Summer Doldrums
~whiskeyding
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Hello, Pub-goers, it's been a while.

I went looking for some internet help setting up my new longbow,
and 80% of the page one hits on DuckDuckGo were AI-generated web
pages, uncanny nonsense pictures included. Google has been a
burning pile of SEO garbage for years, but now DDG seems to be
failing as well. The larger web is no longer a place to go for
accurate information on anything. Supposedly there are new AI tools
coming that can help fix the mess made by the first set of AI
tools, but surely the circular insanity of this is obvious to all
parties involved.

Right?

For now, the public library and knowledgeable locals are a better
bet, at least until the botshit inevitably trickles down to printed
material. I ended up borrowing a car and driving to the archery
shop an hour away, and they showed me what's what. I needed a new
target bag anyway.

The web was never a good or healthy thing for humans, but AI has
shifted it into a phase of total epistemological failure. In a way,
I suppose I welcome its coming collapse. If we survive, the real,
living world--denuded and broken but still there--is waiting for us
on the other side of this strange thirty-year digital dream. It's
just such a shame that the end-stage enshittification of computing
will burn through so much water, power, land, and human dignity in
a desperate, psychotic attempt to keep the stock prices up.

Culture feels...slippery right now, untethered to value. It's like
we are letting something nebulous but very important die out, and
once gone, we will not get it back. Maybe I'm just a grumpy old man
in a long, long tradition of grumpy old men.

The garden is mostly dead again. Last year it was hail, this year
it's a plague of grasshoppers that tapers off and then comes
roaring back over and over again. I don't know if I'll try again,
as it's simply too depressing. Maybe a hydroponic greenhouse like
my father has is the only way to reliably grow anything any longer,
but I hate the cost and complexity of the thing. Good soil just
takes compost, water, and time (and lots of digging).

On the brighter side, I picked up a like-new copy of George
Michael's _Faith_ on CD for a dollar at the thrift store. Listening
to it for the first time in decades, the very wide dynamic range
was immediately noticeable. After years of listening to highly
compressed audio production, being reminded that music could sound
like this was lovely, like eating vegetables fresh out of the
garden after years of frozen stuff in bags.