Cold day ramble: 33 minutes of talk—no action. Hey, at least there's no empty promises.

See vague meta thumbnail for details. You already clicked. There's really nothing left to discuss, unless you'd like to ask me about my disgust for the present state of this platform. Lemme just stick this in here as a placeholder: it's the winter of 2024, and YouTube has just released into the "Creator Studio" its most hideous abomination yet. We "Creators" now have at our disposal a complete palette of AI tools that have been made to help us design better hooks, lines, and stinkers. As if there weren't already a mountain of stupid-generated content out there through which one has to first sift in order to find something real enough to be watchable.

Note that "Allow automatic chapters and key moments" has been checked (✓) for this video. AI segmented this video into parts, not me.

About twenty years ago, my Grandpa said to me once, when asked if he had any interest in browsing the internet (and after laughing), "No, son, not at all; it's a Vast Wasteland." At the time, I didn't know that he was borrowing Newton Minow's clever phrase (about television), but a more prescient and appropriate commandeering has never been made. Grandpa had no idea what our collective online activities would morph into, let alone how that beast would end up stealing our time and shaping our culture, politics, and ultimately, our world. Now he's dead, and I can't tell him just how right he was to refuse the gangrenous superfluity of his age. The rest of us here, now stuck in our Vast Wasteland, have become engagement zombies. A nip to your remembered wisdom, sir.

Hope you like the title and thumbnail—cause more's comin'.

Oh! Looks like they've added some "products" to my description without asking, too! Flacking vampires. [Edited to restore 'products'' bubble from auto-remove.] I wonder if I get a cut. Ha. The irony of having your product blithely advertised directly beneath the phrase,
"flacking vampires." 🡓