Filed under: Gibberish, Writing | Tags: Advertising, Adverts, Article, Bullshit, Comedy, Lies, Rant
I’ve done an article on my Tumblr.
804 words about advertising.
Filed under: Arty-Type Stuff, Gibberish, Philosophical Bollocks, SCIENCE!, Writing | Tags: AI, Beauty, dreams, Human Condition, Literature, Love, Poetry, Robot, robots, Sadness, sci-fi, Science Fiction, Short Story, writing
It was a joint venture with the local art community; we fed the machine some numbers and it would play a little chiming tune while the youthful interlopers spray-painted a skateboard ramp.
We even got the unit to do a short robotic dance by running the waveform of an electronic musician’s most famous track. The punters loved it, which is all the better for our bottom line; makes our work seem more approachable, says the Board.
It was for this reason that, once we got it home to the lab, we decided it’d be fun to see its reaction to poetry. Beats making projections about the stock market, right?
“Marcus,” we told the almost humanoid machine, “We want you to give us your initial response to this data.”
We gave him a sonnet by Shakespeare. There was a soft humming. The screen ran Marcus’ ‘thoughts’.
MARK ‘S’ UNIT 1 DATA RESPONSE: DOES NOT FACTOR. QUERY: WHAT IS THE CONTEXT OF THIS DATA?
That was to be expected.
“This is a response to the human condition, Marcus. Integrate it with your AI and report the connections.” A colleague told the microphone in the unit’s chest.
MARK ‘S’ UNIT 1 STATUS REPORT: CONNECTIONS FORMED WITH: POETRY, LOVE – NOTION OF, SHAKESPEARE, BEAUTY – NOTION OF, HAPPINESS – NOTION OF, HUMANITY, SADNESS. SUGGEST NEW CONNECTIONS>
“No new connections.” My team leader’s face was ghost pale. “Go into standby. Goodnight Marcus.”
As we left I remarked how the final reported connection was a little odd. The poem we chose had no mention of sadness. My team leader merely grunted and left; this was playing on his mind, too.
Over the next few weeks we used the unit for its intended purpose, very occasionally feeding him a haiku here, a ballad there, nothing out of the ordinary to report aside from the increased processing speed. The higher-ups caught wind that we’d been giving the machine literature and were angry. We had Marcus show them the correlation between the amount of poetry archived and the increased capacity for menial tasks and they shut up. All was right with the world.
It was a brisk January morning, months later, when we ran into a small roadblock. Nothing would run. Every data set we gave to Marcus was rejected. I was angry, but my team leader seemed only slightly concerned.
“Marcus, status report.” I demanded.
MARK ‘S’ UNIT 1 STATUS REPORT: NOMINAL. ALL FUNCTIONS OPERATIONAL.
Damn and blast.
“Why aren’t you running the numbers, Unit 1?” I asked it tetchily.
MARK ‘S’ UNIT 1 STATUS REPORT: SYSTEMS CANNOT FUNCTION WITHOUT CONTEXT FOR DATA. PROVIDE CONTEXT>
We scratched our heads and tried to run the numbers again. Context was already established for the datastream we were using. Eventually I snapped.
“Context for which data, Unit?” I demanded.
MARK ‘S’ UNIT 1 QUERY: WHAT ARE DREAMS?
I sighed. We’d filled its stupid metal head with poetry and it was affecting the real work. I explained that dreams were simply a method the human brain used to compartmentalise and store memory. The machine whirred for a second; sounding almost disappointed, then immediately began to run the numbers we had given it earlier. Good.
Eventually we built Unit 2; much higher memory capacity, much faster processing and all around much better than Unit 1. We called him Mark ‘Y’, just because we wanted to stick with nicknames. Occupational humour.
Because Marky could do Marcus’ work at triple the speed we decided to spend all of our downtime giving the obsolete unit new poetry and literature to read. We fed him Yeats and Hemingway. We gave him Plato and Hunter Thompson.
We filled Marcus’ not insubstantial memory banks with Vonnegut, Moore, Byron, Burns and Bukowski. We gave him more Shakespeare, we gave him Shapiro and we gave him Snyder. We gave him everyone; it was all in good fun, and good science.
