I’d like to reiterate what I said a while back: integrating LLM-based tools – chatbots, copilots, agents, etc. – into all corporate and personal workflows is outright dangerous. Even when run locally, most LLMs in use are trained and tuned by corporations that are now deeply in bed with a lawless authoritarian takeover of the US.
People who are removing all references to minorities, women, and equality from your public spheres will not hesitate to ask corporations to tune centrally-controlled LLMs to censor the same from your work.
In short, everyone involved in the current AI bullshit is deeply, deeply tainted by involvement in a goddamned fucking coup of the US government, and should be treated as such. And on LinkedIn a whole lot of “important businesspeople” are still burbling about how this bunch of idiots, coup leaders and rapists are actually brilliant business leaders and how AI is going to revolutionise the world and change everything. What the fuck is going on?
It gets much worse! Apple is phoning home every 15 minutes with personal data. Remember how Apple boasted about on-device “AI� That was a lie. They’re sending private and personal data off device without warning or consent.
And don’t buy new Apple gear if you can avoid it at all. I know how difficult that can be, especially with (effectively) iPad-only apps like Procreate knocking everything else out of the water. I don’t know what I’d do if my 2018 iPad Pro were to give up the ghost, but I’d still look for a refurbished item first. For laptops, there are plenty of good alternatives in circulation, and while my 2015 MacBook Pro is now making ominous rattling noises, I see no reason to replace it with a brand new device.
The Death March of Human Knowledge Continues apace:
This is to remind you that I’m a big proghead and a big enough fan of Jethro Tull for that to have its own category on my blog. Jethro Tull have yet another album coming out in March, the third in under four years. Since I haven’t written much about either The Zealot Gene (2022) or RökFlöte (2023), I want to put down a few notes about where I stand with those albums and my expectations for the next one:
Conversations I no longer care to have: anything to do with Ian Anderson’s voice or the fact that Martin Barre isn’t on those new albums. Ian Anderson’s voice is what it is, the subject has been done to death; the only thing I have to add to that is don’t go to the concerts or you’ll find that the accommodations Anderson’s made in his current writing fall apart in the live context. On record, the performances are acceptable and no alternative will ever be on the menu. And while I miss the lyricism of Barre’s playing, his absence is nowhere near the biggest problem of the post-2022 albums; indeed, the other guitarists are often the best things on them, especially Joe Parrish-James who put some life into RökFlöte.
As I wrote back in 2023, I didn’t buy The Zealot Gene because I didn’t want to encourage Ian Anderson to put out more mediocre Tull albums. When it turned out that that wasn’t going to work because Anderson had a plan for a multi-album cycle, I relented and bought RökFlöte anyway. As a result, I’m a lot more familiar with RökFlöte than with The Zealot Gene, and as it happens, I do think RökFlöte is the better album of the two. I have some hope that Curious Ruminant will be better than RökFlöte, but I don’t think the upward trend will be more than modest.
Anderson’s biggest issue is that he’s become a very fearful writer and producer, who would rather work within narrow parameters of what a Jethro Tull album should sound like than surprise or offend any of the fans. His second biggest issue is that he tends to write all the lyrics at once in what appears to have been a single session with little in the way of revision, and so it’s all a bit… adequate, I guess. Acceptable but not inspiring. Not a lot of original or surprising ideas, musically or lyrically. Again, there are exceptions and they’re mainly to be found on RökFlöte: the intro that sounds like it belongs on a Black Metal album, and the track “Hammer on Hammer”, which has a bit of simmering anger underneath the surface.
And that brings us to the first single from Curious Ruminant, called, curiously and I guess ruminously, “Curious Ruminant”. Or “nosy cow” as I’ve been calling it. Here it is:
What strikes me is that it seems to be a little more ambitious than the group has been lately, at least musically. The lyrics come across like Anderson just put preparatory notes to music instead of developing the ideas a little more, but musically, everything gets room to stretch a bit. There’s some acoustic guitar by Anderson, which surprised me, because as of 2023, he was telling interviewers he was fed up with acoustic guitar. Maybe those parts were among the bits that were recorded in 2007.
