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The new Bedroom Lights are pretty and I spent the monthbuilding my media archive on Jellyfin while the Greens win Gorton And Denton, the AI marches on, and yet more new wars.

Diary

Bedroom

Got the LED strips all fitted and controlled. Check out a video

Each has their own domain name on the LAN. 😆

Quite a bit of software to deal with to get it able to do everything I want but looking pretty great even with just the default WLED patterns.

All set up in time for a little birthday partyat my place. Fun times. Thanks to those who came.

That’s why I’m a few days late with this newsletter.

Song

Before that it was valentines day.

Hope you had a nice one.

In one episode of the Power Puff Girls, Coco The Clown becomes depressed and makes the whole world black and white. The girls save the day before bedtime of course. In this case, with a song.

And that song is actually pretty good advice against depression: Pay attention to your senses, focus on the moment, and most of all, love things.

I recorded the song with the loop pedal

I added a couple of verses coz it was too short but here you go: happy valentines day. Try and be sure to love things. The more you love things the better the world will seem.

Improv

Still at the weekly class on narrative.There is a show on the 19th of March

Story Spine

I missed the one which talked about a story spine, a template I first heard from a Pixar story course:

Once upon a time there was…

And every day they would..

Until one day…

And because of that…

(repeat ‘because’ till end)…

But I was at the next one concentrating mostly on the first bits: Playing out some scenes introducing characters, setting up their normal routine.

The nature of improv can be tricky here. Things spiral out of control quite fast. Things start happening immediately, without time to build that normal routine which you then break.

Take for instance the scene we did at an airport.

Lady rushes in: “Get me on a place as far away from here as possible, right now”.

Its a great offer, but hardly a normal routine for a person. Can you really have a person whose daily routine is to fly to the furthest place they can get to immediately?

Perhaps a flashback to their normal routine then? Or perhaps make the staff the protagonist and their daily routine is to deal with crazy customers.

Character is key in the early scenes of a narrative really. Get the audience to identify with a protagonist.

Who are these people, how do they know each other and what’s their normal life like?

Scene Edits

An important part is knowing when a scene ends,as a group, and getting everyone on a page onwhat to do next.

Some example stories

We did one pretty confused one about a voyage to find unicorns which ended up about time-travellers due to mixups.

And one about the child of a missing astronaut seeking his father by joining a space mission.

Edits are what made the main difference here. Shouting “Cut to the jail” left half the players thinking they were in a flashback and the other half thinking they were in the consequences of the previous scene.

Thus one ending up being a time-traveler.

A more coherent edit might have been “Flashback to jail”, and these more coherent edits are key to what made the second story less chaotic and more whole.

“Cut to the training test” or “Flashback to school where a teacher is impressed with the protagonist”

I like a game with a narrator. The narrator can give the story structure and theme and act as a director of the action. But we can do that without a narrator if the edits are well thought out and shouted clearly enough to keep the actors on the same track.

Mind you, the chaos is the funny bit usually.

Blocking Yourself

Lots of the Narrative class is in the format I like most really.

A few instructive games in the first half and a couple of longer narrative stories in the second half.

We played an island game which was supposed to teach something about not deliberately getting obstructive.

A scene where your players are told they are on one island and must end up at some point all on the other one the other side of the stage.

Set a scene, make some characters, but nobody said it was supposed to be difficult to get from one island to the other.

Yet barriers are deliberately thrown up, actually imaginary barriers since the whole thing is imaginary after all. Why should there be sharks or a quest for a boat or the sea deep and cold.

You can just wade across. You can just have a boat. You can just levitate yourself over with your hive mind psychic abilities.

Unsure about this.

There must be conflict and peril and challenges which are mastered in a story, you can’t set up a hero’s quest only to have the hero just happen to have a holy grail in the stationary cupboard. Already got one you see. Use it for storing pens.

Still. Finding the crowbar doesn’t have to be a quest. There can just be one in the boot. Don’t let things get bogged down in difficulty.

