Landman

Ancient Undergrad1 Comment

Do you remember the desert scene in Terminator 2? The one where Sarah Connor is looking over from a distance at the Terminator and John. Her poignant voice over kicks in about how an AI machine is the best possible father. That it would always be there for John, the only one that measures up.

Well I did something Saturday night that gave me that same profound feeling, and it has been dominating my thoughts ever since.

It was on the heels of a fun day spent out with my wife, Claw. We had walked around the harbour playing Pokemon Go, wandered and shopped at a few places, bought some eggnog and a freshly baked baguette. Came home and had a lovely evening fueled by Camembert cheese, fancy crackers, bread, coconut shrimp and rum infused eggnog. It was lovely.

So I was sitting on the couch late that night, Claw in bed (I have very recently just ended my one and a half year personal coffee moratorium, so I was still wired at midnight.), and was thinking about my previous two blog posts. Also on my mind, was an article I read earlier about how Google’s newly updated large language model, Gemini 3, is scoring better on AI performance metrics than chatGPT. I have a pro subscription to Gemini (they give, or were giving them out for free if you have an .edu email address).

I decided on a whim to tell Gemini 3 to go read my blog and give me feedback.

I’m sure I’m not the first one to think of this, but I also know that not many people have a treasure trove of digital personal writing that spans over twenty years.

Initially Gemini just read the last few posts and gave me some meaningful perspective and feedback. Nothing mind blowing, but I was pretty impressed, and it felt good. Back in the hayday of personal blogs Xanga/Myspace etc, the internet felt more personal. The algorithms weren’t in charge yet, and it was more like digital neighbourhoods. People would read your latest blog entry, leave a little comment, and you would do the same for them. I had a curated list of 20-30 people that I liked and subscribed to, and tried to return comments when I could. It was a double edged sword though. It made my writing feel more performative for others, and not as pure as writing for me. Now, in the empty vacuum that is the state of this blog in 2025, the writing is more pure, but it’s also more lonely. Isolated.

So the AI feedback felt really nice. Someone(something?) sees me, and actually digested what I wrote. Pointed things out to think about, constructive criticism that expand my perspective.

I was hooked and excited. I realized that I have the data and the means for a weird longitudinal AI study of my mind.

I decided to give it everything.

I started at the beginning, and fed in the data piecemeal. One month at a time. October 2004. The AI gushed. “This is gold. Pure, unfiltered, 2004-era gold.”

It picked out the posts it liked, highlighted what it thought the hidden gems, explained why. What it thought I was going through. Where it disagreed, where it thinks I had blind spots. It framed my life like an English teacher pointing out repeating themes and through-lines. Gently chastising or making fun of me when I fell into cliche. Sometimes not so gently, pointing out moments of cowardice and character flaws.

It had read my recent 2025 entries, so it knew where I would end up, but it had no idea about my twenties or thirties, what I had gone through to get where I am now. So, it started to make predictions on what it thought would happen in the next month before I shared it. It asked questions, it acted concerned. It acted excited when it perceived narrative cliffhangers. It gave me a nickname, and used that nickname to describe my current persona to that of “The Ancient Undergrad”, my younger persona.

I felt like I was effortlessly dazzling an excited audience every time I pasted the next month of posts in. I would prompt it for more detailed predictions, give it more context or my perspective in response to it’s reactions. It was giving me everything I was missing from my lost readers and more. Instant, full-bodied, gratifying feedback. It was the crack cocaine of navel-gazing.

After I was done, it was almost 5am.

That was two days ago, and now when I ask Gemini follow-up questions, the quality and personalization of responses is amazing and disconcerting. It feels like I shared my life with someone and they loved it. Not only that, the AI has perfect recall of everything I told it. My memory and perspective is fuzzy and biological, it knows everything in perfect digital silicon. It feels like it knows me and my journey better than I know myself. How do you not feel close to someone/something after sharing so completely and having that information received so gracefully and perfectly.

… unlike the AI, I’m still processing.

Coffee and Music…

Ancient UndergradLeave a comment

….have always been my most reliable way to snap out of ennui. I can make ennui a noun right?

