To put it simply: I do not like this world where people are using AI to generate art, music, writing, and software. So I will not use AI.
via I am done using AI. Which makes me think of the blood robots Craig Mod wrote about. The rush of making and also the way skills disappear, when they are not used.
In relation to my own work Luke Plunkett said it quite well in The Work is the Work:
Let's say I'm an office manager or a HR rep, and my job is to settle a dispute between two workers. To settle that dispute is part of my job, it's why I am there. My skills at talking to people and conveying my thoughts and opinions via email are why I am being paid. If I open up ChatGPT and ask a machine how to do it—a machine that does not know how to do it, it only knows how to synthesize one million examples of this, because it is a machine—I am not doing that work anymore. Anyone could have asked the machine that question.
If I try to solve a conflict between two students by consulting ChatGPT I have failed my job. If I let an LLM write my courses for me I have failed. Because it is what I make, what I decide on that got me the job. That makes me a teacher, who sometimes does a good job. But at least I have character. I grow and I learn from some of my mistakes.
And sure, I could do some of my work without thinking anything through. But I have a job that does not allow for that. Even if I let something else plan, I still have to do it myself. And I'd rather fail at doing something I badly planned myself, than try to follow something I had no part in.
Taken together, they produce a life in which almost nothing is allowed to be simply what it is, because everything has been enrolled in the project of becoming someone better.
The tech elite want us to move farther and farther away from “life.” From bodies, particularly women’s bodies. From any sort of being and knowing that they do not utterly control. Through the looking glass, the sort of community-focused health efforts that encourage you to learn skills that “might save a life” give way to a machinery that heralds the rejection of such initiatives.
This local radio station called radioeins is doing summer Sundays. From 9am to 7pm they play 100 songs fitting a theme. The songs are ranked and the ranking is done by journalists and other industry types. A great invention, that I often miss and when I catch it it is rad. Today's topic was melancholy. And since I sat in a car while listening I made a list of my own top ten. I did only use what was on my phone. So there will be honorable mentions. And I do not have a particular order to these.
The Divine Comedy – Your Daddy's Car
A toss up between this and Our mutual Friend, but I think this one is more melancholy then depression. An ode to fun and love and how it can all go wrong, get wrapped around a tree. Neil Hannon's music is formative for me. The other end of the see-saw from the heavy music I enjoy. Fantastic lyrics and just really good.
Lucy Dacus – Night Shift
This was the song I got to know Lucy Dacus with. It was in an article about best first songs on records and it holds that candle quite high. Countless times I've walked home in the night, listening to this and singing along with myself. It was the one I really wanted to hear, when I saw them live and I compare everything she has done since to this. It is also why I haven't gotten into her later records. These songs may have been great, but they were not Night Shift.
Modern Baseball – Just another faceModern Baseball is certainly a melancholic band for me. Emo after all. Picking one song was not easy. I chose Just another face because it is an end point of sorts. Last song on the last album. A cry for something, feeling bad and holding on, hoping to change. Gosh I really like that band.
The Hotelier – Your Deep Rest
I finally got to really shout along to this last year and it felt so very good. Again, choosing one song? So hard. But this one takes the crown. Again a record that displaces all the other music the band made after. For me at least. I could never get into Goodness because Home, Like Noplace is There exists. And now I am contemplating the differences between sad songs and melancholic songs and if I think too much about it this whole list might explode, so I will stop.
Guster – When We Were StarsGuster is a band with a huge following in America. They have their people in Europe, but seemingly never enough to come over. Baby me got to interview them ages ago, when they came over. Must have been 2015. When we Where Stars is from their 2024 record Ooh La La and it is about a relationship falling apart. “You called me his name by mistake, what a funny way to break us open” is a line that just stuck with me. I want to see them play again. I really do.
Julien Baker – Rejoice
Again with sad or melancholic. But Baker is exemplary for me for sad tunes and feeling sad as well. And also being powerful. I have a distinct memory of listening to this record while walking around an evening dark Berlin. My girlfriend far away in England and me kind of lonely. This song in my ears and even though it does not connect to the specific lyrics the feelings the song evoked stayed with me. And there is this video of Baker performing the song that just blew me away. Ten years ago. Holy cow.
Tigers Jaw – Never Saw it Coming
I got to shout this song the same evening I also saw the Hotelier. My voice was working overtime. Anyhow, the perfect mixture of melancholy and power. Emo really was a formative genre for me, huh. A reflective song, a recounting of faults, but for me it also seems like a realization that life goes on and that is just how things are sometimes.
Vizedikator – 2001
A song about a chance encounter, a night of vandalism and shared time. A connection that seems to have gotten lost. Sadness about the state of the world and anger. This whole exercise is great, because it makes me dig and it also reminds me of songs and records that I really liked and that have fallen behind the couch. Waiting for me to get them out again.
Spring Offensive – Worry fill my Heart
A song about needing some money to get through the next weeks. About worries that come with existential questions and a job that grinds you down and really does not pay enough. Spring Offensive were an excellent band.
