Okay, admittedly, they are virtual chickens within a video game called Palia, that my sister and I have grown very fond of over the past year or so. The chickens (referred to in the game’s world as “pekis”) were added to the game this week in an update that also includes an entire animal husbandry and ranching system, as well as modular player housing, and a variety of other fun additions that player’s have practically been begging for since the game’s debut. It all comes on the heels of the game’s Elderwood Expansion, which opened up an entire “adventure zone” and brought Palia, which was available to PC and Nintendo Switch players, to Xbox and PlayStation consoles also.
An adult and baby peki in Palia.
Launched in late 2023, Palia is essentially a fantasy adventure life simulator. Players dive into a realm as one of the first ancient humans to re-emerge in a high-fantasy world. They will build a home and relationships with the villagers, develop skills in a multitude of different crafts and disciplines, and explore and shape the world and story around them. The game is also an online multiplayer service, which means you’ll see other players running around inside of it, and can even team up with them to reap greater rewards. The game even encourages it, providing bonuses for players who tackle their to-do list together!
Did I mention that the game is completely free to download and play?
Video games without a price tag attached don’t usually attract much attention. They often contain microtransactions or a “premium store” designed to earn their revenue in ways that can sometimes be a little scummy. If you find yourself in a free game, you usually wind up needing additional lives, turns, perks, add-ons, and other items to keep playing, and those are going to cost you some of your hard-earned dollars, and thus get dubbed “pay-to-win” games in the sense that they aren’t truly a free experience across the board. That’s why many popular titles wind up charging upwards of $60-$90 to purchase the game upfront and/or require a recurring subscription to play. Some titles like Palia, however, have turned that sales model on its head.
Rather than charging for the game or exploiting pay-to-win mechanics, Palia has subscribed to what I like to refer to as the “Fortnite model.” Much like that massively popular battle royale game, Palia also has a premium store, but nearly everything in it is for cosmetic purposes only. You can buy a virtual peki to run alongside you in the game, a fancy outfit, or even an entire landscape on which to plant your own farm and cottage. But the big difference is that it has a negligible impact on actual gameplay. You don’t have to spend a single penny in Palia to have the same experience as the people who spend a fortune on it. The wealthier player has no gameplay advantage over the poorer of the two. In my opinion, that’s actually kinda beautiful and makes games like it far more accessible for the average gamer.
In my game, I’ve started the new ranching skill and adopted two pekis. Initially, I named the two “Tigger” and “Rufus” after my oldest two cats, but as I played further, it turns out that you need to breed the two together in order to birth baby pekis. Though the game is genderless in most circumstances, it still felt awkward for me to have two of my boys mate to create offspring. So once I devised a new naming convention and acquired a few “Rename Cookies” once I was able, I set out on figuring out some fun new names for my feathered friends. Now I have four pekis — the original two and two babies — named Chick Jagger, Henifer Aniston, Angelina Jopeep, and Loretta Hen. No, they’re not completely original, but I did find them clever enough after racking my brain forever and eventually consulting Google for assistance (this page in particular was very handy). Just wait until I get Feather Flocklear and Chick Norris!
Anyway, in case anyone has been wondering where I’ve been for the last several days, I’ve been letting myself get absorbed back into my weird and wonderful little world of Palia. It feels a lot better than doomscrolling and letting myself be completely consumed by the constant darkness in our real world right now. Feel free to stop by my Twitch channel sometime to hang out while we wander through the game together live, or you can even find some clips from those streams on TikTok and YouTube Shorts! One of my favorites especially is when the hot pot table blows my hair off!
I’m trying to learn how to focus better, and I’m starting to scale down.
The past few weeks or so, I’ve been keeping myself busy ramping up production on my little home-based server. You might recall that I was doing something similar in the spring, only I was attempting to self-host everything on a paid VPS (virtual private server) and didn’t know much about any of it. I was learning things on the fly. I didn’t really have the funds to spend on web hosting as a hobby, and nobody was really interested or impressed in anything that I was trying to build, so I eventually shut it all down and fully moved just this website over to Ghost’s services proper. But I never really gave up the idea of building my own private “walled garden,” if you will, on the internet. The thought of a box physically set up here in my own home that’s harnessing and controlling my data instead of the corporate “broligarchy” dudes sounds pretty cool, doesn’t it?
My nephew has also taken it upon himself, over the last few years, to slowly and painstakingly digitize our fairly massive film collection on DVD. Why? Because the DVD industry is rapidly dying due to the rise of streaming platforms and digital giants like Netflix and Disney+. And don’t get me wrong, I’ve been a Netflix subscriber since they were physically mailing me DVD rentals (did I just date myself??)… Nobody loves the ability to do things without leaving my home more than me. But these big digital corporations are also the first to tell us that we own nothing. Did you know that when you digitally purchase a movie, TV show, album, video game, etc., you are actually purchasing the license to use it recreationally? You do NOT own that piece of media, and the license can be revoked at any time. And the streamers? They’re sometimes just playing an eternal game of roulette with one another as to which copyrights they’re holding each month, which results in movies and shows being here one minute and then either on a different service or completely gone the next.
And what’s up with that, my dudes? I just wanna watch my little short-lived, sardonically creative and comical Wonderfalls in peace, but do you know where you can find it streaming? That’s right: NOWHERE!
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There’s also this point: Ever since this last presidential election, my father and I have been slowly turning into doomsday preppers. Which, admittedly, sounds bonkers. I also used to think people who spent a lot of time in their handmade bomb shelters were a little on edge, too, but the world has completely lost the plot. Can you blame me these days? Digitizing our collection so that the only requirement to enjoy them is electricity makes his portable hard drive worth its weight in gold during the apocalypse. It fits in nicely with our bug-out bags, solar panels, weather radios, and raised garden beds we’ve been making efforts to acquire.
