Look who said they wouldn't roll their own blog and RSS, and here they are anyway!

This is all super basic, feel free to check out the source code in the usual place. I'll be using it mostly for unserious writing, don't expect big tech guides or anything. (that's coming in the book 👀)

Well, I guess they're evil now. 404 Media (go support independent journalism) has a report up now about how Google is hosting an app designed to help ICE "identify immigrants", which is... pretty fascist behavior. Meanwhile, Microsoft seems pretty chill about them using Halo as a recruitment ad, and the long-standing contract ICE has with GitHub. Does this mean that using Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, or even hosting my site on GitHub Pages like I do right now are acts in support of fascism?

I mean... probably not directly, right? But it's something to consider, especially now that I'm thinking about moving back into the world of writing about these kinds of tools. It's not going to be enough to use a tool from a fascist company in a non-fascist way (the medium is the message, etc.), so the work itself has to be anti-fascist from end to end. Antifasheets, if you will.

I don't know what that looks like yet. Is LibreOffice any good? Do I roll my own thing, like I'm doing on my homepage? Suggestions welcome.

After all that work to get the new blog set up, I nearly forgot I had it! Haven't had the energy to put together a full post on anything this week, so here's a collection of thoughts from the week that I want to talk about and might put more words to soon.

Brand vs. Hobby

I've been thinking about my previous post and can't shake the harm that branding — as a concept — has done to tech. It's never enough for something to be "just a bit of code", it has to have a clever name and logo to associate it with, or else people won't take it seriously. That's "hobby code". And then when there is a brand name to go along with it, your Googles and Microsofts of the world, it's trusted implicitly, even when it shouldn't be. I'm sure this isn't a new problem, but it does feel pretty related to recent events, especially thinking about how various AI products now all have catchy, human-sounding names. They're all just code, but the brand plays a powerful part in how people interact with them.

Going back to the spreadsheet of it all, I do feel like the next thing I want to focus on is something more conceptually complete than marketable, maybe extending something like this bookmarklet spreadsheet so the tool can exist on its own and separate from any one brand or person.

Software Engineering is a Sales job

Related to the whole branding thought is that I've just had an interview for a senior role at my company, and feel like more and more the job of a software engineer is more about sales than coding ability. For example, you have to know which Amazon product best suits a given scenario, and how to adjust your AWS usage to fit a budget. Or you have to explain your AI prompt process, and why you prefer Claude over Copilot. And then if you're lucky there's a tiny bit of coding for you to do, but you have to make sure you're following the standards that Meta gave a cute brand name to.

Which is all... fine, I guess, but we can't do that and tell people just starting in the industry that it's a career full of puzzle solving and critical thinking. (Though now that I've said that I'm sure that illusion will die the second any of them meet a manager.)

Trans Day of Remembrance

Trans Day of Remembrance was yesterday, and like always I nearly forget until about 10pm. I'm glad it exists, but I wish everyone did more to make it so trans people are known and cared for while still living.

NoctHorror 2026

We're wrapping up our annual Halloween movie festival! (It used to be called OctHorror but we've been creeping further and further into November) I'll do a full write-up of it next month, but I've been very happy with my video setup this year, which involves an HDMI-to-analog converter that I highly recommend to anyone who streams and likes that SD video look. Our screenings had the vibe of watching VHS tapes with friends, and I had a load of fun making it all work.

The big difference this year was that I kept the films a secret until the day before each screening, but would send puzzles with hints towards the film and their order. So before each film they could guess what the upcoming films would be, and get more points based on how far ahead they could accurately guess. A few people did really well! Some of the clues are very dependent on inside jokes so I'll only share some in the full write-up, but the morale of the story is that we should all be making puzzles for our friends.