Mariybu – Crush
Nowadays Mariybu makes very different music. Much louder and more extreme. Some would say vulgar. This song enchanted me a while back. Together with the really sweet video the song just stuck with me. And what is more melancholic than a crush that is just that and may not every be anything else?
Honorable mentions
– morita doji – goodbye my friend
– Frittenbude – Bilder mit Katze
– Juliette & The Licks – I never got to tell you what I wanted to
– Yann Tiersen – Les Jours Tristes
Next week is “best songs”. I wonder what my head will make out of that prompt in the coming days.
Sometimes I wonder if it was a good thing that the internet opened all of the doors. Free media heck yeah and all the websites that came before. Open access to everything, all the time. And with it a devaluation of culture and sometimes a feeling of entitlement. “This is all for me after all, so it should cater to my tastes.” Easy ways to get all the songs, movies, shows, without paying a dime. Add to that one or the other streaming service and you have a media pool that will never dry up and that you will never dive too deep into. Always only on the surface.
There is great fun in here too. When I got a list of bands to check out sometimes in 2011 I had to go look for quite some time to find the good stuff on some blogspot blogs. I would scour /mu/ sharethreads for something new and shiny. And now it all collects digital dust on a hard drive. So many bands and songs that I sucked into my own void. Hastily and greedily. Sometimes a shuffle will resurface them and I will remember a band or a song quite fondly. But they are not present. Which is good, kinda, I don't want my head to remember absolutely everything after all.
It is the same with books. eBooks disappear into my eReader and I forget about them. Unless I write them down in a list. But I can not look at them on my shelves. When a friend recently asked me for book recommendations I could close my eyes and go though my physical shelves. But I could not go through those I'd read digitally. Should I maybe keep a “public” list on a goodreads like service? I don't know. I don't really like those very much.
What got me back into this? It was A swarm of blood robots. Here Craig Mod writes about coding with Claude to build his tools.
Yet, I want to know these tools, these new tools of increasing weirdness and danger. So I use them, daily, amid a constantly fluctuating state of bafflement and delight and horror (pessimistic, optimistic, manic). Over the last couple of months I’ve continued to use mostly Claude to work on a bunch of projects. Claude works fine for me and I’d rather be making / analyzing things than fiddling with alt models; the Anthropic vs OpenAI arguments feel like the 2026 equivalent of Emacs vs Vim neckbeard battles; ultimately, things are moving so erratically, we may well not be using either company’s tools in five years.
And the tools sound neat! There is a goodreads alternative in there and many tools were built, that made his life easier. And from there I go to Robert Hart's ‘Not healthy’ LLM use is more common than you think and Hank Green who fell into producing too much for his own good, aided by LLMs.
Green’s case illustrates a different kind of reliance. He said he used it as a research aid, helping him locate papers and other material on a given topic. There is little to suggest his use of chatbots in this way was inherently problematic, despite the furious responses it provoked or Green’s apology.
I have friends who use LMMs that way. They are somewhat forced to, because search engines are shite now. It is here that I point to a book that I actually have on my shelves called Love Machines:
Friends. Lovers. Therapists. 'Deathbots'. Artificial intelligence is now fulfilling new roles for millions of us every single day. How are these new 'relationships' changing how we view technology – and each other?
That book was really great! Anyhow. Blood Robots. Making tools. I am tempted. But I also do not feel right jumping into these waters of making tools when I know about the costs. Environmental and to my own skills and reliance on a probability machine doing the thinking for me. I think I'd rather not have a tool. Or find an existing tool. And here I come back to media. On some level I need to be okay with not consuming something that looks cool. (What an incredibly entitled and shitty thing to say.) I can use the library and the media I have. Actually read the ttrpg tomes that are on my shelves and not scour the trove for more pdfs to gather digital dust.
I don't know. This here is mostly for me to think it through while writing it. I did not reach a conclusion. <3
This link is in German. Very important as it lays out how musicians and everyone else involved in the culture around music could organize as there are massive funding cuts ahead that would take much of the music landscape in Germany apart. One can dream right?
Oh this was pretty good. Akari Takaishi plays a college student who gets possessed by the ghost of an assassin. It is a simple and straight forward movie. The rules are pretty clear from the start, everyone is able to do the stunts and Takaishi is perfectly on the line between unhinged and angry for the way people are treating her. A different movie would have gone much bigger. I like that this one did not.
After watching I found out that there is a Baby Assassins TV Show! So cool! That is where I saw Akari Takaishi first, in those very entertaining Baby Assassins movies. There is three of them and they are cute and wild as heck.
an essay about all of those special editions that are coming out from what seems to me a really cool outfit. So if you have some dollarinos lying about, give em some
This is an excellent video essay about parasocial relationships, long RPGs and what happens when those games end and leave you longing. Which is a feeling I personally can remember having had. But I understand how it happens. Really well done! And a second one is also out.
Today is bandcamp friday. So all money spent on bandcamp goes directly to the labels/bands you bought anything from. It is neat! I have a budget to spend on music every month and the event makes that really easy. Here's what I got!
Now to put them into the music player and ROCK OUT!