web site that I would feel good about.  The big issue was still themes.  I just really hate the look of every theme out there and I kept losing patience at learning yet another templating language.  There are just sooooo many of them and none seem to be particularly better or worse than the others.

So I came to a decision.  I decided that I was just gonna party like it’s 1999 and damn the torpedos.  I picked one easily attainable starting point: a landing page that had a music player on it.  And not just any music player but WinAmp (or, to be more accurate, WebAmp, an HTML5 clone of the original WinAmp player).  Two days ago, on April Fools Day, I uploaded the updated NuclearGopher.com landing page with two initial songs on the playlist: the new Awkward Bodies cover of The Lavone’s 1986 song “My Adventure Flowerland” and “Hi-Fi” by HighTV (and some kick butt WinAmp skins if you can figure out how to change them).  You can go there right now and hear some tunes.  It’s the softest of soft launches ever considering that this a website that has essentially been dormant for about 20 years but it was (gasp!) fun.

Today I realized that it would be nice to have a newsletter signup and also the ability to view site traffic statistics.  Again I asked myself how exactly I ought to do those things in 2024 without signing up for anything or doing any tracking nonsense.  It took a few hours of tinkering because my web hosting provider has incomplete and misleading instructions that are years out of date, but I managed to setup the stats thing (still entirely anonymous, just crunching numbers from the server logs) and I am now auditioning an open-source, self-hosted, newsletter signup tool that will allow visitors to opt-in/out of basic updates about new releases, events, and the rest, again without any tracking or Big Tech involvement.  This is how I built websites 25 years ago.  By hand, using open-source, maintaining independent control and respecting visitor privacy.  It’s kind of ugly right now but in a goofy way that I like more than a fancy theme.

I’m really looking forward to adding to the site, putting up new pages, playing around with the look and feel, throwing in easter eggs and silly bits, and actually having a good time and enjoying the process.  It feels like the right way to do it.  So, please, feel free to go listen to a couple of songs and take a look at the embryonic new nucleargopher.com.  I have interesting plans for it and I promise that the changes won’t be measured in decades or even years from here on out.  The internet need not be boring or corporate, dominated by apps, subscriptions, paywalls, and pretentious BS.  It used to be fun.  I hope I can bring a little bit of fun back to it.  It can’t all be as cool as zombo.com but we can try.  And those two songs are pretty sweet…

Posted on
by

When I was in high school I took a philosophy course and I have to admit that I didn’t think too highly of it.  We learned about the debates over questions such as “What is truth?”, “What is beauty?” and “Does life have meaning?”

I was pretty sure I knew the answers to all the big philosophical questions and I was pretty sure that anybody who wanted to know the answers could just study the Bible a bit with a member of my religion and they could have those answers too.  That is the thing about belief: it gives you the comfort of feeling that you have answers and can therefore get on with the business of living your life instead of wasting all that time in pointless debating like the philosophers.

I didn’t develop a proper appreciation for these philosophical questions until I learned that the “facts” underpinning my beliefs were not actually facts, i.e. – objectively verifiable statements derived from the observation of reality.  Many of the key “facts” I had built my world view on had been derived from opinions, stories, inventions, speculations, distortions, and partial truths that didn’t stand up to scrutiny.  I gotta tell ya, I developed a healthy appreciation for being skeptical about the things I believe in right fast and I have maintained my commitment to skepticism as a virtue ever since.

People in general are not skeptical enough, it seems.  They believe advertisements, politicians, propaganda, religious cult leaders, and fabricated content they see on the internet.  This has led to a slew of opinion pieces about how we live in a “post-truth era” and that hurts both my heart and my head.  There is no such thing as a post-truth era, there are no such things as alternative facts, there is simply an information landscape that has morphed into something so fearsomely massive that the signal is lost in the noise and the average person is ill-equipped to critically examine the information they consume.  This has resulted in the golden age of misinformation wherein the largest number of people can be manipulated by the largest number of bad actors the world has ever seen.  It is no wonder that so many are falling under the sway of authoritarian politicians, hate groups, and high-control cults (or in the case of MAGA Trump Worship, the trifecta…).

Years ago I read an incredible book called Age of Propaganda by Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson.  I firmly believe this book ought to be required reading in this day and age to help people recognize when they are being manipulated to serve the ends of a third party through propagandist techniques.  Chapter 35 in this book is called “How To Become A Cult Leader” and is not intended as a How To guide any more than the recent Netflix series was, but in using this structure the authors run through the techniques that are used to create cults and, if you become familiar with the techniques, you can identify whether or not a leader or group that you follow might, in fact, be a cult.  This is not the only kind of skeptical thought required in our times, the ability to recognize logical fallacies, spot doctored/false/misleading “facts”, and learn enough science and math to at least understand why certain things are true and others false, those are all important too, but without a free brain to use to evaluate information, a person is hampered.  People who are under the sway of cult thinking do not, by definition, have freedom of thought, so the first step in escaping from the post-truth conceit and developing the ability to live in reality is to recognize if you are being interfered with by these techniques coming from leaders you trust.

