Time to Form a Third Party?

More than usual, I’m amenable to hearing arguments in favor of abandoning the dems for a third party. If it was done on a large enough scale and fast enough, it could end-run the two-party stranglehold. If you do it on election eve 2028, bad timing. If you got way better than Green numbers well in advance, with a sufficiently bad-ass campaign, it might not be that hard to make a better showing than Harris, next time out. Her numbers were that miserable. These are radical times; radical things may happen.

I don’t have much to say on this right at the moment, and I know the conversation could get acrimonious, but if you can keep it civil, please speak your piece below. As much as I’m “vote dem or die” when there is no viable alternative in sight, it feels more possible than it has in a while that we could all just dust those fools off and do something else.

With dems acting the way they are now, we can be fairly assured of ten to forty years of fascist rule. If they changed their tune tomorrow I’d be open to hearing it, but they’ve been signaling a right-wing turn. What if we had somebody else, another party that wasn’t a fucking piss-take?

I will immediately return to “vote dem or die” if we get closer without a crushing success in building a replacement, so this is idle fancy. But get fancy with me for a minute.

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Life List: Eurasian Starling

I’ve never been to Eurasia, but Eurasia has come to where I live. Like humans from my ancestral gene pool, just, boom, are you really supposed to be here guys? No? Make yourself at home I guess? The most aggressive and destructive invasive bird species in my region, if not the entire USA, is the eurasian starling.

Knowing that – knowing that they will bully diminishing native species out of their nests to pump out more soldiers for the unending murmuration – I have occasionally harbored an urge to kill large numbers of them. Use their shiny little feathers to make very fancy coats. Turn their skulls into ring ornaments. But not anymore. Now I think of them more like the Lystrosaurus that became the dominant land animal in the wake of The Great Dying. When the smoke clears on this man-made extinction level event, the only life we have left will be the fittest survivors. And here they are.

Starling experiences. I saw one being murdered by a crow. Heard a squeaking sound and cast about for it. On the roof of a little barbershop, a single starling was being stabbed to death by a single crow. Each time the bigger bird’s beak came down, another squeak. Score one for native species.

In college I was eating lunch with this William Shatner-looking dude at a fancy fish restaurant on the Seattle waterfront. Gulls, crows, starlings, and house sparrows were everywhere. Shatner was distracted for a moment and a starling stole one of his pieces of fried fish. Starlings are bigger than most LBBs but smaller than the average thrush, so this was no mean feat. The fish piece probably weighed as much as the bird. Years later at a fish and chips place on Green Lake, I saw starlings all around, and knew what they were there for.

One time at the mall in Federal Way, I was walking behind it, near the big power line towers. I heard a buzz and crackle and thought there might be an issue with the towers, but looked up and the majority of that sound was coming from little beasts. I used to ride the bus with a Russian lady who told me their word for them was something like “staretsya.” I was surprised it had “star” in it.

They’re great mimics, but they do sound tinny, like a tape recorder. Their cousin the common mynah is sometimes kept as a pet, and there is a very cute video of one in Japan that knows how to say “I understand!” (“wakarimashita!”) in a bitchy voice – a hilarious lie. One time when me and my husband (then boyfriend) were walking to the bus stop in the morning, I mentioned their mimicry and he did a wolf whistle at a flock – which was instantly returned by one of them. Only time I’ve heard their mimicry so overtly. I think most of the time they’re doing natural calls, or imitating other birds, and city sounds. It’s all a burbling staticky wash.

Starlings are drab for birds in their family. Any number of starling cousins look way more flashy. But still, they’re pretty cool. Powerful iridescence. Dots (the stars?), lil light brown streaks. When they fly, they look like fighter jets. They’re amazingly adroit for mid-size birds, like they’re evolving toward hummingbird powers. They are, of course, famous for flying in excellent synchrony, in flocks that move like undulating scarves on the wind, called murmurations. The more birds, the more impressive it looks. And unfortunately, we have no shortage of them.

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My Day Job is Threatened by AI, and I Don’t Care

I can’t talk much about my day job on here. It’s nothing exciting or wild, but you know, there are a million boring reasons why that’s a good idea for lots of people. My day job is a kind of social work / bureaucracy type thing, where in a call center environment I help people with issues related to social programs.

This is the most emotionally and intellectually challenging job I’ve ever had, and the more emotional a call gets, the more likely I am to make mistakes on the intellectual side. Gotta be a cool-ass customer. When you’re in a tight situation and you’re talking to a bureaucrat, you want to plead with them to see you as human, so they give you a good deal. That is a mistake. Convey the seriousness of your situation accurately but try not to make the bureaucrat genuinely sad for you, because their job is complicated as balls and they are more likely to make mistakes that fuck you over if they are not thinking clearly.

People make mistakes, because of emotional and intellectual challenges like this. Administering laws and policies related to multiple programs federal and local and the interactions between them, it’s a snarl of contradictory shit driven by the conflicting political imperatives of “having bare minimum human decency” and “never give anybody a nickel they didn’t break their body in half for.” AIs make mistakes because their intelligence is alien and simplistic, their relationship to their output about math rather than true understanding. Between humans and AIs, who makes more mistakes?

