Month: January 2026

When indeed!

I was never a huge fan of They Might Be Giants, at least not enough of one to actively follow their career, hence I never heard this until now. Someone posted it on Bluesky today, and just, FUCK. It is so relevant to the current moment and a certain individual that I can’t believe this song is actually fifteen years old and not actually about That Guy. It predates the full horror of That Guy by years, so much so that he wasn’t even a threat to the world at the time. And yet the question contained in that title is one that I’m sure billions of people keep asking about That Guy every day. Prophetic stuff…

Ars gratia AI?

I neglected to note the other day the funniest story I’ve heard from the art world in ages: a man, one Graham Granger, a student at University of Alaska Fairbanks, randomly went into an art gallery, and took offence at one of the exhibits, which was a series of Polaroids made by another student in response to suffering “AI psychosis” after using a chatbot as his therapist. Granger took such offence at this AI art thing that he STARTED EATING IT. Apparently this wall of Polaroids contained 16o images and he managed to wipe out 57 of them before finally being dragged. And now there’s an interview with him (“CW” is the interviewer):

CW: So your act wasn’t premeditated?
GG: No, I didn’t know about the exhibit before that day. And then I saw the AI piece and it was just—as an artist myself, it was insulting to see something of such little effort alongside all these beautiful pieces in the gallery. It shouldn’t be acceptable for this “art,” if you will, to be put alongside these real great pieces. It’s art that has zero substance. Not zero substance; I mean it’s a very personal work, right? It’s art that takes away from its own substance by not being made by the artist himself. […]
CW: What are your personal thoughts on AI, specifically in art?
GG: I think artificial intelligence is a very valuable tool. I think that it has no place in the arts. It takes away a lot of the human effort that makes art. If art cannot be improved upon by criticism, it’s hard to call it art. And there is an argument to be made that you can criticize your AI art by changing the prompts and generating more images to pick from, but that work doesn’t compare to the criticisms that a real piece of art would receive if you critique it.
CW: So your main problem with it is that it doesn’t process criticism?
GG: It’s not the only problem. There’s a whole host of things. It depends on your definition of art. I say AI isn’t art. I know a lot of people who would agree with me. I don’t think there’s any perfect argument that can be made for this, because no matter what you say somebody will come up with a counterpoint because at its core art is subjective.
However, the process by which art is made is oftentimes more important than the finished product, and if the process of making your art is just typing a prompt in, it just takes away from the accomplishments of other talented artists. And it really hurts the practice of art by commercializing that finished product.
CW: Do you have any qualms about the fact that AI art is made by scraping other artists?
GG: Yeah, I mean, that’s part of why I spat it out, because AI chews up and spits out art made by other people.
CW: So during your demonstration, you didn’t swallow any of the exhibit?
GG: I swallowed some of it. I had really been spitting it out near the end. I didn’t want to make too much of a mess, but I also didn’t want to have to spit it out in the back of a police car.

This is amazing. Needless to say the “creator” of these pictures is… unconvinced, shall we say, by these arguments—obviously it was a very personal work for him—but when asked why he kept using AI for his art after his clearly negative experience with it he didn’t exactly offer an answer. You could, I suppose, see Granger’s act as a product of “AI psychosis” itself, but it’s one I’m rather more sympathetic to than the artist’s work… In any case, I feel that somewhere the ghost of Marcel Duchamp is looking at this situation and regretfully wishing he’d tried eating the actual Mona Lisa rather than just defacing a postcard of her…

Coalition splits again…?

David Littleprick appears to be taking his ball and going home again:

The Nationals leader, David Littleproud, says the federal Coalition is now “untenable”, blaming Sussan Ley for this week’s damaging split with the Nationals, as Liberal MPs say the opposition leader’s position is badly weakened by the chaos.
Wednesday’s resignation by three Nationals shadow ministers quickly escalated, with Littleproud and the party’s entire frontbench walking out. Littleproud confirmed on Thursday the party would sit separate from the Liberals when parliament resumes, ending decades of partnership.
Already under pressure over poor polling and a messy first six months in the job, Ley could face a challenge as soon as February. Liberals speaking on the condition of anonymity conceded a challenge by Angus Taylor or Andrew Hastie was increasingly inevitable due to the Coalition split. […]
Former Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull was blunt, telling ABC radio the Coalition fight was “just making them more unelectable than they were before”.
“The bottom line is this: the Liberal party, to form government, needs to have the National party because it needs to have those regional seats,” he said.
“It also needs to win back seats in the city, which had been thought to be their biggest problem, but now they’ve lost the National party.
“But I think when they survey the scene, it looks like just a smouldering wreckage, doesn’t it?”

I don’t know. The last time this happened, the Coalition was back together only about a week later… but also the last time this happened, the Coalition hadn’t split for nearly 40 years, and this time it’s the same people squabbling and it’s only eight months since the last round. As for Sussan Ley’s leadership, well, she’s a woman leading the Liberal Party. They were never going to permit her to go far anyway. The real question, I think, is about Shittleproud’s leadership, cos apparently some Coalition sources reckon he could be as screwed as Sussan; maybe Colin Boyce is finally going to get his long-held desire… I’ve no doubt they’ll all be back together again sooner rather than later, but in what form? Maybe Barnaby Joyce’ll jump ship back to them from One Neuron if Littleproud does go…

Whatever happened to Peter Dutton?