Ah, yeah, about that. My one prediction about the album is that rather a lot of it will actually turn out to be from 2007. Ian Anderson spent the back half of the noughts (honestly, most of his time after 2004 until 2011) working very hard on things that really didn’t amount to much of value, if they went anywhere at all, and that wasn’t really like him. Surely at some point, he must have made something interesting, and we’re getting to hear some of it now. Keyboardist Andrew Giddings and drummer James Duncan get credited prominently in the press releases and it’s likely that this reflects their prominence on the album itself. Officially, the band still features John O’Hara (keybeard) and Scott Hammond (drums) but the other pair get almost equal billing.
Anyway, musically, this is probably my favorite 2020s Tull already and a lot of that is due to new guitarist Jack Clark sounding different and being given space to shine. But I think Anderson may be trying a little harder this time. I just hope he has managed to revise the lyrics on the other 8 songs a little more.
I visited my parents and came back with a story that I decided to tell on LinkedIn, because that place seemed to be the best match for it. Because no platform should be the only place where my writing is available, here it is in full.
My dad told me a cute story the other day. We were talking about applying for jobs and sending cover letters. He said he’d only ever sent two cover letters in his entire life: once right after he graduated out of school and the second time after he left the military. He got accepted on the basis of that second letter, at a company whose name I remembered: Grabowski & Poort, a construction engineering company. He worked there until he retired.
Before he got the job at Grabowski, he did show up in person at two other construction companies to present himself. At one of them, as he walked up the stairs, he spotted an attractive young lady bearing a coffee tray. They noticed each other but both went their separate ways. Weeks later, they both met again at a dance, she reminded him of that encounter, one thing led to another and four years later, they married. Mom and Dad are still married to this day.
I normally don’t like or trust nostalgia, not for the era I myself grew up in and definitely not for earlier times. And it’s worth remembering that Mom and Dad were both born during a historically brutal, worldwide war, that my mom grew up in poverty during the 1940s and 50s, and that society was organized in ways that allowed my Dad to become the hot young engineer and stopped my Mom’s career at being the coffee lady until marriage.
But that time was also a time when two normal people, not born into great wealth, could have their lives sorted out and their paths laid out for them by the ages of 24 and 23. It’s a massive contrast with the worlds of work and dating today, and it explains a lot about why they turned out like they did. Four job applications in total, boom, you’re hired for life. You meet this person twice, boom, you’re engaged. I do envy them for that, a bit.
But what I envy Dad the most for is that he didn’t have to write 120 cover letters.
No AI was used in the creation of this story. LinkedIn can’t make me!
Last week, I found out that I had actual people (probably) following me on Medium, and I decided to give them something to read. Since I don’t believe any platform should be the only place where any of my writing is published, here’s the whole thing again:
It wasn’t the first time Medium notified me that I had a new follower. It wouldn’t be the last, I’m sure. But I had some time to kill, because I was too drowsy this afternoon to do anything more involved, so I decided to find out how to login to Medium and check. And that was the day I found out 1) I didn’t need a password to log in to Medium; and 2) not only did I have 29 followers, but somehow, I was following over 60 people.
And I have no idea how any of that happened!
I don’t use Medium. I’ve never posted an article on Medium. To the best of my knowledge, I haven’t ever replied to anything on Medium, though I’ll admit my memory may be playing tricks on me. I haven’t read an article on Medium since they started registration-locking everything, and only very sporadically in the five years before. By any reasonable definition of ‘here’, I am not here. And yet, 29 people are following my empty profile. And my empty profile is following 60-odd people. At least I know some of them, so it’s possible I hit their follow buttons or consented to importing my contacts at some point in my life. If so, I have no recollection of it. R
29 followers doesn’t seem like a lot, but for the amount of effort I’ve put in, it’s an astronomical return. I have only 43 followers on my Patreon (25 paid, though) and I’ve posted there a few times a month for almost 8 years. I don’t have 29 subscribers on YouTube, and while I’m not super-active there, I do spread the link to my channel around from time to time.