Here’s the list.  If you belong to a group that uses the following tried and true manipulation techniques, you might want to ask yourself whether or not they are entirely on the up and up:

  1. Create your own social reality.
    Members will continue the bad habit of thinking for themselves if they are not isolated from bad influences, so you start there.  You need to create boundaries between the believers and the non-believers, at least mentally if not physically.  This is fairly easily accomplished by labeling everything that is not from “the group” as being from “the devil”.  Once you do that, you must provide members with a set of beliefs that tell them how to interpret the world so that they come to believe that the cult teachings are the only way the world makes any sense.  Another pro tip: create your own jargon or lingo.  It makes it harder to see the world from a perspective other than the group, it allows members to recognize each other more easily, and when you change how people use language, you change how they think.  Do this right and you will have followers who speak and think according to a set of filters you define, who think of themselves as being “in the group”, and who are intellectually and socially isolated from the larger world.
  2. Create an in-group of followers and an out-group of “others” (aka – The Granfalloon Technique).
    The obvious next step is to strengthen the social reality that you have created using language and teachings by explicitly defining an Us and a Them.  If you do this right, two random members of the group should be able to run into each other on a bus in a strange city, strike up a brief conversation, immediately recognize the other as a member of the group, and immediately consider them a “brother” or “sister”, even though they don’t know each other, entirely because of shared membership in the in-group.
  3. Create a spiral of escalating commitment to combat cognitive dissonance.
    Getting people to join a group that involves the weakening or loss of connections with existing family and friends is a CHALLENGE.  Most people don’t want to do this.  So, how do you get that to happen?  Start small.  Get people to eat just a metaphorical snack.  Leave them with some of the group’s more appealing teachings or invite them to a social event.  Get them to make some small commitment, agreeing to a followup visit or maybe coming to another group meeting.  Each small commitment, each small step towards the group, creates a sense of investment, a sense that if you don’t follow up with the next step you will be letting somebody else down.  This is a powerful force but can’t be rushed.  Don’t want to spook the newbie.  Once a person has started to get involved in a cult group, they are likely to experience some sort of intervention from friends or family and that is the first test.  Ideally, the newbie feels defensive and tries to justify their involvement because the alternative involves admitting that they might be wrong, and that feels terrible.  If you can get a person to start to decide that they are doing this because it’s really what they want, not because they are being coerced, you’re 90% of the way to a new convert.
  4. Establish the credibility and attractiveness of the leader(s).
    It should go without saying that some famous cult leaders are not exactly what one would call “attractive”.  Jim Jones, Kim Jong Un, Donald Trump, Marshall Herff Applewhite, these guys ain’t exactly Ryan Gosling.  But that’s OK.  You want to build a myth, something bigger than reality.  You want tell a story about how the leader or leaders (if you are led by a committee) are chosen, special, the recipients of unique divine direction, God’s chosen mouthpiece, the purveyors of the one Truth, “Only I can fix it”, you get the picture.  It helps if there is some sort of vague event in the past, a heroic backstory, a rags to riches story, something emotionally manipulative.  It’s very important that the leader(s) not be seen as merely people who gathered followers using shady and manipulative techniques.  They are SPECIAL.  Put them on TV, hold them up for admiration, talk about how they are chosen/directed/unique.  If you fail on this point, your whole cult could fizzle but if you get it right, you could get people to do all sorts of terrible things to themselves and others in the name of God or your group.
  5. Send members out to spread the message to the “others”.
    This might seem to violate #1.  If you want to isolate people, why would you send them out to preach?  Well, believe it or not, nothing toughens the skin of a believer (and creates a stronger commitment trap) than promoting and defending your beliefs to others.  If it is at all feasible, send your converts out into the world to spread the word, go door to door, hand out flowers at airports, hold rallies and conventions, encounter resistance, repeatedly and intentionally.  If you really want somebody to be willing to allow their child to die for your teachings, if you really want somebody kill themselves and others for your cause, you need this level of commitment.  And, bonus, you might occasionally make a few new converts in the process.  Nice.  Just remember: the new converts are actually made via the commitment trap, not the preaching activity.  The real point of proselytizing is to keep the in-group IN and the out-group OUT via the magic of self-selling.  For examples simply look at every internet flame war ever to see how views almost universally become more entrenched when challenged.
  6. Distract members from thinking undesirable thoughts.
    You can’t have your members using their pesky brains to think undesirable thoughts such as “What if Kim Jong Un isn’t really a God?” or “What if Noah’s ark was just a story?” or “What if this group is just a bunch of people telling stories and manipulating other people????”   That would be serious trouble.  It’s the brain you want to control, so, how does one do that?  First off, ban independent thought.  Just outright ban it.  Tell your followers that they can’t be trusted to think for themselves, the leader(s) know better, and if they encounter any information that appears to counter that message it is clearly from the devil and should be rejected out of hand.  Make sure other members of the group will report independent thinking to others as well so if somebody DOES use their brain, they’ll know better than to say so out loud for fear of retribution by the community.  Give people techniques to avoid thinking.  Lots of group meetings with rote memorization of texts, songs, and repetitions of the same teachings are a good idea.  Don’t allow time for thoughts to fester, keep the mind busy with other things.
  7. Fixate member’s vision on a phantom.
    We all know that you get a donkey to move using a carrot and a stick.  The potential for losing the social reality, the desire to be associated with the in-group, the commitment trap created by being part of the group, those are all kind of negative incentives for a convert to stay in the group.  The songs and busywork, the meetings and services and rallies and proselytizing activities, that’s all great to suppress independent thoughts, but the final piece of the puzzle is all important.  You need to dangle a carrot out there.  You need to make sure that your followers are constantly reminded of some future glory that always remains tantalizingly just out of reach.  Make America Great Again!  When?  Later.  Just have faith.  Give more of yourself, more of your time, more of your money, more of your resources and the promised land will arrive.  The new earth, the paradise, the glorious future, heaven, or personal riches (in the case of certain business cults) are there, waiting for you, SALVATION, just stay the course.  I mean, of course the carrot is attached to the stick, the stick is held by the leadership, and the carrot moves ahead with the donkey but the donkey isn’t thinking, the donkey doesn’t realize that.

And that’s the list.  Congratulations, you are now equipped to start a religion, a multi-level marketing business, a political movement, or whatever kind of high control group strikes your fancy.

