Category: Uncategorized

I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s been half-paying attention to the latest generations of AI stories, which have moved past both the obvious (and horrific) practical effects on the environment and the existential “what does this mean for the future of art” questions to a new place that’s part-acceptance that this isn’t going away anytime soon despite what we all want and part-but what the fuck does all this mean?

Specifically, I’m talking about two threads of stories that have been popping up in my various feeds lately. The first has been countless variations of stories about people suddenly deciding that AI is less an algorithm that has learned to basically translate Google into something approximating a conversational voice and more an actual deity in digital form. It sounds like a joke, but apparently, this is happening all over; people are so surprised/impressed that AI doesn’t disagree with them or say things like, “No, that sounds like a half-baked idea and maybe you need to take a break and step back for a second” that they start to think that AI is, in fact, God who’s taking directly to them and gets it in a way no-one else does.

This is, of course, a nightmarish commentary on the loneliness people are feeling and their search for higher purpose and deeper meaning in all the wrong places; alternately, it could be a commentary on how eager people are to have their own opinions parroted back at them and the way in which they receive that. Either way, it’s not a good thing. Especially in light of the second trend of AI stories I’ve started seeing more and more often — that AI is increasingly starting to just… make shit up. Not even in the sense of, it got a small fact wrong when someone asked it a question, but in the sense of, “AI is apparently increasingly just fabricating entire fictions whole cloth when asked a simple question.

(This is not an entire surprise, because, well, the entire way AI works, but it’s apparently a bigger and bigger problem as more schoolkids are apparently relying on AI to do their coursework and the information they’re receiving is entirely incorrect.)

Combine these two things together, and we have a world that is increasingly looking to a nonsense machine as God. It’s either a Star Trek episode or a Douglas Adams plot. Whichever one, we’re probably in for an interesting few years as this develops and things get worse, I guess.

I worked another weekend, recently; there was another convention, and again I found myself in the chair at home while others were at the show itself; editing, traffic-managing, and filling in the gaps where necessary. This isn’t me complaining about this part of the job, because both it’s part of the job and I knew that when I took it and I actually like this part of the job, in a lot of ways; instead, it’s me being amused that, as the days led up to the Saturday and Sunday I was working, my brain steadfastly refused to believe that I would be working.

I can’t think of a way to better describe the experience than to say that, utterly unusually, I’d find myself at multiple points during the weekend fantasizing about what I’d do with the time off at the weekend, only to then suddenly remember, oh, I have no time off, I’m working this weekend. It’s not even as if I was thinking about doing anything particularly interesting or fun; I’d think things like, oh, maybe I could head down to this store and pick up that thing I was just thinking about, no wait, I have to work. It was as if my subconscious was determined to just cue up different reasons to play that trombone wah-waaaaaahhhhh sound.

What was particularly strange about the experience — beyond the fact that it kept happening across the week leading up to my working weekend — is that I generally don’t think about the weekend in that way at all; I’m not someone who finds myself “working for the weekend,” or even particularly planning what to do on time off, traditionally; and yet, on this one weekend I was going to be stuck in a chair for 10 hours or so a day, it was as if all I could think about were the other things I could be doing.

Of course, as soon as I got a day off again, I did none of those things. Instead, I just collapsed, exhausted, my mind blank when I thought of things I could get up to with the time off stretching ahead of me.

I have found myself recently thinking in terms of cliches such as it’s a marathon, not a sprint and slow and steady wins the race when it comes to work. Not that I am in any way sports-adjacent nor even one for the sports metaphor in general (I’ll be honest; almost all such metaphors are lost on me, the boy who never really got into sports enough to even learn the rules or anything), but still: I am trying to learn not to become hyper-reactive, and to better pace myself and my stress, and such sayings prove to be useful, if unfortunately attached to activities I would otherwise reject wholeheartedly.

The problem for me, I’ve discovered, is that my latest tendency to become a workaholic overwhelms almost any more sensible response to any given situation or hiccup. Traffic is down? My first impulse is just to work more to make up the gap. Someone is out sick, or on vacation? I’ll work more so that we’re still publishing as much. We need a story on a particular topic and everyone is busy? What if I just stay an hour or two later to get it done?

