Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 3/7/25

You Gotta Be Effin’ Kiddin’ Me edition

Another week, another full bottle of Tums chewed in the hopes that everything would somehow even out and not turn into such a melodrama, complete with mustache twirling scoundrels, willful misinterpretations of easily documented current events, and a sense that this newsletter’s playful name may come back to bite me on the ass before the end of the decade.

Those of you who are fortunate enough to live within the radius of a Regional State-Issued Apocalypse Bunker, please make sure your dues are paid up and your paperwork is current. If you need to re-apply for your security clearance badge, do it now, because all of the badge-making supplies come from Canada and there’s no guarantee we’ll ever get another order from them ever again. We’ve tried several times to acquire materials from Mexico, but they keep telling us that we don’t need no stinking badges, so that’s pretty much a dead end, too. We’re currently seeking a country that doesn’t have any exploitable, up for grabs, rare mineral rights that we can do business with. We’ll keep you in the loop on this.

Love is Love

I am always pleased to perform weddings for the members of the LTBQ community, as the local Justices of the Peace are, collectively, 900 years old and a little behind the times. This was taken a few weeks ago but this is worth sharing, because everyone in the picture is happy.

Artificial Ignorance

If you asked ten different people to define “A.I.” to you, there would be no consensus. You might get two people to give you a definition that is similar, but no one’s answer will agree with any other, nor would they be correct.

Of course, there are memes galore to help us understand what AI is. Most of them have something to do with Skynet or The Matrix, which is fun, in an “everyone likes a spooky story” kind of way, but gives the Brobots of the world way too much credit. They themselves are using AI interchangeably (well, they were; because “AI” has become muddy and problematic, they have started naming their algorithms cute names like “Firefly” and “Gemini” and “Copilot”) and intentionally trying to confuse and convince us that the future is right here, right now.

I think we all know that the only true measure of a truly evolved, futuristic society is a two-part question: Do we have Jet Packs? And Do we have Food Pills? Until we have those things and can use them in our everyday life, we might as well still be in the Victorian Era.

That’s not to say this isn’t a big problem. Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Large Language Models (LLMs), and Generative AI are all being touted as the next best thing, so much so that our Silicon Valley Overlords are already charging us for the privilege of helping them teach their branded AI module for them. Thank you, sir, may I have another?

Is there anyone here, right now, who doesn’t think this all sucks? Anyone? Are we all pretty much in agreement that what we are getting isn’t good and in fact, has only made things worse? I’m not just talking about whenever you do a web search or try to buy something; I mean, it’s also contributing to our rising sense of dissatisfaction and stress to realize we’ve been led down a kill chute into a slaughterhouse floor and it’s only a matter of time before the big pneumatic railroad spike come shooting into our brain, rendering us inert bags of meat for the consumption of the upper class.

I may be oversimplifying just a tad.

Last week, I mentioned that it’s tough to go cold turkey on tech, since we use it all the time, as an essential utility, but maybe there’s something else we can do. We didn’t ask for social media—we didn’t know we wanted it. And some of us may need it, but most of us could surely do without it. Unless you’re writing a bullshit book report for War & Peace so your sixth grade English teacher doesn’t give you an incomplete for the year, this stuff boils down to interesting toys and not much else.

Things like ChatGPT don’t solve problems; it’s more like a dumb person trying to sound smart. They spit out words and concepts based on mathematical percentages rather than cognitive learning, memory, experience, and education. When all of this hit, a few years ago, I was freaked out, at first. “Oh God, what if a computer can write just like me?” Sidestepping the follow-up question of who would notice or care, I took it upon myself to drop about ten thousand words of my fiction into ChatGPT and then told it to write me a few paragraphs of some kind of generic fantasy thing in my own voice. And it did it, pretty much verbatim. It was, without a doubt, some kind of generic fantasy scene. It was also not stylistically relevant to my work in the slightest. I think it used the word “eldritch” correctly in one of the sentences. Big whoop. But it did not have any of the old Mark Finn razzle-dazzle, if you know what I mean and I think you do. And the day that a computer can duplicate the bingo hopper I call my brain, I’ll happily go sell shoes in a mall.