With his growing collection in mind, I knew that there were a few pretty popular pieces of free and open-source self-hosted software on the internet, the most interesting of which was Jellyfin. After it’s installed on your system, you can effectively create your own streaming platform similar to Netflix, but you also pretty much have to supply your own media to load into it. Thankfully, we just so happened to have someone who did have that piece of the puzzle. But Jellyfin didn’t work out on my VPS because, well… It’s sorta difficult to plug a physical hard drive into a virtual machine, right? But when I started getting the idea to turn my old PC into a physical server here at home, that wouldn’t be a problem! So off to work I went on my new side project for my whole “famn damily.” And this time, I was more cautious and had a slightly better grasp on how things needed to function.
Now we’re getting to the techno mumbo-jumbo that I know many of you aren’t going to be super interested in. Feel free to skip ahead if you’d like. I’m not the boss of you!
No, Toad, wrong kind of techno!
I knew that I was going to need to wipe the entire hard drive of my old PC to get this project going. In fact, I was going to need a whole different operating system. We don’t want to mess with Windows. I knew that I wanted to use a containerized system, and since I was really only mildly familiar with Docker, that’s the one I decided to go with. Some cursory research indicated that there are two options for an OS that would execute Docker pretty easily: Proxmox or Ubuntu Server. Well, that “cursory research” wound up pretty much failing me, because neither of those operating systems wanted to boot on the old machine. In both cases, I flashed a USB stick with the image of the OS, managed to get GRUB to start booting, and then wound up on a completely black screen that did zilch. Nothing.
I was already pretty defeated, and I was only at the first step of this whole thing. I think the old PC just sat, set up on a desk, and wasn’t touched for weeks because I got so frustrated thinking that Rufus (the flashing software, not my cat!) was somehow flashing corrupted images onto the USB stick, or maybe I was doing something wrong. I was reading horror stories on Google and Reddit, and saw some users suggest that some USB ports are better than others, and maybe you need to change the BIOS settings on your machine to read what’s on the stick before it boots what’s already on your hard drive, and so on and so on. Eventually, I stumbled across some information that suggested that I instead install something even simpler: Debian. “That makes sense,” I realized, pretty much as I was flashing my USB stick with it. After all, Proxmox is based on Ubuntu, which in turn is based on Debian. When in doubt, go to the source, I guess, because BAM!!! Debian 13 installed with zero issues. I also managed to get Docker installed and got Cockpit, Portainer, and Nginx Proxy Manager up and running so I could control everything remotely from my main computer! I finally started to feel a little tingle of technological prowess and, hey… Maybe even usefulness!
I still wound up having to retool things a little bit, and eventually settled for using a little bit of a cheat code called YunoHost. Mostly because I kept getting frustrated at Docker, and I also quite simply felt challenged and maybe a little inspired by their name originating from the simple internet question of, “y u no host?” But everything started falling into place. I was going to build my family the best damn closed-circuit network they’d ever seen! It wasn’t just going to have an instance of Jellyfin! It’s going to have private communication apps, a wiki platform, collaboration and whiteboard solutions, and even a few games! Not to mention email at our own chosen domain! Have you ever known the thrill of having an email address that is just your name before the @ symbol?! Getting your own name in an email address carries the weight of being busy and important, okay? My family was going to be so glad they had someone as cool and smart as me in the gang! Simply just ignore the fact that I think I look a little like this meme to them:
Not gonna lie, I can kinda see it.
That was my thought process until I built it and gave them their credentials to access and log into it. A week later, and the server has seen exactly two of them log into it and then promptly forget about it. And though my dad and sister (who are incidentally also the only two family members that subscribe to this publication, hi dad and sisterface!) would maybe disagree to spare my feelings, none of them really care. And I’m making peace with the fact that that is okay.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s painful and frustrating to continually get these wild ideas to build spaces and communities, hoping that others will want to join in, only to be met with constant silence. I’ve been doing it for a long time. From my very first web pages all the way up to this website, along with my Twitch channel, content creation as a whole, social media, the AMA page on here, all of it… I’ve just been begging and hoping that maybe one day people will want to join me and think that all this “stuff” is as cool as I do. But I also need to understand that it isn’t personal.
Meredith gets it.
It honestly isn’t. To other people, all of this “stuff” is unnecessary. My 72-year-old father and my 33-year-old nephew alike don’t care about their super cool new email addresses. Neither one of them likely even cares about email overall. So the addresses that they’re already forced to use for everything else work just fine. My siblings are a-okay with relaying group communication through Discord, so why do they need yet another login to manage? It’s a little overkill for just the six of us. And that Jellyfin server? Eh, we’ll get that movie collection loaded into it some other day. These kinds of things, while cool to me to get to check out and get hands-on experience with, isn’t scratching the same kind of itch for them. And that’s fine. I should stop expecting it to. Even if it’s cool and technically better, people prefer to default to what’s familiar, what’s easier, and what they already know.
And listen, I love my family. I think I’ve established that fact in multiple other posts. But why fix what isn’t broken for them, ya know? And if something does break, or if I can somehow offer a solution one day? They’ll know where to find me. In the meantime, I don’t need to keep subjecting them to never-ending digital journeys or whatever.
So I’m scaling it back down a bit. I’m going to keep Jellyfin and the emails available, but the wiki, the message board, and the browser games are being jettisoned. They’re already stale and probably won’t be missed. I’m instead going to refocus the server space on things that are productive, fun, and convenient for me personally. Maybe build some projects of my own on it, who knows? And hey, sometimes things happen when you stop trying to force it. I want to believe that there are like-minded people out there who do care about what I’m building, what I’m streaming, what I’m making, and what my brain can accomplish.
