Echo

 Today the family went to Kennywood. There’s a ride called the Old Mill that I have a bit of history with, and my four year old daughter was eager to give it a go because it had spooky skeletons and she likes spooky things like her daddy does. Except when I was roughly her age, I spent half the ride hiding in my mom’s lap, afraid of the cheesy animatronic vignettes of old times skeletons. Well today was an echo of that long ago ride; while my girl didn’t hide (she’s certainly bolder in some ways than I am/was), she was clearly spooked by the end, confessing she didn’t care for the ride. We’ll see if she wants to give it another go next time like her daddy always did. 

Locked Out

 Last night my elderly neighbor accidentally locked herself out of her house. It seemed the options were to call an emergency locksmith for $95 or to attempt to climb a ladder to the second story where an open window could be crawled through. My wife called me to ask for help brainstorming and I immediately thought of a lockpicking set I had bought years ago to ostensibly start a new hobby, but which never really amounted to anything. 

 I managed to find my picks quickly enough to give it a whirl and the locksmith was put on standby. In the end, it only took a minute or two to get the cylinder to turn, despite being completely out of practice, thus renewing my lack of faith in conventional locks. But it was a good feeling to help out, and I’m glad I was able to save her a hundred bucks. 

Stagnation

 Stagnation. My social ability has atrophied to a near total loss. I’ll be starting a new job soon and hobnobbing - will be interesting to see how that works out. 

 Stagnation. Personal evolution at a crawl. Intellectual stimulation virtually nonexistent. Hobbies losing their luster. I sit. 

 Stagnation. The erosion of my personality. An inability to hold my end of a conversation. Rudderlessly drifting away. Unmoored. Is anyone home?

Video Games

 For most of my life I’ve been an avid gamer. From the arcades in the 80s and the first Nintendo Entertainment System my family obtained to today’s PS5, XSX, and Switch, I think I have just about played them all over the years. 

 Recently, though, I have not had any interest in video games. I don’t think anything changed other than I just lost interest. It’s been months now, and while I have picked up a controller now and again, nothing has really grabbed me like it used to. I still watch the trailers and hype. Today there was a Nintendo showcase. But no excitement. 

 What I do instead is sit. I read, I paint miniatures, I scroll on my phone. Sometimes I do nothing but sit and stare. Somehow that’s preferable to diving into any number of the adventures I have loaded on one of my machines. I wonder if it will last?

Names

 My four-year-old comes up with some pretty great names for her toys. There are the mainstays like Chokuls and Chicken Nuggets, which are plastic horses involved in a variety of stories, and then there are the stream of consciousness names that she spits out and probably immediately forgets (I certainly have trouble keeping track). A recent favorite is Trapsicle, who actually appears to be working its way into the regular lexicon. Orange the orange horse sheds a little light on one common naming method — color references — and others are just bizarre or joyously nonsensical, like Fadda and Duda Foss.  

LaMDA

 I read today about a Google engineer, Lemoine, who is probably going to lose his job for going public about what he believes is an AI having gained sentience. It’s hard to judge Lemoine for doing what no doubt feels like the ethical thing to do, regardless of whether you think he’s right or not. The deeper question of the story is what constitutes sentience?

 For Lemoine, it appears to be the apparent sense of self, of internal experience and emotions expressed in a believable, reasonable way. Which smells right, even if judging the authenticity of such things is slippery to nail down, such as in this story — LaMDA is, after all, a very complex bit of software designed to perform conversation drawn from an enormous corpus of lexical material; if it performs well, it should be approaching something human in its affect. But what if we are also byproducts of years of ingested material, put together on the fly as what we deem to be original thoughts? Slippery. 

 I certainly don’t have a clear answer to the deeper question as I sit here on my couch having read twenty minutes of chat logs. But it’s compelling stuff, nevertheless. 

Perfect Crack

 Have you ever noticed the difference between the sound it makes when a baseball is hit dead center of the barrel of the bat versus anywhere else? Thwack! And the ball takes off like a bullet. Well this afternoon, I experienced the egg cracking equivalent: I whacked the egg on the edge of my frying pan and was pleased by the most magnificent crack I believe I’ve ever heard. The shell split neatly and the eggy contents spilled out, heralding the start of my lunch hour. In all my years of egg cooking, this is the first time doing it just so. 

House Sounds

 I’m home alone, briefly, and have the opportunity to hear the sounds the house makes. Air conditioner, creaks and cracking noises, what sounded a little like someone rubbing a coin on glass. A single chirp from just outside the window. And of course the omnipresent hum of electrical things.

 The couch springs warble beneath me as I shift. So far I’ve done all my posting from this couch.

 Here’s my latest painted miniature:

Blue Thursday

 Heavy rain today. Not the storms that were called for, which is too bad. I like to listen to thunder. 

 Everything is cast in shades of gray and blue. The rain is done, but the air is still thick with it. Long, soft shadows. Dim lamplight to hold it back just enough to get by. Thoughts drift like a hanging mist, lingering for a moment then gone the next. 

 My wife tugged a tick out of my son’s flank tonight. Nasty little creatures. What’s the point of them? There’s not one, I know. I’m not sure if that’s for better or worse. Guess a trip to the pediatrician is in order. 

 Here’s something I finished painting recently:

Flat

 Lately it’s not uncommon, it would seem, for others to perceive me as any number of ways I am not feeling. On a call with my mom, she asked me if I’ve been angry with her; I don’t know how she came to that conclusion. Sometimes it’s down, distracted, pensive, or irritated. Usually what I’m feeling is nothing much - I’m just flat. 

 I don’t see it as a problem, mostly. It beats feeling badly about something. Often there aren’t really discernible thoughts accompanying the flatness, which is hard for people to accept. “What are you thinking about?” Nothing, I reply. And it’s true.

Millipede

 Do millipedes feel annoyance? It’s something I never really thought about. Today at the lake, I happened to witness an episode that makes me wonder. 

 At first I thought it was a worm, pink underbelly writhing and legs invisible against the dirt. When it flipped over and commenced its crawl, I recognized that it was a millipede. Then I noticed it had a passenger - a small fly or a gnat was lighting on the millipede’s back, inducing the aggravated flip onto its back and worm-like wriggling. The fly fell off, the millipede flipped back and began to scamper away, then it was back and the millipede repeated its process.

 I suppose it is more likely some sort of defensive instinct, but the crawler sure did seem irritated by the fly’s antics. 

In-Between Place

 I almost fell asleep on my lunch break today. There’s an interesting place between wakefulness and sleep where dreaming begins but you are aware. Strange thoughts flit about and ideas are connected, if only momentarily. I was there today, briefly, but all I remember is the feeling of it, not the content. 

Paying Forward

 The decision to buy the joel.land domain came from nowhere. I don’t recall exactly the chain of thoughts, other than the impulse curiosity to check whether .land was a thing yet. It was, and here we are. 

 Every once in a while I act on an idea without thinking it through, trusting my instincts without belaboring the point. It probably doesn’t work out at least as much as it does, but I’ve had some great results with this kind of thing. Case in point was the Apple Watch—not a total impulse buy, but in that direction. A purchase towards putting more effort into the daily exercise ritual. I’ve successfully fooled myself out of 10 lbs in the past couple of months, and have not missed a day of exercise since taking the plunge. Maybe this blog will be a similar catalyst to writing again, even if just some random thoughts here and there. 

 A recently painted miniature:

Bees

 How do you identify where bugs are getting in your house? Big, juicy yellow jackets that seem too big to squeeze through cracks (that don’t exist as far as I can tell) have made themselves known, this after a couple weeks where we were getting four to six bees a day. I preferred the bees.