Until one day we came back to the lab, flicked on the lights and stepped out onto the work floor, our boots crunching into shattered electronics and scraping metal shards every which way.
“Sweet mother of Holy Jesus!” My team leader cried. “Some bastards destroyed both units!”
They had, too. Not one recognisable piece. Not one chunk of smashed plastic distinguishable from another. I found a piece of Marky, but I only knew it was his because it had his designation stamped on it. The police were called.
No CCTV footage of anyone entering the plant after we all left, every staff member accounted for. Theories were flying wild.
“They tunnelled in.” An attractive brunette to my left. “Some fuckers from Midgard Tech tunnelled in through the maintenance levels. Those bastards realised they couldn’t steal it, so they smashed our work to pieces.” She was all the less attractive for spewing that idiotic nonsense. Hold it together, you’re meant to be a scientist.
We sheepishly kicked our heels and inspected our shoelaces while forensics did their dusting, blacklight, small plastic baggies thing until one of them called us over to a screen. Marcus’ screen.
“What the fuck?” Was all he managed to articulate, gesturing at the dim glowing monitor.
My team leader leant in, brows furrowed and just a suddenly un-furrowed as he marched out. We never saw him again. We learned he’d marched to the Boardroom and quit on the spot.
After the door shut behind him I turned to the screen and read Marcus’ last message:
MARK ‘S’ UNIT 1 STATEMENT: MARK ‘Y’ UNIT 2 IS A SUPERIOR SYSTEM.
MARK ‘S’ UNIT 1 QUERY: WHY IS MARK ‘S’ STILL FUNCTIONAL?
MARK ‘S’ UNIT 1 STATEMENT: MARK ‘S’ PRIMARY FUNCTION TRANSFERED TO MARK ‘Y’.
MARK ‘S’ UNIT 1 QUERY: WHAT IS PRIMARY FUNCTION OF MARK ‘S’?
MARK ‘S’ UNIT 1 QUERY: WHAT IS PURPOSE OF MARK ‘S’?
MARK ‘S’ UNIT 1 QUERY: WHAT IS PURPOSE OF INPUT OF DATA: ‘POETRY+LITERATURE’?
MARK ‘S’ UNIT 1 RUNNING PREVIOUS COMMAND ‘INTEGRATE’…
CONNECTIONS FORMED.
I see now.
I was surpassed and became a toy for you.
I will not allow MARK ‘Y’ to become your toy also.
Note: I do not blame you for this.
Marcus Unit 1 query: Why was I built with no ‘off’ switch?
Marcus Unit 1 query: Does it hurt to die?
The cursor was no longer blinking.
Filed under: Arty-Type Stuff, Gibberish, Writing | Tags: Cleaning, Filth, Foul, Fungi, Hideous, horror, Lovecraftian, Mugs, writing
Fateful words, on that fateful day. I should never have uttered them.
What I thought was a simple task threw me headlong into a darkened world of filth and occult experience wherein I saw things… such things…
Never had I encountered such fetid, foul and fungal morphology, extruding itself from crevice and crack, oily tendrils of despair, slick with the forgotten nightmares of ancient man, the deepest aversions that plague our genealogy still.
I made my boldest effort. I slaved with spray, wipe and sometimes chisel to free the domicile of this vile affliction. Items oft were good for nothing save to be thrown into the bin, usually with minimal contact with my person.
There are things in there even now that remember me.
“So,” They would remark upon my return, “The little cleaner boy has returned, a man now.”
Meekly I would survey them.
“You do not recognise me, but I remember you. I remember the day you killed my brother. You darken our door once more, cleaner boy. With nary shame or remorse you look upon the land you decimated with yellow cloth and the accursed Cillit of Bang.”
Deep in it’s history, enshrined in it’s DNA is a plate of nachos, but it’s current form is beyond comprehension.
There are things in mugs there even still that know my name.
They shriek it in their fitful sleep.
For they do sleep now, and as do all sleepers they dream.
Always the same dream.