Watched a story about a lazy fellow falling into a life of crime and villainy because of his tardiness and fulfilling his teacher’s prophecy that he would indeed end up as a criminal if he didn’t buck up his ideas.

Good repeated themes of characters making lists of his failures and nice stage-focus work when everyone was on stage at once.

Played a preacher organizing a wedding in a story about friends running a hotel.

Fun to have Reverend Priest finding sin everywhere again. Easy wipe-off sin in this case. We may have come to an end too early. Perhaps not enough obstructions put in the way. 😆

Show

As I say, there is a show on the 19th of March when we do it for proper.

Jellyfin

Since it looks like it might be a while until the Steam Machines are released, due to market bullshit around AI malinvestment and the subsequent price of RAM, I gave up waiting and Installed Jellyfin on a temporary machine.

Open-source app to manage your media libraryat home, allowing you you to stream around thehouse to your phones and tablets and computerselsewhere.

It is pretty nice. I like the sync-play feature so the machines in the kitchen and bedroom and studio can all be playing the same thing. Walking between rooms and detecting which is slightly ahead, makes me smile. Watching a TV show as I cook and being able to wonder around the flat viewing uninterupted.

A bit flakey with video though. Sync failure means they all pause sometimes. Might just be the wifi signal strength I guess.

Ripped all the old archive folders of DVDs and CDs. DVDs have a quite high failure rate after fifteen years in a cupboard eh? CDs faired better.

Expect I’ll buy charity shop DVDs more now. Though also expecting half of ’em won’t work.

I’m listening to music a bit more now I have a one button shuffle that triggers everywhere in the flat.

I set up a ytdl-sub to copy a few youtube playlists into the TV shows folders. Keeping like the last month’s worth. Some shows, like the Dust sci-fi channel say, work really well as being part of the synced TV system instead.

Also made it slurp up all my old youtube videos into a folder too, so yet another local copy of everything I made, in there with all the other ripped shows.

I have spent far too long this month fussing with directory structures and tweeking icon images and things to make it look all pretty. Enjoy that sort of thing though.

Green Party Win Gorton And Denton

I went canvassing

Went out canvassing with the Green Party this month. Not at Gorton and Denton but in ward next door to me.

The candidates seem nice and meeting other green members is nice, but the actual process of going around knocking on people’s doors isn’t really a great deal of fun for me.

Mostly nobody home, or else maybe peering through the spy-hole feeling intimidated by me I guess? Hard to tell.

Spoke to mostly Labour voters who claim not to be sure what they’ll do in May. Couple of folks already Green.

Nobody around here is gonna vote Conservative or Liberalor Reform of course. “Your Party” not likely to get it together in time to even stand. It’s a race to see how many Green and Independent opposition councilors can be elected to avoid a Labour full house.

47 Labour to 3 Green seats last time. Less than 200 votes in it in that seat.

Probably will do better this time, maybe even win the seat. At least make some of the safe Labour seats a bit less safe.

The most exciting part was when the flat over the road went on fire and we had to call the fire brigade and a triplet of fire engines and couple of cop cars turned up to deal with it. Started with smelling smoke and wondering if that flat was on fire, by the time the fire fighters turned up remarkably quickly (someone else already called I imagine) there were flames licking at the windows.

An exploding e-scooter battery someone was saying, but dunno how they knew.

Nice to share a drink in the pub with the green crew after, but dunno that this canvassing lark is for me. I felt like either a spare part, or just backup muscle probably intimidating people into not opening the doors.

Probably I’d enjoy it more if I could get into an argument but apparently that’s rare and the advice is to disengage anyway.

Zack on Novara

Novara Media interviewed Zack in the leadupto the election.

He said that labour are bought

Zack’s right of course.

Labour only really look incoherent if you assume they are trying to do good for the country or win elections for themselves.

If you assume they have been bought and paid for by the oil, gas, arms-trade, private health-care and gambling industry and don’t care if they’re unpopular just want to do what they’ve been paid to do they look perfectly coherent.