If you are reading this and anything on that list struck uncomfortably close to home about a group you are involved in, listen to that feeling and ask yourself if maybe, just maybe, it’s time to try a little of that thinking for yourself thing.  If you aren’t thinking for yourself I’d maybe find a few moments to ponder:

  • Who is doing my thinking for me?
  • Why do they want to influence my thinking?  What’s their motive?
  • If they are operating in good faith, why do they use manipulative control techniques in their group?
  • What can I do to independently validate and verify the information I consume and act upon so I am less prone to misinformation and manipulation?

Everybody needs to develop skills and habits of mind to filter and assess groups, individuals, and information.  Fortunately, once you know some of the things to look for, it can be done.

Posted on
by

A.I. is having a moment.  Everywhere I look these days it seems that people are embedding the former Philadelphia 76er and Hall of Fame point guard into their products and…  wait…  just being corrected here…  A.I. refers to “artificial intelligence”.  Ah.  That makes a bit more sense…

There are a lot of hot takes happening.  Is AI going to steal all of our jobs?  Is it good?  Is it bad?  Is it going to permanently erase any lingering traces of trust from the shattered remnants of human society?

To answer:

  • not all of them
  • yes
  • yes
  • if you have EVER trusted ANYTHING digital, let this be a lesson to you to STOP IT

Look.  I write software for a living.  I have a bit of a grasp on how the trick is being done where the alleged “intelligence” of this technology is concerned.  There is nothing even remotely resembling intelligence in these tools other than the intelligence of the humans who create them.  They are indeed very sophisticated pattern matching and generating algorithms and they are useful for lots of things in the same way that wrenches and hammers are, but they have no goal, no intention, no awareness, no concept of mind, they just regurgitate the digitized human thoughts, feelings, writing, and creativity that belong to the massive datasets they are fed.  It’s an impressive trick.   It’s a kinda useful one sometimes, but does it really merit all of this gold rush behavior?

Here’s what an AI can do for me in my life right now:

  • suggest courses of action, code to write, or text prompts that are utterly useless about 80% of the time, close to useful maybe 20% of the time and require my human judgement, intention, action, and decision making 100% of the time
  • generate shiny but ultimately kinda crappy artwork with no soul or humanity in it that is stolen from massive numbers of actual artists without compensation, recognition, or acknowledgement
  • get trained on things that never happened, people that never existed, places that are fictional, and all the rest of human fiction and then mix all of the above into search results as if they are reality

I don’t even think it’s fair to call these “artificial intelligences” so I will refer to the technology by the more accurate term “generative algorithms”.  GAs are useful tools, when paired up with human cognition, to allow you to create images if you suck at drawing, or write slightly less horrible prose.  OK. I predict that GAs will kill or at least probably make a serious dent in the clip art / stock photography industry… why pay Shutterstock when a GA will poop out 20 images of a kitten and one of them might look good in your PowerPoint deck?

The rest of us can currently be marked safe from the GA apocalypse because these tools don’t do ANYTHING well enough to be trusted.

At first I thought they might be a nice search helper until I realized that fact and fiction are indistinguishable to a GA.  After my hundredth inaccurate search result I disabled the “help”.  (Fortunately I already knew the difference between the actual Scottish “Stone of Scone” and the Terry Pratchett Discworld “Scone of Stone”…  GAs SUCK at identifying parody and satire…  so do many humans so that is why I don’t see this problem disappearing any time soon…)

I added a GA ride along helper to my coding environment at work and it is like a slightly more useful auto-complete (a feature I have had for, like, 20 years…) and probably contributes a few minutes of saved typing every day but it often suggests absolutely, wildly, inaccurate things.  It hallucinates code structures that don’t exist, it sometimes autocompletes huge chunks that I then have to undo.  Some days I am glad it’s there and some days I consider turning it off.

I’ve been impressed by some of the “sound alike” music that has been done via GA.  “Look here!  It’s a song that sounds like The Beatles!”.  Cool?  I mean, I don’t doubt that I could probably use a GA to manufacture my entire next album by training it on all my previous recordings but I mean…  Doesn’t that defeat the whole point of self-expression?

And this, my friends, is why I remain radically unimpressed by this tech.  “AI” is really just GA, and as such is only capable of mixing all the colors of the human creative intelligence into a sort of bland beige that, like pitch corrected vocals, has a tendency to make everything kinda feel and sound and look the same in a way.  It synthesizes information to create something that feels, well…  synthesized.  There is no wabi-sabi, none of the beauty of imperfection or quirkiness that comes from the works of people.  I’ve generated tons of images with GA tools, had my talks with the chatterbots, played with the tech for years now, and I have yet to have any experiences that feel like a legitimate improvement over how I did things prior to their arrival beyond the occasional bit of small time saving.  When I’ve gotten images or other output from a GA that met my needs, there was no satisfaction in it.  I didn’t consider it to be a creative act.  There was no sense of accomplishment, just the sense of acquisition.

Just as I typed that sentence I realized that sums it up nicely.  An analogy:

I love coffee.  I own many coffee mugs.  If I were to take a pottery making class and make myself a coffee mug, firing it in a kiln, glazing it in the raku style, taking the white hot mug from the kiln and dropping it into a bucket of sawdust, and marveling over the metallic finish of the final product, noting my own fingerprint still left accidentally on the bottom, I would not just have a coffee mug.  I would have a memory.  An experience.  A sense of accomplishment.  And also a coffee mug.  Alternately, I could find myself at HomeGoods and see a very nice handmade raku coffee mug and buy it and bring it home and put it in my cupboard.

This is what it feels like to make digital artifacts such as text, images, or audio using generative algorithms, it’s more akin to shopping than it is to creativity.  It’s like paging through all the Amazon products, trying to find just the right mug that looks like the one in your head, clicking Add to Cart, and two days later opening a box, and putting the product in your cupboard.  These GAs are there to turn tasks that were once creative into tasks that are now mostly indistinguishable from acquisition and purchasing.  That’s not necessarily a good or a bad thing, but it does limit the appeal for me, personally.

