Holiday doldrums. Or, why haven't I posted a lot lately?

Some scattered reflections on the outgoing year, and soul-searching for the future.

My employer essentially shuts down each year from before Christmas until after the new year. This year, that meant by taking 3 additional PTO days, I am in the middle of enjoying two full weeks off of work.

Normally, that gets my fingers itching to post a lot. Last year, we had the imminent onset of the Presidential primary, and lots of fuckery around that. And I was in the throes of what to do about the revelation that active Nazi substacks were being (well) monetized and the glib and cackhanded response from the leadership team at Substack was to sniff at the air, continue their 10% rake, and fuck all the concerns of the wider audience.

I split the dummy, and moved my professional pages to Ghost, and kept this here.

Now, I am in the blearghs. Many reasons.

• The election took a lot of wind out of my sails. I knew we were screwed as a country, I just didn’t realize how screwed.

• Work has gotten insanely busy. I now lead a team of 6, soon to be 7, am getting some coaching and mentoring, but reality is that it is taking a lot more mental toll.

• I have turned to playing more guitar. It is one escape that I can do at the drop of a hat, and it brings me joy. No, I am not a great player, but I play to make myself smile, so mission accomplished.

• Whilst I am getting glee watching the internecine battles between True MAGA, and the Broligarchs, I have to wonder what net effect this will have in 2025. Not good I am sure, but we bought the ticket, we take the ride.

• At the end of the day, I worry about the AI mania that we are amidst. Not because I think it is good enough to take my job (it isn’t and nothing I have seen to date makes me worry too much), but because management and executive shitheads will cram it in and “make it work¹” to justify wiping out jobs that for 70ish years have been the lower rungs on the ladder to the middle class.

So, where is Sweaty going with this post? He doesn’t really know.

The election

Head exploding

I have been much more subdued in my rhetoric since the fateful night that DJT² won cleanly the election. This is not because I have suddenly gone MAGA or blue-MAGA, but because the trends show that the asnti-incumbent bias, as well as a lot of people who the Democrats assumed would turn out as they did in 2020 to defeat the orange toadstool decided that “nah bro, Eggs are too expensive, so off with his head” or some such shit.

The reality is that a lot of the 7M vote advantage that put Biden over the top in 2020 weren’t newly uncovered Democrats. No, they went to the polls to vote against Trump, with the horrors of his handling of the Covid pandemic³ in stark relief.

But 4 years is a long time for anyone, especially a low propensity voter, to remember. The number of times I saw journalists elicit potential voters in the run up to talk about how wonderful things were 4 years ago (2020, pandemic, lockdowns, no vaccines, over a thousand deaths per day, and hoarding of basic staples like flour, toilet paper, and dried beans).

No, I knew deep down inside that it was going to be a difficult election, and it turns out that my trepidation was correct.

Now, I am seeing chaos from the Trump camp, and even less cohesiveness on the Democratic side. There is open trench warfare where the far left continues to lob bombs and follow the “stolen election” theme that the Trumpers clung to like pesky TP stuck to your shoe after you walk out of a public bathroom for maximum embarrassment whilst the Democratic machine continues to clutch their pearls, draft thousand page policy drafts, and press released for the wizened legacy media that reaches dozens of interested voters.

And I think to myself, why bother? I mean besides as a way to work out some of the rage that I have from these developments …

I think I will sparingly write about politics in the new year. It was a wild ride in 2024, and a lot of the shit that is coming will be worthy to write about. Just not by me⁴.

On the music front

Circa 2002, I am on the left, playing at a friend’s holiday party, a wild bash in the Santa Cruz mountains

I still play nearly every day. I fire up the Helix, dial up a tone that I like and make music for me.

In the way back time, I really tried to sound like all my heroes of the 1980’s, and that led me to chasing magic.

But when the Pandemic hit, and I was working from home 100% of the time, I began making time every day to play.

Additionally, along the way I stopped trying to sound like Eddie, or Yngwie, or Warren, and to play to make me happy.

And that works.

It also helps that I am now in an economic position to be able to buy the toys/instruments/amps/effects that I want. Yet, I find myself reaching for my Martin 000Jr acoustic, and one of my three Harley-Benton’s 99% of the time. They just feel right. (but I pulled the Charvel off the wall, and man, do I still love that neck.)

That said, I will continue my search for great artists on Youtube and to write about them here. Some of the best comments I have gotten over the last year have been on music posts, and that deeply makes me happy.

AI Thoughts

I remain a skeptic that the current crop of Generative AI will continue to improve and reach “cognition”. This is mainly because it is pretty stupid.

That said, I need to understand more of it. I have installed it on my gaming rig (a beefy AMD CPU with oodles of RAM, and an RTX4070Ti GPU) the Meta open sourced chatbot, and their 70b training set. I want to learn enough to make a chatbot that I can train (technically it is called RAG, or Retrieval Augmented Generation) with all the text from the 181 original Doc Savage books/stories⁵ and see if I can have a discussion with Doc or his aides.

Because that would be a cool use for the technology.

That said, I worry that the barn door is open, and the executive class is salivating like Pavlov’s dogs upon hearing the ding of the supper bell at the possibility of hollowing out marketing, technical writing, and even a lot of the mundane software work.

And the products just aren’t that good for this yet. That will not halt the transition, you will just start seeing shitty text appear, and perhaps some of the former staff writers will be contracted to tighten up the AI slop that is spewed.

My field, Product Management, is already embracing it, and I am seeing some absolutely shit market assessments that are shat out by the chatbots but being touted as the finest gold on the planet.

Wrapping it up

Well fuck, I am at nearly 1,500 words and I could easily write another fifteen hundred, but I will pause here.

Today is the final day of 2024, and if I can get off my ass, I will go get my last haircut of the year.

Then I will plop down on the couch and watch some truly terrible movies (the Sword and Sorcery collection of 4 films is currently in my sights, and the Deathstalker pair of movies is really bad, unless you like middle aged villages with women having perfect breasts, stylish coifs, and on point makeup. Yeah, it is cheese).

Tell me what you would like to see in the new year. More posts on music, or politics, or just general observations. There’s going to be an epidemic of bad actions and activities, so I will never run out of subjects to write about. But it does get trite after a while.

Oh, and Fuck Elon Musk.

1. Badly I might add

2. From the Urban Dictionary: DJT

Designated Jizz Towel. Used for getting the jizz off the end of your cock or your girl's stomach, asscrack, vagina, back, tits, etc.

Used multiple times so as not to dirty other cleaner towels. Also used mostly when out of tp or kleenex or socks.

Boy: "Oh shit, I just blew my load all over your ass."

Girl: "QUICK! Get the DJT before it gets all over the sheets!"

Boy 1: "Oh man, I hope my mom doesn't find my crusty DJT!"
Boy 2: "Why don't you just stick to kleenex man?"
Boy 1: "I'm going green dude! DJT's are reusable!"

by LillyGranger April 27, 2010

3. My original draft of this had a typo and I called it a “mandemic”, and that caused me to chuckle softly.

4. We shall see if I stick to my guns on this.

5. The copyright for the original Doc Savage texts is held by Conde Nast publishing, but those fucking wankers sit on it. So about 17 years ago I found versions of all the original works scanned and pumped into the MSFT eBook format, LRF, and I cleaned them up, and repackaged as ePubs so I can read them on my iPad. If you would like a copy, drop me a note at geoff@sweattspice.com and I will get you a link to them.

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