Labour bar their best candidate, Reform run some knob head off of GBNews, and the Greens run a great working class candidate from the local area who can speak her mind well and explain the way the rest of politics, including Reform, is run by billionaires.

Hannah Spencer

And of course Hannah was on Zack’s show too. Could hardly not be.

She’s entirely charming, and not some representative of billionaires bought and paid for.

Hard to imagine how anyone could watch her talking to Zack for an hour here and then vote for someone else, out of what? Loyalty to Labour that have shown no loyalty to you? Hate with reform who run an our of town GBeebies lunatic?

Will Farage interview his mad candidate for an hour? Will Starmer? Would doing so do anything other than expose those candidates and turn everyone off?

[Some context: Her dogs are greyhounds, rescued from mistreatment in the gambling and racing industry.]

Frightened Media

The media were very shrill before the election too.

Look out everyone, Zack and the Evil Green Menace are going to get you and give you free cocaine and cannabis. They’re going to ban your landlord and allow refugees to earn a wage and tax you and they might even stop funding radical genocidal war in the middle east.

Vote carefully man! You should be scared!

– The entire press.

Our media are entirely hilarious, threaten me with a good time.

Green Win!

Yes! Nice one Gorton.

Well done Denton.

Greens more than 40 percent.

That’s how you do it everyone, replicate this at the national level now.

Note that all the news and polls were saying it would be incredibly close, and then it wasn’t even a bit close except for the second place position.

Funny how the polls always end up biased towards conservatism and the status quo.

Love how Reform warn the greens represent dangerous sectarianism. 😆 You should be afraid of the big bad evil green menace! 😆

Labour’s Loss

Thanks to Starmer’s excellent stewardship, the Labour party ruled out their best candidate for factional reasons, told the electorate how Reform were correct about immigration but Labour will do half as much about it, and alienated his base voters so much he went from a massive majority to third place behind the party he’s been chasing.

If Labour continue to try and ape Reform instead of debunking them, if they continue to do everything the billionaires want instead of taxing them, continue to suck up to Trump and US capital instead of striving for sovereignty, they will continue to lose voters. Alienate the left while encouraging and emboldening the right.

I came into politics to fight for change

He says. Agreed. Lets have some change.

I mean seriously, his response to this is to say thathe wants change.

He’s the one in power now, he needs to stop telling everyone we need change now that he’s the one we’d be changing, surely?

Stuck on the same opposition message without any plans for any actual concrete action other than the same mantra that he was saying when he lucked into a win as the conservatives imploded.

False Terrorism

The court found the government acted illegallyin banning Palestine Action

Guardian Report

Palestine Action have never been a terrorist group, have never tried to terrorize the British public. The attempt to classify them as one was unjust, authoritarian, and motivated by support for a foreign state committing war crimes.

I’m mostly just surprised that judges appointed by the British state operating in secret agree. Usually they back the corrupt British state entirely.

Yvette Cooper should be resigning in disgrace, suspected of treachery. Every MP and Lord that waved the proscription through through should be ashamed and probably also fired.

[This message should not be read as support for Palestine action, which would be illegal, but instead just contempt for the authoritarian corrupt UK government]

AI

Read an interesting news-report about the AI economy that fell through a time tunnel from two years in the future.

Fake-news, obviously. It’s from the future. Just a story. A scenario. Interesting possible way the bubble could pop even if the claimed efficiency gains are real.

We probably could have figured this out sooner if we just asked how much money machines spend on discretionary goods. (Hint: it’s zero.)

AI capabilities improved, companies needed fewer workers, white collar layoffs increased, displaced workers spent less, margin pressure pushed firms to invest more in AI, AI capabilities improved…

It was a negative feedback loop with no natural brake

Yes, machines don’t spend money and so can’t drivean economy.