As to whether this sort of “buying yourself a voice/image/face/video/music” thing is ultimately bad for society…  That depends.  If people keep mistaking GAs for intelligence, continue to uncritically trust and share online information, and keep putting their trust in authoritarians, demagogues, propagandistic “news” outlets, and shit they see on social media, we are probably collectively going to struggle but hey, since when have people been gullible, stupid, or fanatical?  I really can’t see any way this technology could be abused.**

** This is one of those sarcasm things that GAs suck at, so, hey Bing or whichever GA-enhanced monstrosity is indexing this page, I meant the opposite…  Got it?  Or did I?

Posted on
by

As a bit of a follow up to my mea culpa regarding the Apple M-series MacBooks and how impressed I am with them, I have taken the plunge and purchased my first new Apple product since the iPhone 7, an iPad Pro with M2 processor.  The question: can this serve as a legitimate laptop replacement or, at the very least, a replacement for the majority of daily laptop tasks.

I have only had the new iPad for a few days but here are my first experiences.

Before I proceed, if you’re unfamiliar with me, I am not somebody who just converted to Apple products.  I am a long time Mac user going back to the 90’s, an owner of every iPhone from the 3g to the 7 (although when they took away the headphone jack I switched to Android because I don’t much care for phones in the first place but I do love my wired headphones…), and I’ve owned three previous iPads.  I work in software engineering and media production so my general daily use cases involve music production, video editing, graphic design for print and the web, and coding software.

The temptation to try to replace my daily driver laptop with an iPad is strong.  I have been trying to get there for a while now.

Way back in the ancient times (around 2012) I bought a 14-inch MacBook Pro and an iPad 2(?) to replace my previous iPad 1.  I liked the iPad form factor quite a bit and I even started to write some software for the platform but I found that I was not thrilled with a few realities of the situation.  Firstly, while I could write software FOR the iPad, I could not write software for the iPad USING the iPad.  So, it was more like a phone than a laptop.  It couldn’t be used to modify itself in the way a proper computer can.  You still needed a Mac.  Secondly, the Mac lacked any sort of touchscreen support, so, writing software for the iPad and its touchscreen interface was clunky as hell.  You had to run an iPad emulator on the Mac, which sorta worked, but you had no way to really emulate gestures and multi-touch in the emulator.  There were plenty of other limitations too, mostly related to file management.  If, for example, I wanted to edit a video on an iPad with footage I shot using my DSLR, iCloud was a non-starter as a file sharing technology.  Basically, email and web browsing and digital comic books were great on the iPad, but for any serious work, you needed a Mac.

That situation didn’t really change in the ensuing decade.  iPads got more capable and back in 2016 I upgraded to a Pro with a Pencil, I added a keyboard case to it, it was a nicer iPad experience, and some really kickass music production apps on the iPad became part of my life, but I still couldn’t use it to code, I still wouldn’t consider it for any sort of serious media production work if for no other reason than the lightning port didn’t really allow it to dock with external devices like large capacity file storage or an external monitor or a high quality A/D converter (or, ideally, all of those things at once).  Also, while multi-touch is great, some tasks/apps are more efficient with a keyboard and mouse/trackpad.  Finally, laptops were just faster, had more memory, and had more storage.   If you have access to an actual computer, why on earth would you limit yourself to the restrictions of a tablet?

But I dreamed of a world where I could have the touch/tablet experience so I experimented with Windows machines.  Specifically, I acquired a Lenovo Yoga convertible laptop.  Now, Windows 10/11 are not quite as polished as MacOS for traditional computer work and they are miles behind iOS or iPadOs in terms of touch support, but the Yogas are solid machines.  As fast, or faster, than the Intel MacBook options of the time, thin and light like a MacBook Air, a little more expandable and upgradeable, and the tablet experience was actually pretty solid, if maybe a tad too big.  My Yoga is a 14-inch so it’s a pretty mega tablet when it’s in tablet mode, but it’s been a great machine and I still use it daily.  In the 12 years since I bought my last MacBook (a 2012 machine which I still have and use) I have bought TWO Yogas.  Both times I considered a Mac purchase and chose the Lenovo and I have no regrets.

But I haven’t been in love.

I used to LOVE my Apple gear.  I still LOVE my older Apple products but I don’t have any particular affection for the Yoga experience.  It’s just decent.  Serviceable.  It gets the job done, the form factor is convenient.  I wish it ran MacOs.  I wish the MacBook Air could flip over and have a touchscreen but this is as close as it seems I can get, it’s just a second-tier operating system experience.

But the Yoga has some serious benefits.  It is a full scale computer, it docks with peripherals, it runs all the apps, it’s fast, it’s an all-in-one.  If I take a road trip it’s the only thing I need to bring along and I don’t need dongles to use it.

At the end of the day, my laptop that converts to a tablet is sub-par because of software but at least it’s self-contained, a true 2 in 1.  On the Apple side of the world I have two very separate devices, each of which has some exclusive capabilities the other lacks, creating a situation where I have to chose one, or the other, or to use two devices where one could have sufficed.  I’ve long felt this was a pretty shady product strategy on Apple’s part, an intentional choice to sell more devices, and I’ve long resented that.

Hence the desire to find out if the current M2 powered iPad Pro can finally be a proper 2-in-1 device.  Could it replace my ancient MBP for all the things I still use that machine for?