And the website that houses my webcomic Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan, a body of work that stretches back 34 years and consists of 1300 published updates? Just worked its way up to 64 subscribers. So when I find that there are 29 people on the planet who signed up to watch me do nothing, I’m intrigued. I want more of that. Whatever is causing this, I want to subscribe to its newsletter.
Speaking of newsletters, mine is doing OK at about 275 subscribers, but it’s not here, it’s on Substack. I kind of want to move it out of there, but for now it’s still there. While I was learning more about Substack, I read this post by a growth hacker that said you could grow subscribers more effectively by not posting too often. After all, people subscribe because they like what you’ve already posted, but a new post may offend them, or bore them, or reveal that you’re not who they thought you were, or remind them that you subscribed as a result of a cross-promotion and you’re not getting as much out of it as you thought you would. Posting new stuff is risky.
So you grow more by posting less. I thought that was a growth strategy for cowards and wannabes. But the fact that I got 29 followers on Medium doing nothing at all? Kinda shows that it works, doesn’t it?
Who Goes Maga?– Talia Lavin, The Sword and the Sandwich. This appears to have vanished from the internet and I couldn’t even find it on the Internet Archive. The concept of this kind of piece, based on Dorothy Thompson’s “Who Goes Nazi”, has come under some criticism but I found it useful as kind of a mirror. I have things in common with the people who would never go nazi, but also with some of the people who would. So I try to work on the traits that make me susceptible and draw strength from the traits that protect me.
Yay! Newgrounds has published a guide to detecting AI music on its portal, and presumably elsewhere. This is great ear training!
AI Foreclosure – Audrey Watters, 2nd Breakfast Watters argues that AI forecloses on our future by tying us to the past, and to complete all-encompassing surveillance limiting our options. What I find striking is the examples that Reid Hoffman chooses to illustrate his thinking that AI empowers:
“Imagine A.I. models that are trained on comprehensive collections of your own digital activities and behaviors,” Hoffman writes. “This kind of A.I. could possess total recall of your Venmo transactions and Instagram likes and Google Calendar appointments. The more you choose to share, the more this A.I. would be able to identify patterns in your life and surface insights that you may find useful. …* [I]magine a world in which an A.I. knows your stress levels tend to drop more after playing World of Warcraft than after a walk in nature.* “
Like, yeah, you would imagine a worle where touching grass would be worse for you than digital media.
I found out that I had actual followers on Medium, a site where I’ve never posted anything, and decided to have some fun with it. If you’re willing to log in for it, read “I am a ghost“, my first-ever piece on Medium. It won’t tell you anything you already know but now I wonder, will actually using the platform make line go up or down?
I left Substack once, came back and now want out again. I’m trying out Steady, because it’s located in the European Union. Since they’re doing the rewards for referrals thing, I might as well share that link here in case you’re also looking for a workable off-ramp from there:
Whoa, it’s been a hot minute. Hope I still remember how to do this. Folks, I got discouraged by how hard I found Hugo to use and develop sites with. So now I’m returning to WordPress for blogging, using the old site configuration, because waiting a whole hour for static pages to export from it is still time better spent than implementing the same workaround for the same intractable problem every time I write a new post, only for the workaround (and the whole site) to fail the next time I write a post. For all its faults, WordPress works. I also got overwhelmed with my projects – a monumental effort to make sure my webcomics ended 2024 in better shape than they started the year in. This effort is now complete, though I have my doubts about how successful it has been. Or rather, my wallet has doubts.
Anyway. A quick update on my life and those projects.
I’m looking for work, because I’m broke. I’ve been stalling on this while the massive projects update was ongoing, but while my wife does have an income, in this dark timeline, we can’t count on it being there for us when we need it.
Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan has been fully retransferred to my on domain. The Comicfury website is still my main point of outreach to readers, but all comics are now on Reinderdijkhuis.com with a delay of a few days because I am only uploading static pages exported from WordPress and the process of exporting them has to be manually started and takes more than an hour to run. But apart from the very newest comics, at any time everything is there, at a larger image size and with character galleries and the beginnings of a cast page.