This weekend, my partner and I wrapped up the sixth annual NoctHorror (formerly OctHorror, renamed because it kept creeping further and further into November), our annual Spooky Season film festival we do for our friends. Normally, we watch 13 films over Zoom and wrap the month with a pub quiz about those films, but this year I went a little overboard and made the films themselves into the puzzle. I kept all 13 films a secret until 24 hours before each screening, and sent the players puzzles along the way so they could try and suss them out, as well as an overarching mystery. There's a lot of internal lore that's built up over the last six years, so sharing all of the clues won't make a ton of sense, but check out this tube map I made for one of them:

The symbols on the left are part of the "ancient language Dra-Q-Lese" spoken by long-time antagonist "Count Dra-Q-La", and the map points the players both towards the next three films in the series and hints at the broader theme of the month, which culminated in drawing a giant pentagram on a map to triangulate the Count's hideout. I was even extra-devious this year and made some of the stops clickable in the PDF, so savvy players could uncover hidden mini-quizzes that netted them extra points in the finale. I'm extremely proud of it, but woof am I tired. 😅 Part of this year's event was a symbolic "passing the torch", and I'm excited for someone else to take the reins next year, at least when it comes to picking the films.

This year, we watched:

1. A Quiet Place
2. Bodies Bodies Bodies
3. Poseidon
4. 247℉
5. Let It Snow (2020)
6. Saloum
7. Anaconda
8. Bacurau
9. In the Shadows in the Mountains
10. The Edge of the Shadows
11. The Platform
12. Omen
13. Congo

And before you even start — I know that some of those aren't horror films. I was going for a whole geographical theme, it all made sense in the end.

Of the selection this year, I liked Saloum and Bacurau the best (RIP Udo Kier), and despite Omen being a straight-up drama (despite what the trailer and marketing sell it as), I recommend that to pretty much anybody. In the Shadows in the Mountains and The Edge of the Shadows aren't good movies by any means (sorry, Malik), but it was so cool to see a Greenland local's take on their folklore.

Because we started this tradition deep in the COVID-19 pandemic, all of our screenings were over Zoom, which is a legally dark-gray area, but hypothetically one way to facilitate this sort of thing is:

• Buy as many of the films as possible on DVD
• Hook your DVD player into an HDMI switcher (so you can swap between it and your Nintendo Switch and your Apple TV)
• Make sure your
• Plug the output of the switcher into an HDMI splitter
• Take one of the outputs from the splitter and plug it into your TV
• Take the other end of the splitter and plug it into an HDMI-to-Analog converter (for example a Mini HDMI2AV Upscaler 1080p, hypothetically)
• Take an RCA cable from the output of the converter into an Analog to USB Video Capture Device (there are a hundred generic versions of these)
• Optionally, use a USB to USB-C converter to plug that into your laptop
• Use OBS Studio to take in the audio and video from the caputure device, making sure to add any necessary filters to account for "buzz" that might happen during the analog conversion
• Start the OBS virtual camera
• Open Zoom or your video communication app of choice
• Set your camera and microphone to the OBS virtual camera (and make sure to enable any "high-quality audio for musicians" settings)

And voila! Hypothetically, you'll be watching your favorite films with your friends, as though you were all in the same room together. The digital-to-analog conversion helps make sure DRM won't stop you, and gives everything an actually pretty pleasant late-VHS/early-DVD vibe.

In case you're looking for any further inspiration (or if you're me next year, trying to remember this), here's what we watched for previous NoctHorrors:

2024

This year we had a "teen horror" theme, with everyone picking cabins in the fictional "Camp Dra-Q-La" and competing for prizes throughout the month. We watched:

1. Jennifer's Body
2. Ginger Snaps
3. I Know What You Did Last Summer
4. Final Destination
5. Fright Night (1985)
6. House of Wax (2005)
7. The Lost Boys
8. Chopping Mall
9. Jeepers Creepers
10. The Funhouse
11. Happy Death Day
12. Sleepaway Camp
13. Buffy the Vampire Slayer

2023

This was our first themed year where we voted for "space", so naturally I included a fully-voiced HAL 9000 to "help" me run the quiz (I did, somehow, shove him out an airlock in the end).

1. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
2. Killer Klowns from Outer Space
3. Plan 9 from Outer Space
4. The Thing
5. Jason X
6. Leprechaun 4
7. Hellraiser IV: Bloodline
8. Planet of the Vampires
9. Solaris (1972)
10. Event Horizon
11. Sunshine
12. Predator
13. Alien

2022

This was before we were officially doing themes, but even then I was always playing with the idea of how each film could relate to the next one, so the whole thing had kind of a semi-logical flow to it.