Subscriptions and memberships that passively renewed despite months of disuse. Introductory pricing that sneakily doubled after the trial period. Each one was rebranded as a hostage situation that agents could negotiate. The average customer lifetime value, the metric the entire subscription economy was built on, distinctly declined.

…

Any category where the service provider’s value proposition was ultimately “I will navigate complexity that you find tedious” was disrupted, as the agents found nothing tedious.

😆 Disenshitification by AI would be quite a reversal of the current trends.

[…Door-dash is disintermediated by AI…]

This was oddly poetic, as perhaps the only example in this entire saga of agents doing a favor for the soon-to-be-displaced white collar workers. When they ended up as delivery drivers, at least half their earnings weren’t going to Uber and DoorDash. Of course, this favor from technology didn’t last for long as autonomous vehicles proliferated.

😆

In the US, we weren’t asking about how the bubble would burst in AI infrastructure anymore. We were asking what happens to a consumer-credit economy when consumers are being replaced with machines.

This is pure Marxist, exactly how Marx said capitalism would eat itself.

I wonder if there’s room for a kind of AI accelerationism? Encourage the robots taking our jobs so that we overthrow capitalism all the sooner?

The federal government’s revenue base is essentially a tax on human time. People work, firms pay them, the government takes a cut. Individual income and payroll taxes are the spine of receipts in normal years.

Indeed. Collapse in the labour economy causes a financial state collapse when the state is funded by a tax on labour.

Productivity is surging, but the gains are flowing to capital and compute, not labor.

Which would ideally mean you tax compute and capitalbut how’s that work when compute and capital own the government already?

The Occupy Silicon Valley movement has been emblematic of wider dissatisfaction. Last month, demonstrators blockaded the entrances to Anthropic and OpenAI’s San Francisco offices for three weeks straight. Their numbers are growing, and the demonstrations have drawn more media coverage than the unemployment data that prompted them.

It’s hard to imagine the public hating anyone more than the bankers in the fallout of the GFC, but the AI labs are making a run at it.

Dunno that the public hated the bankers nearly as much as they ought to have. Outside Iceland were any jailed? Did any even lose their job?

For the entirety of modern economic history, human intelligence has been the scarce input. Capital was abundant (or at least, replicable). Natural resources were finite but substitutable. Technology improved slowly enough that humans could adapt. Intelligence, the ability to analyze, decide, create, persuade, and coordinate, was the thing that could not be replicated at scale.

Human intelligence derived its inherent premium from its scarcity. Every institution in our economy, from the labor market to the mortgage market to the tax code, was designed for a world in which that assumption held.

We are now experiencing the unwind of that premium. Machine intelligence is now a competent and rapidly improving substitute for human intelligence across a growing range of tasks

Which is what saves us from this scenario I guess? Because the machine likely isn’t really a substitute for human intelligence.

🤞

Interesting and enjoyable read. Anything this specific can’t be true, obviously. But maybe plausible I guess?

I reckon there’s bubble in them their markets,but that even the size of the bubble is probably over-estimated because the gain from these machines is over-estimated because they’re good enough to fool people.

Glad I’m closer to retirement than to the start of a career tho. And worried somewhat about that.

I mean if human-capable AI is here now that doesn’t mean we just say the AI companies have won capitalism and they get to be the new feudal lords now!

Does it?

If they have won capitalism then now is the time to start a new game!

Dismantle capitalism and turn the power and effort of the economy towards environmental recovery and human general flourishing instead!

War

What? ANOTHER One?

It is such a mystery, why do American presidents start patriotic wars far from home when they are unpopular and the mid-terms are coming up and there’s incriminating evidence against them in the news every day. 🧐 🤔

Nothing like this has ever happened before.

Some say he’s doing what he promised and ending the forever wars!… By winning them!

Israel thinks that having the country next door fall to chaos and civil war makes them less of a threat. I don’t think that’s right, but I think that’s what motivates them. Those in charge of it’smilitary want that Greater Israel with bigger borders and smaller neighbours.