Tess Durban got some updates, then stalled. It turned out to be very difficult for me to draw and I got stuck on every single page in the third storyline.
Greyfriar’s Isle is back as a bi-weekly (every other week) feature on Planet Nude. This is my big success of 2024 and I hope to build on it some more. Planet Nude is on Substack, and the publisher requested me to have a presence on Substack as part of the agreement to publish. This has led me to do some other things through Substack as well, though I’m now once again looking for a way off there that works for me. Currently, I’m republishing Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan: Feral there as a scrollable comic, which works pretty well.
My YouTube channel has had a minor revamp as part of my preparations for February Album Writing Month. Nothing serious because I’m not adding videos on any regular basis, but I did add the official album releases for The Hooded Crow’s old recordings to my front page so they’ll be more visible to my fellow FAWMers.
Finally, as a response to the, er, grim times we live in, I’ve decided to reduce my dependence on American companies for online services and technologies. I have fully canceled my Facebook and Instagram accounts (because Mark Zuckerberg is an absolute tit) and will be canceling my Dropbox and iCloud accounts, using pCloud as a substitute. I was going to continue slowly migrating all my email from Gmail to Proton, but that hit a bit of a snag as Proton’s CEO kissed the ring. My plan for moving off Substack also involves finding a EU- or EEA-based substitute and my plan for buying new computers and tablets involves only ever buying refurbished items.
Anyway. Dark times. The state of the world is probably the worst I’ve ever lived through, so far, and the best I’ll ever live through again. There’s no point in me elaborating but this simple fact will inform many of my link posts.
I know this is a rather dramatic headline and that some people might incorrectly assume that I’m mad about some particular piece of hardware or software, but it should come as no surprise that I’m hopping mad at Tim Cook for how he’s ingratiating himself to President Trump again. The President has done, and will continue to do, harm to marginalized communities. Harm was a promise of his campaign and underscored by this President’s earlier efforts the last time he was in office. The last time he was in office ended with his supporters storming the Capital Building because he was so desperate to steal the election. There isn’t a “wait and see†or a “maybe he won’t†to excuse investment in this morally-bankrupt, tin-pot dictator.
Project 2025 wants to criminalize trans literature. Here’s a game plan for keeping our stories alive.
A very thorough long read that could be a model for other groups that are threatened by Project 2025, which is, well, everyone. But it would not be right not to highlight that this is first and foremost trans people’s project for the survival of their own culture and that any benefit to cis people is incidental. There is, however, a section on what cis people can do.
The world’s wealthiest man stood at a presidential lectern and gave a Nazi salute and thousands of Republicans cheered. We all saw it, we all heard. It’s an unmistakable gesture, one of the most recognizable in the world, and it was given in as deliberate a manner as possible, so all the Nazis currently celebrating it did not mistake it. To debate what it was resembles debating whether a rock that fell to the ground after it was dropped fell to the ground after it dropped. Yet the debate was forced, all the same, by people committed to rejecting the evidence of their eyes and ears. It’s the same debate we have any time any Republican makes an overt pitch toward Nazism. The debate, I think is the main point—the fact of the debate, I mean. The fact that there is a debate demonstrates the impunity over definitions of reality that Nazis demand and now enjoy, that one of their most prominent adherents can give the most famous signifier of their allegiance in the most obvious way without enduring even the consequence of having it named for what it is.
Finally, a video. This one is “Breathe” by Alpha Alpha, from 1997, remixed in 2024, with live footage from the 1997 Rooie Oortjes Festival. Hans Dekker – vocals; Danny Barnhoorn – bass;Â Johan Dijkhuis – Drums; me on guitar. A very spiritually uplifting song. It’s not actually fun for me to play on the guitar, but it is one of the best songs that Hans has ever written.
“We get that execs are excited about Google’s future,†another question reportedly said. “Why should we be excited, when we might get laid off and not be around to share in that future? If we lose our jobs and equity grants, it’s cold comfort that Google is succeeding off our hard work, and we don’t get rewarded for it, but you do.â€
The story quickly went viral, because things like this have happened before, because it feels absurd, and because we as a society deserve it for putting internet connectivity in everything and for not securing those devices.