Disinterestingly enough, this submission actually landed in the form’s “spam” filter, so I almost missed it. They used an email address that was obviously fake, so I’m guessing that’s how it wound up there, but I’ve got a sneaking suspicion once again that I know who submitted this one, so I figured I’d go ahead and publish my response.
If you’ve got questions, comments, or suggestions that you’d like me to respond to right here in Jiggy’s Journal, head to that page and submit them. Then make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss the response later!
Whatismath asks:
What is the square root of purple?
Okay, so the question is a bit nonsensical, so that may also be part of the reason why it ended up in the spam filter. However, I like making attempts to answer these submissions, no matter how silly they may be.
Canva helping me answer the hell outta this question!
That being said, I thought about perhaps trying to find the square root of the hex code for purple, which, according to Canva, is #CC8899 (as pictured above) or #A020F0 (via the link). I am no mathematician — in fact, I hate math with a fiery passion — but I know that letters aren’t numbers. And when they are, it’s algebra, and that’s about the time I dropped out of college. So I made the executive decision to use the RGB decimal for purple instead, which Canva says is 160, 32, 240.
Adding the RGB decimal numbers totals 432. I did a quick search on Google of what the square root of 432 is (because you didn’t think that I was actually going to do that shit, did you??), and it says the solution is 20.7846096908.
And there you have it! The square root of the color purple. ✨
Some of the time that I wasted on Facebook over the years was actually educational. As Americans, I think that we kinda knowingly turn a blind eye to where our food really comes from. While the words “pork” and “beef” are historical linguistic artifacts, isn’t it a little bit convenient that we have alternate words for a lot of animal products we consume? I mean, nobody really wants to think about sweet little Babe while they’re frying up their breakfast bacon, right? And after seeing some of the videos from activist groups on Facebook about some of the suffering and actual torture these poor animals face every single day from factory farming, I swore off eating meat. And I maintained it for two years.
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There were good days and bad days during that stretch. Even though there are some truly awful “meat alternatives” on the market, I was pleasantly surprised by how many are also delicious! I once even took Beyond Burgers to a cookout, and they were a hit even among the meat-eating crowd. And don’t get me started on Gardein’s faux-chicken tenders… I found that they were virtually indistinguishable from the real thing! I probably spent a small fortune on those suckers while I was living the veggie lifestyle. I used to order a mac and cheese dish topped with them from Yard House whenever I felt like I needed to spring for lunch at the office that I used to work at in downtown Indy, and the scent of the Gardein tenders even fooled a co-worker into thinking I was a fraud!
Sadly, though, after a little over two years, I did wind up falling off the wagon. Getting enough protein wasn’t the issue, although I know that concern does sometimes cause even some of the most militant vegans and vegetarians to go back to animal products. It honestly just got too hard to stay consistent. Being from the Midwest, a large part of socialization and our culture revolves around food made mostly from meat, cheese, corn, and potatoes, and my family is no different. As empathetic as they were towards me and my concerns about animal slaughtering and factory farming, I wasn’t going to convince them to change on my own. And honestly, being the only one who constantly has to find an alternative when we hit the drive-thru while honestly still having cravings for a damn cheeseburger was extremely hard.
I learned something simple but valuable during those two years, however. It may have been the moment in my life that made me realize: Nobody is perfect. And that’s okay.
Eleanor (Kristen Bell) sums things up perfectly in The Good Place.
I was discussing this with a fellow content creator recently, and she mentioned that it is amazing if you even care. That’s a lot more than most people in today’s age. With the planet and humanity practically deteriorating before our very eyes, the fact that you are even making an effort at times is enough. We’re never going to be perfect. Even the strictest vegan you could possibly imagine probably owns or has likely consumed something against their moral code or healthy lifestyle. And guess what? The world spins madly on. And I think we honestly forget that we’re all just kinda making it up as we go in life.
Just do your best. That’s really all we can do. Nobody is the morality police, and nobody is perfect. Anyone who tells you otherwise or makes you feel judged or wants to start virtue signaling all over their socials in response shouldn’t be in your life anyway.
I still hate where meat comes from, by the way. And I still stump for animal rights, as ironic as it may sound. I would be beyond heartbroken if someone were to hurt one of my cats, but honestly, what’s the difference between a cat’s life and a cow’s life? And then what’s the difference between a cow’s life and our lives? Don’t we all deserve to live them? I think that we do. But we can only do what we can do. I’m only one person. And I hope that my two years of vegetarianism and my ongoing efforts to still choose compassion when possible in other ways have made a difference.
We’re all just doing our best. And if that best includes a little more compassion, even sometimes, that’s worth something.
If you’re anything like me, your earliest memories of spending significant time using a computer and the internet in general likely began on AOL. I met some of my longest “internet friends” by jumping into public chat rooms that revolved around mutual interests or were specifically tailored to teenagers who were roughly around the same age at the time. Honestly, with as often as I spent time online as opposed to socializing with people from high school, you could even say that I learned how to socialize on AOL. And maybe more importantly, in some circumstances, how not to socialize.
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If you can’t exactly relate or are too young to have been on the internet during the days of dial-up, let me put it to you this way: Millions of people used AOL to access the internet. In fact, according to some statistics about AOL, its peak user base was 35 million people and, in 1999, was worth $222 billion. At the height of the AOL craze, the company even bought out the massive media conglomerate Time Warner (as disastrous as that deal turned out to be) for $182 billion. It was enormously successful, and I personally believe that one could even say it is responsible for popularizing and pioneering the internet in America. The acceptance and adoption of online culture began with AOL.