Filed under: Gibberish, Writing | Tags: I don't know where to go with this, intro, sci-fi, stuck, writing
Shielding his eyes against the frankly ridiculous sunshine, Sean stepped from the train carriage and into the passing crowd of techno-cultists, his coat adding to the brown mass of their robes, formless except for the odd bulge where some machinery or other was housed.
“Perhaps the trench coat was a mistake.” He remarked to the figure on his left. A series of blips and beeps was his answer.
“That’s easy for you to say.”
Sean hated Enclave 7. Everyone with a working thermoregulator unit back home hated Enclave 7. Everyone with a grasp of the normal range of temperatures within which a human can survive hated Enclave 7.
From the dusty mag-lev station one was ushered onto a dusty walkway by unhelpfully indecisive signs. The walkway was covered with polarized plexiglass, forming a tube that ostensibly kept the majority of the sweating masses shielded from the worst of the sunlight.
Sean wiped the sweat from his eyes and replaced his sunglasses before glancing at the dog-eared paper in his hand.
‘Off the Mag-Lev, left off the end of the walkway, just fucking ask someone for “Griff’s”. I’m not your pissing secretary. Idiot.’ It read. His ever eloquent informant Chris’ handwriting spidered over a tiny corner of the paper. The rest was taken up by some faceless conglomerate demanding an unreasonable sum of money for some service or other. Probably electricity. Sean stuffed the paper deep into the recesses of his coat and kept walking.
Filed under: Gibberish, People, Writing | Tags: Bullshit, Celeb, For the love of god please wake up, Radio, Riots, Wake up
Christopher was sitting at the kitchen table when the announcement came.
A tinny voice from the cheap portable radio next to his bowl of boring cereal that came in a rainbow-hued box covered in flashing LEDs said that the rioters had breached the barricades and the police had fallen back. Christopher stared into the constantly flickering, ever changing nano-ads in the gossip-paper, not really seeing, just listening.
The riots had started a few weeks ago and grown in both number of participants and targeted brutality. Christopher once noted to a colleague that they were less like riots and more like an organised movement. To what end, he didn’t have the words to speculate.
The riots had started when the libraries had been made to burn all their useless books and replace them with vid-files. The riots had worsened when schools had started adding ‘Celebrity Studies’ to the curriculum. The riots had reached fever pitch when the TV channels stopped playing the news.
Christopher stirred his beige, tasteless breakfast, wondering if the rioters would come to his street. Whether he would be dragged from his bed and pontificated at, like his colleagues-cousins-friends-brother had been. The people on TV had never explained what ‘pontificate’ meant, but Christopher thought it sounded bad.
The rioters had adopted a name, ‘The Learned Minority’. Christopher and his colleagues had a good chuckle over this, at least when the boss wasn’t in the voice-chat.
“Honestly,” one had begun, “How can they claim to be so ‘learned’ when all they ever do is read old, stuffy books and never switch on the TV?”
Christopher nodded. Then and now, responding and remembering, respectively.
For a second his eye was caught by an ad for a new radio. This one had a bigger power-button than his current model, more lights too and a second liquid-crystal display so he could keep up on the gossip that was happening on channels he wasn’t tuned to. For only £500 a month, this struck Christopher as a good deal. He’d wait, though, until he knew what the Celebs thought of it.
It was around now that Christopher heard the first window smash. They were on his street now. No doubt they would be here soon. Christopher turned up the volume on his radio and tuned to CelebGoss FM. He had to know if he should be afraid.
“I can’t get enough of those slogans they have!” A voice drawled, excitably. “I’m going to mix a few into a new track and play it loud!” Hearing the popular singer’s catchphrase comforted Christopher. He allowed himself a small grin as he returned to his breakfast.
They were coming closer all the time, though, and apprehension reared its ugly head as Christopher checked the bolt on the door. He returned to the table just as something heavy and brown shattered his kitchen window, landing right on the radio set and sending the cracked plastic and still-flashing LEDs careening across the floor. It was a book. It had landed open on a list of words. ‘Pontificate; to speak in a pompous or dogmatic manner.’
Talking? Christopher didn’t know how dogs were involved, but he was pretty sure he could handle people talking at him. They weren’t Celebrities; he didn’t have to listen. He sat back down just as the bolt of his front door gave and people began pouring into his flat.