This (not good, somewhat unhealthy) mindset is both a hangover from the always-hustling freelance brain that I had for more than a decade before my current position, and also the desire to magically be able to fix problems through effort and force of will, instead of… well, actually trying to address the problems.

What I’ve learned through a couple of months of trying things that way was twofold.

1. It doesn’t work, but it sure is exhausting.
2. It’s infinitely more productive to actually try to think through the situation and see if there really is a problem, or I’m just overreacting to something that will either sort itself out in time or be taken care of by someone else.

So, now, I’m trying something different: teaching myself to not panic react, but to try to sit back and take a beat to work out what the best thing to do will be. The frustrating thing isn’t that it’s seeming to work from my admittedly limited experience so far. (I am less stressed and things appear to generally be working! Who knew?) Nope, the frustrating thing is that all of this is still so unnatural to me that, in order for it to work, I need to constantly think things like it’s a marathon, not a sprint in order to get where I need my head to be.

Surely there’s a less cliched way to do this. Surely.

I am, I’ve discovered, a practitioner of a particular form of procrastination ; one that I didn’t even realize I was doing for the longest time, but also one that is (worryingly) deceptively convincing to fall for. I am someone who doesn’t actually do a thing, but thinks that they have, and so certain things just… don’t get done.

That’s not the full story, of course. What actually happens is this: I have a task that needs done — and this is always “a task that needs done,” as opposed to something that just pops up or happens — and, because I think about it for a second and identify what needs to be done, part of my brain just moves it to the file marked “completed” and moves on. Because I’ve identified the problem, the problem is solved, my head goes, and that’s that. Even though, you know, the actual practical aspect of the whole thing, that whole “really doing it” part, hasn’t actually taken place.

This is a trap that I build for myself over and over again, without knowing it. Why were there uncashed checks lying on my desk for three weeks? Because I had thought, oh, I need to take those to the bank and then assumed it had already been taken care of. What about the library books that were overdue for pick up? Well, I’d remembered that I needed to do it, so it was as if it was already done, right? Right?

I’m not entirely sure what this says about me, beyond the fact that I clearly conceptualize tasks as being primarily problems to be solved in my head and then everything that follows is an unnecessary afterthought, but it’s something I need to work on if I want to, you know, stay financially solvent and avoid late fees on everything in my life on a regular basis.

For now, just know that if I’m late or seemingly absent from an obligation we’ve agreed on, chances are I’ve already given it some thought and then just moved on, unwittingly. That’s got to be worth something, surely.

I’ve been reading The Name of This Band is R.E.M. A Biography lately, and it’s got me nostalgic for the fact that, for a good number of years there, R.E.M. was the band I was unmistakably a fan of. I think everyone’s been there at some point in their life if music has been in any way important to them: having a band that you listen to and identify with a bit too much, and find yourself spending too much time thinking about.

From Out of Time through… New Adventures in Hi-Fi, probably…? that was R.E.M. for me; I bought the albums — Automatic for the People was the first CD I ever owned! — and the singles alike; I even bought the videos and bootlegs and read books about the band, too. (Not much changes there, I guess.) I had feelings about what B-sides should have been on albums, and what songs should have been singles if only someone had listened to me, whose teenage wisdom was obviously very important on such topics. R.E.M. was my band.

These days, I rarely listen to them, unless I’m feeling particularly nostalgic. Now that we’re a quarter-century out from my intense love affair with the band, it strikes me that their longest lasting effect on me wasn’t aural, but visual; the aforementioned videos and the album sleeves (and tour program art, when I saw them in 1995 or 1996 for the Monster tour, whenever that was) all had an unmistakable impact on me was I was developing my visual language at the same time as I was preparing for, and then starting, my art school career.

I wasn’t aware I was doing it at the time, I don’t think; certainly, when I first started getting into the band musically, I didn’t really spend too much time analyzing the album covers of Document and Eponymous and Green as I got them out of the local library over and over again. (That’s not true; I was fascinated by the texture of the black lines on Green‘s cover, for some reason.) By the time Out of Time and certainly Automatic for the People were coming out, though, and my obsession was at its height, I remember being fully aware of looking at the type choices, or considering why that particular photo had been chosen versus any other options. (I can still remember feeling just a little bit disappointed by the obvious Photoshop filter on the Automatic album cover.) Perhaps more than any single other influence, R.E.M. shaped what I thought looked good, and also what I thought I wanted to create for myself.