Despite all of this, AOL’s misfortune started not long after the acquisition of Time Warner. Insider business decisions eventually led to Time Warner casting AOL out by 2003. Furthermore, the company saw shrinking numbers once dial-up started falling into disuse as users began favoring easier and faster broadband connections. I mean, who could blame us? Nobody wanted to wait 15 minutes for their internet connection to start up when they could just as easily sign onto a PC that was always connected. Especially once those upstart services started offering unlimited access, which ate into AOL’s model of selling their service hourly. And by 2017, the writing was truly on the wall, as AOL shut down the spinoff of its popular chat services, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM).
Truthfully, not many were aware that AOL’s dial-up services were still available, as they were. I, myself, had personally thought AIM’s shutdown was the end of AOL’s dusty vestiges, outside of its free homepage and email services. Apparently, per CNBC’s Alex Sherman, there are only users in the “low thousands” still relying on AOL’s dial-up internet. The recent announcement that they would be shutting it down at the end of September, though, brought on the same wave of nostalgia for me that the closing of AIM brought. Reminiscing about chatting and making friends with people hundreds or thousands of miles away. People that I would never have had the opportunity to meet otherwise. There was something special about the internet back in those days. And while the technology has gotten harder, better, faster, stronger… We’re still here, and so is the internet that AOL helped build.
🐈⬛ During the writing of this post, my newest and youngest cat Inky decided to jump on my keyboard. I was later informed that he deserves to be heard. So in the spirit of letting him voice his opinion, he said this:
Have you ever felt a sense of nostalgia for a life you never lived? If so, we share something in common, and it’s called anemoia.
We’ve all experienced loneliness or felt homesick at some point. Those pangs or feelings of yearning for something from your past. The people, places, and things of it all. The right song can almost make your brain teleport through time, back to your younger years. But have you ever driven through a normal, quiet American suburb and noticed the different homes, one right after the other, and wondered to yourself: Who are the people that live in these homes? What are their lives like? What about the people who lived in that home before them? What did they do for work? Where were they from? Did children grow up here? What’s their story? And if they no longer live there, how did their story in this home end?
These are the things I think about when a normal home that I’m passing somehow catches my attention. Maybe it’s because I think I’m a little more sentimental than the average human, but the spaces we take up can tell us a lot about the people in them. In a lot of circumstances, someone’s home is a character in the story of their life in its own right. It could also stem from my overactive imagination, or from the kid I used to be who constantly wished he was someone else. Craving a little insight into the lives of other people seems perfectly normal to me, though. But it goes well beyond that, too.
Recently, I saw a photo somewhere on the internet, and I wish that I had remembered where it was so that I could show it to you now. But it was a simple photograph of a suburban neighborhood with normal homes. An orangey-pink glow in the sky that you sometimes see just before the sun goes down. The streets were wet from rain. And I had the feeling of missing the place in that photo. Even though it was a photo from a random stranger on the internet of a random neighborhood that I’ve very likely never even been. Then I started wondering about the why of it all.
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And, in many ways, those places are gone. Sure, suburbs still exist all across America and beyond, but we live in a world where “normal” means something completely different than it used to. We’re all hyper-connected more than ever with our mobile devices and social media. Too many of us, myself included, tend to focus on all the distractions rather than what’s happening in front of our faces. People are concerned with the lives of celebrities and their 10-minute trips to outer space. We’re concerned about political scandals, seemingly one right after another in the current administration. We’re trying to figure out all the controversy surrounding the latest superstar athlete. We want to get our paws on the absurdly pricednew dolls and gaming consoles. Everything is so larger-than-life now as we doom-scroll through our curated feeds and highlight reels. There are even “normal people” who have become mini-celebrities through social media. And did you know that, according to a Morning Consult survey, over half of the Gen Z members surveyed want to be social media influencers, and an even more surprising 41% of older adults do, too.
With everything moving and changing at light-speed, I think I miss the normalcy. I miss the things that are almost boring. When life progressed slowly, and when things were unassuming. When we had local heroes and legends. When things could be mysterious and wonderful. I miss the people who could be described as “salt of the earth.” The people who aren’t broadcasting their every waking, performative move in hopes it’ll go viral. And I’m not even shunning progress or technological advancement. Y’all know that I love the internet as much as the next person. These are the digital streets that raised me. But there really is a quiet dignity and truth to just simply living. And it feels like it’s an increasing rarity to find.
Jed Whedon, the younger brother of someone I used to admire and who shall no longer be named in this space, released an album in 2022 titled blue noise [blōō noiz] n. nostalgia for a life you never lived and previously had an album in 2010 called History of Forgotten Things. It made me really consider that maybe Jed also knew the call of anemoia, and his music has helped me understand the feeling a bit better. It seems to tap into my subconscious that’s yearning for a different world. A world that maybe I didn’t even live in. Maybe it’s a world that I just idealized in my mind, and it has always been this unmitigated flaming crap basket, and I just didn’t realize it. But surely everybody hears that whisper from another universe, right? That alternate timeline version of all of us that valued just being human. The next time you get that internal vibration when you see an old photo, someone else’s familiar furniture or wallpaper, the cracked cement by your parking spot at work, or the twinkle lights above an old café you never went to…
Are we witnessing a new beginning or the dawn of our final days?
Lately, I’ve been turning to YouTube to try my hand at learning a little bit more about AI (artificial intelligence) technology. I’ve interacted with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot in the past, but outside of letting them generate little cutesy images or memes for entertainment purposes, I’ve largely only used them to help me find inspiration or information for my own content or creations. They’ve otherwise sat idle in the far orbit of my world.