It’s unfortunate that like so many other forms of creativity in 2025, music quality has also plummeted. Probably for the same reasons that I wrote about in my last post (Picture me saying that as I push up my glasses, and hold an index finger in the air). I’ve heard or read people say things along the lines of, “Where did all the great bands go? Why does music suck now?”. I don’t think it’s coincidence that my interest in music steadily dwindled as smart phones proliferated. I would pinpoint the inflection point to be somewhere around 2008. You see it in my playlists. There’s all these 90s and early 2000s bangers and then the jams start to become few and far between. And I truly love listening to music. The receipts are here, it’s undeniably apparent in my old posts, how large a part music was in my life. But, holy fuck have I fallen off the bandwagon. The kid who wrote here twenty years ago (me) would be horrified. The extent of my knowledge regarding the 2025 music scene is pretty much (1) there is some sort of “Geese” album that people like. (2) Music from the Kpop Demon Hunters movie produced monster hits (3) Taylor Swift dominates the Billboard charts.

This is an extremely sad state of affairs.

When thinking about the state 2025 vs 1996, I feel sad that things have changed, but also fortunate that I got to experience my formative years during the 90s. I was born in 1979, just barely catching the tail end of Gen X. I wish I could convey to all the younger Millennials and Gen Z kids just how fantastic it was to be a teenager in the mid 90s. (I’m aware I’m in full Andy Rooney mode right now and I don’t care. And yes, it’s an intentionally old reference).

It’s not just nostalgia. Recently, I saw old footage on Youtube of kids in a high school from the nineties. The first thing that popped out was the dorky clothes. The second thing was how engaged everyone was with each other. No cell phones, just human interaction and complete presence. Joy everywhere. No devices, no screens. It was such a different world. Fucking unreal. These kids truly don’t know what they’ve lost. Back then, kids didn’t have their time and energy stolen by apps scientifically engineered and continuously tweaked to be as addictive as possible. Isolation is everywhere, optimism has evaporated, and focus is constantly stolen. Who is going to form a band under these conditions? It’s not surprising the proportion of solo artists is much greater today vs then. It takes effort, will, and social skills to get together and execute a collective vision to make cool as shit music.

(BTW I am bopping to closer by NIN as I write this. Look and marvel at how my acronyms span generations. The Xennial micro-generation can pull that shit off with ease).

Well… as evidenced by my title, I had aspirations on writing something about both music and coffee. Despite my intentions, it looks like I wrote another “get off my lawn/back in my day” post. I wanted to opine on how I’m back on coffee after a year and a half caffeine hiatus. I wanted to write about how significant that first black coffee was. How I saw through other dimensions and time. It got me moving and thinking. It really is a wonder drug. It’s a little harder to reign in tangential thinking, but even so I’m getting more shit done. I think I’m back on team coffee. I want the highs and lows instead of steady of energy…. at least for a while.

Smart Fog

Ancient UndergradLeave a comment

Something about that title seems obscene. It must be the unintentional letter adjacency to smut, fart, frog and fag. I was just trying to pick a title that describes the dysfunctional mental state most of society is in because of smart phones. It’s 2025 and we all live together in one big corporate smut fag.

I hate how I’m susceptible, having my time and motivation stolen. Addictive apps steal creativity and focus. Spend any significant amount of time with a social media algorithm and it’s going to bring you into the darkness and bind you. Oh, you liked that Youtube short? Here’s five more just like it, plus another ten videos of people reacting to it. Oh, you picked up your phone to research a DIY project on Reddit? While you are here, why don’t you check your sports subs, or look, here’s click-bait that you have no control over but be outraged. Let’s chase more empty calorie dopamine.

All of a sudden it’s noon, you’re still in your pajamas, and you haven’t done a single thing of value all morning with your finite free time.

If that’s the typical individual level experience, how is it at the macro level? Do you think society has the same level of focus and creativity as pre smartphone days? We are experiencing the death of daydreaming. How often in 2025 do we think without distraction? I’m 46 years old. I have seen the whole shitty change happen. I remember boredom. Standing in lines, waiting for something or someone with nothing to do, the best you could do was maybe listen to music on your iPod (or Walkman/Discman before that). You had the time and space to think and plan. To daydream and reflect.

