I was out of work for over a year and jobs have been coming in again since two months. The many indications that this unholy shit bubble is finally bursting has me smiling, dancing and singing “The robot is dead, the robot is dead!”. I hate the AI hype with a passion, not just because of my work, but because of the ghastly slop we’re being exposed to everywhere online. I hope it disappears quickly into the same hole NFTs when to fuck off into.

Now before the billionaires come up with the next stupid hype can we at least eat a few of them?

Here’s another poem.

Downvotes due to AI art

AI wastes resources

Environment destroyed

Jobs killed

Fascism installed

Please do not use

Let poetry speak for

itself

• Gardening. I’ve had no gardening land until yesterday so I have filled my terrace with pots and bags of soil. Very proud of my (admittedly shitty) beans and tomatoes. I’ve made raised beds out of rubble in my backyard. A friend has offered me to use some of her land, so that will be next to plant.

• Cat. I was really awfully depressed so I adopted a sickly kitten to have someone else to care for. It helps. The cat doesn’t give a shit about world politics. It’s now growing more healthy and becoming too powerful for my furniture. When I wallow in bad moods it will let me know without delay. It’s currently sitting on my lap making sure I don’t get too much screen time.

• Community. The local community is poor, rural and divided into (very conservative) locals and foreigners (who come here to live in more natural settings than where they come from). Since I’ve turn woefully old I feel like I am now the adult in the room, so I try to work on bringing people together, and a few others are doing the same. That’s how we fight the fascists and xenophobes who seem to be everywhere these days. There was a small group of at least four different nationalities banging pots for Gaza in our tiny town yesterday. When it feels that there is not enough community I will come up with some way to create it through common activities. Two or three people meeting and doing something together is a success!

• Bread. I bake sourdough bread because the local bread sucks. Some people buy it from me and enjoy it very much, and that makes me happy.

That said I am often nearly succumbing to all the doom out there. There have been days in the last few months when I was really not wanting to live anymore. I then return to one of the points above and carry on, and the doom passes. I’ll keep doing that, sometimes out of spite, till I’m booted out of this place or this life.

All of the points I wrote down connect with caring for human and non-human life (even the sourdough is a friend!). One more point I should add is ceremony/prayer, which sounds stupid to the average anarchist/atheist, but it has become important to me and connects me to ancestors and landscape. The land is alive and my work is to participate in caring for the land and its inhabitants - a lot of that philosophy is borrowed from native and indigenous people. I’m not caring for others because some god tells me to, but because being a good neighbor to people, plants and animals makes everyone involved more happy.

All I do is purposefully small. No big ambitions that would eat me (been there, done that). Just my tiny self doing my best. Plans and ideas don’t have to be - shouldn’t be - big and sparkling.

Don’t use AI. Huge negative environmental and social impact just to create slop. Not going to play your games, sorry.

Touch grass is what we need to do. I do as much as I can in my surroundings - raised beds, gardening, and sharing stuff with people. I work as much as I can in my local community. That’s how we beat this shit and keep our souls alive.

This mindset is how we arrived at the shit show we are currently living in. “Everybody is using the Torment Nexus these days, guess I’ll have to use it as well”. Guys when are we going to resist the slop and enshittification taking over? Whatever happened to small scale DIY culture resisting the big buyout?

Yes I will fucking freak out. The planet is on fucking fire, people can’t afford basic groceries, species are dying - and some idiots insist in spending water, using energy and stealing people’s works using some fascist tech-bro’s doombot because AI is supposedly fun or convenient. I hate AI with a passion for all the reasons reasonable people keep explaining again, and again, and again: the environment, the copyright, the dark fascist agenda behind it. Soon enough I’ll lose patience with stupid AI bros who are going ‘but it’s just harmless fun’ and just screech into their ears at full volume in a last desperate attempt to wake up their shrinking GPTchat-fucked brains.

No, it’s not just a trigger. It’s just really that bad.

