I’m also taking a bit of a hiatus from this blog, apparently. Things haven’t been this quiet here since 2008—where you know, I only wrote 1 measly entry.

What I’m not taking a break from however, is music making and all of its various forms.

By which I mean, I may have accidentally stumbled onto a 1960’s Winfield Audition Electric Organ in a vintage warehouse.

And then perhaps I accidentally haggled the price down to £15 because it didn’t work—functioning ones in good condition go for £150 on eBay.

I may have then, quite possibly, completely unintentionally opened it up and fixed it in less than 10 minutes—because I’m actually quite handy.

So, now I have fully working 1960’s Winfield Audition Electric Organ and it sounds amazing—It’s a free reed aerophone where the only electrical part is a small fan motor that provides the air needed to blow through the reeds as you press the keys to play the notes.

Honestly, fucking love it already. So I’m going to have to figure out how to sample things—that’s a thing people do, right?—so that I can sample it and use it in future songs.

Oh right, songs, yes, still doing those.

I have rough demos for all the songs. I have laid out the entire first album. I’m currently, well, sort of building a guitar so that I can get the guitar sound I want.

“But Carlos, didn’t you buy a guitar like a while ago?” I hear you ask.

Why yes, dear reader. I did. How lovely of you to remember.

It’s basically a cheap Stratocaster style guitar and I’m not feeling the sound of the single coil pickups.

So I may have also accidentally, totally not on purpose—but obviously completely on purpose—bought a second-hand, in pieces Epiphone Les Paul Special II 1997 Sunburst Indonesia—that I will also fix. I haven’t fixed this one yet, it only arrived this Friday, and this Friday was snip snip day, so no guitar building for me.

I’m optimistic though and I’m hoping, based on my early research, that the humbucker pickups are going to have the sound I’m looking for.

Although, as a side-note, I did also buy some after market single coil pickups so that I can swap out the Stratocaster ones.

And no, I’m not going to talk about tone wood. Don’t worry.

I’m quite excited to enter this new era of adulthood. Bring on my forties—which I’m already in—I’m loving it so far.

Where, by “you” I, of course, mean a Future Carlos who might look back at this before pressing delete in another yet-to-be-written Tales From The Archive cull.

Yes, it’s suddenly June.

And in about 2 weeks, give or take—it’s give—it will be my 41st birthday.

But I’m not worried, or lost, or anything like that.

Nor am I surprised by it suddenly being June.

This year, as all years tend to do, has brought with it plenty of interesting detours along the way.

Burnout being one. Realising that I need to find a new job is another—in an industry that currently burning it all to the ground by shoving AI into everything.

Unless it was already clear, allow me a moment to make it clear: I don’t hate AI but it’s not going to solve anything. The CEOs of various AI companies are deluded little piss-babies who yearn for a time when slavery was still legal. And I don’t want any of those fuckers to be in charge of anything. So, kill all billionaires.

Parenting a toddler, is another. Now, I want to be clear again. I love all of it, even the hard days. I’m getting the opportunity to show up and be calm in a way I don’t think I ever received as a child myself, and I can see the positive impact its having.

Like I said recently in a conversation: having a child is piss easy, parenting is hard.

Oh, and I’ve also—in my spare moments—have been building Warhammer terrain and chipping away at my debut album.

The first requires flexing my crafting muscles, and I’m really enjoying the multiple media aspects of it all; from cardboard and hot glue, to grass and brick, and windows boarded shut with wood, every little details adds up to the level of fidelity I’m looking for.

The second requires learning an entire suite of professions that were once divided across an music production company and label, or something to that effect. Now, I can get a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) and do everything myself.

Except I don’t know how to do everything myself. And, more importantly, I don’t even know if I want to know.

I don’t think I want to be a music producer. I think I’m more interested in being a musician, but I can’t afford to pay someone to do the parts I’m not interested in and I have more time than I have money, so here we are.

I mean, I don’t hate it. In fact, after trying a few DAWs, I’m quite liking Logic. But, but but big BUTTS! I want to be a musician, not a music producer and no DAW is going to change that.

I’ll figure it out. I have already laid out the scratch tracks, and the rough tracks for the whole album, so that I can play along to it with my guitar and it feels great. I’m sure I can figure out the rest so that I can make it sound vaguely like it already-sort-of sounds in my head.

So there you go Future Carlos, enjoy reading this, knowing that next week you’re seeing the doctor about a vasectomy.

Snip snip motherfucker.

Peace up.

A-town.

I had no desire to return to work this week.

And despite the fact that the Occupational Health Team did include this in the Management Referral Report, it seems to not matter much to the people who make these decisions.

I’m obviously not one of the people making these decisions.

So here I am.

On a phased return that I couldn’t feel more indifferent about if I tried.

Don’t worry, they won’t read this blog. Even if they did—as we’ve established—it wouldn’t matter anyway haha.

Question is, where do I go from here?

So, although I have actually done my reflection on the list of directions I wrote at the start of the year. And I’ve written down a lot of Why and Why Nots, I’m currently struggling to muster the energy to make this into a coherent piece of writing.

So, there might not be a year-in-review for you read this year and now you know why.

Perhaps a week from now I will have more energy and finish what I have already, mostly, written. Perhaps I won’t.

I really don’t know right now. What I do know is that Future Carlos enjoys reading my reflections but since I have actually done that bit, he’ll be fine, even if I don’t publish anything for the rest of the world to see.

I also know that I’m going to have to take a break, or else a break will be taken for me.