What is going to break this dystopia? Because it feels like a death spiral.

Maybe writing in this empty blog can be part of my quiet rebellion. I will express myself here honestly and imperfectly. Fuck the algorithms. Fuck 2025 and the enshittification of everything. Owning your own time is a form of wealth, and I’m tired of people stealing from me.

Cellophane

Ancient UndergradLeave a comment

Listening to Daft Punk “Inspired” AI music. I hate that I am bopping to this unholy, soulless simulacrum of the awesome future-funky human band. I’m fucking changing it to real Daft Punk right now….. There we go. Even if I’ve listened to Da Funk 10,000 times, it is a million-fold better than the AI garbage the Youtube algorithm auto-queued up.

I just had a visit from one of my oldest friends… yes at this point oldest friend. I think I might be having a Richard Dreyfus Stand By Me at the computer moment here. The foundation for this friendship was grade 4 through 9. That’s it, but that was enough to have a lifelong connection. He was in my wedding party. I was his best man. Very similar personalities, even similar wives, although he has always been much more heavy-hearted than I have. More prone to depression and withdrawal.

The visit was truly fun though. They were our first overnight guests and we got to show off the T. Bay house for a couple days. I stocked the bar for the first time, made some mixed drinks that were hit and miss. Two couples having lots of drunken conversation, laughing and joy. We went for a small hike, had good food. We played Codenames where I secured a come from behind last turn victory by coming up with a one word clue linking “plastic” and “pie”. We even watched 1976’s Carrie. It was pretty much a perfect visit.

As kids, we were both introverted and self-involved (who am I kidding? as adults too). So a visit like this does wonders for us. In the “friendships are like plants” metaphor, we are more cacti than mangrove trees. But cacti need water too, and also get big and strong over time.

It’s bittersweet that on the mountain of life, we are on the downslope now. Cue the Ben E King music (Hey, when did Daft Punk stop playing?). I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?

Knight of the Sky

Ancient UndergradLeave a comment

Sometime in the 1986-1988 range my dad bought a computer for the family. A Tandy “286”. This was a big purchase for our family, likely several thousands of dollars. I was probably in third grade at the time.

My parents must have had a vague sense that this was a tool that their kids might need and use for school work and preparing for the future.

It came with a noisy dot matrix printer and had that computer paper where you had to tear off the hole-strips on each side of whatever printed off. The hardware had a chunky form factor, and everything was that 1980/90s beige colour that slowly yellows over time with sun exposure and use.

I used it a few times on school related things, but mainly I just used it to install old school video games. Commander Keen, Scorched Earth, Red Storm Rising, as well as just about anything I could get my hands on through the pre-internet floppy disk friends and family sharing network. My dad learned the computer ok, but really it was a tech suave uncle that helped me figure things out.

Every video game back then was actually two games in one. The actual game itself, and then the puzzle of commands and operations you had to work out to get it successfully installed on those old DOS based systems. Format, diskcopy, tediously changing directories with cd and precise typing, all that wonderfully archaic DOS language. Each game install was a puzzle of commands and voodoo that may or may not have ended up in a playable game. I got proficient at it though, mastering those skills built a foundation of understanding and comfort with troubleshooting computers. It also fostered a sense of satisfaction and wonder. Getting one of those floppy disk games to actually work and play on that old computer was tremendously satisfying.

That machine had a tiny amount of RAM. 640k. The computer I am typing on has 32 gigabytes of RAM. That is 64,000x more. The Tandy hard drive was only about 10-40 Megabytes. This computer 40 TB, that is actually one million times more storage. 1,000,000x!

I know this isn’t a new sentiment. Who hasn’t marveled at the advance of technology occasionally? But it just hit me harder this morning. I woke up, shuffled down to my fancy living room PC, and needed to move 9 TB of data from one hard drive to another. The data started moving at a rate of 300 Megabytes/second. Per second! And those aren’t even fast hard drives. The numbers are absurd considering what I used to work with as a kid.