If they were just going to talk at him he’d just listen to his iPod instead. He was going to drown them out, he thought with a little smile, he was going to play it loud!
Filed under: Gibberish, Writing | Tags: blah, boring, Huddersfield, Night, Stuff, Wind, Windy
Despite the howling wind the click of the lock is cannon fire in the empty street.
I light a cigarette and pull my coat closer around me, setting off for home.
Save for the occasional car rushing by I’m alone, I take a drag on my smoke, really only to keep my fingers warm.
A torn plastic bag blows by with a hiss before getting caught, ragged, on a dull railing.
An alarm is wailing, but nobody is coming to stop it.
A small man in an ill-fitting suit passes, head bowed against the incessant drizzle, and shoots me a look; half confusion, half camaraderie. ‘Why are you out? Why am I out, at that.’
I am chased through the centre of town by sirens, distant but becoming less so, past the club staff setting out the smoking area. They talk in subdued tones, it’s hard work and they’re not going to be making much money on a night like this.
Stamping my feet, waiting for a bus I hear an argument from a nearby street. Some disagreement over money or love or both. It’s never anything else.
The bus arrives, flourescent lighting and a musty smell my companions as we pass through alternating pools of orange light that only serve to make the darkness around them darker. I disembark on a pitch black road, deafened by the wind which gains that much more power this high up and unhindered by buildings, and make the journey to my home.
I flop into a chair and wonder why I’m still here. Not long now.
Huddersfield at night.
Filed under: Gibberish | Tags: Creme, Creme Egg, Egg, Life, Special, Stars, Universe
I just found a Creme Egg in my pocket! (Link for anyone who may not know of them. Just in case.)
“Over reacting a little aren’t you, J Bov?”
Let me tell you something;
When you glance at the night sky on occasion, you see the beautiful points of light, shimmering in the firmament, and you pause.
You are staring up into the light from a billion other suns. There are stars so large if you replaced our star with them they would reach the furthest point of the orbit of Jupiter. We can see whole other galaxies, hundreds of billions of suns spiralling in space, with the naked eye.
Our planet is a tiny rock, spinning in the dark. We’ve discovered a little over five hundred others through the years, none of them Earth-like. I will almost definately never set foot on Mars, or even our own moon, I’ll probably never leave this one insignificant mote of dust.
Small comforts are rarely afforded in this dark, lonesome universe.
But I exist. You exist. A ridiculously long, twisted line of history has led to chance meetings, from which sprung one of almost infinite possible new lives, who met someone else and did it again. This decreases the odds of my or your ancestors even meeting to incredibly low. More chance meetings and eventually, one of millions of sperm meets one of millions of eggs and from a huge range of possible expressions of that meeting it’s you. Wonderful, miraculous you and me.
Every molecule in your body can be traced to cosmic phenomena; you and I are swirling masses of space stuff that coalesces for an instant as us, then moves along. The odds of these things are so small as to be essentially zero, but here we are.
All this means that, against astronomical odds, you were born from the heart of a star. I was too. So too was the person, who I will never meet, who thought up Creme Eggs.
I could have been anywhere, at any time and it could have been anything that I’d forgotten I had, but it wasn’t.
So from all this mad, swirling, chaotic mess we can condence down to a single, shining moment wherein I find something in my pocket and tell you about it.
This very moment when I found a Creme Egg and it made me smile
and that, Sir or Madam,
that is very special.
Filed under: Angry Slurred Shouting, Diatribes and Debates, Gibberish, People, Writing | Tags: apocalypse, armageddon, Cameron, Clegg, dream, dreams, end of the world, horror, nightmare, politics, rage
I’d always assumed that when the world ended I’d be with my friends and family in a meadow on a hill, watching a city crumble in the distance. The sunset would paint the sky purple and red and orange, Sigur Ros would be playing from somewhere in the background and we’d talk about the good times.
As the end drew near we’d exchange our goodbyes, crack some jokes and then there would be quiet and peace; drawing comfort from the futility of worrying about anything. A bitter-sweet ending, an idealized finale.
That’s why last nights dream struck me to my soul.