If I see a face like this I know I don’t want to watch the video. Problem is there are almost no videos left that are not some kind of engagement bait with cranked up emotions and very little substance. I remember when I used YT for learning about stuff. Now I just scroll through idiotic thumbnails and sigh.

I found out that the random weed in my crappy backyard is feverfew (tanacetum parthenium), a medicinal herb against migraine and menstrual pain.

I feel you, I know what you mean. End of the world - as we know it. I hope that while everything comes tumbling down we re-learn how to be in community with others, humans and non-humans. I hope we re-learn how to be and not spend so much energy. The tiredness people feel these days seems to indicate that the great mother is taking care of that for us - nothing we have to do, just give in to feeling tired. In the meantime, I am coming to accept that together with many others I might die in this process of unraveling, but that’s not important.

Slow down, do less, achieve less, buy less, worry less. More casual hanging out with trees, birds and lizards in my neighborhood. Eat the rich.

I’m a translator, and we’ve been plagued by MT (machine translation) for years. A year ago translation jobs stopped completely and all I was offered was “Rating AI results”. I refused all of that garbage and turned temporally very poor. I went to shovel manure like a proper peasant to not have to engage with this shit. A year later translation seems to bounce back a bit, and I suspect art will do so as well. Most people can’t stand this slightly-off uncanny slop everywhere. It’s not just us artists and writers who react with almost visceral hate to this life-less soul-less crap. The hype will die down (don’t forget to diss it wherever you can in your free time!)

I believe a lot of the wellness stuff is to keep us functional in a sick world (I have used mindfulness to be more productive before and it has driven me into burnout), so I really don’t want to get obsessed about the wellness or fitness game. I also don’t want to be a fucking wreck at 55. Not always as chill as it seems. 😅

I’ve been looking into local plants as coffee substitutes, and made my own malt coffee once by sprouting and roasting grain. At the moment these are too time consuming for me, but I might get there at some point. I really don’t like being addicted to this colonial stuff, it’s wrong on so many levels, not just health.

I’d say it’s a solid 50/50 these days. If I force myself to follow ambitious plans, anything to do with what others might think of me, or socialize too much when I actually should be resting I will certainly regret it. I try to access my feelings and find out what really matters to me. Those are the things that make me feel more alive. Hard to find the difference but I’m getting better at it. Most FOMO can go fuck itself these days.

To create is even more important now. To fight this machine, this soul-less destruction. I’m more of a crafts person and only rarely a writer. Everything I do can be done by a machine faster and cheaper, so there is seems to be no reason to keep making it. A lot of the time I stare at my little felt figurines and my plant-dyed yarns and wonder why I even bother, and lately have stayed alive only because it would make my dad and my kid sad. But every now and then someone’s eyes get a certain sparkle when they see what I do. There’s life in it. My wonky basket contains life and love - the plastic basket with the fake wicker pattern does not. People at the moment can’t afford to buy my basket instead of the plastic one, but it has to exist to keep the real craft alive. We crafters, writers, artists, musicians need to keep alive the knowledge of how to make the real things. Some day it will matter again, I believe at some point the machine will eat itself.

Not very well, to be honest. I have replaced one or two of the many coffees I drink every day with herbal infusion because my joints have started rattling in the last few years. I add vegetables to my food often, and also use the herbs I grow on my balcony. I pray to the goddess that she permits my coffee habit for another few years. But also, I very rarely touch ultra processed foods, don’t drink soda or any other sugary drink, avoid stress (even most stuff considered ‘fun’ stress, like holidays and events) and try to not pollute my mind with too much bullshit. I don’t like being obsessed or make myself feel guilty about living in a very healthy way. Most of my wellness practice consists of doing whatever I feel like doing without worrying too much about it.

Got some of this as well, started with pain in the throat last week, I slept a lot for two days, came down with migraine a day after that, and the last week I have been mentally really unwell feeling more anxious and depressed than usual. Something is going round.

Yay low cost nuclear reactors! /s