Humans, are you fucking kidding me? The public will benefit by everybody in my position being replaced with AI.

If this is done with wisdom, which hardly seems likely given the Klown Kar Kabinet, it will move in stages. First people like me will be able to use internally trained AIs to seek the policy and procedural information we’ll need to handle a call. In parallel, there will be an automated phone AI to handle easier things if people are willing, thus getting its training in. When the AI looks good enough and enough people are willing to use the automated system, it should graduate to having bureaucrats like me take responsibility for all critical inputs, for the reasons of checking hallucinations, fraud caused by bad actors manipulating silly bots, and to have a human that can be held to account for bad mistakes. Lastly, if you can go a few years with an acceptably low rate of failures for the system, you let the AI take over completely, and only retain a small core of highly trained humans for support.

The biggest risk to the program I think is “AI whisperers” that can talk the bots into accepting con jobs. Another significant risk is the system being programmed with bad values, discriminating against callers on various grounds. Something I didn’t know well before I took this job is that some cisgender women sound like men on the phone – especially older black women – and you cannot reasonably judge age by a person’s voice. Some people young enough to be my child sound like seventy-year-olds, some eighty-year-olds sound like me. The pitch and grit in a voice can give you a clue, but you need more than a clue to judge if a voice on a line belongs to a person of a given demographic. I could see misguided anti-fraud measures causing bots to treat trans women and black women like they’re con artists, to speak nothing of the risks others have noted in AI being used by insurance companies like (see image in my sidebar yo). But my employer does not have the profit incentive of private business, so the last should, in theory, not happen.

In a country with reasonably funded social services, you’d have a large contingent of standby people waiting to take over during system outages, who can spend all day studying the ins and outs of the policies, get to where they can do really well in the edge cases where their involvement is necessary. But the US will never be that country, so the AI will be an excuse to downsize everyone like me into the streets.

I’m the resident pro-AI weirdo on a typically anti-AI leftist blog network. How do I feel about it? If the public is better served by bots, bring on the bots. I’ll have to desperately work three jobs to pay my mortgage, I’ll feel the pain really badly. But if the public is better served by bots, they deserve what better helps them – especially if it’s more economically efficient, allowing those social programs to make the best use of their limited funds.

I will have to eat shit on that deal. I don’t imagine this is going to happen until several years from now, but like I said earlier, who knows with these clowns? Maybe I eat these words around the time I’m eating my hat to survive, but from where I stand now, I say do what’s best for the most people.

Likewise, I find it impossible to believe that we can’t develop a self-driving car that makes fewer mistakes than a human. When that happens, the haters should maybe acquiesce to the good of saving literally tens of thousands of lives a year with AI. Call me wacky.

In a sense that last one is a strawman. Many AI detractors are situationally OK with the tech, and could be moved by common sense and hard numbers, on a case-by-case basis. That’s fine. The same way I’m glad there are anti-death penalty absolutists working to make the world a less nasty place, even while I don’t have very strong feelings about it, I’m OK with there being a reflexively anti-AI contingent that looks for all the possible failings of such systems and hectors The Man about it.

But I’m pretty sure there are literally millions of jobs that AI is going to kill over the next decade, and society is going to have to figure out what to do about that. Because if a human can be *reasonably* be replaced by an AI, increasing the benefit to society, that should happen. Even if I’m wrong about that? It’s going to happen, and the problem is worse – because we’ll be unemployed with essential services administered by a pyramid of flaming cybertrucks.

Good luck to everybody, whatever the future brings. Perhaps I’m a little unreasonably optimistic about the possibilities.

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Life List: American Robin

He rocks in the treetops all day long, rocking and bopping and singing his song.  Does it sound like tweedlydeedlydeet?  Not exactly, but it’s more variable than you’d expect.  Many times when I’ve heard an unfamiliar bird call or seen a bird flying in some strange way, it turned out to just be another american robin.  Bitches should be called migratory thrushes; they are not real robins.  But they are ridiculously successful animals in North America.  I wonder if blue sky posts can embed in wordpress ok.

actually I think democrats should move 2 the right & just become republicans and republicans should become giant skeleton monsters and giant skeleton monsters should become giant skeleton monsters that pee wasps

— birdrightsactivist (@probirdrights.bsky.social) November 7, 2024 at 11:05 AM

Anyway, american robins have the worst fucken theme song ever.  But they are respectable beasts.  I like the white ring around their eyes, helps them stand out from the dark hood, looks expressive.  The yellow beak and feet.  The red breast, very cool.  Give them a hand.  Yes, the song they sing around March 1st through most of the year, that sounds like a horror movie soundtrack, and one time my home boy Clark heard one singing it at three AM, but you gotta respect the hustle.

Sometimes I see about a dozen of them in a flock.  I think they’re more likely to posse up during migrations, but I’m no expert.  My dad said he used to see flocks more like a hundred, back when he was a youth, and remembered particularly watching them get drunk on rotten fruit.  The sixties, maaan.