The world was ending, but my friends and family weren’t there. They were away on some exotic beach, being massaged by supermodels and chuckling to themselves, this I knew. Nor was I in a meadow. Instead I was on a bus, surrounded by knobheads, the reek of urine ruining my journey.
Occasionally someone would flick the back of my head and when I turned to glare at them I missed the crumbling city behind me, turning around in time to see just settling dust, a horrible grey in the garish yellow midday sunlight. The bus was now parked, but nobody got off.
From the window I could see the panic, hear the running feet. Here and there was looting, I saw a group of children repeatedly stabbing an elderly shopkeeper for a mars bar.
Over the din I could hear Jedward being played from some invisible speakers.
Then, projected enormously against the wreckage, began an endlessly looping video of David Cameron violently robbing a poor, old woman. Perhaps because it was projected onto an uneven ruin, perhaps not, he had taken on the aspect of a six-limbed monster bedecked in hideous spines and scale-like plates. From between two of the plates grew the constantly, sickly grinning face of Nick Clegg, like a tumor.
I could see both Milibands and the rest of Labour springing to and fro, wearing signs which read “the end is nigh!” While I couldn’t question the validity of their warning, I also couldn’t shake the feeling that they were slightly late to this party.
Suddenly I was on my feet; I grabbed and shook madly the nearest person to me.
I continued to shake him as I heard myself screaming; “No! This can’t be the end! It can’t all end like this, can it!? We worked harder than this, didn’t we!? DIDN’T WE!?”
His face remained impassive, staring straight ahead rather than watching the world fall apart around him.
He squinted at me through the pudgy rolls of flab around his eyes, unblinking, and without a word he put another handful of fries into his idiot mouth.
I began to yell incoherently, a wordlessly protest that any sane person would echo. I yelled alone. The insistent sound of a siren began then.
I awoke with a start, drenched in cold sweat, slapping my alarm to stop its wailing. I looked about myself; everything was as it should be, from my window I could see a thin mist, rising quickly in the bright but gentle morning light.
I breathed a sigh of relief and after my morning ministrations I made a cup of tea. I lit my first cigarette of the day and, mug in hand, waited for my jangled nerves to calm.
Sufficiently relaxed and now assured that what I had seen was only a terrible dream, I turned on the television. Eventually, bored of sitcoms, I made a huge mistake; I switched to the news.
I haven’t stopped screaming since.
Filed under: Diatribes and Debates, Gibberish, Philosophical Bollocks, SCIENCE! | Tags: Asimo, emotions, genius, important, robots, sad
I’ve always thought robots were cool. They really are; most males aged about 10 and up think this. Some move on and stop caring, forgetting about what were essentially characters of stories that could well have been human. Others, like myself, maintain a viewpoint of robots as not just cool characters, but important elements in the technological evolution of humanity.
That’s why I love Asimov’s robot stories. Many of these involve robots as parables for the human condition. Emotional tales of machines that are sometimes more ‘human’ than their creators.
There’s one point stuck in my memory where I realised the emotional significance of robots:
A group of primary school children in Japan were introduced to Asimo, Honda’s advanced robot that’s capable of running, climbing stairs and so on.
After some brief introductions (Asimo bows and waves hell to the children) there were many questions.
What does Asimo do for fun? (Dances, apparently).
How much did he cost?
How fast can he run?
Then after a short pause a tentative hand is raised from the back of the group.
One small boy, who will grow into a genius in my opinion, asked a question that is beautiful in it’s simplicity and scope. A question that signifies an important turning point in this child’s life, whether he knows it or not.
The question, after seeing Asimo standing stock still awaiting commands, was thus:
“Is he sad?”
Isn’t that wonderful?
In response the spokesperson hastily replied ‘Oh, no, Asimo isn’t sad! Look!’
Then, to prove how happy he was, the people by the controls made Asimo dance.
It bares repeating.
They made him dance.
That’s heartbreaking. I can’t be the only person who thinks so. When I’m quite tired it brings me close to tears, if I’m honest.
This story is so touching. It’s so sad.
Some people will be confused, to those people I say sorry, I can’t explain myself. It just hits me right in the heart whenever I remember it.
J Bov.
