...spin class...
“Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.”
-Alfred Lord Tennyson-
With this dizziness of a mind spinning, I stare down at the headlines, focused on not what I read, but what I hope to read between the lines. Living in an increasingly divided culture of extreme right and left wings, I find myself asking…what about the thighs, the legs and the breasts?
The legs of society run marathons of misinformation each day, telling me I should care about a certain celebrity’s cup size and a different debutante’s dalliances. The breasts bounce my brainwaves. And the thighs tender me lies. Disinfo, misinfo, and then more info and this bimbo knows not what anything means anymore. I’m spun.
Quoth the pedia, spin is a form of propaganda, achieved through knowingly providing a biased interpretation of an event or campaigning to influence public opinion about some organization or public figure. The basic gist of spin is that anything being told or reported, is likely told through a lens of deception. With that premise pounding my perspicacity proceeded and I decided to approach a week of news knowing that whatever I knew was likely nonsense, and what I could know knowing that was not necessarily notable.
The news is our record of what was, but the more it spins, the more it skips and degrades. So I decided this week I would be taking out a vinyl brush to see if I can’t clean out some truth in the grooves. I opened the paper and put Monday’s record on.
MONDAY - SHOWRUNNER A.I.
Last week a company called FABLE STUDIO released their new A.I. product, a generative showrunning tool that creates A.I. simulations of existing IP with the hopes of making endless content. Their goal is “AIs that are truly alive, not chatbots that pop into existence when we speak, but AI people, living REAL daily lives in simulations, growing over time. They want you to be able to watch the lives of AIs in Simulations you follow, build or train - think of it as reality TV for AIs.”
The work has been successful so far to this point that major news orgs are picking up and tracking its success. But if all I read is simply spin, what am I seeing in this shitty sim of south park?
[takes a gigantic bong rip]
What if we are the simulation man? It has been intimated that A.I. has already won, and that we are not beings of flesh and spaghetti monster, but rather ones and zeros working through a great computer’s database. As someone who has spent most of their life being a total zero I see some great potential truth herein. How else can I explain my watching of the entirety of the Golden Girls no less than 3 times in this life? If that is not just a man recharging his batteries then I know not what else is.
But if reporters are reporting on our life being a simulation, then the simulation theory might be a spin unto itself. Could that mean we are life pretending to be A.I.? I’d have to read Tuesday’s news to find out.
TUESDAY – HUMAN BARBIES
This last weekend all of mankind celebrated corporate synergy with bright pink sold out attendance at theaters across the country celebrating the release of our very first live action Barbie movie. This is a great win for Mattel, a brand seeking to monetize and build IP from every last drop of product it has created. But the headline I was reading was focused on a far more fearsome finding. According to the paper I would be shocked to see what a real human in Barbie proportions would look like.
Unfortunately the most shocking element of this story is how not graphic it was. I wanted to see bent necked pink humans running the world like dogs and all I got was a shasty illustration of some doll that doesn’t even look like a Barbie. The spin was the shock. When you don’t expect something you get surprised, but what do you call it when you expect a surprise but get banality instead? Some would call this a plot twist, but even with those I expect some element of energy from the experience. I think we should call surpriseless surprises Barbie Dogs in honor of this paper’s plot twist.
WEDNESDAY – LOST AT SEA
An Australian man named Tim Shaddock just survived 3 months at sea, and according to the paper, no one reading would have any idea how to do the same if put in a similar situation. To that end this article offered some helpful tips for those of us planning to get on a boat and go missing for half a year. Apparently you shouldn’t drink urine, you should drink turtle blood, and at some point you should think about killing your dog. As I read deeper into the article I learned that fish eyes are a good source of water, and that I should avoid giving myself salt water enemas. I read even more and I hear about a man named Jose Salvador Alvarenga who lasted 438 days at seas living off of birds he crippled and periodically drank and ate. Oh and he also likely ate the other dude on the ship. Either way the dude is a boss.
The spin was easy to see in this story. I was clearly joining a cult as I read this article. Anyone who has joined a cult before knows you definitely need to drink blood, urine, and kill dogs to celebrate your new lord Zanzigong. I unzipped and poured myself a glass of piss. I was ready to be lost.