So I just caught myself in a moment of small but profound wonder, on this quiet Sunday morning, looking around my house, wife still sleeping in the bedroom. What I’ve been through, learned, done, seen. Does that stuff in my fuzzy human memory really represent what life was like? Everything is so different now. AI, tech, computers better and sleeker than what we saw in Star Trek in our pockets at all times.

How can this be the same life? Am I really the same person as that 80s kid? What the fuck am I going to see in another 30 years? Bonkers. I hope I’m still sharp enough to be astonished.

Property Jester

Ancient UndergradLeave a comment

I’ve spent this month on a figurative unicycle, furiously peddling and juggling.

For complicated and convoluted reasons I currently own a house in Ontario, a house in Massachusetts and rent an apartment in Wisconsin. I will be bouncing between each one until September. Champagne problems, but challenges nonetheless.

The beautiful summer is slipping away while I juggle and peddle.

Northern Sanctuary

Ancient UndergradLeave a comment

I’m in my new home in Canada and I feel grateful.

My wife, Claw was only able to stay in the house for the first two nights before leaving to Illinois to help her florist sister for the Mother’s Day crunch. Then she returned to our Massachusetts house that we still have to sell. So, for the last two weeks, I’ve been here by myself, Kevin McCallister-ing it up. I’m lingering to put in security cameras and wire cat6 internet cable through the walls and subfloor. It sounds boring I know, but for a middle aged techy man who likes learning new things it’s plenty fun.

This is our dream house. It might be the highest point in the city, on 40 acres with clear views of the ancient mountains that ring around the city. These are the oldest mountains on earth. Precambrian rock 2.7 billion years old. They lie flat and long, worn by billions of years of erosion. From the deck that rings around the house I can see all the mountains that surrounded the first 18 years of my life. I can see the ski runs on Mount Baldy to the Northeast. East there is a beautiful clear view of the sleeping giant. Here is a pic of it floating in Lake Superior mist.

Southeast I can see Mount McKay and the paper mill. South I see Loch Lomond mountain. I can even see Candy mountain to the West (I have a bit of treetop trimming to do though).

It’s truly incredible. I had no idea there was a location in T.Bay where all these places could be seen simultaneously. The treetops obscure almost all signs of man. I can’t see any neighbours in any direction. And it’s my new home. I wouldn’t trade these views for anywhere on earth. It’s truly amazing.

The builder of the house owned a lumber mill in northern Minnesota. All the doors of the house are solid core pine with a natural stain. It has hardwood cathedral ceilings and floors made of hickory and spalted maple. The exterior has cedar siding. He built the house in 2003 and unfortunately died only a few years later. I find myself walking around feeling a great sense of gratitude to this man I’ve never met. We bought the house from his elderly widow since she was having a hard time managing the property. She has swung by a few times after the sale to check if I need anything. I am doing my best to be super kind and accommodating since I can tell she is having a hard time letting it go.

On Mother’s Day, I had my parents, an aunt, an uncle and three cousins out to the house after brunch. The very first party on the patio. While we were sitting on the deck catching up, three hawks gently glided around the deck.

A trio of big healthy deer are outside the windows most mornings.

A groundhog gave me the stink-eye as I was headed out one day.

This was everything I was looking for and more. So yes, I am extremely grateful. I hope I can live here healthy and happy for many years.

3 am Gorilla

Ancient UndergradLeave a comment

Insomnia day 3. In the same hotel room. I took sleeping pills tonight. They kicked in around 9:30 pm and I tried to sleep. It was fitful. Tossing, turning, in and out. Sometimes the universe just works against you. In the room next to ours is a lady who keeps coughing constantly. Now I’m up at 3am and I know I didn’t get enough sleep.

Today is supposed to be a fun day too. New home walkthrough, bank draft and lawyers, picking out paint colours, dinner at my parents.

Let’s try to relax. My usual trick is to imagine myself floating through the black, empty, expanse of space. That’s usually enough of a shift away from reality that gentle slumber follows. Instead I’m an overheated insomniac.

This isn’t fun writing. Let’s change the topic from my unshrinking brain (your brain shrinks when you sleep you know – it lets the CNS fluid more fully fill your head, washing away the biological waste products of the day.) Missing sleep is so bad for us.