Let’s start with the positives.  The iPad Pro M2 is the fastest computer in my house, beating out the laptop I use for work (a MacBook Pro M1) in terms of shear horsepower.  It’s wicked fast and uses very little power, just like the M1.  It’s orders of magnitude faster than my old Intel-powered MBP.  It’s not even close.  However, the two machines are really not all that different when it comes to things like web browsing, email, and basic productivity apps.  In fact, the M2 experience is almost wasted on standard apps like that.  My first gen iPad Pro still has more than enough horsepower to handle all of that stuff with ease.  My Intel MacBook too.  Hell, I am even running the latest version of macOS on the old Intel machine (via some open source hackery) so I’m really missing nothing where the normal stuff is concerned.  If that were all I needed my computer to do, the M2 would be the sprightliest of the three but it wouldn’t be enough to make me want to upgrade to it.  In fact, the only reasons I did so now were:

– A CostCo Rewards certificate
– A CostCo sale on iPads
– A failing battery on my 8-year-old iPad Pro

I.E. – it didn’t cost all the much out of pocket and my current tablet was suffering some LI-ION aging.  I didn’t buy it because I was suffering from poor performance or lagginess.

I outfitted my M2 with two accessories: a Logitech Combo Touch keyboard/touchpad case and (of course) an Apple Pencil 2.  I want to talk about how those two additions do seem to turn the thing into (very nearly) the laptop/tablet 2-in-1 I am hoping for.

The Logitech Combo Touch is what really makes it feel like a laptop.  If you’ve ever used a Microsoft Surface, you know the drill.  A detachable magnetic keyboard/touchpad, a kickstand to hold the tablet up, not as friendly for actual lap usage as a laptop, but if you use a lap desk it’s not so bad.  It really is just fine.  I’ve had other keyboard cases for previous iPads but I’ve never had a touchpad before and it changes the game, makes it into an 11-inch laptop for all intents and purposes.  The ergonomics and muscle memory are what I’m used to.  The keyboard shortcuts I have been using macOS for the last 25 years generally translate to iPadOS, honestly it’s damn close to using a MBP.  The keyboard feel on this Combo Touch is pretty impressive. The keys don’t feel mushy, the keyboard doesn’t feel all that cramped.  I can legitimately write long form text without wishing I was on a bigger machine.  Yes, it’s a bit compact but it’s really quite good.

There are a few annoyances that I’ve noticed.  The kickstand approach to keeping the tablet upright is definitely a drawback compared to the fantastic Logitech Create case I have for my older iPad Pro.  In the case of the Create, however, the lap stability is created via moving the keyboard forward and magnetically securing the tablet:

Unlike the Combo Touch:

As you can see, the lap depth of the Combo Touch makes it a strictly lap desk/table top situation while the Create could be used on-lap.

This is down to the absence of a hinge, one of the more impressive parts of the Yoga design.

Of course, I could have gone with an Apple Magic Keyboard case instead which would have addressed this shortcoming because it features a very cool cantilevered hinge design and basically turns the iPad into something even close to a laptop but I didn’t for two reasons:

1) The Magic Keyboard is hella expensive (more than half of what I paid for the iPad itself)

2) The Magic Keyboard is bulkier and heavier than the Combo Touch

3) Did I mention that the thing costs $299????  The fuck, Apple….

Maybe someday I’ll buy a refurb/used/sub-$100 Magic Keyboard but for now, um, no.

OK, so, it’s “laptop like” with the Combo Touch and, if I was willing to shell out some more money for a Magic Keyboard OR if I was willing to eschew the trackpad I could get a bit closer but I have chosen my weapons and here I stand.  Let’s talk Pencil.

I’m a huge fan of the Apple Pencil.  I may not show my work here on this site, but I draw and paint and when I’m taking notes during meetings at work or designing and planning things, I’m a pencil and paper (or fountain pen and paper) guy.  I used to regularly use a Wacom Artpad with my various Mac computers for creative work and I have a stylus for my Yoga and other styli for touchscreens but frankly, nothing compares to the Pencil.  It’s really one of the greatest things Apple has ever made.  It feels right, it works right, it’s excellent, but there have always been some annoyances that have kept it from being perfect.

Annoyance the first: charging the Pencil is stupid.  A magnetic cap (which you could easily lose) covers a lightning connector which charges by either sticking out of the side of your iPad waiting to be snapped off by a nearby dog or connecting to a stupid little dongle (which you could easily lose) that converts the male plug to a female plug and allows you to connect it via a lightning cable.  It’s just….  DUMB.

Annoyance the second: the Pencil lacks an eraser.  Dumb, I know, but they should have called it the Pen maybe?

Annoyance the third: Storage.  The Logitech Create case solved the storage issue by including a little Pencil storage loop, which was nice, but sans a case-provided solution, keeping your Pencil on you was a bit of a problem.

I wish I could say that the Yoga stylus was a better solution or at least equivalent in terms of functionality or annoyances but the less said about it the better.  The one I have isn’t rechargeable (it uses one AAAA battery and one tiny little coin cell battery, both of which are usually dead when I go to use the stylus), has no storage option at all, and barely works.  A truly pointless accessory and it sucks because one of the truly defining use cases of a tablet is DRAWING.  I never, ever, ever, find myself using my Yoga in tablet mode for drawing or note taking.  It’s just not worth the hassle.

Finally, let’s talk about drawing tablets, the only solution for a MacBook.  I mean….  Hey, when I was in middle school and we had a Koala Pad with a stylus that let us draw lines on the screen of the Apple II I thought that was pretty keen, but being able to draw directly on the screen like it’s natural media is just, DUH.  It’s how the mind and body work when using a writing instrument.  You don’t draw over on the desk to your right and watch what you draw on the piece of paper to your left when you take out a sketchpad and start sketching.

The Apple Pencil experience on the iPad is the single best drawing/handwriting experience that I have ever had with a computing device.  I still prefer using a Parker “51” fountain pen and a piece of actual paper for note taking and exploratory writing and song lyrics, but it’s a really wonderful experience and it’s one of the primary reasons I bought my iPad Pro in the first place.