Our robins get worms.  Not those ones.  Probably those ones too, but they eat mad worms.  I’ve heard invasive European earthworms are an ecosystem-crushing omnipresent disaster in the USA.  But I wonder, is their presence part of why migratory thrushes are so successful?  American robins and crows love the hell out of those things.  It’s every day.  Early birding.  Early worming.  Rise and shine, and by shine, I mean jerk a stretchy pink-grey freak out of a lawn and eat it.

USian robins are a bit smaller and much more graceful than USian crows.  The crows have a shambolic walk, and can only comfortably go faster by switching to a hop.  Robins run so smoothly their body doesn’t move up and down at all – just legs furiously wheeling beneath them, like Shaggy and Scoob.  I’ve dubbed it “the robin run,” but it’s not too unusual of a small bird gait.  It’s the crows that are especially maladroit.

Where do they migrate to?  They migrate, but they’re here all year.  But sometimes they do look like they’re going somewhere.  My guess is that in winter I’m seeing alaskans and canadians, and in summer i’m seeing guys that winter in california.  I don’t know.  They get around, like so many beach’d boys.  I’m getting bugged flying up and down the same old strip, I gotta find a new place where the birds are hip.

Why did I ever listen to the oldies station as a youth?  Big mistake.  This article is over, man!

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Eccentricities

I can talk a little shit about people in my life on here because they all have reasons for not reading any of it.  Reasons are reasons and I take no offense, plus the freedom to talk that shit has some use.

There’s a cognitive feat that even many single celled organisms are capable of: responding to a sensory stimulus in a binary way.  See light, move towards.  See dark, move away.  I live with a full-fledged human being that utterly fails at a task this simple, probably by making it more complicated?  I don’t understand how.

In her case, it’s backing up a car.  With a backup camera.  That camera affords her the possibility of forgetting everything she ever learned about driving, about left and right, and simply moving the wheel in the direction that makes the car go in the desired direction.  It’s comparable to a video game less sophisticated than Pong.

There are two circumstances that occasionally come up in our lives which require backing up, and she avoids them at all costs.  One is going to the dump to get rid of garbage in excess of what the man will pick up from our curbside.

She was so bothered by this, I offered an alternative.  You can illegally dump this garbage, say, in a dumpster behind a random business, but I am not going to ride shotgun if you do so.  My husband said, hey, you can do that at your sister’s condos.  Unlike ours, they have shared dumpsters.  I mentioned there was a slight possibility she could get busted for it.

She instantly hatched a zany scheme to make it look like our excess trash actually was her sister’s, thereby dodging that unlikely ticket.  This only emphasized the eccentricity for me:

She crafted a macchiavellian plot to avoid culpability for a very minor crime she was very unlikely to catch punishment for, all to avoid a cognitive task that could literally be performed by a protozoan.

That’s a lil funny.

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Mandate of Heaven, Evil Edition

Some prominent dems have signaled willingness to work with the repugnant.  Should they?  Or should they just stonewall and annoy, as much as is possible from minority positions?  I don’t know.  Yes, everything the nazis have said that they desire is literally evil, the kind of stuff that should be opposed by all decent people with everything they have.  On the other hand, this is what the US wanted.  The nazis have a mandate.

Literally speaking, it isn’t what the people actually wanted, right?  All the polls say those positions would fail if given simple majority polls of all people in the US.  But that isn’t how things work.  You have to vote.  This is the thing about red state people saying “my vote doesn’t count”:  Yes, it doesn’t decide the election, but it helps set the tone of the national conversation.  By not caring enough to show up, you said, “nazis, fuck it, take it all.”  Now they have, and they will get to goose step all over our asses, for as long as they can stave off self-destruction.

And it will have to be self-destruction, because without earth-shattering numbers of people voting blue next time, it will be impossible to break through the wall of voter obstruction they are going to erect the second they take office.  We know americans are too bitchy provincial and lazy to make that shit happen, so we are officially at T minus X days til more than a decade of fascist rule.

So what do you do, as a non-genocidal body filling the loser seat on Capitol Hill?  Oppose and obstruct as much as you can, or play some kind of ball?  If one of the ball-players manages to wheedle the fascists into being 2% less deadly to innocent people, that’s worth doing.  It will be degrading, humiliating, frustrating, and tragic to behold, over and over and over again.  So much failure ahead of them.  But still, some lives might be saved?

Any dems with that in mind are going to have to pick their battles.  Obstruct on some days, play ball on others.  It’s just how it is now.  At many times over the last few decades, it’s the way it has been – only now it’s a lot worse, and going to stay that way.  Meanwhile, smarmy anti-voting anarcho-fools will point to AOC signing off on some reprehensible bill as proof they’re all out to get you, even when it was the best thing she could do to eke out a better chance of survival for her constituency.

America didn’t want fascism, but didn’t know enough or care enough to stop it, and they will not have a choice next time around.  So for those of us who are vulnerable, it’s all about picking our battles.  For some, that will mean never coming out of the closet, leaving the country, shining stormtrooper boots on monday and trading illegal art on tuesday.  For some, it will mean joining La Résistance.  For many, it’s going to be some combination of the two.

