We’re Going to Put a Happy Little Bush Right Down over Here in the Corner There and That’ll Just Be Our Little Secret

Bob Ross specifically made his work accessible for people to begin creating art by demonstrating techniques and tools that were simple to build upon. AI erodes people's ability to even begin creating art. https://t.co/2KXCYAzxQV

— John Pickles (@IGdolljunk) May 23, 2026

I admit that I excitedly played around with Midjourney when it was released four years ago.  But after a couple months, I walked away from it because it was not generating art, nor enabling my creativity.  It was a slop machine, and even as AI tools' output has "improved", it still ain't art or creativity.

I think this is the best encapsulation:

"AI is data, and data can only look backward. Creativity looks forward"  
A profound statement on the level I want to frame and hang on the wall

I do fancy myself as creative, but expression of such lies elsewhere.  Yet I enjoy art despite my artistic ineptitude, or perhaps because of it, and long-time readers and family members know I adore Bob Ross for myriad reasons.  

It is not impressive to me, beyond maybe the technical aspects (I am a geek, after all), that a computer can put a bunch of pixels together in a plausibly cohesive way at scale based on large sets of stolen data.  Without consciousness, feelings, and a soul, it's all just soulless shit, and I do not see the fucking point of it.  Rather than democratizing anything, it merely dilutes our perceptions of the world we uniquely engage with as human beings.

In conclusion: if you tell anyone that AI can create art, I will come to your house and I will cut you.

PS - I do think there are legit use cases for Pseudo Intelligence, which include coding, data analytics, and even learning augmentation.  But an AI tool could never feed Peapod the squirrel with joy in its heart.

Ladies and Gentlemen, You Can’t Dance in Here! This Is the War Room!

Well, maybe in Drunky McSecdef's war room you can.

What I’m Doing at Work, Actually

We're Building the Ship as We Sail It:

The first fear
being drowning, the
ship's first shape
was a raft, which
was hard to unflatten
after that didn't
happen. It's awkward
to have to do one's
planning in extremis
in the early years —
so hard to hide later:
sleekening the hull,
making things
more gracious.

Kay Ryan. 

This is it, the apocalypse

One of Lou's greatest roles.

I’m Waking up to Ash and Dust

Ode on Solitude:

Happy the man, whose wish and care

   A few paternal acres bound,

Content to breathe his native air,

                            In his own ground.

Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,

   Whose flocks supply him with attire,

Whose trees in summer yield him shade,

                            In winter fire.

Blest, who can unconcernedly find

   Hours, days, and years slide soft away,

In health of body, peace of mind,

                            Quiet by day,

Sound sleep by night; study and ease,

   Together mixed; sweet recreation;

And innocence, which most does please,

                            With meditation.

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;

   Thus unlamented let me die;

Steal from the world, and not a stone

                            Tell where I lie.

Alexander Pope.

#throwbackthursday

Bubsy eleven years ago.

Got to concentrate

Don't be distractive.

雲、あるいは蜘蛛

Cloud of Feelings:

I want to hold a cloud but it’s made of  air

a smog of   tweets makes a world go round,

the confusion of  clouds predicting a storm

think nothing of  it, bombs are natural now,

explosives wrapped in their hollowed brows

exploiting crisis and pushing the inevitable,

bluebirds know it’s a new day, they whistle

without confusion, listen, how do we speak

to light at the end of  the holographic tunnel,

my first smoking question of a new season

to begrudge feelings we once had, released,

the future reading books and understanding

tweeting, unbreathable air, and the confusion

of  so much suffering and sovereign comfort,

exploring the rites of  violence, an old feeling

publicized and burning, cyclones, heilstorms

slapping the drafts, think nothing of it, birds—

get out of  their way, the powerful are talking,

don’t breathe the confusion, sideswiped in

holographic traffic, a question for bluebirds:

if  you, dear birdsong, took away our clouds

of  feelings would anyone notice send tweet

Nikki Wallschlaeger.

Genesis 41:29

Original caption (4/25/2019): So imma spend a lot of time in this place...

Narrator: he did not, in fact, spend a lot of time in that place.  