1. Dracula
2. The Wolf Man
3. Monster House
4. The Cabin in the Woods
5. The Evil Dead
6. Drag Me To Hell
7. Friday the 13th (2009)
8. Halloween 3: Season of the Witch
9. Old
10. Us
11. Parasite
12. Pet Sematary (2019)
13. Shaun of the Dead

2021

This was when we landed on doing 13 films for the event, which gave us a good (spooky) number and meant we could schedule it in a way that fit for more of our friends' schedules. As always, the real monster is "having other responsibilities"!

1. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
2. Psycho
3. The Birds
4. Rosemary's Baby
5. Don't Look Now
6. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
7. Halloween II
8. Bloodbath at the House of Death
9. Silence of the Lambs
10. Candyman (1992)
11. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
12. It Follows
13. One Cut of the Dead

2020

We started this right in the middle of a lockdown, half out of our minds anyway, and just needed to do something. So we thought it would be a good idea to watch one movie every night for the entire month of October. And it was a good idea at the time! Just... not one I'd do again.

1. Hocus Pocus
2. The Addams Family
3. Sleepy Hollow
4. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
5. Corpse Bride
6. The Craft
7. Halloweentown
8. The Blair Witch Project
9. The Frighteners
10. Halloween
11. The Shining
12. Scream
13. The Mummy (1999)
14. Crimson Peak
15. Bram Stoker's Dracula
16. Rocky Horror Picture Show
17. The Sixth Sense
18. The Faculty
19. Death Becomes Her
20. Coraline
21. The Wicker Man (1973)
22. The Wicker Man (2006)
23. Pan's Labyrinth
24. Monster Squad
25. Carrie (1976)
26. Under Wraps
27. Nosferatu
28. Hellraiser
29. Beetlejuice
30. Young Frankenstein

Something I'll start writing about more here — so that you'll keep me accountable, if nothing else — is that I'm starting to write a book.

Specifically, I'm starting to write a book about spreadsheets, and what they are, and what they can do. I've been trying to isolate what specifically I'm drawn to in this subject, and just now my partner pulled up this talk with Sir Grayson Perry. When talking about his process, he said (paraphrasing), "I'm not one of these artists who comes in with an effortless line. My art is more like a war of attrition." In Perry's art, that lust for war comes from his love of outsider art, and building up a piece of art through painstaking little steps of process and craft, rather than effortlessly falling into something. And this will sound crazy, but:

When I was making video games in spreadsheets, using only built-in functions, it wasn't intended to be a showcase of my own technical mastery; kind of the opposite, actually. What I wanted to do (best laid plans and all that) was show what could be built up from a modest and boring starting place if you pour enough time and careful thought into it. It was a million tiny knife strokes in code instead of paint, unobscured by the final piece.

That last part is just as important to me: when you as the user want to learn how a "good" spreadsheet works, those answers are there for you in the piece itself. That makes it a unique artform from apps or AI slop or any of the million bits of corporate code we interact with now, which hide their true forms away from you like that Simpsons meme where Homer's pinned all his fat back with chip clips and hair ties. We can't learn anything from those, because they resist being learned. But a spreadsheet bares its scars in the open for you, and there's something poetic and lovely about that that I want to share with you.

Anyway, so that's what the book's about. Stay tuned.

I applied for a job last month, an internal posting for the "senior" version of my current role, which is "software engineer". I didn't get the job, which is fine because I still have a job that I mostly enjoy, but I was confused by the feedback I received from the hiring panel: They said I demonstrated excellent communication, leadership, critical thinking skills, and a strong ability to act as a well-rounded full-stack engineer (meaning both "back end" code that you don't directly experience as a user and "front end" code which you do). They said, point of fact, that I would be good at the job. But I didn't get it because I lacked specific, deep knowledge of a product that I have never once had reason to use.