„Querdenker“, wie wir im allgemeinen die Szene der Pandemie-Leugner nennen, die große Überschneidungen mit Impfgegnern und Rechtsextremen haben (auch bei Befürwortung von Putin und dessen imperialistischen Angriffskrieg), lagen immer falsch. Sie haben von Anfang der Pandemie an stets mit Manipulation, Lügen, wirren Verschwörungsmythen und überzogenen Behauptungen gearbeitet, haben stets Wissenschaftler, Politiker (und auch Faktenchecker) attackiert und bedroht, sogar zu Gewalt, Mord und Terrorisierung gegriffen.
It’s Official, Apple Kills Web Apps in the EU – OWA. This seems bad considering that at least one organisation I’m a member of uses a web app for its digital membership cards. This was done as an economization measure but replacing web apps may be more expensive to them than the amount that they saved. Never trust a platform not to sell you out.
Gelekte documenten bewijzen tot nu toe onbekende connecties tussen Rusland en de PVV – Laurens Groeneveld, Follow The Money, in Dutch, from October 2023. Surprise! Our local populist fascists who won the last elections (as opposed to the elitist fascists who have been pushed back to the margins for now because their leader is nuts) are Russian assets.
AI undermined my old job and then destroyed the market for one of my creative pursuits that I’ve been trying to make some money on. Now it may contribute to keeping me unemployed: AI hiring tools may be filtering out the best job applicants– Charlotte Lytton, BBC Worklife.
Financial Times, paywalled so hard you can’t even see the byline for free, but honestly, all you need is the byline. The climate scientist in question is Michael Mann and I hope he gets to rub that million buckaroos into the faces of the people who falsely accused him of fraud for years (the defamation case took 12 years to resolve).
Last week’s new old The Hooded Crow track is one of my favorites: “Ravine”, a fast, driving, riffy rock song with a lot of movement in the middle section.
Unfortunately, at the time of writing, it’s been out for two days and it’s already clear that whatever YouTube audience my brother has built with his weekly posts does not agree that it’s great. As I’ve said before, the potential reach for this sort of thing – lyric videos for demos created by an unsigned band almost 30 years ago – is brutally low, but the pattern for the last few months of The Hooded Crow posts has been that each video gets viewed about 150-200 times. Most of those views happen in the first day, and the counter basically comes to a standstill when the next video is posted and the previous one ceases to be the latest one. Compared to that low expectation, “Ravine” still laid an egg, standing at 61 views after just two days. So the YouTube game is even harder than I thought. (Update: embed now uses the YouTube Music release powered by Routenote)
Another Sunday, another video. I’ve decided, for the time being, to keep a similar production and release cadence to my brother’s posts of old material, until February begins, when the plan is to speed up.
It’s another mostly-electronic instrumental that I recorded on OP-1 in 2021 or 2022, did a few mixes of and then decided it didn’t have enough going on to be viable. But in November last year, I got the idea of making an animated video for it. This is not that video! Because animation is hard and time-consuming and it’s going to take a little longer for me to get there. I am, however, working on it, and designing characters and settings, in-between all my other projects.
Recorded on OP-1 with built-in presets (the fake koto sound), third-party patches from OP1.fun (the live drums) and sampled MicroFreak sounds that I made myself (the drone and the chanted voices). Drum parts were fingerdrummed and unquantized; what with the track sounding like some sort of procession, in which the drumming wouldn’t be all that precise, I decided to embrace the slop. This was a bit of a problem when I made the mix for this video, decided to add bass and guitar to it, and cursed myself for allowing the drums to be that sloppy. I also doubled up the MicroFreak and added one extra sample at the end to give it a little more kick. I wonder if anyone will recognize it.
The original mix reminded several people, including myself, of the self-flagellating monks from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, so naturally I wanted to reference that in the art. On the animation end, that quickly evolved to the monks hitting each other with their wooden boards, instead of themselves. On the character design end, as mentioned before, I had my brother’s postings of old The Hooded Crow tracks on my mind, so when I was struggling with creating eye-catching designs that worked with the monks’ robes, I naturally returned to the old idea of crows that are literally hooded. I included some of my preparatory drawings in the video.