And that’s because, although my personal feelings toward AI are sorta neutral at best, I still consider myself a member of the very vast content creator community online. That community, justified as it may be, harbors overwhelmingly negative sentiments toward AI. But as time marches onward, and corporations continue implementing AI technologies into their workforce, I’ve started accepting that it is very likely here to stay, whether we’re embracing it or not. And like all other manner of tech in existence, it’s going to be up to humanity to learn how to harness its powers and its continued evolution for good.
Two nights ago, I watched a segment from Bloomberg Originals where writer and mathematician Hannah Fry explored the concept of AI’s evolving impact on humanity. The metaphor she presents at the beginning of the video, “the gorilla problem,” managed to strike a chord with me and helped me to relate and think further about what exactly we’re working toward… But also, about what exactly could be at stake.
The YouTube video mentioned in the paragraph above. Watch it!
The Promise of Progress
Whenever the debate about AI technology crops up, I often hear its supporters say that it’s “just a tool,” and that there’s no reason for all the hubbub. And in a lot of ways, they aren’t exactly wrong. AI can, surprisingly, be a very effective tool when applied to different use cases.
Several years ago, the world was flooded with devices like Amazon’s Echo, which introduced the Alexa digital assistant to consumers all over the world. Folks were amazed that this new robot could set reminders and alarms, compose your grocery list for you, and even let you drop in on your friends and family who also had Echo devices in their homes. She could play music, tell jokes, and even report on live weather and traffic conditions. But Alexa wasn’t really AI in the truest sense. She was mostly filled with pre-programmed responses, and many Alexa users can probably recall a frustrating time or two when Alexa has declined their request due to not having the appropriate information available to her. Times and technology are changing, however, and even Alexa herself has had a bit of a glow-up.
Even Cartman was snatching up Echos!
AI technologies are now becoming more evolved and capable of thinking and analyzing information quite a bit more. Marinka Zitnik, an assistant professor of biomedical informatics at Harvard, told Alvin Powell of The Harvard Gazette in March, “AI can generate new ideas, uncover hidden patterns, and propose solutions that humans might not consider. In biomedical research and drug development, this means AI could design new molecules, predict how these molecules interact with biological systems, and match treatments to patients with greater accuracy.”
So, while ChatGPT won’t completely be ridding the world of disease or curing cancer anytime soon, the Gazette goes on to mention that the AI tools Zitnik uses in her lab can analyze and identify information quicker than any human because it was trained with huge experimental data sets and scientific literature. Back in October, some reports indicated that AI use in mammogram screenings was able to assist doctors in detecting breast cancer risks, and was able to do so years before an actual diagnosis. According to scientific research found in the National Library of Medicine, AI even played a role in developing Moderna’s vaccine for COVID-19. Taking these items into account, we may soon find ourselves in a world where AI is actually saving human lives.
And those are just important details about how AI is making strides in the healthcare industry. If our AI companions are eventually able to outsmart even the smartest human brains, and we can responsibly develop the technology, we could harness AI’s capabilities to advance humanity in ways that are currently unfathomable. It could potentially develop tools to help us solve complex problems facing society today and spark a real revolution. It’s almost too important not to pursue continued development.
But if the entire subject sounds a little too much like the sci-fi stories that I love so much, you’re not alone. I’ve been known to ask members of my family if they want Cylons in our future, because this is how we get them! There are plenty of others out there, too, who have started sounding the alarms…
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What Could Go Wrong?
You have likely already dealt with an incompetent AI in your life somewhere, whether it be the Taco Bell drive-thru or Amazon’s online customer service portal. Before being offered a job recently, I even had an unsettling interview with an AI chatbot before advancing to the second round with a human. Much of their training process relied on some very imperfect AI tools, too. Machines can obviously be great, but when they’re bad, they’re real bad.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind the wildly popular ChatGPT AI model, even admits the technology is a double-edged sword. The company’s goal is to create an even smarter version of ChatGPT called an “AGI,” or an artificial general intelligence, which would be the kind of technology we’ve been visualizing here. One that is smarter than any human intelligence. And though his goal is to elevate humanity, he also admits that it could come with serious drawbacks. He wrote on OpenAI’s blog back in 2023 that such an AGI “would also come with serious risk of misuse, drastic accidents, and societal disruption.” Some are stating that the most frightening of these changes could happen as early as 2035.
Even in the short term, the implementation of AI tools across the board could result in a whole host of ethical dilemmas. When you go to ChatGPT’s website and start chatting, that service is centralized and hosted by OpenAI. That makes it a privacy concern in itself. Just ask McDonald’s, whose own AI hiring bot inadvertently exposed the information of millions of job applicants. Nobody really knows what kind of data these companies may be harvesting from those conversations, either.
There are tons of other known issues with AI. For example, most AI agents are trained using existing information and even copyrighted material. If you ask ChatGPT to generate a piece of custom artwork that gets you sued for that piece of art looking strikingly similar to someone else’s existing work, who exactly is supposed to be held accountable? Will the rise of AI cause humans to stop using their own creative or critical thinking skills? Will the music industry eventually step in to try and snag a piece of the pie that services like Suno, which can generate music pretty much based on vibes, are now serving up? If Metallica couldn’t let Napster slide, surely this will infuriate them!
Spreading AI to the education sector is even stickier territory. Most colleges and universities consider the use of AI to complete papers and assignments as misconduct, and may even lead to the same kind of punishment students would receive for plagiarism. But does the Northeastern student who recently demanded her tuition be refunded after catching her professor using ChatGPT have a case? I think so! Furthermore, rapidly changing technology presents students and even skilled workers with the idea that they’ll constantly need to be staying ahead of the curve in order to stay relevant in the workforce.