At some point you’re going to be forced by circumstance to play nice with your mortal enemy.  (Black people have to do this every time they get stopped by a cop.)  Don’t let it defeat you, in your heart.  Keep keeping on, my friends.  Eventually, we’ll get through it.  And if we don’t live long enough to see the other side, we can still live well, in whatever ways we can find.  Power on.

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Sorry, I never explained the title.  It’s kind of obscure to most of us in the USA.  There is a concept from part of Chinese history that overlaps with mythology, that you can win the blessing of rulership from Heaven itself, if you get a cool magic artifact or whatever.  I half-remembered that when I thought about our incipient theocracy.  The dominionists threw a little lasso around the foot of a golden toad, and now they can ride behind him as he leaps across the night sky, raining despair and violence like sweat as he goes.  Blessed be.

Life List: Bald Eagle

When I first moved to a homeless shelter in Seattle as a child, I was given a book about wildlife.  Our Magnificent Wildlife, by Reader’s Digest books.  The cover was dark brown, with the lovely face of a bald eagle in profile.  The articles inside gave me some interesting bits of information, might have informed my worldview in some respects.  I do think they overemphasized the threat to animals posed by poaching – the number one enemy has always been greed, from colonialism to capitalism – thus giving lil me an outsized hatred of poachers.  In my mind they were white dudes in khaki pith helmets with elephant rifles.  Shit do be more complicated than that.  Still, that book was the first place I ever saw an illustration of a slow loris.  Love those guys.

Getting away from the topic.  Other than that book cover and images in media, I never saw a bald eagle until a certain zoo visit around age ten – and then only through the narrow slats of a fence.  My first wild sightings were much later, which makes sense – the population still had a lot of recovery to do, after depletion from the pesticide DDT thinning their shells.  Something I also read about in that book.

Now I know.  That eagle cry you always hear in Hollywood output is actually the sound of a red-tailed hawk*.  Bald eagles sound like the seagulls who get bullied by other seagulls for being too effeminate and silly.  Bad seagulls, leave those apex predators alone.  Incidentally, bullying is the easiest way to spot a bald eagle in the open.  Unless you’re in an area with a weak presence of corvids, you will hear the cawing of crows and see them fly aggressively, before you notice they’re doing so to harass a bald eagle.  The only times I’ve seen a baldy that wasn’t being tormented by crows was when the eagles had a flock of their own, or they were at some lonely altitude, far above the earth.

Bald eagles are known to join claws and plummet out of the sky, as a daredevil courtship maneuver, I think?  My dad said he saw some doing this over I-5, and they almost got hit by a car when they neared the asphalt.  It was visiting my dad, in a brief window of time when he lived on an Indian reservation in Snohomish County, that I got my best view ever of a bald eagle, perched briefly in a tree that had been stripped of all its low branches.  I also saw one even closer, more briefly, as it flew above his back porch there.  Majesty, yo.

In Alaska they are numerous around landfills and fisheries, seen as pests.  It’s easy to find video of this on youtube.  Big flocks, kinda cool.

Bald eagles are the symbol of Amurrica.  Love it or leave it, pal!  Hey, where are you going with my DDT, I need that…  Gotdam renevuers.  What was I saying?  Bald eagles are not very rare anymore, and that’s nice.  Look upon them and feel some type of way about where you are.  And wonder how long it will be before the tumorous-organ-in-chief mandates all factory farms switch to eggshell-destroying pesticides again.

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*I never recall hearing red-tailed hawks make that sound, as many times as I’ve seen them, until this year, when we went to a mountain on the Olympic Peninsula for part of our honeymoon.  At high altitude, they love to belt it out.  Only other soaring birds up there were ravens, that I saw.  Ravens surely harass raptors like crows do, but I didn’t happen to see it.  Probably because they don’t have as large of flocks.

Unimaginable Nationalism

Any kind of nationalism is kinda fucked up and weird to me.  Born and raised on stolen land, soaked in blood and slavery, the whole nine yards.  I don’t belong here but I don’t belong anywhere else either.  Citizen of the world?  Except you can’t be.  Every inch of every place that hasn’t had the natives fully eliminated is staked out, by people who would die for the dirt, kill for the dirt.  Give me this dirtpile or give me death.  But better to give you death, other people who I have decided should not be here.  Nationalism, like colonialism, is the seed of genocide.  Some flavors of it are so mild and banal that you could miss it, but it’s always there, waiting to blossom.

It’s especially wild to me that some people want to kill or die for land in the Middle East.  There are much nicer or more interesting deserts and plains and beaches, and most of them don’t have nearly as many genocidal terrorists or fascists, don’t have as many centuries of decapitations and flayings and immolation and destruction.  If any place in the world is hell, it’s the holy land.  If I was Jewish, I’d be glad to be nowhere near it.