So, this leads me to a minor confession.  I don’t have the Apple Pencil 2 yet, I only have my original Apple Pencil BUT I discovered that there was a little Apple Pencil -> USBC dongle that could be obtained for $9.00 so no problem, I figured I could just use that and I’d be all good to go in Pencil land.  Ordered the dongle (unhappily, as described above) and learned almost immediately that it’s no good.  The latest and greatest iPad Pro generation is only compatible with the 2nd Gen Pencil.  Oh bother.  The good news is that Amazon refunded my $9.00 and didn’t even make me return the adapter.  So, yay?

I won’t be getting my hands on the Pencil 2 for another day or two but I already know I love the Pencil and I also know that it addresses a couple of the above annoyances.  While still not delivering an eraser function on the rounded end, the charging and storage are both neatly addressed by a magnetic wireless charging system that attaches the Pencil to the iPad and keeps it fed with yummy electrons.  I think I’ll be using the Pencil a LOT more now that this is the case.

In summary on the positives side:

– The form factor can be made very laptop-ish and generally usable
– The performance is incredible for basic productivity and even for serious computing tasks
– The actual tablet experience is superior to the Windows 2-in-1 equivalent thanks to a superior multi-touch operating system and a stylus that is second to none

Now let’s talk negatives, because they exist and they are some of the same ones that have been there all along.

A mentioned above, the form factor is a big part of the conversation here.  A 2-in-1 device needs to be a great tablet and a great laptop.  The iPad is the platonic ideal of a tablet and a so-so laptop (without spending a shit ton of money) while the Yoga is an excellent laptop and a so-so tablet with no additional modifications required (or possible).  Something of a wash.  iPad wins as a tablet, Yoga wins as a laptop.

So it is then down to software and here the problems arise because, I’m sorry to say, that’s still the rub.

If I were a person who could meet all of my software needs via a web browser and an email client (true for many) it would be end of story but I can’t.  Hell, for a lot of people the only thing they might add to that list would be games and with an 8-core CPU and a 10-core GPU this thing is probably pretty good for games, I dunno, I haven’t tried it yet.  Most of my gaming is accomplished via the Windows gaming PC I built which has a fancy Nvidia card and VR headset and a trillion Steam games.  When I want to play on my laptop I just use the Steam Link app and play remote over my home network.  Don’t need much processing power for that.  I do  have a free three month trial of Apple Arcade available with my purchase so maybe I’ll do a gaming test as a follow up but it’s not all that important to me.  If I can pair my XBoxOne or my Nimbus Steel controller to the thing and play some games that will be plenty cool and I presume that is something that’s possible.  If so, the hardware is likely faster than my Ryzen/Nvidia VR beast.  So, again, games would likely not be a major obstacle to laptop replacement for many casual gamers.

But what about my other uses?  What about video editing, photography, audio production, graphic design, and (the big one) software development?

Therein lies the rub.

Let’s start with video editing.

Long ago in a galaxy far far away I used to do quite a bit of digital filmmaking.  Music videos, short films, I was even considering a feature.  I do a lot less of it at the moment (my most recent productions were a few music videos and a short film collection) but it’s something I intend to go back into with a vengeance as I launch the new Nuclear Gopher YouTube channel.  To gear up for this I have re-evaluated my choices in video editing software and come down on the side of Davinci Resolve.  It’s not completely necessary to know this, but I started my digital filmmaking life using analog capture cards and Adobe Premiere back in the 90’s, moved to DV->Firewire Macs in the early 2000’s with iMovie and then graduated to Final Cut Pro about, oh, 20 years ago.  When I got the Yoga I toyed around with Vegas as a video editing platform because it kept coming up on Humble Bundle sales so it was cheap as hell and claimed to be pretty professional grade.  I tried, on multiple occasions and with multiple versions of Vegas, to make videos but it was so buggy and flaky that I just couldn’t ever see myself using it for long.  I will never subscribe to Adobe and FCP will never be available on Windows so was I ever happy with Davinci Resolve came up on my radar.  Holy shit I love Resolve.

Having just completed my first large Resolve video project (“Nuclear Gopher: The Disorganization Behind The Name”, a two-hour short film retrospective that went direct to DVD and VHS for some reason… no streaming) I gotta say I am SOLD.  Final Cut is dead to me.  So, imagine my happiness to discover that Resolve exists on the iPad!  Rock.  And.  Roll.  Final Cut Pro also has an iPad version but Resolve is:

a) Free (FCP for iPad is subscription-ware, blech!)
b) Interoperable with the Win and Mac versions (allegedly)

The iPad version of Resolve is a subset of the full version but a pretty good start from what I can tell so far.  I won’t even glance sideways at FCP for iPad unless I hit some sort of wall in Davinci that I can’t see my way clear of.

But, editing the video is not the only thing required sometimes.  Sometimes I’m working with old, low-resolution, standard-definition footage and I want to bring it up to modern resolutions without it looking even more like crap than it already does.  I have been a regular user of Topaz Video AI for a while now for upscaling old footage.  When I was working on NG:TDBTH I was working with digitized 8mm footage, VHS footage, Digital-8 footage, ripped DVD video, and Mini-DV footage.  I used Topaz to bring all the footage up to a 1080p HD level prior to importing it into my Resolve timeline.  I bring this up because the upscaling process was easily the most processor intensive part of the project and the performance differential between the machines at my disposal was a serious factor.  Wanna stress test a computer, do AI upscaling of long video clips.

It went something like this for upscaling the same video clip (rough guideline, I did some bake offs but I didn’t keep track of the numbers):

Elderly Intel MacBook Pro: several hours
Slightly less elderly and more powerful Intel iMac: maybe 30 minutes less than the MBP but still hours
Much newer and more powerful Intel Lenovo Yoga: about twice as fast as the old MBP but still pushing an hour
Gaming PC with fast Ryzen 7 and Nvidia GPU: less than 20 minutes
MacBook Pro M1: less than 10 minutes

This more than anything was the experience that convinced me of the massive performance leap the M1 MacBook had made.  It was both a) demonstrably the fastest computer in the house for the same exact task with the same app and b) a power-sipping portable machine rather than a full sized desktop box that has a big ass power brick.