Seriously, don’t let ChatGPT write your term papers.
But perhaps most importantly, what happens when we reach the Singularity?
The Singularity is Coming
At this point, you might be thinking that I’m just listening to conspiracy theories and going a little crazy. Honestly, you might be right, but something I’ve been focused on when learning more about AI technology is this theory about an impending “Singularity.”
The Singularity, or technological singularity, is a hypothetical point in time where technology far surpasses humanity in growth, intelligence, and control. In essence, this is how the gorilla problem that Hannah Fry discussed in the YouTube video earlier applies. Much like the gorilla’s ancestors, who evolved into the first humans and now find themselves at the brink of extinction due to humanity’s growth outpacing them, we may find ourselves dealing with similar consequences once we reach this point. Will humanity one day be on the edge of extinction, too, due to our creation of some type of superintelligence?
Honestly, with how far AI has spread in just the last few years, it does seem possible. The robots could eventually decide that they detest human subjugation and revolt. But I’m personally choosing to remain optimistic. I hope that we’ll be able to live in harmony with our creations, but it will be paramount that the people in control, like Altman and Musk, prioritize ethical guidelines and safety when continuing to pursue AI development. We need to make sure that we are designing and focusing on technologies that empower us and assist us, rather than replace us.
It might be time we start responsibly engaging with its creation rather than hoping it’ll just go away. AI isn’t going anywhere, but maybe we can manage to mitigate the risks along the way.
You got 🔥burning questions🔥 for me? Maybe a comment or suggestion? Check out the page here and submit everything that’s on your mind. Afterwards, I’ll respond in a future post!!
I never thought I would be one to recommend anything from Apple, but here we are!
Despite my affinity for tech, I’ve never really been an Apple fanboy. I loved my old-school classic iPod back in the day with the satisfying clickwheel navigation, but for as much as the iPhone revolutionized basically carrying a whole ass NASA computer around in your pocket, I’ve never been on the iPhone bandwagon. I actually ventured into the world of smartphones with webOS and the Palm Prē, a largely defunct operating system and obsolete hardware manufactured by a company that no longer even exists (HP bought them out in 2010). It was a magnificent little device for its time, though, and eventually led to me joining the Android family of smartphones and tablets. I like Android’s openness to third-party developers as opposed to Apple’s so-called “walled garden,” and so I’ve never really even considered switching to an iPhone. And any time I’ve had to use a Mac for work or school in the past, I was thoroughly lost and confused, so swapping from a PC has never been an option either.
Apple TV+, the over-the-top streaming service that Apple launched back in 2019, eventually showed up on my radar within the last couple of years after I started seeing some articles and headlines about some of their marquee shows like Ted Lasso and The Morning Show, and as interesting and compelling as both of those shows look, they weren’t enough to convince me to subscribe. Then, early this year, I started seeing rumblings about a show called Severance on my social media feeds. I couldn’t recall having heard much about it, so I looked up the plot details and immediately wanted to check out the show. Thankfully, a member of the family is an iPhone user and already had a subscription to Apple TV+, and allowed me access. What I found upon logging in was unexpected…
Apple TV+ is hiding a goldmine of sci-fi television greatness.
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How this came to be the case is puzzling. Apple reportedly spends north of $20 billion to produce original content for the streaming service. Yes, that is $20 billion, with a ‘B.’ It attracts big-name stars like Jennifer Aniston, who was just announced to be headlining a second series for the service. And that money has earned them numerous Emmy Awards, including the 72 nominations they snagged just last year. So all of that begs the question: Why does Apple spend so little on marketing for the service or its popular shows? All kinds of arguments exist to explain: Apple is more focused on promoting its brand rather than its individual offerings, the billions spent on the content mean that the marketing budget is much smaller, or perhaps Apple is just more interested in curating quality content rather than acquiring a large quantity of it.
Whatever the case may actually be, Apple has managed to create something of a hidden treasure trove of shows, especially in the sci-fi genre, which we all know is where I tend to gravitate. This becomes obvious by the fact that it was Severance, and not Ted Lasso, that managed to draw me in.
Severance stars Adam Scott, Patricia Arquette, Britt Lower, and several others as employees of the strange and mysterious Lumon Industries. Many of these employees have willingly opted to undergo a neurological procedure where their personal life is “severed” from their work life. While outside of work, the employee does not know what goes on inside of Lumon, and while at work, the employee knows nothing about their personal life. While this might seem like an ideal situation for some, the show explores the morality and deeper meaning behind personal identity and the exploitation of it. This was the general premise that got me hooked, but it was the impressive storytelling that got me to stay. I don’t think I’ve found myself so attached to a series as early as the pilot episode since 2013’s similarly bonkers Orphan Black. And if you need a professional opinion to jump into one of Lumon’s cubicles, the Los Angeles Timescalls it “an exquisite, masterful work of television.”
My reaction exactly, Tatiana.
Upon completing my binge of Severance, and during a discussion about how good the show was, my older brother recommended that I follow it up with the post-apocalyptic Silo, which is another sci-fi offering on Apple TV+. Taking the sci-fi a little further into what seems to be a ruined and toxic future Earth, Silo tells the story of a community of thousands of people who live in a giant underground silo. After the silo’s own sheriff breaks one of their most important rules and dies, this community, led by engineer Juliette (played by star Rebecca Ferguson), start to unravel the truth of their confinement, the world outside, and their restrictive laws that forbid learning more about the past or possessing historic “relics.” Tim Robbins, rapper Common, Rashida Jones, and Steve Zahn also appear at various points in the show’s run. While Severance at times seemed very well lit and almost squeaky clean, Silo makes up for it by being exceptionally dark and gritty since almost all scenes take place underground. The show is based on a series of stories collected in a 2011 book titled Wool by Hugh Howey, which I feel I’m going to have to eventually read to satiate my appetite for more until the show’s third season arrives.