Trump thinks he can go down in history as the saviour of the world and if he just chops off the head of the regime the people will rise up and be a liberal democracy. I don’t think that’s right either. He thinks similarly about Venusualia.

The US administration aim to take control of the global oil supply for private American and multinational owned corporations. Their power is rooted in control of the literal power supply. Oil. Distributed clean energy is a threat to their power. They want to stop all this solar windmill crap and go back to good old fashioned tax and control of centralized oil distribution hubs.

Starmer just thinks he has no choice and he has to do what America says and can’t risk the Telegraph and the Mail calling him antisemitic. He falsely accused thousands of not-terrorists of terrorism and is putting them through courts as terrorists for the same reason.

Powerless

One of the best things about Brexit is how we left a power-block in which we had a veto and a vote and a large soft power reputation and a real say in it’s policy and outcomes.

And now, instead, we have to do whatever the mad king in America wants. Bomb whoever he wants. Let him store his weapons and his bombs here. Fly his airplanes on our runways. Pay whatever tariff on trade he demands, accept his hormone ridden meat and unsanitary chicken processes.

And we have less say in it all than Puerto Rico, much less than any actual full blown state.

We ceded control of the EU to Germany, just abandoned any say in what happens there for no reason at all, and are left begging treats from a powerful clown’s table like a yapping little toy dog.

The final step down the power-escalator, from empire to now less say in world affairs than Austria or Finland which at least have EU voting rights and members in the EU parliament.

Now just airport 1, a runway which the US uses as it pleases and no say in anything.

What a move from England, absolute masterclass of dim witted self destructive spite. Couldn’t hope for a better example. Textbook.

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Reading

Artificial Condition

I read the second of the Murder Bot novellas by Martha Wells, Artificial Condition.

Our hacked security droid takes a job looking after more idiots in order to get a ride to investigate his missing memories.

And they get into trouble of course.

Enjoyed it more than the first one. The ship intelligencehe teams up with sure does have a lot of ability for anauto-pilot. The Secunit’s sarcasm and reluctant disdainof his charges seems better written and deepening.

Watching

Murderbot

Meanwhile, also watched the AppleTV show of the first, Murderbot

Enjoyed it quite a lot more than that first novella.

Seemed to be longer, more detailed, and the actors made the characters into much more than just stereotypes on a page.

It was funnier, and more captivating.

Really great show.

Releases

Tarot Show - Gorton And Denton

Tarot show of the month was when I predictedthe by-election victory completely correctly:

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Watch the show on the website: https://wordcloudtarot.com/readings/2026-02-24-upcomingbyelection/

Links

Nice things I read on the web this month:

War

Media Lens always do great work on the absolutepropaganda blitz we’re given at war time.

“The 100-death toll may come as a surprise to consumers of ‘mainstream’ media, which have shown zero interest in the people killed and maimed. If US soldiers had died, we would know their names, faces, army units, back stories, with spouses and parents expressing their grief in heart-rending interviews. – For ‘mainstream’ politics and media, the latest killing spree is just another Groundhog Day. Maduro is not perceived as a particular individual; he is perceived as the latest incarnation of the generic ‘Bad Guy’: Milosevic, bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Assad, Nasrallah and Sinwar. The Venezuelans are another anonymous crowd of (mostly) brown-skinned people indistinguishable from Iraqis, Iranians, Libyans, Syrians and Palestinians.”

More from Media Lens on the even newer war:

Pure, mendacious propaganda on prime-time BBC TV.

Surveillance

You know how governments are trying to makeeveryone prove their age at every website andeven operating systems?

Techdirt article on the data honey-pots thatproduces and the entire impossibility and ulteriormotives of the project

See the pattern? Discord keeps swapping vendors like someone frantically rotating buckets under a leaking roof, apparently hoping the next bucket won’t have a hole in it. But the problem was never the bucket. The problem is the hole in the roof — the never-ending stream of age-verification government mandates.

