Joel Morris

The equivalent of me finding a really good pencil eraser that is handy for inked illustration work, and insisting that we fire everybody in the NHS and army and retail and accountancy and same day delivery and the Law Courts and replace them all with pencil erasers.

We decided a while ago that rain wasn’t for supplying the need for water and food. It was for gambling on, in the form of raindrops down a window.

Yeah. But that’s an actual useful business with a functional role within human commerce. Not a wonky pantomime horse for gambling on. And that’s where the real money is.

A business that turns a profit, while making good products, that pays and retains its staff and pleases its customers won’t necessarily find a use for shoddy AI.

If the shitty output of AI seems a godsend, that’s an active decision you’ve made: to not be that sort of a business.

If your measure of success is ever increasing market share, public declarations of increasing “efficiency”, and funnelling more money upwards to the owners and shareholders, a workable business will become unworkable pretty quickly.

AI is the answer to that. But only because that’s the question.

The argument in favour of AI is that it cuts employee costs for businesses that simply can’t afford those staffing levels.

But a successful businesses not having enough money to pay the required number of staff is a *decision*. And a side effect of endlessly moving money up, away from most workers.

Like the internet, it was probably at its best a few years ago. Before it pissed in its own water supply.

“My work is irreplaceable. Yours is automatable. Otherwise, why am I being paid 40 times as much as you, you dullard!!!”

Lovely, lovely meritocracy there.

Steep hierarchies in a workplace - the sort of thing that leads to vast pay inequality - can only happen if people have no respect for the work done by junior colleagues.

Anyone who knows *everyone* is working hard would never invent an insulting machine to bodge others’ work.

The perfect tool for the management classes.

“This replaces junior people for whose work I have nothing but contempt. Hurrah. I no longer have to pay them. (Short pause) Oh noe! Nothing is working now and all on fire!”

And on the technical side, for all the promises that generative Al offered, the team realized the technology wasn't quite ready for prime time. "For some businesses, good enough is good enough," said Chris Ross, an analyst at Gartner. "In the entertainment business, the bar is higher." THEWRAP.

AI seems to be an expensive way to do someone else’s job as well as you reckon they probably do it, whatever, but no use for anything you do yourself, where you can professionally tell it’s hopeless.

Good luck with the bubble, lads.

(Clipped from The Wrap, about Disney giving up on its AI R&D.)

And a year or so later there was Exterminate / Regenerate, and I’d like to apologise for possibly being part of spoiling something sacred. But we did get a lovely book, and a splendid podcast out of it.

This chat took place while John was publicising Love and Let Die, his Beatles / Bond book. I offered him the chance to talk about either. He chose Who instead, saying it was his safe place, and he’d never write a book about it, cos it’d spoil that. Down the pub, about four of us nagged him hollow.

going through hell, keeping going on art, grief, and the emotional heroism of just bloody keeping on making your work

I flew to Canada this week to go to a Paul McCartney concert and I wrote about it here:

open.substack.com/pub/naomiald...

Weird to see Keir Starmer carefully naming his favourite film as whatever is the most popular TV show that day, just in case, the same week the actual Pope had a rave.

And on this Doctor Who Day, if you join the Broken Veil channel, you can hear our Discomfort Blanket celebration of hauntological Tom Baker swansong Logopolis.

(Plus all the other DB episodes on everything from Sapphire and Steel to Robert Aickman…)

www.patreon.com/collection/1...

It’s Doctor Who Day so why not enjoy @johnhiggs.bsky.social talking about CLASSIC WHO!

pod.link/1614879928/e...

Trump looked so happy.

We should fix it for him to meet Han Solo and The Fonz next.

bsky.app/profile/brai...

Follow link in this thread to video for explanation (and jokes…)

Just watched The Holiday and shouted excitedly “DEAN CUNDEY!” at the DoP credit at the start, then couldn’t explain why, and would like to thank @brainmage.bsky.social for an unexpected new game.

A definitive Pastem, this one, then perhaps. (Something that’s not necessarily true, and you don’t know where it originated, but which enters the collective brain and is stored as a useful shorthand to use in arguments in future because you “wouldn’t put it past ‘em…”)

But even the biggest arena-sizes jokes are built from the same material. Just with more sharing possible.

The best ones are like a broken amulet, with each person having a precious matching half. Like social superglue, but for a very small group.

It contains three tribal tokens. Ringo. Foulness. Ultimate force. They all have to have resonance. Oh, and “what news sounds like”. That’s not a set of shared texts you can assume when selling a joke. So it becomes a little internal map of your local mental space instead. So it’s comforting.

I think the Ringo joke makes me laugh because of the echo of the tense speeches in Edge of Darkness, about Northmoor. So it requires my exact internal mental landscape to tickle the right synapses. And other people might have that too. It’s fairly likely. But not super-common. So it’s extra funny.

Got hundreds of these, buried at the back of notebooks and bits of brain. They’re usually quite neat. But not neat enough to travel outside the heads where they were once brewed up. And that makes them somehow funnier, but only to that tiny group.

Right now I have this unsellable news item that still makes me laugh.

“Ringo Starr has recorded a new song about Foulness. The army have said that any attempt to release the song will be met by ‘ultimate force’.”

Never placed it anywhere. Over a decade of giggling at it. No idea why. Just that.

They will bubble up into your mind, and you’ll think “that’s a classic joke, that” and then realise you can’t quote it or even say out loud why you’re laughing at the thought, because it’s only ever briefly left your head ever. It’s like laying down wine.

My favourite jokes are ones that got scribbled in notebooks, and don’t quite work, so you can’t sell them to anyone, or develop them, but for some reason that makes them even funnier to you and whoever you made them up with, that you wrote it down. The pure essence of the Siblings At A Funeral joke.

Like a mediaeval general besieging a citadel with a trebuchet and a herd of sick cattle.