And the thing is…  the M2 iPad is even faster, at least on paper.

I don’t doubt for a moment that the iPad could beat the MacBook at the same computing task, even if only be a few seconds but I can’t do the test because the application is available for Windows, and Mac, but not iPadOS.  This is true of a lot of professional grade media production applications and it’s easy to see why.  To make a version of an application that works on an iPad means you need to factor in limited device storage (mine only has 128GB of storage compared to the 1TB in the laptops and the dozens of TB or storage attached to my desktops), limited RAM (it’s 8GB, from what I understand, compared to 16GB minimum on my other machines), and the need to redesign the UI to optimize it for touch because you could never be sure a user would have a keyboard/trackpad attached.  And the market for such software is very small.  Professionals don’t try to do things like that with iPads, historically speaking.  Could change, sure, but as of now?

So it’s a little frustrating to have this blazing processor in a device that can’t run a piece of software that really needs that kind of power because Apple decided to fork the Mac operating system into iOS and iPadOS instead of aiming for a unified platform and, lest we forget, the iPad is a locked down platform that can ONLY run software from the Apple App Store so there isn’t really any incentive or option to load something of your own on there, is there?  The very fact that we call it “side loading” when we put applications or data on our devices using methods other than the Officially Approved Outlets is kinda embarrassing.  For decades you bought a computer and installed whatever the hell you wanted on the thing and used whatever files you felt like.  Now you buy a computer but it’s called a “device” because you can’t.  The iPad can play at being a proper computer but the App Store reality means it’s still a “device”.  A separate computer remains necessary for this, and other tasks, at the moment.

But, HD video upscaling is, admittedly, a corner case even for me.  If I can do most of my video editing on the iPad, that will be groovy.  I haven’t tested it yet but I have no reason to doubt that I can work with a large external monitor, I know I can use a 4TB Thunderbolt drive that I have for storage, and if the back and forth of project between iPad and Mac/Win actually works for Resolve, I will be psyched.

On to music.  There are a TON of fantastic iPad-exclusive music apps that I have used for years.  I even find the iPad version of Garageband to be preferable to the Mac version for working on casual demos or even recording whole songs.  That said, my primary DAW of choice is not Garageband, not Logic, it’s Reaper.  Wherever a music project starts, it ends up in Reaper.  Reaper, like Resolve, is available in highly compatible Windows and Mac versions, and that factors into my choice of DAW.  The Windows PC in my recording studio is connected to a 16 channel audio interface and when I’m recording something with a lot of tracks (like, I dunno, the cast commentary track for the movie I recently tracked with five other people or a drum kit with eight microphones on it) that’s a nice rig.  When I want to take the session to the kitchen and headphones for editing, I can put it on my Yoga or my MacBook depending on my mood.  I checked if there was an iPad version of Reaper and the answer is, no.  No there is not.

I’ve used the iPad as a Reaper remote control for ages, so it’s a nice accessory in the studio when recording oneself (being your own engineer is it’s own art…) but that’s not the same.  This is OK though.  There are plenty of iPad DAWs available and as long as the tracks can be exported to stems and imported into another DAW, it’s perfectly fine to use a different app for tracking, even the excellent Garageband.  The question I still have is whether or not I can use one of my USB audio interfaces with it, however.  I have a Mackie Onyx interface that is ideal for recording single sources at high fidelity with near zero latency.  I use it on Mac and PC all the time.  I have some lightning cable audio interfaces that I could hypothetically use with my older iPad but I haven’t used them a lot.  For quick demos on the iPad I have tended to just use the built in mic for scratch vocals or guitars and go back and replace them later with real parts recorded on a proper computer with a real interface.  If I can attach a USB-C hub to the iPad and use my Mackie interface or something like it, the iPad could be a serious contender for a mobile recording platform.  More trials required.

At this point I feel like I’ve established that I can likely use the iPad for general video editing, with some corner cases that still require a full computer and I have used iPads for demo-grade recording for years and may be able to step that up if the audio interface support pans out.  How about photography?

I like old school analog film photography (I have many Nikons…) and I also have a couple of DSLRs and, of course, old and new smartphones that can take great pics and shoot 4K video.  Basic photo management is a given and RAW image editing is also nothing I worry about.  The options are nearly limitless.  I am not clear, however, on scanner support.  Can you scan film negatives with an iPad?  What about printing?

I’m none too sure and so far I am not seeing a lot to reassure me.  It is my understanding that iPadOS just doesn’t have the underpinnings necessary to connect via USB to printers and scanners.  Also, I’m going to have to explore a bit to see how I feel about the image editing tools out there on the platform.  I’m a wizard with the open-source GIMP, which I have been using for decades in lieu of paying Adobe for the privilege of using Photoshop.  I also make heavy use of an image management application (cross-platform, open-source) called Digikam.  Neither of these is available (or at least not in a usable version) on the iPadOS operating system.  I am anticipating that like in the case of video editing and music production, the iPad will bring something to the table as an adjunct to a computer but won’t be able to completely replace one.

Finally, the big one.  Coding.  Can you code with an iPad?

The answer in this case is: that depends on what you want to code.

If you want to write iPad software using an iPad you are SOL as far as I can tell.  There is something called Swift Playgrounds which appears to allow users to learn coding with Swift and even build iPad apps of a sort but I honestly don’t know if it’s possible to publish said apps to the App Store and if you can’t do that, well, you can’t really do anything except make toys for yourself.  XCode is the industrial grade dev tool from Apple and you need a Mac for that.  But what if you just want to write HTML, Javascript, and CSS to build websites?