Might feel some type of way about it, since the history of the shituation is very different from that of my ancestral island.  What would it be like, to have lost your homeland for over a thousand years, to never be allowed to feel at home anywhere in that entire time?  To at last be given a promise of a return there, of a homeland – a promise literally predicated on nationalism and colonialism both – and to see that come to exactly what anybody with an ounce of wisdom could have seen a hundred years away?  Poison gift.  I’d keep Brooklyn, thanks.

Seriously.  People who feel magical about that piece of dirt.  What even?  I can’t imagine a worse place in the world.  Here I can walk down main street and feel the ghosts of natives choked in disease, driven from their homes, murdered in the wilds.  Not great.  There, I’d be walking the same streets where so many people were slaughtered in so many ways it’s fucking near unimaginable.  I’m willing to bet there is not a person in the entire region who is without genocide in their hearts.  How could you live through that history and not want to see everyone on the other side of the conflict disappeared?  With cruel violence?  At least on some level.  I know there are peace activists in Israel and bless their hearts.  But how often are they tempted to just give up, and join in finishing the job on their opposites?

The overwhelming hate of it all.  For dirt.  If I was born there, I’d have left and never looked back.  The USA is bad enough, but at least I’m not living on a land mine, living in torture alley between people who want nothing more than to see each other reduced to shreds, to blood and then dust.  Ain’t no god and ain’t no land and ain’t no ideal worth living in hatred.

This is the only thing we have, when fascists rule the day.  The freedom to have moments of peace in our hearts.  Because above all they love hate, and we have the ability to love life.  They can’t be happy unless horrible shit is happening to someone, somewhere.  We are capable of living for good things, and they aren’t.  We win even when we lose, given that.  What if we didn’t have the option tho?  What if we were born into an endless war, gestated in amniotic fluid poisoned with cruelty, with lust for annihilation?

I advocate a no-state solution.  Everybody lives as refugees in other countries for another thousand years, and moves back when they’ve learned to play niceys.  I used to be more flip about the idea all the holy cities should get nuked (rome, jerusalem, mecca – ideally with everybody moving out first), and I’m not that grody nowadays.  But should anybody be living there?  No.  What’s the half-life on genocide?  How long before that land is no longer glowing with hatred?

My guess is that for the remainder of humanity’s time on this world, there will be nothing in Israel or Palestine worth preserving, except for people – who would be much better preserved by leaving that hellhole behind.  The touristy beaches, the shopping malls, the ultramodern gleaming skyscrapers, the perfectly irrigated fields – yeah, even the nice parts.  They are not nice, because of what they cost.  Leave them.

With my nazi-ass country in your corner, Israel, things are about to get even worse.  So much worse than you’ve ever imagined.  To those of you who love genocide, you may find that getting what you wished for is the worst possible outcome for your people, for humanity.  And your day in the sun won’t last.  Your whole country will be destroyed.  And then rebuilt again, I’m sure, with or without you, and whoever lives there?  Probably gonna be genocidal zealots as well, of some flavor.  It’s in the dirt.

Fuck dirt.

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Life List: Pigeon

The rock dove, aka the rock pigeon, the common pigeon, the dove, winged rats, etc etc, this is a feral domestic animal found all around the globe – especially around humans.  They’re on the “life list” of birds I’ve seen, and they’re on yours too.  Along with Canada geese, they’re the biggest purveyors of bird feces where you don’t want them to be, in much of the USA.  But still, they’re ours -we made them- and I do like them an awful lot.

Pigeons are a cool group of birds.  Different species are found all over the world, and it’s surprising to me what they have in common.  Some diverse far-flung groups of birds like woodpeckers have more variety in proportion and shape than pigeons do.  For some reason, doves all have that broad powerful chest, stretchy neck that narrows at the top, and a lil’ head with pigeon beak.  How do I describe that beak?  You know what it looks like, and it looks the same from ivory-colored desert beauty on one side of the planet to upside-down parrot-colored jungle freak on the other.  Dodos were the one outlier in that beak shape.  I know the cloning projects have been scams and bullshit, but I’d love to see it happen.

In my neighborhood there are only two species of pigeon that I know of:  the one this article is about, and invasive Eurasian collared doves.  I do like the invaders, as rarely as I see them, but this article is not their time.

Domestic doves are known for coating the cities of the world in guano.  At one time in the Middle East, silo-shaped dovecotes had chutes designed to spill fertilizer into fields of crops.  Smart.  Now people remember after the fact that anything humans can build, pigeons can perch on, and they have to cover unintended landing strips in bird spikes.  I heard anarchist cockatoos in Oz are tearing up that hostile architecture; good job.

Lingering traces of domestication syndrome haunt the gene pool of these animals, some over a thousand generations removed from active human care.  You see it in their lack of fear around humans, of course, but also in their mottled colors.  Many have reverted to natural enough color schemes, like if feral domestic cats had achieved higher rates of brown tabby in their numbers, but many pigeons are missing a category of pigment, or gone leucistic or piebald or polka-dotted.  I like the natural colors, but the mutants can be very pretty.