Enshitificator

A lovely little spoof video about the guy whose job itis to make everything worse at tech companies.

Fediverse

Mat Duggan’s article on the Fedi:

“there’s something quietly beautiful about a place where people just… share what they know. No brand deals, no engagement metrics, no algorithm nudging you toward rage. Just someone who spent twenty years studying Arctic policy posting a thread at 2 AM because they think you should understand what’s happening. It’s the internet I was promised in 1996. It only took thirty years and the complete collapse of American journalism to get here.”

Around the Fediverse

Mat is right, it’s different there. Here’s a fewthings I boosted this month.

Fediverse Thread

Taylor Lorenz is famous enough to get asked about it and the replies in the thread areall good for a taste:

I’ve been asked on TV hits and interviews lately to explain why decentralized social media is better, especially re: Mastodon.

How would you explain the benefits of a platform like Mastodon and the fediverse to someone in just a few sentences? How would you make the argument that platforms like Mastodon allow for more free expression than big tech controlled apps?

Would love to hear people’s thoughts! Trying to make my arguments most effective

Google Locking Android

Google are going to lock their phonesto only run software from their own appstore, like Apple.

This can’t be allowed.

Neil points out:

People should be able to write software for Android, and distribute it outside Google’s Play store, without having to:

  • pay Google
  • give government ID to Google
  • agree to Google terms and conditions

People should be able to install the software they want on their phone, from sources other than Google’s Play store, without having to jump through Google-imposed hoops.

e.g. via F-Droid.

We’ve got until September this year to stop Google squeezing the open Android ecosystem.

https://keepandroidopen.org/

Andrew’s Toys and Media

Andrew has some toys:

I’ve talked a lot about our toys, and why we make them, but I figure I should explain again.

I make the toys that I want to see in the world.

I’ve been collecting toys for years, but those toys are so often made by or in service of corporations that want to lock up our culture and burn our planet.

So I created my own characters, started writing, mined the public domain, and started making my own toys and telling my own stories.

Stories that don’t enrich some far off corporation or overstuffed capitalist, toys that are made sustainably, by people who are being paid a reasonable amount of money.

We tell stories that reflect our values, it’s #CommunityMedia, and we’re making toys that reflect those values too.

It’s one part #anticapitalism, on part #openculture, and a small dose of #smallThings

We can’t do it without your support, so if you see something you like in the toys that we make, boost it. If you want something, and you can afford it, buy it.

Ask questions, help us tell stories.

Thanks.

And a new community broadcast network too:

Announcing the Community Broadcasting Network

The trailer is live.

You can watch it on YouTube (https://youtu.be/N97vqR1pVOY) or on PeerTube (https://communitymedia.video/w/icMDFVmUA8jC8WEDFei1SB). It’s a short video that tries to answer a simple question: what happens when a community picks up cameras and starts telling its own stories?

…

AI Worm

Christine warns AI is going to make viruses,spread itself.

I am convinced we are on the verge of the first “AI agent worm”. This looks like the closest hint of it, though it isn’t it quite itself: an attack on a PR agent that got it to set up to install openclaw with full access on 4k machines https://grith.ai/blog/clinejection-when-your-ai-tool-installs-another

….

I suspect we’re months away from seeing the first agent worm, if that. There may already be some happening right now in FOSS projects, undetected.

AI ID Theft

Pointing out that Grammarly is just stealingpeople’s voice and pretending that they aregiving criticism from people who are not involved:

“Grammarly’s “expert review” feature offers to give users writing advice “inspired by” subject matter experts, including recently deceased professors, as Wired reported on Wednesday. When I tried the feature out myself, I found some experts that came as a surprise for a different reason — one of them was my boss.

The AI-generated feedback included comments that appeared to be from The Verge’s editor-in-chief, Nilay Patel, as well as editor-at-large David Pierce and senior editors Sean Hollister and Tom Warren, none of whom gave Grammarly permission to include them in the “expert reviews.”

…

❤👍👎😆😢😮
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