So I’m taking a break.

Maybe building some Warhammer terrain?

Yeah, that sounds like “not work”, which is what I need right now.

And after years and years of you have to endure seeing my feet, I think it’s high-time we try some other body parts for this year’s Christmas card.

You can start looking forward to next year’s card already where we’ll somehow use our elbows to make a card.

Only 12 months until you will find out if I’m joking or not.

Katy, Lucien, Jude and I wish you a peaceful Christmas and a rejuvenating New Year!

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Except they’re not, Of course they’re not.

They’re instead from a self-help book from 1998.

But here’s the thing, I still like them. They resonated with me, so here we are, writing them down so that I can find them easily again in the future—when I stumble on some ancient Sanskrit that just feels oh so familiar.

1. You will receive a body.
2. You will learn lessons.
3. There are no mistakes, only lessons.
4. A lesson is repeated until it is learned.
5. Learning lessons does not end.
6. “There” is no better than “Here.”
7. Others are merely mirrors of you.
8. What you make of your life is up to you.
9. The answers lie inside you.
10. Your answers lie inside you.
11. You will forget all of this.
12. You can remember it whenever you want

From If Life Is a Game, These Are the Rules by Cherie Carter-Scott.

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Yes, you.

Specifically you.

And not this (gestures wildly) circle of hell where you have to fracture yourself across an undulating number of spaces all vying to extract as much return on investments for stakeholders on the asset that is your fleeting attention.

This torment where you’re forced to be a pitiful piece of their product, lest you be anything at all.

Praying on the social aspect that defines our species, they’ve tricked us all into thinking that without them we would get no attention, and without attention, well, we might as well not exist.

Don’t worry though, very soon you might as well not, because they won’t need you at all.

What was once carefully and carelessly created by you, lumpy, hairy meat sacks, will instead be created, consumed, and regurgitated ad nauseam by what they mistake for artificial intelligence.

An unaccountable system trained on our ill-begotten life stories which are now reduced to “content”.

Generative content for generative bots that provide generative impressions and interactions to generate more content. Rinse, exploit, repeat, profit.

Where that one Facebook comment from your racist uncle will live forever as it takes on an entire persona of its own but cannot age or grow or unlearn its racist bullshit. #ForeverConservative

A fully automated attention economy without the need for anyone to actually pay any attention any more.

But here’s the thing—well, one of the many things—there is no intelligence in the artificial. No magic. Unless you’re a child at a birthday party dazzled by the magic thumb trick—if that’s the case, I can’t help you.

Instead, we watch as primates argue with each other on Hacker News as if their latest brand of snake oil is a new god.

It isn’t.

It isn’t even intelligence by any way we measure it—setting aside the eugenic notion of IQ for a moment and focusing instead simply on the concept of an agent with a will of its own. Mammals, including ourselves, fall into this definition.

Instead, what it really is, was and ever will be, is a probabilistic generator for letterformesque from a relational tokenization across 12,000 dimensions.

We interpret these to have meaning, purpose and intelligence but it doesn’t. It’s a spicy autocomplete at best. At worst, it’s not even spicy but here we are, discussing whether to let it be in charge of our justice system.

And idiots such as Samuel Harris Altman, Ilya Sutskever, and Elon Reeve Musk would very like us to believe in the magical possibilities of artificial intelligence.

I’m calling them idiots here as a gesture of good faith by assuming incompetence where malice is probably the more likely reality.

No, Skynet isn’t coming to any kind of sentience.

What we instead have is an erosion of society by tech bros who ascribe godhood to a badly formed collection of basic maths.

And now that your attention isn’t needed anymore, you might be fooled into thinking that life will be better.

No.

It won’t.

You thought life was bad when capitalism sought to extract you for the £1.17 it deemed you to be worth, imagine what capitalism will do when your worth is zero.

Infinite content straight from the dead primate’s mouth. Where you and I the primates.

It was never about, “Better connecting you with the pages and groups you care about.”, “Blaze your glory!”, “Make every second count”, or, “Capture, Create & Share What You Love.”

No.

“Make number bigger,” was always the real goal.

Like a virus, contemporary social media platforms cannot grow without replicating and spreading from host to host.

And if there’s one thing we’ve learned from viruses lately it’s that—at least if you’re in the UK—Traditionalist conservatism was quite happy to sacrifice those of us whose extraction of value got too close to zero.

The film Idiocrazy was only satire until it became just another Tuesday.

Whether it’s users, impressions, attentions, or revenue, “make number bigger” reigns supreme-acist.

And idiot tech bros were eager to invent new fucking ways of making that fucking number fucking bigger.

Never mind the casualties. Never mind the erosion of democracy. Never mind the damage to the ecosystem we inhabit.

So I wish you had a blog.

A place you could truly call yours—as much as any of us can own anything anymore.

If boomers were the last generation to own houses, perhaps millennials were the last to rent domains.

Because of course, we don’t own a domain, and perhaps we shouldn’t.

There should definitely be a best-before on the artefacts of my ignorance.

There should probably be a best-before on the artefacts of your ignorance too.

So perhaps, renting domains is a way for us to not live forever.

But whilst you’re here, I really wish you had a blog.

I would read it.

I would give you that attention.

If you allowed for comments—I know I don’t at the moment—I would engage with you.

You exist, despite it all.

I would nurture your expression of the multitudes that is all the parts of you that don’t have a place on curated platforms where women’s nipples are not allowed but men’s are fine.

So yeah, I wish you had a blog.