A Betamax man in a VHS world

Derek liked to feed the ducks at the local pond. In return, the ducks helped him plot revenge. One particularly blood-thirsty drake insisted Derek chop up the body of his love rival and throw it in the water. This seemed a bit extreme.

Nonetheless, his daily ritual of bread sacrfice took Derek’s mind off losing Mandy. It was his own fault really. He should have gone with her to Pilates when she asked. Now here he was, with his hand in a bag of Hovis getting Machiavellian advice from a group of mallards.

It hadn’t always been this way. Derek used to be a successful, upwardly mobile young executive at an accountancy firm, but as soon as he laid eyes on the new temp, he knew Mandy was the one for him. He had lost focus. That’s what Mr Jefferies had told him when he had let him go. Still, it was worth it – Derek was now dating Mandy and everything was going very well. He could get another job.
But he didn’t. Writing poetry for Mandy and creating collages of surreptitious snaps he’d taken of her was a time consuming enterprise. But worth it. Weeks turned into months, and while Derek and Mandy were happy on the face of things, Mandy seemed increasingly restless. They had tried going to clubs and activities together but nothing seemed to stick, and Derek – although he wasn’t proud of it – had become jealous when Mandy had spoken to other men.

Before too long, things came to a head. Mandy had started getting private Pilates sessions with the instructor, one on one, on an evening. She came home a lot more tired than the group classes made her.

Shortly after, Mandy stopped returning Derek’s phone calls. He was heartbroken. Derek was a romantic, but also a realist. He decided to pull himself together and stop going through Mandy’s bins. He uninstalled the app he had put on her phone to read her text messages. He was being reasonable about things.

That was the point he started hanging around with the ducks. At first he’d felt foolish telling them all about his problems, as they circled in the algae-choked water in front of him. But as he got to know the ducks, and they got to know him, they started to come to an understanding.

“Slit his throat,” quacked the larger of the two drakes.
“Yeah, fuck his shit up,” said the other drake, who did tend to agree with everything the other one said. Derek wasn’t sure if the myth of the Alpha Male actually rang true in ducks. But if it did, the large drake was it.
“Look,” said one of the females, who tended to be a bit more reasonable. “Why don’t you get this guy down here to the pond when it’s quiet. Give him a bit of a nudge, he’ll fall in here and we’ll do the rest.”
“Really?” said Derek, “I don’t want to get you guys in trouble.”
“Ahh don’t worry,” said the largest drake. “We kill people and eat them all the time, it’s no big deal.”

So the plot was set. Derek invented a scenario with Jonas (the Pilates instructor) whereby he wanted to meet to ‘clear the air’ about the whole Mandy situation. Luckily he’d saved his number from his previous aborted appointments. They would meet at the pond at 7am the following morning. Jonas got up early to meditate, so this wasn’t a problem for him.

Morning rolled around and Derek felt nauseous and unsure. After a final pep talk with the ducks the evening prior, he had felt buoyed, indestructible. But that’s ducks for you, they’re very persuasive. Now, in the literal cold light of day, Derek thought he was perhaps making a mistake. Murder. It was a big step. But the ducks… seemed so confident.

He could see Jonas coming over the hill towards him. He exhaled slowly. The ducks started to circle, excitedly, and it wasn’t because of the Warburtons in Derek’s pocket.

“Hey mate,” said Jonas, his hands stuffed in his tracksuit pockets. “Lovely spot this isn’t it?”
He was altogether too nice. Derek couldn’t take this young man’s life, it wasn’t right. He had just started to apologise to Jonas for wasting his time, when the Pilates instructor lunged at him, pushing Derek backwards towards the lake.

For what seemed like minutes, Derek windmilled his arms trying to regain his balance. But inevitably, gravity took him and he plunged into the cold green water. Beaks tore at his parka, then at his flesh, in a frenzy of quacking. As his head broke the surface over and over again as he struggled, he glimpsed the Alpha Duck standing next to Jonas on the bank, looking pleased with itself.

Water filled Derek’s ears as his blood mixed with the foaming algae, feathers and beaks forming a whirlpool around his disappearing consciousness.

“Same time next month?” Jonas asked the duck.
“Quack,” replied the duck, and smirked at Derek with his beak as everything went black.

Iam writing this on a Psion Series 5MX. Why? Mainly because I’m a bit of a contrary bastard, but also because I am on a quest. Aquest to find a portable, distraction-free writing device.

Sometimes called a ‘writerdeck’, there’s a whole Reddit community dedicated to finding, using and making these types of devices.So what are the parameters here? Well, in no particular order, the ideal device would be portable – no bigger than a laptop – battery powered, have a decent keyboard, and enable me to get plain text or RTF files off it easily.

What it doesn’t need is the internet, subscriptions, apps, or any of that modern shit.

So, how does the 5MX shape up? It’s definitely portable, and has a nice leather case. Batteries are 2 AA sized cells, and the backup 2032 is easily accessible. Seem to last for ages. Keyboard is OK- a bit stiff but nice travel and full set of characters. It takes a Compact Flash card, which with a Russian Doll like combination of adaptors I’ve used a microSD in. This allows me to get files on and off easily enough, but I’ve also ordered a serial cable and adaptor so hopefully Ican connect to my Mac and use a bit of software called Reconnect to do the same thing, plus backups and so on.

It’s a cool thing. The OSis nice and it’s instant on. Ilike it quite a lot. But is it ‘The One’? Our adventure continues…

I have a theory about where we’re headed with AI.