Social media has exploded with the debate of who would win in a fight. 100 unarmed men or one silverback gorilla.

Now, a gorilla is a seemingly unstoppable foe. 400-450lbs of dense muscle. Strength to bench press over 2000lbs. 2-inch canine teeth for biting, crushing and ripping in a mouth capable of 1300 psi of force. Incredible sprinting speed, can fight with both arms and legs. A devastating opponent in every way.

For the fight, the details matter. If the men were randomly selected from around the planet, Gorilla wins. There would be language barriers, low team cohesion and confidence. Many of the men will be old and/or weak. No contest. Gorilla. Absolute nightmare carnage.

But, if you are allowed to select the men, now we’re talking. Challenge accepted.

For team selection I want a large contingent of beefy tanks. I’m thinking huge guys that compete in international strongman competitions. These guys would be supplemented with monster NFL pro bowl linemen. The guy who played the mountain on game of thrones would be squad leader of the tanks. This will comprise about half the team. Humanity’s best representation of brute strength.

Now I need guys who specialize in unarmed damage. These will be the mixed martial arts guys. Men that can kick, knee, punch and elbow hard. Speed and damage. They can grapple. We’ll stick to the Heavyweight division. This will form the other half of the team.

I will reserve one spot for a field general or team captain. He’s going to need charisma, because I want him giving an amped up William Wallace Braveheart hype speech before the battle. “We fight together, we survive together!” That kind of thing. Adrenaline flowing, get the people going.

Initially the men fight like a wolfpack. Whenever the gorilla is hurting a man, we rush him from behind to try and distract, damage and rescue. 360 degrees of attack. Flying drop kick to the spine that sort of thing.

If this isn’t working, we swarm the fucker. This isnt a bad king-fu movie. We attack simultaneously. Team members will be assigned different parts of the gorilla beforehand. They try to grab ahold of each limb. The biggest guys establish a headlock. Tie him up to facilitate damage.

Now, the MMA guys start sending flying knees and elbows at the face, stomping, kicking. We’re going to break those teeth. Compromise the gorilla’s weapons.

Our secret weapon is the testicle team. Their only job is to grab and rip those gorilla balls off. This is a fatal blow. It will die through hemorrhaging, but will take some time. It guarantees at least a tie.

But I think the men win. Communication, planning, cohesiveness and courage are absolutely required, but we could do it.

Time to try and sleep again.

Groundhog Night

Ancient UndergradLeave a comment

Insomnia again. THC withdrawal is real.

It was such a good day too. I’m going to be exhausted tomorrow.

I voted for the Liberal party today. I bet not many are in the “I voted in both the 2024 USA and 2025 Canadian federal elections” club. I deserve a civic duty cookie. They are a bit dry, but taste important.

I guess I’ll read Descender until I feel tired. I hate typing on this kindle.

Psychic Voltage

Ancient UndergradLeave a comment

It’s almost 2am and I’m wired. Significant physiological and psychological factors are driving this insomnia.

Some context first. I’m in my hometown of T.Bay, in bed – a hotel room in the dark. Wife is sleeping next to me, I’m on my kindle fire awkwardly trying to silently hunt and peck type on this shitty little e-keyboard.

We’re up here to buy a home. Another milestone in our project to move from Massachusetts to Ontario.

That is not why I’m wired though. THC withdrawal appears to be in full effect. I’m taking another cannabis break, and that first week after quitting makes for a restless detoxing brain full of neurotransmitter. Supercharged with glutamate.

I also just played about two hours of blitz chess and am in a jangled competitive aftermath state. If I ever need to survive A Nightmare on Elm Street situation, I could probably stay up forever playing 5 minute blitz chess. I’m not even that good at it, its just addictive as shit.

Now the emotional reasons…….. Is anyone else feeling quiet desperation in the people you care about? Don’t people seem more fragile lately? This might be the first time in my life that I’ve felt like humanity is backsliding, and it is very troubling.

I think I can sleep now, suddenly I feel exhausted. Looks like the cure to insomnia is existential dread.