Welcome back. I was once roped into appearing in a video chat for my workplace wherein I was asked to tell everyone how good it was to work there. The only thing I could honestly come up with was to say ‘it’s really close to home so I can walk to work’.
Upon seeing it the first time one of my workmates said it looked like a hostage video. Then they laughed and laughed. I still looked more human than old Zucko there.
Hi Rick. I think I’m wicked. I can’t ache much for the American fire. The destruction in Gaza from American supplied weapons is many times worse and the loss of life uncountable. And where is Dr Abu Safiye? The photo of him facing down two tanks, surrounded by the ruins of his hospital, is seared on my mind but has not appeared on our MSM. A real, not a virtual, hero.
"Not enough to turn their backs on art, they learned to dehydrate the essence of it on a drying rack, crush the remaining crystals and snort the lot just to achieve an ever diminishing euphoria from the same metric tonne of cultural vandalism."
You describe the Australian summer hiatus so well. I am only just emerging too. Your Zuckerberg explainer is the best way to start my year. The locked sauna , the blind fish, the snake's elbows, thank goodness for you Rick. Our collective sanity is safe.
The emperor has no clothes…and six fingers, and an extra arm. (I had to go to wiki today to find out about accretion disks and Odysseus’s main claim to fame😬).
Pale skin seems to come with the territory. Musk too. Can't see Zuckerberg now other than a blind fish. Such a visual metaphor, of which you Rick are the ultimate master.
'Zuck’s blood oath might not be worth quite so much but it’s certainly left him drained and pallid. Look at that skin tone. It’s the exact colour of that blind fish they found living in a sealed cave system'. :)
Nice exploration into what is surely a ridiculous sign of our times. I believe that more people are going to pine for authenticity as a consequence of these technologies. Their workplace provides nothing even close to genuine interactions, and soon their entertainment, which is supposed to offer a reprieve from superficial reality, is going to be even worse. Social media and news will provide more of the same, and they'll have nowhere to go.
I see this as optimistic. We've been searching for authenticity and humanity in strange places for a long while now. I think we're going to see more people making deliberate choices about how they interact with this nonsense.
Hi Rick, so glad I found you here. Ive read your work (real books) and posts on on othe social media. I'm an artist and writer and have lurked on Substack for a couple of months trying to figure out if it is going to be worth diving in, this last week I have taken the step of exciting insta and waiting to download so I can do the same in FB. Snapchat is making it really hard to do the same (although I rarely used it). Finding your post today is gold as it afirms that creativity and authentic people maybe still able to exist in
HA! I was just saying to a friend that the whole semiotic assemblage of Zuck in this message video is like Trump light - as in a lighter shade of hey, spray me orange. You can see it around the eyes! And the medallion that reads like a solid gold dog-tag. There he is, ready to step in line. So yeah, he sure does look like his owner. I have to say, there's so many curtains being pulled back right now it's hard to know where to look.
I'm reading Rebecca Solnit's Hope In The Dark right now - as a kind of antidote. I'm finding it to be a very emotional read. An updated forward from 2015, originally published in 2005, it's not so much a comfort as it is an energetic prompt to not give in to despair. God help us all.
Welcome back. I was once roped into appearing in a video chat for my workplace wherein I was asked to tell everyone how good it was to work there. The only thing I could honestly come up with was to say ‘it’s really close to home so I can walk to work’.
Upon seeing it the first time one of my workmates said it looked like a hostage video. Then they laughed and laughed. I still looked more human than old Zucko there.
The image in footnote 1 is a hoot. The "cowboy" using his thumb as the trigger finger. AI seldom gets hands right. It's a metaphor for a lot.
Hi Rick. I think I’m wicked. I can’t ache much for the American fire. The destruction in Gaza from American supplied weapons is many times worse and the loss of life uncountable. And where is Dr Abu Safiye? The photo of him facing down two tanks, surrounded by the ruins of his hospital, is seared on my mind but has not appeared on our MSM. A real, not a virtual, hero.
"Not enough to turn their backs on art, they learned to dehydrate the essence of it on a drying rack, crush the remaining crystals and snort the lot just to achieve an ever diminishing euphoria from the same metric tonne of cultural vandalism."
Made my day! Thanks Rick.
You describe the Australian summer hiatus so well. I am only just emerging too. Your Zuckerberg explainer is the best way to start my year. The locked sauna , the blind fish, the snake's elbows, thank goodness for you Rick. Our collective sanity is safe.
Thank you Rick for explaining things I do not really understand. I love the picture of Duke looking so comfortable.
The emperor has no clothes…and six fingers, and an extra arm. (I had to go to wiki today to find out about accretion disks and Odysseus’s main claim to fame😬).
Save us Rick!
The blind fish in the sauna hahahaha
Pale skin seems to come with the territory. Musk too. Can't see Zuckerberg now other than a blind fish. Such a visual metaphor, of which you Rick are the ultimate master.
'Zuck’s blood oath might not be worth quite so much but it’s certainly left him drained and pallid. Look at that skin tone. It’s the exact colour of that blind fish they found living in a sealed cave system'. :)
Nice exploration into what is surely a ridiculous sign of our times. I believe that more people are going to pine for authenticity as a consequence of these technologies. Their workplace provides nothing even close to genuine interactions, and soon their entertainment, which is supposed to offer a reprieve from superficial reality, is going to be even worse. Social media and news will provide more of the same, and they'll have nowhere to go.
I see this as optimistic. We've been searching for authenticity and humanity in strange places for a long while now. I think we're going to see more people making deliberate choices about how they interact with this nonsense.
Don’t understand how it all works but thank you for trying to sort it for me .No photographs of Hugh ?Duke is cute but no substitute for a cute baby .
By the way still don’t understand it but will do my best to avoid it that Ai thingy
Hi Rick, so glad I found you here. Ive read your work (real books) and posts on on othe social media. I'm an artist and writer and have lurked on Substack for a couple of months trying to figure out if it is going to be worth diving in, this last week I have taken the step of exciting insta and waiting to download so I can do the same in FB. Snapchat is making it really hard to do the same (although I rarely used it). Finding your post today is gold as it afirms that creativity and authentic people maybe still able to exist in
cyberspace.
Thank you.
HA! I was just saying to a friend that the whole semiotic assemblage of Zuck in this message video is like Trump light - as in a lighter shade of hey, spray me orange. You can see it around the eyes! And the medallion that reads like a solid gold dog-tag. There he is, ready to step in line. So yeah, he sure does look like his owner. I have to say, there's so many curtains being pulled back right now it's hard to know where to look.
I'm reading Rebecca Solnit's Hope In The Dark right now - as a kind of antidote. I'm finding it to be a very emotional read. An updated forward from 2015, originally published in 2005, it's not so much a comfort as it is an energetic prompt to not give in to despair. God help us all.
No misinformation/disinformation in this excellent essay.
I think you should get yourself a long haired dachshund and name it Liebe
God I love this. Thank you Rick.
Making me laugh and almost cry again Rick. And love the footnotes. (And isn’t Zuck pathetic??!!!)