Another Attempt To Finish A Story
I’ve been trying to focus on “real work” type stuff — data reporting, etc. On the side, I’m working on ffmpeg video tech. I’ve started many Medium stories. I keep losing my cool. I rant.
Instead of finishing my stories I comment on other Medium stories. Thank God Medium is still a place one can have civil discussions. Or Thank God my fellow writers let me ramble on in their comments sections without taking offense.
Writing is very, very, very hard for me. For every sentence I write, it takes me ten tries to reach basic comprehensibility.
The bigger problem lately is the loneliness, a loneliness I believe everyone shares in, dare I say, our orbit. We are so few. Most of the people I read have under 5,000 subscribers. (LET ME BE CLEAR, this has nothing to do with big-audience success.). These writers are my friends, albeit the parasocial kind. I may write poorly, but even those who write well reach only the tiniest sliver of readers (let alone, never more than a rounding error, for the general population).
I’d be surprised if anyone has written social commentary on Medium and not tangled with Tessa Schlesinger. Sometimes I want her to die a horrid death in a boiling pot of water. At other times, her stories inspire me and make my day. Lately, she’s been sick. Depressing.
It’s not fair that I can no longer fantasize about Tessa screaming out from the fire!
Our voices are so small and we’re getting old and sick too boot.
Why write about the social illness we all see? A few days ago I watched a movie about a third grade teacher who destroyed Davinci’s Mona Lisa painting to wrap up a plot — more like connect-the-dots for first graders — in what was supposed to be a murder mystery. There was no mystery.
Okay, that’s not the plot you’ll read at IMDB.
The Mona Lisa! We live in a world where destroying that is okay!
A week before, I watched the character Jack Ryan, supposedly a genius analyst, spend most of his time killing Russian security guards in hallways. Rambo was more considerate — and had more brains. A few episodes in I stopped. Not out of protest. I simply could not care less what happened next.
Life is cheap everywhere. Today’s hero is a person who can do what he or she wants, kill or hurt whoever they want. The hero is someone the filmmakers get you to relate to, through your basest desires, to get your own way. The hero doesn’t fight against his desire to kill everyone. He doesn’t try to reach any idealistic goal.
Our generation was about not trying to be a materialist jerk. Today’s young people look in no mirror, have no self-reflection, doubt. They can’t take an once of criticism.
Yes, I know it’s all entertainment but where our fantasies go so do we — eventually.
Recently, I flew United. Their computer system is only marginally “better” than Southwest’s. No surprise today that the whole air traffic control system went down today. Everywhere I look I see dead tech.
ChatGPT? That’s 0-to-rant in 1 second. In a nutshell, ChatGPT is a Google search with results giving in a snazzy-typing animation, without advertisements and spam. So sure, I’m all for ChatGPT. But I’d rather be able to search, get the answer I want, and read at my own pace.
AI? Puuullleeease. Sure, I was amazed for the first hour. Then it started wasting more and more of my time. Do I waste time waiting for it to finish “typing”, or do I wade through all the spam results in Google? I’ll have to wait for some AI system to give me the answer to that one!
Don’t worry. I’m not really waiting.
I feel a rant coming on. So I better go. Feel free to let loose in the comment section!