The first place pigeons became important in my life was as supporting actors in John Woo movies.  Some other random experiences:  Seeing them puffed up to the size of bowling balls, trying to hunker down for the freezing weather in the International District bus tunnel.  Seeing their fucked up malformed feet, and seeing an article on the subject just as my curiosity about it was reaching its peak.  Seeing a baby pigeon ganked by crows on Mother’s Day.  Seeing baby pigeons close up for the first time, in a nest at the Federal Way Transit Center.

I’ve wanted to have a pet bird I could easily snuggle with, and if I ever get over the annoyance of cleaning the cage etc, pigeons are on my list.  They’re domestic animals so would feel less nervy about it than 99% of parrots, and they’re less scratchy / bitey than chickens.  I wouldn’t even get a fancy pigeon.  Plain ol’ winged rat is good enough for me.  I would hold it under my arm like a football and get gross stains on all my clothes.  Worth it?

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Using AI to Write

Where does one draw the line with using AI to create art?  A court ruled AI art could not be copyrighted, but what about AI assisted art?  Is there a percentage where the sin overtakes the whole endeavor?  If I painted a fifty foot long mural and glued a stamp-sized print of AI art to it, is the mural’s entire design rendered public domain?

What if the art is writing?  I was recently trying to come up with an idea for a story and not liking anything that came to mind, so I had a convo with chatgpt about it.  At what point in this conversation does the writing become my creation, or does the fact it started like this invalidate the entire project – even if I wrote a million words off the concept in iambic pentameter, all from my own brain?

GAS:
put this plot outline into a format you can easily understand, short phrases and simple formatting:  (here I posted a four act gothic plot outline mashed up with save-the-cat screenplay bits)

ChatGPT:
Act 1: Rise from Obscurity
Opening Image / Character is not Valued
Tone and concept established…  (it responded competently)

GAS:
list seven ideas for sources of supernatural power that come at a terrible cost

ChatGPT:

  • Blood Pact with a Demon
    Power:  Grants immense strength, magical abilities, or immortality.
    Cost:  Slowly consumes the user’s soul, leading to eventual damnation or loss of humanity.
  • Cursed Artifact
    Power:  Bestows knowledge, wealth, or abilities.
    Cost:  The artifact demands a toll (e.g., harming loved ones, madness, or eternal servitude).
  • Forbidden Knowledge
    Power:  Unlocks hidden truths, magic, or control over reality.
    Cost:  Warps the mind, creating paranoia, hallucinations, or inability to return to normal life.
  • Ancestral Spirit Possession
    Power:  Access to ancestral wisdom, battle prowess, or supernatural senses.
    Cost:  The spirit takes control intermittently, eroding the user’s autonomy.
  • Blood Magic or Life Sacrifice
    Power:  Casts powerful spells or grants regenerative abilities.
    Cost:  Requires offering the life force of others—or the user’s own lifespan is drastically shortened.
  • Cosmic Entity Bargain
    Power:  Grants the ability to manipulate time, space, or destiny.
    Cost:  Reality becomes distorted; the entity’s influence seeps into the user’s life, erasing relationships or memories.
  • Monster Transformation
    Power:  Unparalleled physical prowess, healing, or shapeshifting.
    Cost:  Gradual loss of humanity, uncontrollable urges, or permanent disfigurement.

GAS:
list seven variations on the concept of a vampire, a noble class that uses supernatural power to oppress the people, but not literal blood drinking

ChatGPT:

  • Dream Eaters
    Feed on the dreams and ambitions of the people, leaving their victims apathetic and without hope.
    Use stolen creativity to maintain their grandeur and invent new ways to control society.
  • Soul Harvesters
    Extract fragments of souls from the populace, weakening their victims’ vitality and willpower.
    Hoard soul energy to maintain eternal youth, power, or invincibility.
  • Emotion Leeches
    Drain intense emotions (joy, love, anger) from others, leaving them numb and subservient.
    Use this energy to amplify their charisma and influence, manipulating the masses.
  • Shadow Lords
    Absorb the shadows or “life essence” of others, which leaves victims sickly and feeble.
    Their stolen power allows them to control light and darkness, creating fearsome displays of authority.
  • Pain Feeders
    Draw strength from the suffering and despair of the oppressed, perpetuating violence and hardship.
    Use this energy to fuel supernatural resilience and cruelty, ensuring their dominance.
  • Memory Thieves
    Steal memories and identities from their subjects, erasing rebellion and rewriting history.
    Use the knowledge gained to maintain a perfect grip on power while ensuring no one remembers life before their rule.
  • Time Parasites
    Drain years of life from their subjects, shortening lifespans in exchange for their own longevity.
    Create an illusion of fairness by taxing the life of the poor while claiming eternal reign as divine justice.

GAS:
in bloodborne the healing church uses cursed blood from the elder gods to heal people, gaining favor, but the blood eventually turns people into monsters, and it ushers in an eternal inquisition as those that became beasts are being hunted.  in elden ring, outer gods have bred with humans to create a noble class with a supernatural power of “the grace of gold,” but their might causes their power struggles to rip up the world itself. list seven similar ideas, but try to make them as different and distinctive as possible.