This struck me as unfair at the time, not only because the job spec didn't mention that product (and in fact appeared to be looking for generalists like myself), but the feedback of "gain specialized knowledge" carries the implied meta-commentary of "gain the correct specialized knowledge". Deepening one's knowledge of their work is never a bad thing, but in a field so broad as software engineering, it's sort of a crap-shoot as to whether your specialism will be the secret password into a new role unless it's explicitly advertised as such. They did not, for example, care about spreadsheets or database management for this particular role. There's also something to be said for skills refused with reason, like my "inexperience" with generative AI, which is very much on purpose.

I conveyed all this to my manager in a debrief chat after I'd heard the bad news, not to cast blame on anyone because all in all I think the hiring process was very well organized, but to try and parse why I seem to struggle so much with finding recognition in this field. After a bit of venting he said to me, "Are you a software engineer in your heart? Because I don't think you are."

I was about ready to fight him on this, initially hearing it as a different way of saying "you aren't ready for the role", which always gets my hackles up. But saying it this way made me pause: am I a software engineer in my heart? Was I "born for this"? Am I, to be crude for a second, horny for it?

And... no, I don't think I am. Or, at least not in the way the hiring panel was secretly looking for. Because when someone's real horny for this kind of work, real sopping wet for it you see, having a deep specialized knowledge in everything is just a way of life for them, as easy as breathing. The people who got the role didn't need to think about the overly specific questions that got sprung in the interview, because they (in some cases literally) were doing that work in their sleep, spending their free time reading AWS press releases and examining the differences between AI agents. The kind of software engineer that was in demand here, and maybe in demand everywhere (in which case I'm cooked), is absolutely horny for it. And that's... just not me.

While it's difficult to be told that you aren't "cut out" for your current career despite literal years of hardwork and being actually quite good at it in practice, I'm kind of relieved to have found this flaw in myself while still relatively early on. There's this Oscar Wilde quote that I've returned to a lot over the years that goes, "If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward." If I wanted to be a software engineer, I have no doubt that I would become one, but in truth I have no idea what I want to be. I hope that means I'm living "the artistic life", but I think that will be up to those who outlive me tk decide.

Lord willing, and if the creek don't rise, I will continue to be gainfully employed in the role of "software engineer" for the foreseeable. I will get to keep engaging in the bits of it that tickle my brain, like reproducing strange bugs and planning for traffic spikes and fixing issues to make my colleagues' days easier. But "software engineer" is not what is written in my heart, and I hope that it is not a term that will appear in any eulogies of me when my time comes. To me, it's a job to have for now, and I'm happy to let others claim it as their life's calling. I would like to find my own one day, and hope that I can leave behind something good even if I don't.

There's a thing that happens when you move timezones that no one really talks about. It's always there, but I find it's especially potent this time of year; when the days are shorter and the light dims to a constant cool grey. It's "the night shift".

Specifically what I mean by that is that, when you move far enough away from the important people in your life, every day starts to feel a bit like picking up a new shift at work, trading a 9am-5pm for a 9pm-5am. Your sleep schedule starts lining up with when your friends and family are at work, and you live for the little glimmers of time when you're awake at the same time as them, swapping stories over your dinner and their breakfast (or vice-versa). It can be a lonely thing, especially times like now when all of my friends back home are living the daily reality of a government crashing in around them. I'm sure for many of them think I disappeared or "got out", if they noticed at all that I'm no longer online at the same times they are.

But I don't say any of that to be sad about it, even if I am sometimes. Putting a name to it helps. I worried for a long time that people stopped reaching out because they resented me or my decision to move away, or maybe I just wasn't interesting anymore, but it's never anything like that really — most people don't think that way — it's just The Night Shift.

The temptation of The Night Shift is to lean into it; to stay up later than you normally would to see who logs in, to wait an extra few minutes for that friend to reply. But if you're in The Night Shift like I am, I'd encourage you to resist that as much as you can. Unless you have a long-distance community with very strict schedules, waiting for those messages that may never come can lead to more sleepless nights than you can afford this season. Certainly more than you deserve.

Instead I think the answer to the loneliness comes from the oncoming Autumn/Winter season we're rapidly approaching. When the common squirrel or magpie feels the temperature drop, they start building their little hidey-holes, their treasure chests of tasty treats that will help them survive the darkest months, and come back to reward them in the Spring. They know, in whatever instinctual animal form of knowing, that this practice is the stuff of life itself, and the preparation should be long and careful if it is to succeed at all. The same can, and I'd argue should, be a practice for us.