I was just thinking the other day about how we haven’t heard much from the erstwhile leader of the opposition since the last election, and lo, here he comes again:

The release of the Liberal Party’s review into its disastrous 2025 election campaign has been delayed because former opposition leader Peter Dutton claims elements of the report are defamatory to him and his staff.
The ABC has confirmed that Mr Dutton and other key players were given the report ahead of its release, which is usual practice.
However Mr Dutton has claimed in response that releasing it in its current form would be inappropriate because it contains claims about him and his staff he believes are defamatory, and has suggested its release carries legal risk for the Liberal Party.
The party’s secretariat has now held off on releasing the report in order to deal with the issues Mr Dutton has raised — with some believing he may sue the party if changes are not made. […]
The ABC understands Mr Dutton has told the party he is worried that his former chief of staff, Alex Dalgleish, is unfairly targeted in the report, and that his staff deserve protection. […]
One senior Liberal told the ABC the party’s review of its 2022 election loss was also critical of then-leader Scott Morrison, and accused Mr Dutton of holding himself and his office to a different standard.
The threat of potential legal action by a former party leader is also unusual and exposes a rift within the party.

I’m just wondering what might be “defamatory” in a report like this. I mean, the fact remains that the Coalition failed terribly at the last election. Someone has to take responsibility for that at some point. If Dutton thinks the report is unfair to his staff, then he can take it in their place, as he should anyway; he was a catastrophe of a candidate that even Australians weren’t stupid enough to vote for, and Australians voted Abbott and Morrison into power so that tells you how bad Dutton was. Ultimately YOU failed, Peter, rather than the people working for you… maybe let them decide if they want a legal battle.

Shittering prize

If we learned nothing else from this week in politics, it’s that there actually is one person with even less capacity for embarrassment than Mushroom Cock, and that person is Maria Corina Machado, Venezuelan opposition leader, seen here giving his majesty her Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his commitment to Venezuela’s oil reserves… er, freedom or something. Yeah, she actually gave him the fucking thing and he’s kept it, BECAUSE OF FUCKING COURSE. What else would the cunt have done? This is all despite the fact that the Nobel committee swears up and down that she can’t actually do that cos the Nobel laureateship can’t be revoked, shared or transferred, and I bet there’s going to be some discussion very soon about changing that first detail if nothing else…

…And this grotestque show of fawning STILL won’t work for her. Trump’s got the prize, which is what he cares about, but Delcy Rodriguez has the leadership of the country and the oil, and that’s even more important. I have seen a conspiracy theory (which I personally find at least somewhat credible) floating about that the whole Maduro business was in fact instigated by Rodriguez and others in the United Socialist Party, that they’ve been working secretly with the US government for months to get the latter to remove Maduro on their behalf and let them take over, with obvious recompense and favours for the US. I think Machado’s going to have to pay Trump a lot more than that if she expects him to install her as his puppet instead.

In any case, the whole stupid affair has started producing memes of people giving Krasnov prizes on social media, and if we have to be stuck with generative AI then let it be used this if nothing else. The most inspired one I’ve seen so far is this little bit of genius:

Milli Donilli: fake singers, fake president

Parenthetically, this is not actually the first time this bullshit with the Nobel Prize has happened; in 1943 Knut Hamsun, famed Norwegian author and, er, Germanophile, shall we say, gave his own Nobel (for literature, awarded in 1920) to Joseph Goebbels in recognition of the Dritte Reich’s efforts to save Norway from itself in the early 1940s. As Mark Twain said, history may not repeat but it does rhyme, and that’s kind of what I’m seeing here…

Such bloody awful poetry

Oooh, I just perpetrated another mix! An assortment of 80s stuff this time round.

    1. Big Audio Dynamite, C’Mon Every Beatbox (ext. vocal version)
    2. Bush Tetras, Too Many Creeps
    3. The Smiths, Frankly Mr Shankly
    4. REM, These Days
    5. Public Enemy, Rebel Without a Pause
    6. My Bloody Valentine, Thorn
    7. Sonic Youth, Eric’s Trip
    8. Alan Vega, Cry Fire
    9. China Crisis, King in a Catholic Style
    10. A Certain Ratio, Life’s a Scream
    11. The Sisters of Mercy, Possession
    12. Empty Quarter, Crucial Lover
    13. Single Gun Theory, Exorcise This Wasteland
    14. Bauhaus, The Sanity Assassin

Not now, Lovecraft

In the midst of everything else happening at the moment, I feel that the last thing we need right now is the discovery of the city of the Great Race of Yith and the half-polypous horrors from even greater antiquity that drove them to flee millions of years into the future and rendered the creatures their minds had inhabited extinct. Alternately, maybe extinction is exactly what we do need just now…

Actrually, the real story is just as interesting as Lovecraft’s (if not potentially a bit more alarming in a different way); this geologist reckons it’s actually a buried crater about 300 miles across, which would make it nearly three times the size of the Chicxulub crater which is thought to have been where the asteroid that eradicated the dinosaurs hit. If this was an impact crater (and unfortunately there’s no real evidence yet that it is, apparently that’ll require a lot of obtain either way), the rock that made it must have been a motherfucker of a thing to leave that much of a crater. Gilkson reckons that if he’s right about it being an impact crater, then it probably hit around 445m years ago, or about the time of a mass extinction that wiped out 85% of all life on Earth… but did it leave room for a species of “immense rugose cones ten feet high”? And are we better off not knowing for sure?