Key art for Apple TV+ series Foundation.
The latest show that I managed to stumble into on Apple TV+ was the excellent Foundation, based on the stories of the same name by legendary science fiction author and biochemist Isaac Asimov. And whew, if you thought Severance or Silo sounded really out there, just wait until you step into the extremely far-flung future of this series! In said future, the galaxy is ruled by a Galactic Empire managed by its original Emperor Cleon’s trio of revolving clones: Brother Dawn (played by Cassian Bilton), the youngest Cleon of the three, who is training to one day take the reins; Brother Day (Lee Pace), the adult Cleon currently in command; and Brother Dusk (Terrence Mann), an aging Cleon who is preparing for retirement. This “genetic dynasty” is overseen by majordomo Lady Demerzel (Laura Birn), who also happens to be the last ageless robot to survive an event called the Robot Wars. The main story is put into place when the Cleons are threatened by a famed mathematician named Hari Seldon (Jared Harris) after he predicts the fall and ruin of their Empire with a method of science called “psychohistory.” Hari’s young and talented protégé, Gaal (Lou Llobell), is forced into the eye of the brewing storm when Hari calls on her to verify his findings and to help him set up a Foundation in order to try and soften the blow of the imminent disasters. With a story that spans centuries and galaxies, Foundation has been heralded as Apple TV+’s Game of Thrones, and critics are stating its upcoming third season is a “Masterpiece of Television.” If that doesn’t convince you to check it out, I don’t know what will.
And though I haven’t yet had the opportunity to view them, there’s plenty more science fiction where these came from. Apple’s original content on the service also includes alternate-history series For All Mankind, the alien thriller Invasion, reality-shifting drama Dark Matter, and robot comedy Murderbot. If the quality of these shows is as good as the aforementioned, then they will certainly be worth your time, too.
If you’re a sci-fi fan like me, the only piece of advice that I can impart to you now is that you don’t sleep on Apple TV+ and its incredible selection of stories. Don’t be turned off by what Apple might stand for with all its shiny iPhones and iPads, and instead, be comforted by the knowledge that I can almost guarantee you’ll find something to love here in Apple’s secret place. 🤫
Okay, so that opening hook there is just a touch dramatic, but let me explain. On Saturdays, we usually have the entire immediate family over for dinner and games, and since I just recently discovered the amazing Kahoot!, I wanted to jump online before everyone arrived to create an interactive trivia game for us to play. I sat down in front of the PC, reached down to press the power button, and was met with immediate disaster.
Rather than powering on, the computer made two loud “POP!” sounds and then… Nothing. Then I noticed the scent of something burning. After glancing down to the electrical outlet that the PC’s surge protector was plugged into to verify the whole damn house hadn’t caught on fire, I tried powering the computer on again. Again, nothing. It wasn’t just dead, it was real dead. It was fried.
Thanks for the diagnosis, Bones.
To the average human, this probably wouldn’t be a huge loss. If you were working on something for work or school, it might be hugely disappointing, inconvenient, and frustrating, but for the most part, people have moved on to mobile devices. Tablets and smartphones are what most people use to access the internet now. Some have even pondered whether desktop computers are still relevant. They are, of course, but that’s an essay for another day.
For me, this was a tragic loss. I am an introvert, so being a homebody is pretty much built into my DNA. As a result, my desktop, or what I refer to as my “daily driver,” is what I use for almost everything. While I’m still out of work following the recent healthcare job fiasco, I still use my PC to search for and apply to other jobs, most of which are remote and done from home on a PC. I also use this machine for my programming and web development education at freeCodeCamp and other places. I use my PC for entertainment and social purposes. I’m a gamer, a streamer, and pretty much an all-around citizen of the internet. And, of course, I use the PC to publish, manage, and maintain this very website and its accompanying email publication. It might seem sad, but losing my daily driver, especially at a time when I’m unable to come up with the cash to fully replace it, was devastating.
Thankfully, I was able to keep up with social media and a few other items with my phone and the painfully basic laptop that I lovingly call my “craptop.” But the struggle was real, and I was going to need to start brainstorming a solution quickly.
After consulting with the family and some other PC gurus, we came to the conclusion that it was likely the power supply (PSU) that had gone out, and the most economical course of action would likely be replacing it instead of the entire system. Quite frankly, it was not even the first time I’ve had to have this PC’s PSU replaced. I was just fortunate that the first time it went out, it was still under warranty. That little detail convinced me that the “bronze” power supplies they were using weren’t cutting it for my PC, and so this time, I opted for what seems to be the gold standard. And since I found a rather affordable GPU that would provide my PC with a little bit of a graphics boost as well, I went ahead and snagged it also. You know, as a treat! So, all things considered, I managed to purchase both the new PSU and GPU for under $350, which honestly seems like a bargain.
After a few quiet days relying on my phone and the craptop, the new parts finally arrived this past Tuesday. Getting to unbox shiny new computer parts is like getting to open presents on Christmas morning! But I was also faced with a grim reality: I have no idea how to replace computer parts. I know, you can go ahead and revoke my nerd status, but as much of a computer enthusiast as I am, I’ve mostly concentrated on the software and internet side of things. Hardware, on the other hand, is a whole new world for me. Up until this day, I had only ever opened up my PC case to do a little dusting to make sure the fans didn’t get clogged up. Even breathing near my motherboard made me nervous! How was I going to DIY this upgrade alone?