Even though our phones and laptops and tablets and watches can send messages across the globe instantly, we know from our experience in the Night Shift that expecting an immediate reply is purchasing an express ticket to the land of disappointment, on the cable car of self-inflicted rejection. And we know that that's no one's fault, but in the moment our feelings often override that logic, especially in the cold and dark. But, if we can flip that around and work slowly and intentionally at the practice of community, we can change the script from a defeat to a marching advance — building the messages up like Cold War secrets in a spy's dead drop, lying in wait to be received by our counterparts abroad. Changing the quick "hey" into poems and essays and love letters that say "yes, we're still here! we still care! and we know you do too."

It's... stupid, I know. Writing all of this is a bit of a faff and it's my way of saying yes, I'm still here, and I still care, and I know you do too. It's a hard time to stay in touch, especially when we're oceans apart and life is so much more difficult now. But I think we can do it if we do it slowly and with kindness for ourselves. We're all just doing our best.

Let us turn our tweets and skeets and snaps and bleets into acorns for the Winter. Seeds for the Spring. Letters from the Night Shift.

New Year's Resolutions! They're a real crapshoot for me if we're being honest, and I've tried a half-dozen pretty jerk-off-motion ways of calling them by other names over the years. Big fan of the Theme System idea of having yearly themes instead of explicit resolutions, but I could never make that stick personally. I've also done yearly recaps instead to see if I felt better about annual retrospectives than look-aheads (I don't). But here I am back to plain old resolutions, declaring to the world that these are things I want to do in the next year, and releasing myself from any judgment if I don't get around to all of them for whatever reason. Hopefully, I think, putting some of this down in writing will spur me into action six, seven months from now when I've lost motivation again.

Writing

I've started working on a book! I'm a couple thousand words in and have an outline I feel good about already, but this coming year I want to set aside dedicated writing time to finish it up.

Music

I used to play music, and don't so much anymore, but would like to again! This will require a bit of change in my home setup, as there's not really a place to play without disturbing neighbors, but hopefully with some good headphones I can make this happen.

Sport

I've started working out again recently, and want to get into a sport next year. Specifically, I'm really itching to lift/throw heavy things?

Styling

I feel strongly that Spring should come with a bit of a wardrobe shake-up for me, specifically leaning into more femme fashions and pieces that make me feel actually sexy over just presentable. Some skirts, some low-cut shirts, and showing off my arms and legs more will hopefully be in the cards soon.

2026 is also the year I want to start experimenting with makeup! I know myself well enough to know I won't like wearing lots of it, but there's little things I want to experiment with to shake up my daily look.

Drag

Related to the above, I really want to try performing in drag this year! I think I'd enjoy it, and I think I'd be good at it!

Community

While I'm so glad that I've found queer people at work that I can spend small amounts of time with, those interactions are very much limited to the office, and I don't really have a community in London that I can share life events with yet. I want to change this, get some out-of-office friends in my area, and feel like I have a support network physically nearby (even though my remote support group is the best and I love you all, you're just an ocean a way is all). I'm in my 30s so I'm (as is my millennial birthright) not sure how to do this at all. I know a couple people who know a couple people involved in the local drag scene, so I'm wondering if that's secretly my way into checking off a few of these things at once.

Huge birthday party

My birthday is in June (every year!) and for my 35th I want to throw a big, fuck-off birthday party with a theme and costumes and prizes and merch and everything. I've already started drawing up some plans, and I'm about to start roping friends into contributing.

And I think that'll be my year! Fingers crossed I get at least a few of these things done.

Just thinking about what kind of blogging I want to do this year, and I think it's two things: I want to blog less seriously, but do it on the laptop instead of my phone. Originaly I came up with this whole system by which I could write on my phone and post from wherever, but in practice I think that made everything feel weirdly more and less formal than I want it. So... fuck that.

I remember reading somewhere (probably Instagram) that Millennials need big screens for big purchases, and won't buy flights or things like that on their phones, and while that is cringe in a uniquely Millennial way (the last generation capable of shame) I think I'm OK with that being true for writing.