I would argue that anything with a text editor and the ability to render to a web browser would work and an iPad would be just fine for that.  A web developer is good to go.  If, on the other hand, you want to write Python or Java or Rust or Go or anything compiled…  Nope.  No can do.  No alternate compilers or runtimes are allowed on an iPad.  Just no. Stop.  Bad Ryan.  If that ever happened then the iPad would be a proper computer instead of a device.  If you’re some sort of lunatic who likes to code then tough noogies, the iPad cannot be a laptop replacement.  Sorry boss.

There are ways around this, sorta.  For example, one can use a remote desktop application on an iPad to operate a different computer running MacOS or Windows or Linux and via this remote control can code, but that doesn’t really count.  At that point the iPad is just a peripheral, albeit a very smart one.  If you want to experience wicked fast build times powered by the shiny M2 processor for your language of choice, too bad so sad, shoulda bought a Mac.

At the end of it all, I will be using this iPad more than the one it replaces.  I can do more with it.  It’s a better laptop than my old MacBook Pro or my Yoga for most things, it’s frustratingly limited by software for other things.  It’s not as good a laptop as the M1 MacBook Pro because that’s a proper computer, not a peripheral, but it’s smaller, lighter, and has touch, so absent a touchable Mac, there will continue to be a class of apps that excel on the iPad that are impossible on the Mac, and vice versa.  Therefore, no, the iPad cannot be a full laptop replacement for me.  Maybe for somebody else, but not for me.  And that’s OK, I guess.  It’s an amazing machine for what it is and the software front keeps changing so, who knows?  Maybe now that the iPad has an M2 and a USB-C port the peripheral support will happen.  Maybe the Magic Keyboard will be so successful that users will clamor for XCode and sandboxed development environments that will let them use iPads for software engineering and Apple will allow it even if it bites into MacBook sales.  I dunno.  I think Apple could do the ideal 2-in-1 machine and they choose not to precisely because they get to sell two machines to power users like me instead of one.  I’ll almost certainly wind up buying an M-powered laptop to go with the M-powered iPad someday when I need to upgrade something.  I’ll use the iPad every day, no doubt, but full laptop replacement with the iPad remains a wish, even as it gets tantalizingly closer to being a reality.

Posted on
by

I am a notoriously difficult person to get a hold of.  Texts are missed for days or weeks, emails too, my social media appearances are few and far between, if I don’t recognize a phone number I don’t answer the phone.

This is not because I don’t want to talk to people or because I want to make anybody’s life difficult, but rather because the thought of picking up a smartphone for anything, even to approve a multi-factor authentication request, has become repugnant.  I have no positive feelings about the device.  I resent it.  I want to throw it in a river or toss it as high as I can up in the air and watch it smash on my driveway.  It takes an act of grit and determination to remove it from the charger, unlock it, and check it for messages.

I enjoy going to the physical mailbox.  I enjoy socializing in person.  I enjoy PEOPLE.  I even enjoy talking on the phone and hearing the voice of somebody I love.  But the smartphone represents advertising, scammers, invasive tracking, disruptive notifications, and negativity.  No joy is to be found there.  No warmth.  No positive energy.  Just a cold, dead, screen, filled with vapid content dished up by entities intent on taking my money, my time, or both.  Why on earth would I ever want to use it for anything?  I truly hate that thing.  I’d rather pick up a dog turd than a smartphone.

It wasn’t always this way.  I loved the first iPhone I had, (it was a 3G, the second iPhone iteration).  That was a fun device.  Before that I had a proto-smartphone, the Motorola Razr, and I thought it was pretty fun too.  In fact, I was pretty smartphone crazy for the first decade they were available, TBH.  Then, sometime around the beginning of the Trump presidency, the smartphone just came to symbolize all that is wrong with the world for me.  They stopped being fun and started to make me feel terrible every time I touched one.  I don’t know what to do about it.

The smartphone is the thing everybody expects you to have.  People expect you to carry it with you at all times.  I was one of the early adopters.  I get it.  To be a person in the 21st century who avoids social media and doesn’t usually have a smartphone nearby is to basically be a caveman.  But here I am trying to  figure out how it would work if I were to switch to a no-smartphone life.  Landline or feature phone only, use a tablet or something else for MFA login authentication stuff.  The only thing I would miss is GPS but my car has that built in now.

As it stands I sometimes go most of a week without even picking up my smartphone so I feel like it would be doable.

I find it bizarre that a device that I once saw as the greatest innovation ever and quite a lot of fun is now something I want to get rid of forever.

Maybe this is coming from the big stupid big corporate social media internet we have now, which I hate, or maybe it’s just that I’ve been using smartphones (and proto smartphones) for over 20 years so the novelty has well and truly worn off, but I constantly find myself thinking about how nice it would be to simplify the number of ways that people can reach me.  One of the overwhelming things about the modern communications landscape is the sheer number of things that people monitor.  They monitor texts, DMs on multiple platforms, app notifications, phone calls, and email.  It’s a lot to respond to and keep up with and I just don’t want to do that anymore.  I only need one.  I don’t need one device with 47 inboxes, notifications, or messaging apps.  I just need one place to be contacted.  When I was a kid there were two ways to reach me.  You could mail me a letter or you could call my home phone number and if somebody was home to answer you could ask for me and if nobody was around you couldn’t.  In my early 20’s I added email to the mix.  Then PC messaging apps.  Then a cell phone.  Then texts.  The options kept multiplying and I just don’t monitor all of this stuff anymore.  I don’t want to.  Bill Murray has a voice mailbox that people can call to leave him messages about things.  That’s it.  There is no other way to get in touch with Bill Murray.  That’s genius.  I need to figure out something that simple.

And then I need to “accidentally” drop my smartphone in a wood-chipper.  🙂