There’s something good going on with music these days. Romance by Fontaines D.C. is a perfect album. I have listened to it almost every single day for weeks and have not gotten sick of it once, which is – and I mean this clinically – a medical miracle. Jack White is on SNL. The Strokes are touring. There is a band called Angine de poitrine who are the most aggressively anti-AI band I can imagine existing, out here doing absolutely Weird Shit™, and I don’t even normally listen to math rock like this but I am so glad someone is making it. My current theory (slash hopeful prayer) is that the best thing we are going to get out of all this AI slop era is the good bands dusting themselves off and getting back in the van. We have the robots writing our emails and apparently that is enough. That is exactly the kind of low-grade existential dread that makes people pick up a guitar again, and honestly good, great, more of this please.
For a laugh I ran some of my pre-2020 blog posts (safely written in the pre-ChatGPT era) through an AI detector and it came back telling me they were between 59% and 93% AI-generated. I am now in a full spiral that I just naturally write like a language model that has been asked to sound like a person. I’ve been a robot this whole time. The robots didn’t take my job. I was always the robot.
One of my absolute favourite pieces of trivia, which I keep locked and loaded in my back pocket, is that we only have good blueberries because of USAID (rip). The full thing is a Planet Money episode which you should listen to but the tl; dr is: blueberries used to be bad and seasonal and therefore pointless, Peru was growing coca leaves, America was doing its whole thing about that, and USAID showed up (with what I can only describe as the most optimistic foreign policy proposal in recorded history) and said what if instead of cocaine you grew asparagus. The farmers loved asparagus so much they immediately destroyed the asparagus market by growing too much asparagus, so this one Peruvian dude had a look at what else could grow in sandy Peruvian soil and the answer was blueberries and that’s it, that’s the whole thing. Bingo bango, you can now eat blueberries in January like a queen. The war on drugs gave us bloobs.
Saved from last week’s update in what I am choosing to call “planning”: face jugs at the Atlanta High museum. Face jugs are jugs (or jars, the taxonomy is loose) from the 1800s American South, and they have faces on them, and the reason they have faces on them is to scare children away from the moonshine inside. Or spices. Or genuinely anything else you care about; children get their grubby little hands in everything. I found this especially delightful because I took a portrait sculpture class last year and since then have been putting faces on pottery, and it turns out once again that nothing is new. Nothing has ever been new.