ChatGPT:

  • The Whispering Veil
    A noble caste gains supernatural wisdom by communing with an ethereal “Veil” that reveals hidden truths.
    Over time, prolonged exposure causes their bodies to fragment into translucent, ghostly forms, rendering them unrecognizable.
    Their attempts to rule through divine knowledge breed paranoia and civil wars, as they suspect each other of treachery.
  • The Forge of Embers
    A sacred forge grants its wielders the ability to create living weapons infused with fire and metal, capable of reshaping reality itself.
    However, using the forge binds their souls to the weapons they create, slowly transforming them into inanimate, mindless tools of war.
    The world becomes a desolate battlefield as these cursed weapons perpetuate endless conflict, with no one left to wield them.
  • The Harvested Horizon
    Nobles consume fragments of a celestial being’s body that fell to earth, granting them the ability to terraform land and summon crops.
    Overuse of this power corrodes the natural environment, creating barren wastelands and causing the nobles to mutate into colossal, immobile “roots” that consume all life.
    The oppressed are forced to fight both their parasitic overlords and the spreading desolation.
  • The Starbinders’ Oath
    A celestial pact grants nobles the ability to manipulate the heavens, altering seasons, weather, and even time.
    Their bond with the stars, however, slowly pulls them out of sync with reality, turning them into disembodied echoes incapable of understanding human suffering.
    Their unfeeling interference fractures the world’s timeline, plunging the realm into cyclical chaos.
  • The Choir of Depths
    Nobles receive their powers by harmonizing with a cosmic “Song of Creation,” which grants them the ability to reshape matter and minds.
    Singing the Song too often causes the nobles to lose their individuality, merging into a horrifying, ever-growing chorus of flesh and voices.
    Their subjects live in terror of being assimilated into the Choir, even as they revere the beauty of its creations.
  • The Thorned Crown
    Nobles achieve dominion by donning crowns grown from a mystical tree that connects to the collective lifeforce of their subjects.
    The crowns grant immense power but drive the wearers mad with visions of every subject’s pain and suffering.
    As the nobles succumb to insanity, the tree begins consuming the people it was meant to sustain, leaving the land twisted and overgrown with carnivorous flora.
  • The Light of Hollowing
    A radiant crystal buried beneath the earth empowers nobles with the ability to project light that heals wounds and invigorates armies.
    The light, however, siphons the emotions and humanity of everyone exposed to it, leaving the populace as emotionless husks.
    The nobles, desperate to retain control and their fading vitality, begin to drain one another, turning their court into a cannibalistic struggle for survival.

GAS:
take any three of those and make them Christmas themed.

ChatGPT:

  • 1. The Choir of Frost
    Nobles attune themselves to a mystical “Caroling Frost,” a sacred hymn carried by the icy winds of a cursed winter.
    The song grants them control over the snow and cold, allowing them to create eternal winters and summon crystalline ice structures to awe and oppress their subjects.
    However, the more they sing the Frost’s melody, the more their voices freeze into hollow echoes, and their bodies become statues of living ice.  Over time, they merge into frozen monuments, incapable of thought or speech, yet still radiating the chilling hymn that numbs the hearts and spirits of the people.
    The world becomes locked in a perpetual winter, with frostbitten villagers whispering prayers to thaw the cursed song.
  • 2. The Thorned Wreath
    Nobles gain power by donning enchanted holly wreaths said to be blessed by the Spirit of Winter Solstice.  The wreaths grant the ability to summon endless feasts, gifts, and celebrations, making the nobles beloved as symbols of holiday cheer.  Over time, the thorns on the wreaths grow inward, piercing deeper into their flesh and souls.  The more they indulge their power, the more they become driven by greed, feeding endlessly on the joy and warmth they create.
    As the wreaths take control, the nobles transform into monstrous “Yule Fiends,” evergreen hulks that spread cursed festivities, forcing villages into endless, lifeless celebrations where no one can leave or rest.
  • 3. The Starbinders’ Noel
    Nobles form pacts with a celestial “Yuletide Star” that appears every winter, granting them the ability to summon miraculous lights and deliver blessings of warmth and hope to the people during the darkest nights.
    Each use of the Star’s power, however, draws them closer to its fiery essence, causing their bodies to burn with an inner light that they cannot extinguish.  Eventually, they become radiant, hollow shells, consumed by the Star’s endless hunger for devotion.
    As the nobles ascend into blazing constellations in the night sky, their subjects are forced to endure their light, which grows ever brighter and hotter, turning the joyous season into an unbearable, fiery trial.

GAS:
take the second one and make it into a sort of conspiracy situation, where the source of power is kept secret – some kind of lie makes it seem like something else, less a supernatural power than a more banal source of privilege.

ChatGPT:
The Thorned Wreath Conspiracy

The nobles appear to rule through mundane wealth and tradition, claiming their authority comes from ancestral ties and their ability to preserve the realm’s prosperity through seasonal festivities.  They maintain the illusion that their power stems from their role as caretakers of a sacred winter holiday—a benign, cultural privilege tied to generosity, feasting, and the supposed goodwill of their forebears.