At this point, I’m not sure if I should thank them for that, or regret that I didn’t latch onto something more immediately commercial, given how my art and design career went. What could have happened had I found myself obsessed with the visual stylings of, I don’t know, whoever designed Heat magazine or something similar…!

As I’ve already written about, in many respects, April was an aberration of a month — a period that I can look back at already with no shortage of, huh, that was weird. Not bad, by any degree (in many ways, it was a better month than most, if not all, so far this year), but certainly an odd one that threw all of my rhythms out of whack in ways that were probably good for me.

Much of this was work related; there was a full two-and-a-half weeks where I wasn’t working my traditional Monday-Friday schedule for multiple external reasons, which made for an interesting, exhausting experience. The long and the short of it is was that I probably worked more hours than I would have otherwise, but at entirely different times; I worked two weekends in a row, for example, and there were three days where I was working what we called “Japanese hours,” because it was to cover a show in Tokyo, but in practice it meant 13 hour shifts that ended around 1am, which is a problem when my body clock refuses to let me sleep past 6am any given morning.

(There were also a couple mornings where my head decided to get so stressed about things that ultimately don’t matter that I woke up around 4am and couldn’t get back to sleep; those were fun too, he lied.)

What’s more interesting to me looking back, though, was what I did in response to all of this external stress: I read more, and watched more movies, in what little downtime I did have. I went for more walks, as the weather improved, and realized that exercise and seeing other human beings instead of staring at walls was actually good for me. I went to the movies; I found new restaurants to eat at. It felt as if, for the first time this entire calendar year, I was proactively finding space for doing things that felt good, and were good for me, instead of just trying to keep my head above water the entire time.

It’s a nice feeling. I should do more of that, I think.

April was always going to be an odd month, this year; there was a two-and-a-bit week period right in the middle of the month where my work schedule low-key imploded (intentionally so, but no less disruptively; there were conventions and editing and things that needed to be done that knocked my regular schedule and routine on their head) that felt like a black hole, pulling everything into it and warping the sense of reality surrounding it. There was a stretch where I worked eight days straight without a break, with a few of those days really long ones, and by the end of that, I felt notably off, as if my head has simply run out of power.

The thing about all of this, though, is that it’s happening at the same time as everything in the rest of the world — or, really, the rest of the country, with what used to be called “norms” and “the rule of law” breaking down at such speed and with such severity that it only added to the sense of having accidentally fallen off the face of the Earth and ended up somewhere that looked kind of the same but was notably, importantly, different in such a way that I couldn’t actually explain.

(At the end of that eight-day work stretch, I sat down to look at the news for the first time and saw that Trump was planning to withdraw all funding for public broadcasting; it seemed at once inevitable and the kind of thing that someone would object to, if we weren’t all exhausted by objecting to everything else that is arguably more important.)

There’s something to be said for that liminal feeling, when things just don’t feel entirely right, but not necessarily wrong, either. Even in such dire circumstances, to be able to sit there in that feeling just for a few moments and feel lost but not terrified is a wonderfully freeing thing.

And then, of course, reality sets in and you remember to be terrified again.

The wonderful thing about Spring is how easily I forget it after it’s finished each year.

Despite how that sounds, I don’t mean that sarcastically, or as any type of warning that I actually hate Spring and look forward to it ending every year — just the opposite, in fact. What used to be one of my least favorite seasons (I’m an October baby, I’m naturally predisposed to the fall, what can I say?) has become more and more of a highlight the older I get, and the longer I stay in Portland with its lengthy and emotionally difficult winters. (Man, the unrelenting greyness gets to you after awhile.)

That said, I feel as if Spring is something I remember in the abstract, at best; I know in theory that everything comes into bloom and plants sprout new life, and the sun starts to shine, and all that good stuff. If you asked me to describe the kind of thing that happens in the season, I could do that, no problem. I just forget what it looks like, is all. And then, each Spring, there will come a moment when I’m out on a walk, and I look up and see all the trees covered in their new growth and it takes my breath away.

