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: