How many best friends in the whole world have you got? I often feel like I miss having a best bud. Someone I could scheme with. I suspect it’s more a reflection of getting older, the intensity of those friendships and the excitement of the future bound together. Of course you don’t have a chum to scheme with, you fool, you’re 56 not 16. Or maybe it’s a reflection of how my brain chemistry works.
That’s not to anyway demote the great friends I have now, but certainly the spending every minute of free time cheek by jowl and talking nonsense about the world and how you’re gonna do great things is a joy that leaves as childhood does.
In my childhood my best mate was GIGO (the nickname only a seven year old could come up with) that friendship was intense and sacred and lasted with that intensity until I moved school. Every day was a new way to play war. Rather pleasantly he got in touch a few years ago and we’ll still chat. But conversations now are about work and kids and the only bright future is retirement.
In my teens I went through a few best mates, Keven in first year (modern day year 8 I think) I don’t remember that we had a great deal in common only that he was a fairly big lad and I was and remain not. and then Walshie and I were inseparable. Though none of these friendships overlapped with all of my interests. I think walshie was also in to computers but we walk around school and the get our lunches and we’d be happy kids (doesn’t sound like much but our school was hell on earth)
We moved when I was 16 out from belays to Strangford and new school in downpatrick were I knew no one and suddenly I was no longer part of any double acts. I made plenty of friends and some of those had the promise of being co conspirators but really we were only there a year before we boomeranged back to Belfast and suddenly I knew no one.
One anchor to Belfast was working in a computer shop and I became best mates with a guy there Karlos. This is right around turning 18 and so that friendship was cemented in booze and parties. And what a great time that was.
At 19 I think, I met JT and we were that tight co conspirator team. He wanted to be a writer. And I wanted to be an artist. But journalism was his future (and mad stories of the war in Bosnia were ahead of him whereas I liked my war stories safely on paper)
Later in my 20s I didn’t have one close friend but I did have lots of friends and that was great. Then I met my wife and none of it seemed to matter much because this was my future.
I think I just miss my youth.
Anyway that got melancholy faster than I’d intended!
On to…
PJ’s Progress
Finished one page of F&McB inks (most of had been done the previous day) and completed a page of inks and then started and left unfinished another page. So, actually roughly speaking two complete page of inks. Not bad. Not bad.
Yesterday on social media
This might just be a lot of embeds, let’s see…
More space stuff! This is fascinating, no?
A bon mot from yesterday
APEUOTF. (All pens end up on the floor)
Turns out a lot of my yesterday was taken up with screaming into the void about AI.1 I have a lot of conflicted feelings about AI, best summed up with “I wish it would go away”.
I think it has no business involving itself with creativity of any kind. Art and culture come from a human place. We replace that with machine learning, civilisation becomes a grinding spiral, lacking any forward movement. Not just for creatives who are the engine of the possible, but for people who like to read and watch things. All art is a communication between the creator and the person looking at it. If you replace the creator with AI, what then?
I suspect that the problems we all have with Ai in its environmental impact will eventually be solved – like many computer problems moores law will probably kick in somehow. (When China released their Ai model that had slurped up open ai’s model and somehow had become more efficient, stuff like that I suspect will keep happening)
It’s copyright slurping – too late to fix it. We’ve all been stitched up on that front, but legislate to keep it out of creativity, or delightfully, ensure anything with AI can’t be copyrighted.
But, I dunno, to quote Lord of the Rings:
“I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.” “So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
- I have no mouth and I must scream. ↩︎