Perhaps a qualifier is needed, here: programs like ChatGPT and Midjourney can produce things of middling and uninspired quality that, if you were to look at it without the context of knowing it came from a Large Language Model generator, you’d think, “Eh, it’s good enough.” Talk about damning with faint praise. That’s where a lot of AI art falls these days—good enough for your eyeballs to rest on for a second or two before you move to the next paragraph in the 750 word blog post about how much smarter dogs are than we were led to believe. That graphic you did a trampoline bounce on with your brain didn’t add anything—at all—to your existence. You got nothing out of it. Your cognitive biases were quick to inform you that the diet coke of ones and zeros your eyes slid over were, in fact, something in color, maybe a photograph, and that looked pretty much like a terrier in a chair, watching television, so, cool, this is a website that cares about my experiences here, because there’s art, see? We can move on, now. And that’s your relationship to AI Art. How enriching.

Now this AI predictive model shit is in all of the big tech programs; Adobe, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, et.al. Their use in these programs is essentially one of constant interruption. Before you can get to what you were trying to do, the “AI” tells YOU what it THINKS you MIGHT have wanted to do. And you gotta dig through that to get to your answer; if only there weren’t so many ads for similar and related content you had to navigate through afterwards. Google should be ashamed of itself.

Maybe you don’t notice it. Maybe you do notice is and you don’t care. But those of you with a monthly subscription to things like OpenOffice and Adobe Creative Suite now get to pay for this thing you don’t want and aren’t using anyway. It’s almost as if they are trying to get us to subsidize their research and development, huh? And what are you getting for it? There’s nothing it promises that it can actually deliver.

I think these “AI” programs only make sense to the people who are working on them, the guys who wish like hell they’d had something like this in high school and college so they could use it on all of the bullshit assignments they didn’t care anything about so they could fart out the results and then get back to making that fat cheddar cheese, Whoop Whoop! Up top, bros! Amirite?! That’s the target market for this junk.

But we weren’t consulted, were we? Only, we kinda were. All of these programs have these little feedback buttons you click to tell the AI it did a good job. That the summary was accurate. You can see where I’m going with this, I bet. We need to embrace our American-ness and take the piss out of these jokers, trickster-style.

They want our help? Okay. Let’s help. Your homework assignment is to start telling these BigTech Bros that their Billion Dollar Toy is shit. Thumbs down, every time you’re asked. If they want details, just type “inaccurate, unwanted, unnecessary” and hit send. Help them train—badly—their large language models by deliberately feeding them bad data. The more bad data they get, the better.

Oh, and hey...if you get an app asking you to rate it, and you know it’s got an AI module in it—tank the rating. When asked why, tell them. I mean, sure, if it’s something you can do without, then delete it and move on. But we all can’t become Luddites overnight. So push back on this. It’s not all we can do, but it’s decent first step. They aren’t reading your Blue Sky account. They are only looking at the spreadsheets. Let’s give them something to look at.

---

Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

A Thousand Blows (Hulu)

Stephen Graham and Erin Doherty star in a historical crime drama set in 19th century London about the rise of the Marquee of Queensbury’s rules that transformed boxing and the all-women criminal gang, the Forty Elephants.

Stephen Knight is the guy behind Peaky Blinders, so if you liked that show, you, well, I don’t know if it’s a one-to-one equivalent. 1880s London is a squalor, full of gangs of roving thieves, none more brazen than the Forty Elephants, a real criminal gang, fronted by Mary Carr, herself a real person. They operate out of a pub in the East End that also sponsors bare-knuckled boxing matches, featuring a pair of brothers nicknamed Treacle and Sugar. The gang of thieves has a big heist planned with a lot of moving parts, a delicate operation that is in danger of crashing. Thankfully, two Jamaican boxers are new in town and looking to better themselves, so they get thrown into the mix.

It's fun stuff, unless you have a problem with thick accents (you may need captions). Stephen Graham is fantastic as Henry “Sugar” Goodson, a tough as nails bare-knuckle champion who is starting to slow down. Erin Doherty plays Mary Carr and she’s a lot of fun to watch. The Jamaican boxer, Hezekiah Moscow, is played by Malachai Kirby, and he’s our initial point of view character in this seedy little world.

Where this story came alive for me was the historical boxing story, right as the Marquis of Queensbury Rules were being established with the introduction of leather gloves, timed rounds, no hitting below the belt, and so on. If you’re a fan of the Sweet Science, this is a rare treat, because we get to see both East End Bare-Knuckle brawls, with all of the dirty tricks in play, and West End matches at an upscale Athletic Club, with chamber music and champagne flutes. The contrast is striking and deliberate, and I’m wondering if A Thousand Blows is a heist story inside the world of boxing or a boxing story inside the structure of an upper-class heist. Luckily, I’m here for both.

We’ve only got six episodes out of the proposed twelve at the moment. Presumably, the last half will show up later this year. It’s not getting a lot of chatter at the moment. Give it look and see what you think.

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every obnoxious film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”