Other than that, 2026 is off to a good start! I've got a tiny little diary (physical paper!) to help keep track of what I do each day, because 2025 felt like a blur, and I've done a nice little refresh on all my electronic devices to get a fresh-ish start to the year. Next week I should be getting some parts to do a final repair on my old GameBoy Color so it can be my commuting buddy again, and then I should be all set up to have a low-stress re-entry into the daily grind.

Toodles!

Hey all — been a little bit since I've blogged, felt like I should check in. I've been thinking about you, I promise! It's just with everything going on in the world, it's tough to feel like my little posts are worth writing. Also the weather is shit — whoever decided to start the new year here really messed up. But, you know, maybe this can be a small distraction. Here's a bit of what I'm working on lately:

Website / brand redesign

I've loved have a working spreadsheet as my personal site, but after adding the blog, and starting on the book, and I'm looking at starting up my YouTube channel again, it's not the most marketable. So I'm back in the CSS mines with a design I'm really enjoying, that feels like me, and the plan is to have that carry over into my visual identity everywhere else. It's exciting! Just... slow, especially as it's hard to be productive in this time of year -slash- state of the world. I'm pushing to have at least the website done by the end of the month.

More games and PICO-8 projects

I've been getting back into PICO-8, and really loving it! It's really relaxing to have something with really specific constraints while also providing all of its own tools, as it means I can put together something with graphics and sounds and music without having to overthink any of it if I don't want to. I've made a couple smaller games that I'll embed below, and I'm working on some slightly bigger ones that I'll post about next month. I even made a game as a birthday present for a colleague, which I'm keen to do more of this year.

TYLERCON 2026

My birthday's not until June but I've been deep in the planning process already, as this year I'm determined to finally make good on my dream of having a huge birthday party that's halfway between a tech conference and comedic summer camp for adults. I'm turning 35 this year, and I'm roughly the same age as the World Wide Web (also turns out I'm exactly the same age as EarthBound), so the theme of the event is "Celebrating 35 years of Online Excellence". I'm designing merch, there'll be a website, multiple talks and activities, the whole shebang. I've gotta lock down a venue soon. 😬

Work

Over at LEGO.com, I'm working on a variety of quality-of-life improvements to the Wish Lists features! This started with changes to back-end data, so now the retail side can do things like review how many people are wishing for a product before it comes out, and now I'm focusing on the front end and pitching a bunch of changes to make wishing easier and more useful. Of course I've also got to build this stuff as well so I can't go too crazy, but it's pretty positive so far so hopefully I'll be able to get a lot of it done this quarter.

YouTube / Podcast???

Speaking of work, I've been ramping down the various internal talks and hosting roles I've taken on there, and will be focusing on doing that kind of thing in my free time instead! Specifically, I really want to get back into making YouTube videos and showing folks how tech stuff isn't scary and how to use the digital tools they have at their disposal already. Things like spreasdheets, basic website development, PICO-8, all the stuff I've been interested in this whole time. A few people have also asked if I'd do a podcast, so maybe that's on the table as well! What would you like to hear me talk about?

So naturally, I uh... I made a spreadsheet app with it:

I'll put together a video walking through the hows and whys soon, but for now I think it's enough that it exists. It's silly! I've got a little gameboy-shaped emulator that it runs beautifully on.

And it proves a point that I'm keen to make as often as I can: practical digital tools like spreadsheets do not need multi-million-dollar teams to be useful. If I can make a spreadsheet app that runs in PICO-8, a system almost explicitly not built for it, you can make the app you need with what you've got access to. More on that soon!

Well, I say "new year" but it's mid-February... no, I'll allow it.

I've got a new home page, check it out! It's inspired by Popular Mechanics guidebooks, one of my favorite things to spend hours on as a kid (which... explains a lot).

For fans of the old page, never fear! I've saved it over yonder, and will work on some improvements down the road.

