Insert Carl McCoy here

On a lighter note, Threads (which I still check out most days) has turned particularly silly in the last few hours…

So, the weather in the US has been quite foul lately, even for this time of year, and someone somewhere was inspired to develop the idea that the US “government” has engineered the weather to stop the Biblical Leviathan from awaking and to drive it back into its frozen slumber. This is FUCKING MAGNIFICENT, especially cos no one seems to know how it started nor whether (nearly wrote that as “weather” HO HO) the people who started it  mean it or not. A lot of people do seem to be invoking it sarcastically as a meme, but the funnier and sadder responses come from people not getting the joke (if it is one), e.g.:

Well, in spite of my own education (Matraville Primary 1980-86, Sydney Boys High School 1987-92, University of NSW 1993-97, and two TAFE courses 2001-03), I’ve never seen satellite imagery off the tip of Argentina/Chile before because there’s never been any reason why I SHOULD have done. I generally don’t NEED satellite imagery of anywhere, let alone the arse of South America, my interests and activities generally don’t require that sort of thing. I imagine MOST people are in a similar position to me, in that they don’t take a regular active interest in this sort of thing, but when someone shows them a cool picture like this they’ll say “oh, that’s a cool picture”, they’ll acknowledge it positively despite that… and then some prat comes up and screams at them for not being more interested in science.

Then there’s Paula here:

Here’s something else she seems to be serious about:

I think I’ll pass on that offer, thanks. At least some people are retaining their senses of irony:

And this is hard to argue with too:

As a respite from the horrors, this whole Leviathan thing certainly has been one. And, as a final note, this is also hard to argue with:

Up, up and aw-AI?

This won’t end in catastrophe at all.

The Trump administration is planning to use artificial intelligence to write federal transportation regulations, according to U.S. Department of Transportation records and interviews with six agency staffers.
The plan was presented to DOT staff last month at a demonstration of AI’s “potential to revolutionize the way we draft rulemakings,” agency attorney Daniel Cohen wrote to colleagues. The demonstration, Cohen wrote, would showcase “exciting new AI tools available to DOT rule writers to help us do our job better and faster.”
Discussion of the plan continued among agency leadership last week, according to meeting notes reviewed by ProPublica. Gregory Zerzan, the agency’s general counsel, said at that meeting that President Donald Trump is “very excited about this initiative.” Zerzan seemed to suggest that the DOT was at the vanguard of a broader federal effort, calling the department the “point of the spear” and “the first agency that is fully enabled to use AI to draft rules.”
Zerzan appeared interested mainly in the quantity of regulations that AI could produce, not their quality. “We don’t need the perfect rule on XYZ. We don’t even need a very good rule on XYZ,” he said, according to the meeting notes. “We want good enough.” Zerzan added, “We’re flooding the zone.”

There’s several hundred living human beings on any given plane flight, and I feel like settling for “good enough” in this situation could lessen their chances of making it back to the ground alive. Does Gregory want to potentially “flood the zone” with corpses? I don’t know, maybe we overstate the potential problems of this sort of thing, but then again, maybe we have to so that the problems don’t actually ensue?

…

I don’t want to talk about Alex Pretti, cos that’s such an unspeakable story; it was bad enough when the news started spreading before I went to bed last night and, frankly, it didn’t get any better when I got up this afternoon. I refer you instead to Wiki for a summary of things because I don’t want to have to write about it.

There was a rally at which this was taken:

And… I can’t disagree with that. I’ve said before about how much I hate that this regime has made me a worse person because I’m increasingly OK with everyone in it dying. Now I’m increasingly feeling it’s necessary that they do. It won’t end with Mushroom Cock finally popping his clogs (which I expect him to do before 2026 is over), because he will be replaced by someone probably worse. And those people will be replaced too by even worse people. I don’t see it ending except with the absolute destruction of the entire Republican party and everyone associated therewith; as long as the Republican party exists, this will continue. Abolishing ICE won’t suffice, the whole fucking party and everyone it gives a home to has to be destroyed so that it can never return. Nothing else is going to be remotely enough.

And I HATE that. I don’t WANT these pieces of shit to HAVE to die, and I don’t WANT to be happy when they do even though I’ve no doubt I will be. I don’t LIKE being this person. But it is increasingly the person I am, where I wish nothing but unspeakable evil on MAGA from Trump on down to his individual cultists. And I hate that. I hate that I can barely think of MAGA as people, cos that really just makes me as bad as them. I don’t want to say anything else for now. I’m just done, I want to get back to posting comparatively silly stuff.

I forgot to mention this…

Screenshot from Facebook a couple of weeks ago by my friend Matt who, frankly, had the best response to the news. Another friend commented that she’d heard the song and was initially convinced it was a generative AI parody, so I had to listen to it myself, and GODDAMN genAI parodies should feel insulted by that comparison. It is THAT terrible. But the album is evidently not the one he’s spent years pissing and moaning about how he can’t get a record label to release it; apparently this is another one entirely, and the idea of self-releasing the other one has never occurred to him even though Capitol Records gave back the rights to it.

Still, at least some things in Mozchester remain reassuringly the same:

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…