That's the Kumo building, one of myriad on the South Lake Union campus, where I survived my all-day interview loop for a tech trainer gig at AWS (and man, did I think that I blew it).  But when my recruiter called me with a job offer, I didn't know just how chaotic my professional and personal life were about to be.

Back in the day, I taught a few times in Seattle for Sprint and Qwest, but never dreamed that I would ever actually live in the Emerald City.  It was a fairy land, only to be seen from afar.  And then one day, exactly seven years ago, I attended New Hire Orientation, spent a few days at my desk, and pretty much never sat at it again.

Before the pandemic started, my classes moved from building to building (sometimes even between AM and PM sessions), as space was at a premium and never guaranteed in those days.  It was a great way to get to know my new city, and get my steps in (as though I didn't already walk about 6 miles a day in my classroom, stimming as I taught).

Anyway, I'm now ostensibly assigned to the Oscar building, but rarely go there because I don't particularly care for it, plus it's less convenient than Frontier, which is further south and kitty corner to the 6th Ave C-line stop.  I pass through our old neighborhood on the way to the office (when I deign to go in), and still get emotional flashbacks, but otherwise it's nice to be there without threats to my person (yeah, there are still tweakers, but they have never harmed me the way Ericka did).

My entire tenure (which is longer than 88% of our 1.7m worldwide employees', making me a "relic" according to the Old Fart internal tool), has been with the TechU program.  A lot of change has swirled around me, yet I remain.

Selah.

Śūnyatā

The song was written from the point of view of the release you get when you have nothing left to lose.

void

The Emptiness of Thought:

this morning I felt my life

if you were dead

the expansiveness of the bed

the birds still singing

the remnants of the smell

of coffee in the morning

the emptiness of thought

the deafening silence of my heart

James K. Zimmerman.

My reflection, dirty mirror

There's no connection to myself.

There Is an Invisible Book of Life

Rubaiyat (LXXI):

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

Omar Khayaam.

Doin’ It Naturally

When Mount St. Helens erupted on this day in 1980, it was the deadliest and most destructive volcanic event in American history, killing 57 people and triggering the largest landslide ever recorded. More than four decades later, the ecosystem is healing. Discover why it's one of… pic.twitter.com/dwfx4gkt6N

— Smithsonian Magazine (@SmithsonianMag) May 18, 2026

Saving a couple extra clicks:

In 1983, when Allen and other scientists flew in by helicopter to an area devastated by lava, they found only about a dozen plants surviving there. Even the seeds that birds had dropped in the area were struggling to grow. In an experiment, the scientists airlifted local gophers, known as northern pocket gophers, to two enclosed pumice plots for a day.

“Bringing them there was like bringing a mini-ecosystem just for a short time,” says lead author Mia Maltz, a soil microbial ecologist at the University of Connecticut, to New Scientist’s James Dinneen.

The scientists hoped the gophers would help restore the ecosystem with their natural digging activities and defecation, which would fertilize and aerate the soil and bring in microorganisms like bacteria and fungi. Although the burrowing rodents are often considered pests, “we thought they would take old soil, move it to the surface, and that would be where recovery would occur,” Allen explains in the statement.

Past research has shown how these animals are ecosystem engineers. In a study from 2022, gophers were described as doing simple “farming.” They turned over the soil by tunneling, dispersed their waste within their burrows—a form of fertilizer—and harvested roots for food, showing how their lifestyle can promote rich soils and root production... 

Something similar happened at Mount St. Helens. Six years after the gophers were brought in, the land they hadn’t touched remained largely barren, while 40,000 plants grew and thrived in the gopher plots, according to the statement.

The secret to life was mycorrhizal fungi. These organisms are essential to plant growth: They form symbiotic relationships with roots, allowing them to access more nutrients from the soil and protecting them from diseases. The gophers promoted growth of the fungi by burrowing and moving the soil around, which brought buried fungal spores to the surface and introduced new microbes.

“With the exception of a few weeds, there is no way most plant roots are efficient enough to get all the nutrients and water they need by themselves,” Allen says in the statement. “The fungi transport these things to the plant and get carbon they need for their own growth in exchange.”

So we got that goin' for us, which is nice.

<exits singing, I'm alright, nobody worry 'bout me>