In Frank Herbert's Dune, Kylie Jenner's boyfriend the Kwisatz Haderach points out that "whoever can destroy a thing, controls the thing." And in fact in the book's later stages (there's a movie version don't worry), Herbert's protagonist pulls a reverse-Christ and turns the spice melange (the galaxy's superdrug and seemingly only intoxicant) into water through the power of generational mommy issues and phallic imagery, thus demonstrating his power over the spice by destroying it. Sort of a trick you can only pull once, but OK. Maybe there's a Connecticut Yankee angle I missed in the sequels... Anyway,

AI! Not just a buzzword to get you past the first paragraph, but in fact a Chalamet Haderach of our very own — a messianic figure for the 21st century, brought about by the power of generational mommy issues and phallic imagery. Some of us have seen it firsthand; its Voice is miraculous, its Works a marvel. All for a low, low price. Oh, did I mention the price? Never fear: AI embraces tradition with the return of Indulgences, invisible tokens to be purchased with Real American Dollars (TM) and converted directly into answered prayers. So load up, lock in, and feel your need for things slide away, into the murky depths of the beforetime. Have a question? You've got an answer. Writing an email? Already sent. Oh, you need Art? Movies? Video games? No sweat, fam. Feed me those sweet tokens, watch me gulp 'em down, and out pops whatever you goddamn please. Would you like a Cadillac car? Or a guest spot on Jack Paar? How about a date with Hedy Lamarr?

My intense, painful crush on Hedy Lamarr notwithstanding (god-damn!), the instant satisfaction of an AI "anything app" is the ultimate siren call of capitalism. Its proponents, the sailors who swung hard into the shoals of ChatGPT and Claude and Copilot, return to dry land with tales of gaining new abilities without need for practice or training. A fleet of self-proclaimed artists, musicians, writers, and thinkers coming home to bewildered families, who are mostly "just happy he found something he enjoys."

And a lot of them, truly, do enjoy it. They talk endlessly about the things they can do that were previously kept from them, like how they never used to draw because it was too difficult, or write because it took too long. These tools they've found present a world in which they can simply jump to the result they dreamt about, without the roadblocks of study or critique. So many who had been held back by an unkind word in their childhood are rediscovering a love of artistic creation. And not just creation, but creation of something that looks professional! In some cases they're even getting jobs with it, becoming professionals themselves! Say what you will about the average, middle-class white men and their terrible moustaches (you know they are), but there is something about this turn at the Artificial Intelligence genre that presents a marked difference. Like when Sleep Token released their third studio album Take Me Back To Eden in 2023 — it wasn't the first time that a couple guys put on masks and played prog metal with pop and R&B influences, but people were really starting to take notice.

Here's the thing about those guys, the AI guys: no matter their intentions, their altruistic goals, their "ethical usage" of the water-chugging leviathan of machinery powering their new passion, they have to pay to play. Now that they're locked into a system that grants them their wildest desires, missing a payment or running out of tokens would cut Samson's hair, and maybe... worse? As someone who's avoided getting deep into AI tools I can't properly imagine this, but there must be some kind of phantom limb feeling of not having AI access, after getting used to it for a year or more. That feeling like... you can picture what you want, but you can't make it happen. Like a hand you forgot was amputated until you reach for your favorite mug.

There's some of you reading this now — I have an undying reply-guy voice in the back of my head — reading this and thinking, "Oh come on, it's not that serious." But I don't think it's fair to brush aside people who feel like they've come to rely on something in order to live a fulfilling life. It's easy to brush it aside as a phase or a misguided attempt at finding purpose, but at some point we have to start taking people seriously when they tell us that they've found something to believe in. Especially when that something comes with a monthly bill. Because, while yes that does mean they could miss a payment, it also means that the company which takes those monthly payments can decide (or get decided at) to close the tap. Forcefully removing artistic creation ex nihilo and replacing it in nihilum with a difficult to describe, but noticeable void.

Now, looping back around, we understand that this means they also control the thing. And the "thing" in this case is what their users understand to be art and its many forms — your drawings, paintings, writings, songs, movies, so on, so forths. They control the end product of these arts for their users, as that is all they produce. You cannot ask an AI to help you experience four years of theatre school, for example, but it can write a three-act play about your father as though you did. For the people I've heard from and spoken to about AI, they know that the artforms they're pursuing with Claude or Suno are often exercised by people who have spent years on training and practice and repeated failure — all things they, the geniuses, can circumvent with their new tools. They — maybe even you — believe that the end product is the art.