If you take away the staggering environmental cost, the complete paucity of any kind of ‘ideas’ as to how to make LLMs or AI Agents actually work for humanity, the casual plagiarism of actual human effort and the usual ‘let’s be as evil as possible by default to make more money’ deathgrip held on the technology by a few whey-faced white nerd billionaires, the facts of the matter are as follows:

1. Everyone thinks AI produced art, writing and music is shit.

and

2. Everyone can tell when art, writing or music has been AI generated.

Therefore, my prediction is thus:

The rise of AI will make actual human-crafted art more valuable than ever before.

Even if it’s shit, it’s shit with soul.

So, apparently we now live in a post-truth world. You can say anything you like, just make that shit up, and it’s not possible to challenge it – fuck your facts, logic, common sense.

This is very disturbing for a number of reasons. Not least of which, is us creative types – who for so long have been making things up for fun and profit – are now going to be indistinguishable from the grifters, the corrupt, and the downright evil.

So, how to combat this? It would be tempting to retreat into a fantasy world, and effectively ‘unsubscribe’ from reality. Lots of ways to do this, and it is indeed tempting.

However, we can use our power of making-things-up for good, rather than evil. Satire, comedy, social commentary, allegory, have been used since civilisation began and should continue to be so.

So whether you’re Dante, or Stephen Colbert, keep doing your thing. Let’s make sure a post-truth world isn’t also a post-consequences world.

What? Who is this?

Look, I don’t know if you think you’re some kind of wise-guy or what, but this is the second time you’ve come here this week, talking some phooey about a car dealers in Bismarck. Well, I told you then and I’m telling you know, I don’t know nothing about it.

What? I don’t care what Google says! You hear me? This is a personal web blog for a mildly mentally ill creative type in the UK. Huh? No. I don’t sell cars.

Well, I don’t know how you ended up here either! Huh? You clicked the link did you. Just saw it there and clicked the link. Good for you. Good for you. Uh huh.

No, look – this conversation is over. If you, or anyone else comes in here looking for a Bismarck Car Dealership, we’re gonna have a fucking problem, understand? Goodbye. Yeah fuck you too buddy.

Blogs (abbreviation for ‘weblog’) first came to prominence in the late 1990s, a time when the democratisation of online publishing was nascent. Initially single-user websites, typically either personal or niche in nature, throughout the 2000s these became curated, multi-user sites (eg, AKPCEP.com, dotCULT, etc.).

Moving into the 2010s, micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter, and web 2.0’s inclusion of replies and ‘social’ aspects bring us to where we are today. A few behemoths soak up most of the discourse and put it behind a login.

I’m of the old school, whereby people with things to say developed their own space, and had full control over the presentation and distribution of their words. No adverts, subscriptions, data mining, algorithms, Russian misinformation bots, Cambridge Analytica.

Nowadays of course, you can still create a blog, write in it, and hope people read it – much like I’m doing now, but like a lot of things in life, you end up asking yourself the question “what’s the point?”.

Maybe it’s just for expression’s sake. Maybe it’s stubbornness. Do I even have anything to say anymore? Probably not. There’s easier and more fulfilling ways of saying what I want to say (music, art, fiction) than typing things into a lonely text box.

One thing I do miss, back from the weblog days, is the ability to link between individual blogs in a curated, deliberate fashion. So, if you have a blog you’d like people to know about, link it in the comments below – I can’t promise you traffic, but I can promise you solidarity.

I’ve counted, and I know 123,704 facts. I’d like to share a selection with you now.

• Some bees are magnetic
• There are more different lego bricks than there are grains of rice in the sahara desert
• Bruce Forsyth had an extra foot
• Terrapins taste like hummus – and nobody knows why
• The term ‘Hi-Fi’ was invented by Benny Hill by accident when saying hello to his neighbour Fiona
• There are no cats in the world named Derek
• In Bulgaria, licking a post it note is punishable by death
• Before Bill Gates formed Microsoft, he wanted to be a “sexy cowboy”

I know another 123,696 facts. That’s another fact, so actually 123,697.

When I was a child, I used to lay on my back in the summer playground and stare at the heavy clouds. I would imagine one of them was an alien spacecraft, hovering ponderously, come to take me home.

It would explain, wouldn’t it, how I didn’t feel like I belonged here on Earth, and why everyone else slipped and slid through life while I tore at imaginary barbs and tangling vines.

After all, 8 year old me thought, I am an alien.

Most likely a common thread of ‘otherness’ that weaves through many a nascent psyche, but I found the thought of collection reassuring. A return to a known-good world and life where everything just – ahhh! – made sense after all.

40 years later, I wonder if I was right all along.

Do you ever get that thing – I’m sure you do – where you constantly hear a robotic woman’s voice saying the same string of numbers over and over again in your head?

I wonder if there’s a medical name for this phenomenon. Apart from being batshit crazy, that is.

It’s like having an annoying pop song stuck in your head, but much more sinister, like it’s a warning or an instruction or something. It feels like I need to do something with the numbers 35719.

It’s a shame robot lady can’t give me some useful numbers, like the lottery ones.

Sometimes, when I’m very bored indeed, I look at the Google Analytics data for this website. Today, I saw this among the most popular URLs visited:

Obviously, Google is my friend. Takako Konishi was a Japanese office worker who lost her job and sank into depression. She travelled to Minneapolis, then to Bismarck, then to Fargo, where she drank two bottles of Champage, lay down in the snow and died.

There’s an urban legend she went to Fargo to try and find the $1m treasure Steve Buscemi’s character hid there in the film of the same name, but this wasn’t the case. She’d gone there because an old American lover hailed from there, and I guess she was lonely.

A very sad story, but one that deserves to be told. There wasn’t a page on this site called ‘Takako Konishi’ before, but there is now.