It reminds me of something I realized when I was back in my hometown for the first time in years, back in 2023; I went for a walk in the early morning before anyone else was up, it felt like, and there was a point where I realized that I’d grown up surrounded by beauty and nature, and hadn’t even noticed at the time. There was such lush greenery all around me, and it had become alien enough that I noticed it again, and appreciated it as if it was new.

I get that every Spring here. There’s a point where I suddenly remember that there’s all this life happening all around me in such colors and varieties, and I feel humbled and touched at the same time. I always forget how genuinely beautiful Spring can be, and I actually love that; every year, I get to see everything new and fresh and fall in love all over again.

Ever since I started in this job, I’ve made it a point to keep analog, handwritten notes whenever possible. I have multiple notebooks — I generally go through two a year, although that’s in part because I always like starting a new notebook at the start of each calendar year, so the real measurement is probably closer to going through one-and-a-half-maybe-more — filled with comments to myself from meetings, from planning sessions or those brief moments of inspiration where I suddenly know just what I should be doing to achieve success or whatever; I have notes that are instructions for specific tasks, and notes that broader plans for, if not world domination, then at least ways to move through the world without too much disruption.

And, for the most part, I rarely look at them a few weeks after they’ve been written.

There are certainly some notes that I find myself poring back over, however long later; there are instructions for specific things that require codes or particular steps to be followed to avoid failure, or there are things that should be remembered very particularly for the desired result. But for the most part, almost everything I make note of is temporary, and forgotten about within weeks. Each of these notebooks is filled with comments and phrases that are meaningless to most everyone, including myself after enough time has passed.

Occasionally, I’ll look through old notebooks, looking for one of those codes I need or something else that suddenly seems relevant long after the fact, and I’ll find myself lost and confused: what does all of this mean? Why did I write these meaningless phrases, and did I even know what they meant back then? I’m creating an archaeology of myself that no-one will be able to decipher if they tried.

Tax season, every year, is a stressful time for me. That’s been the case since I came to the States; I remember that first time of trying to do American taxes and basically thinking to myself, this is arcane and ridiculous, and somehow I have to do this every year? (Yes. Yes, I do. Every single year.)

It’s not just that I’m hardly fiscally-minded. I try to make myself feel better about that each year by going, oh, I’m creative, that means I get a pass on being business-minded or serious in a way that actually benefits me — a theory that certainly makes me feel a little better about myself before the crushing reality sets in and I worry if I don’t have all the paperwork I need and perhaps I’m going to be destroyed by a system that really couldn’t care less how creative I may or may not be. It’s also that the tax system is this very strange, seemingly very intentional anxiety machine that makes things as difficult to understand as possible: do you have the right forms? Have they all been filled in by other people appropriately? Because if they screwed up, that means you screwed up. Are you going to get everything filed in the appropriate manner to two different entities in time? And, because I’m in Portland, Oregon, will you also remember to pay the entirely separate Arts Tax, which isn’t included in the State filing for some reason?

It doesn’t help that I have experience of having done it wrong in the past; I remember being told, the first time I went to a tax specialist, that I’d been doing it so wrong for the past three years that I owed an entire subsection of taxes I wasn’t even aware of. Oh, and because I’d owed it for so long, I’d be charged a 100% penalty for non-payment, so I basically had six years of back taxes waiting for me like the worst Christmas gift ever. I remember being called while on a business trip to the UK by a separate tax preparer that something was wrong with my paperwork and they probably wouldn’t be able to file on time unless I scanned and submitted entirely different documents that I didn’t have to hand because, again, I was in a different country on a work trip.

Because of all of this, I try to do my taxes pretty early each year — preferably somewhere in February, so I have two months or so to fix things if and when they go wrong. Except that, this year, I spent February and the first half of March sick, so I had this internal pressure of gotta do taxes gotta do taxes GOTTA DO TAXES in my head the entire time. They were done before the end of March, filed and accepted, but still. I’m half-convinced that, somehow, something is going to go wrong at any moment and I won’t have time to fix it.

Happy tax filing deadline tomorrow, everyone.