I'm hopeful that my tone here is clear enough that you can hear that this belief is an incorrect and dangerous one. But I also want to make clear that if you believe this, or know anyone who does, it is not your fault. When we celebrate great artists, when we go to the cinema to watch great works, when we stream Dune 2 on our big-screen TVs, we do it because the end product of the art is so breathtaking. We see the final edits and we are astounded by their beauty. We are told by our friends, our family, our newspapers and social feeds, "Wow — now that's art."

My friend, I have excellent news for you: that is not art. What you see on the silver screen or hear in your Bose QC2s is content. And there's an important difference.

Content, by its nature, can be bought and sold. That's how you're seeing it! Someone bought it, and believes they can make a profit by showing it to you. Sometimes that looks like Netflix temporarily leasing the rights for a film, and serving it to you in exchange for a monthly fee. Sometimes that looks like Instagram "allowing" you to post a video of your dog, in exchange for all of your friends watching a 5-second ad right after liking it. I mean, fuck, I'm sure someone's profiting off of you reading this exact blog post, but it sure as shit ain't me. AI models are trained on this stuff that's bought and sold, so they produce things that can (if we ignore ethics for a second) be bought and sold in turn. The people who have grasped AI tools the tightest seem to do so because when they tried to make art previously (if they tried at all), they failed to make content. They failed to make something commercially viable, something which was not bought and sold, which did not receive critical acclaim, which will not be written about in the history books, and they confused that for failing at art.

I hate to be a "the dictionary defines 'art' as" person, but truly if you look up any definition of the word, you'll always see the words "activity" and "work". Action and process are intertwined with artistic creation. My other favorite word to use here is "pursuit", because sometimes you have to chase your art, and sometimes you never catch it.

"Wait," I can hear you typing in the replies again, "what do you mean 'you never catch it'? How is not making art an acceptable end point of making art?"

This is another confusion between art and content, and one that I struggle with all the fucking time (it's why I don't post much anymore, for example). The words "work" and "activity" and "process" and "pursuit" are so often used in the definition of "art" because those are the art. Art is not always meant to produce a spectacle — sometimes it does and that's OK — but it always evokes a change, and that change is the point. That change happens whether you like what you made or not, whether other people like it or not, no matter what materials you used or how much time you spent on it.

I... this is getting a little woo-woo, I feel like I need an example to ground us. Is that OK? I think we should make an art together. Go ahead and edit this spreadsheet. Yeah go on, whatever you like: change a column width, color in a cell, write a curse word, whatever floats your boat in the moment. This won't feel like art at first, but consider:

If you answered "yes" to one or both of those questions, you've successfully done art! You are an artist! Now... do it again!

To keep being an artist, to keep succeeding at art, you must drop the notion that art is something that is only valid when it's finished. Arguably, art is the least valid when it's finished – it is the process, the try-it-and-see, the experimentation. When you engage in it, you may not be able to sell whatever you made, but you grow every time. You learn what you like and don't like. You learn what your friends like and don't like. That learning lends purpose to the next thing you try, and the next, and it's the trying that makes us human.

And if your friends never like the art you make that way, guess what? They're telling you that they would rather pay some company for a quick hit of content than be absolutely fucking stoked for their friend engaging in the art of being human. What kind of friend does that sound like?

So... I don't know, this has gone places, I should wrap it up. When I talk to you about why I won't willingly use AI tools, and why I'm concerned about what AI's doing to us as people, please know that that's why: you are already an artist. You're doing fucking great. All AI does when it comes to art is try to convince you that art is something it's not, so they can make you reliant on them, and take your money. It's not complicated.

If you're worried about what you can accomplish without AI tools, do yourself a favor and watch at least the first ten minutes of Fast & Furious 8: The Fate of the Furious. Yeah, it's content by my own definition, it's truly not art, and it's not about AI, and it's only loosely applicable here, but it fucking slaps and you're my friend and I care about you so I think you should watch it. It doesn't matter what's under the hood; the only thing that matters is who's behind the wheel. Are you behind the wheel?