The track was mixed in GarageBand; the video was made using iMovie. The reason I’m using these tools is because I’m a complete simpleton, but also because I can be sure that I will be able to work on any Apple product that I happen to have in front of me (I have mostly stopped using third party plugins in GarageBand for that same reason – give me a consistent setup between systems any day of the week). However, after making only two videos in iMovie, it’s clear to me that iMovie and GarageBand are not of the same caliber. While both programs are a good way for people to get started, GarageBand is very versatile and allows users to keep discovering features. It grows with the user’s experience level. This is not the case with iMovie, which is very limited and often behaves in ways that are contrary to what a GarageBand user has learned to expect. I may have to use something different with more of a learning curve, and if so, it probably pays to make the switch sooner rather than later.
I posted something on YouTube. Because my brother posted a filler The Hooded Crow track from the first demo, called Spontaneous Recording Take 6, I decided to spend some time finishing a track that uses samples from that old track, which I recorded late in 2021: Double Vodka.
As you may know, for the past 18 months or so, I’ve been running this blog as static pages exported from a WordPress site that lives on my local hard drive, which I generate on a weekly basis and then upload to a server. If that summary didn’t make your eyes glaze over, I have two posts about my experiences:
Unfortunately, since I posted those, things have become a lot more complicated. WordPress 6.4 in combination with updates Simply Static broke Simply Static’s link-following ability so that sites built with Comic Easel no longer exported. That was the end of my project to move my remaining webcomics over to new self-hosted websites under reinderdijkhuis.com, because while the alternative, Toocheke, looks slicker, it’s inferior to the older Comic Easel plugin in pretty much every other way. Bootstrap, no built-in transcripts, and the lack of comic updates in the RSS feed were dealbreakers for me once I became aware of them.
But that doesn’t apply to Obsession Du Jour, which is an old-fashioned blog, not a webcomic. But I came to realize, the hard way, that this whole setup had too many moving parts that could break. How did I find out? Why, because they broke. I was exporting a batch of pages from my laptop, when the laptop Unexpectedly Shut Down. When I brought it back up, the MySQL database for the WordPress instances that lived inside MAMP Pro on that laptop was irretrievably corrupted. Well, possibly not technically irretrievably, but I’d have to pay a database expert to unfuck it for me. I was able to reconstruct the posts from a backup from a few days earlier, combined with the parts of the export that went through, but I spent a day getting to that point and double-checking if everything exported correctly from my other machine. And that got me to start thinking about how I might want to run the blog instead. I ended up looking at Hugo, followed some tutorials, looked for a theme, and before I knew it, I had the bare bones of a blog. So that’s what I’ll be using from now on. It’s not easy, but it has fewer moving parts, and those moving parts that it does have are much more accessible. Like, if I want to edit the theme, I can just find out where I need to edit it, because there isn’t the soupy blend of PHP and HTML that characterized the themes in WordPress (at least the pre-Blocks ones; while Blocks are a great idea for themes because they’re HTML-first, the Block editor is still hot garbage for bloggers). So while I can’t rule out running into serious problems with the Hugo-based setup, I’m much more confident that, with a bit of help, I can solve those problems when they arise, which isn’t true with WordPress, and hasn’t been for a while.
On the new blog, I’m building the same categories as on here. I may or may not decide to export the original Obsession Du Jour to Hugo templates, and if so, I’ll duplicate the old posts on the new site. If not, the new location will have a nice, lean archive for a while.
If you’ve read through all of this, you deserve a music video. As it happened, my brother posted a curio the other day: a track called Spontaneous Recording Take 6. Yes, back in the day, we literally came up with goofy ideas during practice and then recorded them in multiple takes as if they were proper compositions. The players who didn’t take part in the original goofyness added samples and found sound later. The result ended up on our first demo as a hidden track, and is now posted on YouTube with “Hidden†status, whatever that means. I can still see it; if you can’t, I can’t fix that. Which is why it’s a fitting goodbye for a setup with problems that I can’t fix.
