Last year, it was comments. This year it’s AI. Now, I think if you’re going to blog, you should do it yourself. Using AI for inspiration, I suppose, is okay, but the actual writing? Why bother having a blog if you’re not going to do the writing yourself? The entire point of blogging is to express yourself. That doesn’t happen if Chatty Jeeps does the work for you.

It’s not like coding where you might not have the knowledge to actually do the coding yourself. That is a usecase I understand and support. But,you have to have had the knowledge to set up the blog, and writing isn’t going to be any better with an AI doing it (trust me on that, AI can’t write worth a damn).

So, I’m taking part in Blaugust again. I’m not even going to try to do 30 this month. I’ll be happy with 5 or 10. But this is #1, so it’s a start.

The last time I wrote something, I talked about how I was considering going back to music subscription services simply because I missed their music discovery options. Self hosting was just not doing it for me in that regard. I really didn’t want to go back to paying for music, though. I have spent well over a year getting my own library up and running and properly tagged. It has been a long and tedious journey. But I have a great and huge library, so paying for music again just seemed silly.

So, awhile back, I decided to start self hosting my music collection. I’m sure I’ve at least mentioned it somewhere here on the blog. I re-downloaded my entire collection and more beyond that. Nearly 5TB of new music was stored on my various hard drives. It took months. And by the end, I was pretty damn proud of it.

I’ve been using that system now for months, and I’ve realized that I miss streaming services like Tidal and Spotify. It makes me feel a little dirty writing it, but it’s true. Why?

Last October I posted a review of 11/22/63. In that post I wrote:

This was 900 pages of wasted time. I enjoyed most of it. But the ending ruined every good feeling I had about this book. Why did I read it? Nothing changed at the end of the story. Nobody got a happy ending; not even a smidge of one. It feels like a betrayal. It feels like a sucker punch right to the face.

There is a lot of hype around Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman, and I’ve always wondered why. I knew from the summary that it was LitRPG, and those are hardly ever “mainstream.” I’ll be honest and say that I was never really won over by the hype or the concept of the books themselves, despite having a soft spot for LitRPG novels. I just couldn’t really get myself that excited about a man and his cat going dungeon crawling. Add in that there was some odd rumblings online about there being some sort of romance between the MC and the cat. Those are false, thankfully, but honestly at this point I’d kind of be happy if those rumors had been true.

I use AI for some things. I’m putting that out there right from the start because it will get rid of those people who are so unreasonable that they can’t even be arsed to hear me out.

I get most of the arguments against “Artificial Intelligence”. In fact, I agree with a lot of them. From the environmental and human costs to the apocalyptic possibilities, the arguments make a lot of sense. There are a lot of dangers when it comes to this “AI” revolution, and the corporations who are in charge of this revolution cannot be trusted to do anything but try to pad their bottom line.

Awhile back, Joel wrote about his Inoassis Y1 which is a little iPod-like thing that you can buy to play music. As with most things in life, I aspire to be Joel, so I bought one too. (Seriously, Joel is cool and has tons of ideas, so he gets me into a ton of bad habits like fountain pens. I should probably stop following his blog, I spend too much money as is).

One of the things I’m trying to do with my life is lower the amount of money I spend on things I don’t really need. I call it The Don’t Buy Shit Challenge. I’m actually doing really well with that so far, which I’m proud of. I do have several yearly subscriptions, however, that I still need to figure out what to do with. One of those is TickTick Pro.

TickTick is a ToDo application that I’ve used for a couple years. Technically, I could probably get away with using the free plan, but there are a few premium features that I do use so it has, in the past, made sense for me to continue to subscribe to their service.

I am not a people person. Despite being a YouTuber and now a “professor”, I would much rather be away from people as much as possible. Of course, that’s not very healthy, so I try to put myself out there as much as I’m comfortable with.

But each time I have interactions with someone else, I get very anxious beforehand. I deal with it because I must, but it’s something I’ve felt basically my entire life.