THURSDAY – MINDFULNESS IS NOT HAPPINESS
Mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us. Lots of folks can find this state through meditation, or by taking time to focus on the present moment through all the various senses we have access to. But according to the Canadian experts in this article there is no scientific proof that these tactics will bring you any more joy. They go so far as to say that Netflix or watching people work out might give you the same mental boosts.
Never one to turn down an opportunity to be lazy I sat down on my couch with my iced pee martini and turned on the TV. I meandered up and down the channels until I became worried that I might be exercising my thumb and thus missing out on the mindless means of mindfulness. I stopped my search on channel 264. A marathon of Golden Girls preened from the screen and I spun myself into a nap. I dreamt I was meditating on day 93 lost at sea. I had arched heels, a sagging neck and could only walk on all fours. I flapped my arms, simulating life as a bird and hoping to fly from my lifeboat I wagged my wings right and left. When I awoke I had a dry sour thirsty mouth and the TV was blaring an infomercial for a waffle maker. I realized I needed to be more mindful of how I spent my time.
FRIDAY – ROBOT DOGS
So apparently the cult of Zanzigong’s power was growing, as the news began suggesting to me I seek out robots instead of fine furry companionship. The prospect of a selfie stick shih tzu following me around doing gymnastics seemed creepy, but after watching a young boy play with the robot in their promotional video I realized, it was super fucking creepy.
We live in a world where Sarah Maclachlan is constantly singing to us because there are so many real dogs to rescue…
We live in a world where there are so many real dogs that in some towns they eat them. We live in a world that has enough real dogs that we can have dog walking competitions, dog surfing competitions, dog diving competitions, and competitions to celebrate the ugliest dogs in the world.
But here we are, with another tech product that solves a problem that doesn’t exist. Here young buddy, I got you a pet Napster for Christmas. I don’t need a fake dog. I don’t need a dog to take pictures of me. And I don’t need a dog that doesn’t poop, plays music, and that dances for my pleasure…wait a second…
SATURDAY – WARNING LABELS
As my week span closer to a close the news next brought me a tale of terror unexpected. Apparently warning labels have grown to be so ubiquitous that they no longer bring with them the proper fear that they should. All the warnings I was warned about no longer had a purpose. I am so used to being scared, especially by tags and labels. I’m afraid people are going to label me an idiot and tag me because I’m it. If the warning labels had lost their ability to instill alarm what else might they not do. Further what do we call things that are supposed to be scary but they are not? I think we should call them Barbie Dogs. And if labels are going to be Barbie Dogs, perhaps we don’t need them anymore. A utopian society, labeless and fearless awaits us. We shall also call this society Barbie Dog. Or Hooters 2.
SUNDAY – FACEKINIS
It was Sunday. The Lord’s day of rest (...Zanzigong…). And as I kicked back my heels to suck down my last salty yellow soda. According to this article the hot summer trend is putting a bikini on your face. Now nevermind that a facekini is actually just a ski mask, my mind needs to wrap around the idea of what a facekini is. If a bikini is a swimsuit made to cover your genitals, would it posit that a facekini would serve the same purpose but for a face? And since the facekini covers the entirety of your head but leaves open your eyes, mouth and nose, would that mean your head is the crotch of your body and your ears are your breasts?
Most importantly if climate change is going to bring us fashion this hot I’m ok with burning the whole world down. Now let me throw this legging over my mug and I’m going to go rob a grocery store.
“I realized the world spins without me having to spin it.”
-John Schnatter-
A week spent spinning myself yet I feel no closer to the truth. Here I am mindless, labeless, a mouth full of me juice, surrounded by dogs and birds that watched me consider eating and drinking them. Yet still Zanzigong rings it bell. It rings my bell. Once a day the denizens of the cult come to my doorstep and asks if I could subscribe to their newsletter. Their pamphlet asks me “What if we live in a simulation?” and I think about the cast of South Park stuck in some terrible A.I. and ask myself. I wonder if they are going to release a version of this for Golden Girls?
The layout of this article is A+, serious work went into making this entertaining to read and I was surprised many times by the layers of humor in every possible area on this one. Well done. The photo with the caption "…the author after drinking his fourth glass of piss…" made me spit take (it was not piss I spit but should be counted all the same).