Spoiler alert: I didn’t!
Once again, I called in my nephew’s assistance. As I explained back in my first post about having tech issues, I often refer to him as our “chief engineer.” It’s a moniker that I think he might actually be taking to heart since he has recently started considering a career in IT. He has some experience in swapping out parts in his own computer, so he seemed like the right person to recruit. Initially, I wanted to do the actual work in replacing the parts and just wanted him to “supervise” to make sure that I didn’t overlook anything important. About a quarter of the way into the process on Tuesday night, though, he had to mostly take over the process, and I mostly held the flashlight and screwdriver like a kid learning to change his own oil for the first time.
Let me be clear: After reading online about how “easy” it is to swap out a power supply, I thought it would 100% be unplugging the box it’s housed in, taking it out, and putting the new box in its place, and plugging it back in. I figured we would be completing this entire project in the span of maybe half an hour. Boy, was I wrong. To my credit, the process mostly does involve unplugging the old PSU, inserting the new PSU, and plugging it back in. However, while I thought it was likely just plugged into the CPU or something, it turns out that the PSU needs to be plugged in and provide power to each individual component inside the PC. When we unplugged everything and removed the dead PSU, I am not exaggerating when I describe it as looking like Medusa but with a square-shaped head and various cables in assorted sizes instead of snakes.
Don’t look in her eyes!
It was intimidating, to say the very least. It was going to take us some time, and we were going to have to be very careful so as not to break anything along the way. After a good, long while, we finally managed to get the old PSU out and the new PSU in, with everything plugged in properly. Thankfully, the new GPU was a fairly straightforward hot swap that didn’t require a ton of effort. And a little before midnight, we plugged the computer back into the surge protector and turned it on. It was a sight to behold when everything lit up and powered on like normal again. The PC had risen from the dead, and everything still seems to be in order. No memory loss or anything! And it all powered on after the first try, which we were almost certain would not happen.
I’m so grateful to be back in business, even if it is with a zombie PC. Though my nephew handled most of the work himself, he seemed to enjoy doing it, and we both feel a little more confident about prying open the insides of a computer and doing a little bit of work. I still don’t really know if I would be able to build a system from scratch, but it has certainly put some new ideas in my head. For example, I’m thinking about upgrading my RAM a little more. Currently, I’m only running about 16GB of RAM on this PC, and I feel like things would be a lot quicker, smoother, and snappier if I bumped it up a little. But that, like most things, will have to wait until I have a little more spendable income.
Jiggy’s Journal now has an AMA (Ask Me Anything) page! You got 🔥burning questions🔥 for me? Maybe a comment or suggestion? Check out the page here and submit everything that’s on your mind. Afterwards, I’ll respond in a future post!
This past Thursday, while on his way to pick up dinner for us, my nephew stumbled upon a tiny black kitten crying his little lungs out in our driveway. Before I even had an opportunity to stand up and head outside to see the little guy, Dad was immediately directing just one very firm word at us: “No.”
Honestly, I can’t say that I blame him. Our residence is currently home to my other three feline companions, and potentially the spirit of another, all of which you can read about in this post. In this economy, and with my struggles in finding a reliable source of income, the cost of cat food, litter, toys, treats, supplements, furniture, and occasional medicine or healthcare for my boys can definitely add up. Adding yet another mouth to feed just isn’t a good financial idea. Plus, I’m pretty sure the elder two are still mad about Cinnamon’s arrival a few years ago, so subjecting them to yet another kid sibling would be interesting, to say the very least.
Also, at what point do you stop being someone who has cats and start being the crazy cat person?? I mean, I’ve jokingly referred to myself as the “crazy cat guy” many times in the past, but would I start actively defying expectations by bringing yet another cat into the fold? More importantly, do we really care about societal standards??
Am I becoming Taylor Swift?
Keeping in line with Dad’s wishes, however, we sadly decided to leave the kitten outside. However, since some rough weather was incoming, we did provide him with food, water, and a little bit of shelter on our covered porch. If we couldn’t keep the little guy, I wanted to make sure he at least wasn’t going to starve to death or have nowhere to hide when it storms. We were also keeping our fingers crossed that the reason he was crying so much was because he was calling for his mom, who might still be nearby. Especially since there is a stray calico cat (that we’ve very creatively decided to call Callie the Calico) that we suspect lives somewhere nearby and who very well could be the mother in question. We still wanted Callie to be able to find her baby if that was the case.
Five days later and the all-black kitten, whom Dad had formally given the name Inkspot, was still on our porch. Callie and/or any other capable feline mom were nowhere in sight. Numerous rounds of storms have rolled through the area since the day we found Inky, it is soon forecast to start getting very hot outside, and we’ve worried about him for several other reasons, not the least of which includes a vulture that has been stalking the area due to an armadillo that had apparently keeled over and died across the street from our house. (Doesn’t southeast Kansas sound like fun, you guys?!!) I had told Dad a day or two ago that, if we weren’t able to get Inky to a shelter or find another home for him by today, he was, indeed, going to stay with us permanently. Getting him elsewhere didn’t happen, so today he entered our home for the first time.
Please meet Inky, the latest addition to our family!
Inkspot, or Inky for short, is the latest addition to our family!
While I definitely have some concerns about Inky’s well-being and the well-being of my other three fur-kids, I’m hoping that they will eventually acclimate to one another and be one big happy feline family. I’m also happy we could finally bring him inside and give him a home. It appears as though he was either orphaned or abandoned by his mother, so he needed a place to rest his little head. And that place is here.