In truth, the nobles’ grandeur and influence come from the Thorned Wreaths, enchanted relics hidden beneath their ostentatious holiday crowns.  Each wreath feeds on the warmth, joy, and hope of the common people, amplifying the nobles’ charisma and material abundance by siphoning life force during the season of celebration.  The public is told that the lavish feasts and seemingly endless gifts come from centuries of careful stewardship and family wealth, when in fact the wreaths are drawing vitality from the very people they claim to serve.

The wreaths grow thornier each year, the hidden barbs pressing into the nobles’ minds and hearts, warping their personalities.  While they are celebrated as benevolent lords of the season, they secretly become cold, calculating, and deeply paranoid.  The cost of this power remains hidden: villages sink into depression after each “festive season,” with the populace left drained of energy and hope, unable to rebel or question the system.

The conspiracy is tightly controlled.  A secret society of nobles, calling themselves The Keepers of the Holly, works tirelessly to suppress knowledge of the wreaths.  They stage elaborate holiday spectacles to distract the people, enforce the narrative of familial legacy, and ruthlessly silence anyone who comes too close to the truth.

However, cracks are beginning to show. Rumors spread of servants witnessing nobles removing their crowns, revealing twisted wreaths of holly beneath, their vines crawling into their skulls.  Commoners whisper about the increasing sterility of the land—fields that won’t grow crops, towns that never recover from the holiday season.  Meanwhile, a small resistance begins to uncover fragments of the truth, learning that the wreaths were not gifts of the Winter Solstice but ancient, cursed relics that the first nobles stole from the wilderness to gain their power.

The question is: if the wreaths are destroyed, will the nobles crumble into husks—or will the land itself, so dependent on their ill-gotten vitality, fall into ruin with them?

GAS:
a gang of street thieves does a heist on a noble, and at first it’s fun and games, but they fall prey to jealousy and betrayal.  ultimately one must use dark knowledge to vindicate himself, at a terrible cost.  how could this plot go?  a short summary.

ChatGPT:
A gang of street thieves targets a wealthy noble during a grand winter festival, believing the score to be easy and the spoils immense.  They infiltrate the noble’s lavish estate, stealing what appears to be mundane riches: gold, jewels, and an ornate holiday wreath.  The gang celebrates their success, reveling in their newfound wealth.  However, tensions rise as jealousy brews—one thief claims they deserve more for their role in the heist, while another begins to suspect the leader of withholding the best prizes.

Amid the infighting, strange events occur.  The stolen wreath exudes a sinister aura, and those near it feel their deepest insecurities amplified.  One thief, desperate to outshine the rest, secretly dons the wreath, unknowingly activating its cursed power.  They gain unnatural charisma and strength, but the wreath begins to twist their mind, driving them to betray the others.

The gang implodes in violence and paranoia.  The leader, framed for betrayal, is left for dead and abandoned by their comrades.  Desperate to clear their name and seek revenge, they consult a forbidden source: an old hermit who reveals the wreath’s dark truth—that it feeds on ambition and life force, granting power at a terrible cost.  To expose the traitor and vindicate himself, the leader uses the knowledge to claim the wreath’s power, sacrificing part of their humanity in the process.

In a climactic showdown, the leader confronts the corrupted former ally, now fully consumed by the wreath.  Though victorious, the leader realizes they have become just like the noble they robbed: a vessel for the wreath’s hunger.  With their gang destroyed and their soul tainted, they are left to wander, a hollow shell of their former self, carrying the weight of their choices into an uncertain future.

GAS:
remember the generic plot outline you helped me with before?  make your plot summary here fit into that outline.

ChatGPT:
Act 1: Rise from Obscurity
Opening Image / Character is not Valued
The gang of thieves struggles to survive in the shadow of the nobles, resenting the disparity between their lives and the wealth flaunted by the elite.  Their leader, though clever and ambitious, feels underestimated and unappreciated by their crew.
Incidental / Accidental Accomplishment (Catalyst)
During the winter festival, the gang pulls off an audacious heist, stealing gold, jewels, and an ornate wreath from a powerful noble…  (you get the idea.)

Humans are all recycling the same six story ideas ad infinitum and have been content with that for ages.  Don’t tell me the bot here is being less creative than five thousand romantasies about muscly dudes with big donks loving up on the normal girl who turned out to be the secret faerie queen.  Any one of these ideas could turn into successful commercial media, in the right / wrong hands.

Or can it?  There is that court precedent which could limit commercial application.  Well, doesn’t matter much to me.  Copyright law will never protect me from the deep pockets of corporations, regardless of whether I write my own shit or bot it.  The law exists solely for them.  Disney could copy-paste the entire history of this blog into Frozen 4 and I’d have to eat shit about it.

This is the world we live in.  As creative people, what will we do with it?

–

PS:  This is the post you can point to if you want to join in the AI version of the Satanic Panic, where saying anything neutral to positive about AI will have a gamergatesque mob braying at your door, calling into question the legitimacy of every piece of art you’ve ever made.  Act now while supplies last!