This October’s drawing obsession: drawing skeletons for things that don’t actually have them. I think it’s inspired by wandering through a Spirit Halloween one year and seeing a plastic figuring of an octopus skeleton. If you have non-skeletal skeletons you’d like drawn, just leave them in the comments or join me for the FancySchmancy Creature Feature.
This month I’m drawing spooky, scary skeletons for the FancySchmancy Creature. This is the first, a skeleton tavern keeper requested by my Twitch mod Harukio. From here on out, I think we’re going to draw the skeletons of things that don’t usually have skeletons. It reminds me of seeing an octopus skeleton figure at a Spirit Halloween: biologically unfeasible, but seasonally awesome. More to come!
Of all the places to be seized by revelation, I didn’t expect it to be the Wash & Go Laundromat in Redondo Beach, California.
I’m on the West Coast for work, but also for reconnaissance. This past week, I’ve been trying to learn videography as rapidly as Neo learning kung fu. I’m attempting to give our company a healthy dose of modern digital marketing, filming the shoe wear testing process at our biomechanics lab in Los Angeles, and proving to our team we have the internal capacity for webinars, TikToks, and podcasting.
I’ve also been staying at a friend’s studio in the back of their house near Hermosa Beach, testing the waters of a move back to this side of the country.
I miss Southern California. Like, a lot. Yeah, the traffic sucks, and shit’s expensive, and the city sprawl is as thick as kudzu. But I have tried to replenish the word “home” in my brain with at least seven other states in the Union, and none of them fill it to the brim like this one does.
Last time I lived here was in 2008, right when the Great Recession was revving its engines. It was not a great time to be a college graduate in the City of Angels with only an inkling of a career path. I made the right choice at the time (that is, after a brief and impulsive move to the Pacific Northwest that led to a nervous breakdown, but I digress). I moved to the East Coast, where there was extended family and a semblance of stability. And for at least a decade, it remained the right choice.
But stability isn’t always growth, and historically, California is where I’ve come to grow. It’s where my first memories were forged, combing shells on Newport Beach as a little blonde-haired kindergartener when my family lived in Costa Mesa in the 80’s. It’s where I came back when I left home after high school in the Midwest. I got my bachelor’s degree in Azusa, had my first kiss in Pasadena, got hired for my first marketing gig in the Arts District. The decade or more I collectively spent in California was arduous sometimes, but it was nourishing, like how a shrub thrives in the desert.
And now, at the end of a long but fruitful week of shoe footage, I find myself doing laundry at the Wash & Go in Redondo Beach, getting ready to fly to a trade show in Portland. A song comes on the radio. It’s “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls.
This song. I think I first heard it when I was living in Indiana at 16, driving back and forth between home and my summer job as a kitchen manager at a youth camp. The last gasps of radio before MP3s nearly drowned it.
There’s a bit of trivia about this song that’s never left my brain’s disheveled archives. When it was written, the lead singer and songwriter John Rzeznik was suffering from a year-long case of writer’s block. Just when he thought his career might be withering, he got a call to produce a song for the movie City of Angels. And he determined that no matter what spilled onto the page, no matter what he felt about it, he would commit to it wholeheartedly.
He wrote the song in one day, like a primal scream. The song was so ubiquitous—and the word choices were so elementary—that it was easy to overlook the earnest tension on display in the chorus:
And I don’t want the world to see me‘
‘Cause I don’t think that they’d understand
When everything’s made to be broken
I just want you to know who I am
In the music video, Rzeznik swivels on a chair in a lonely tower above the city, peering through a series of steampunk telescopes at a world he either can’t or won’t participate in. In the context of the lyrics, he’s a man torn in two: anchored to his isolation to protect what he perceives as grotesque injuries to his soul, but wanting to risk exposure to people so his soul might have a chance to flourish. It’s not unlike a songwriter in the throes of writer’s block, torn between latching his heart shut or opening it up to the world.
And it’s not unlike a single man with no kids at a transitional stage of his career, torn between the two coasts that, respectively, now offer the same prospects of stability or growth they always have in his past.
The song ends. The washing machine comes to a standstill. The clothes stop tumbling. An empty dryer awaits them.
It might be time for a transfer.
A few years before the pandemic, the chamber of commerce for my quaint New England city sent its bohemian enclaves into an uproar. They were proposing a promo campaign to draw more businesses from out of state. The main image was a cloud of cute, lineal drawings of laptops, kayaks, and to-go coffee cups—the digital nomad lifestyle craved by the tech workers of the late 2010’s. The slogan read something like “Tiny Big City,” the promise of urban amenities without the overstimulation of Boston or New York.
The vibe of the campaign was sterile and innocuous. But anyone with a keen cultural nose knew, this was the beginning of the end. The gentrification cycle was nearing completion: an old port city whose original industry had dried up was now a target of conquest by the wealthy, thanks in part to the artists and tastemakers who had made it an appealing place to live for the last couple of decades. Slowly but surely they would be muscled out by soaring rents as luxury condos devoured the market. The same would be true of many independent pubs and shops, clearing the way for familiar franchises awash in out-of-state capital.
The day I knew there was no going back was when I was sitting in a coffee shop, eavesdropping on an older couple from Connecticut, talking about buying a home in town so they could summer there. When you hear a newly inducted local use the word “summer” as a verb, you know it’s game over.
I wrote yesterday that it might be game over for the internet, too, at least when it comes to its major platforms. Thanks to things like Google Veo 3, generative AI has reached a threshold where it requires a lot more scrutiny to discern than most algorithms give us time for—let alone what most modern attention spans are equipped for. GenAI has absorbed enough of humanity’s collective endeavors that it can effectively walk around in our skin, with only the most anal-retentive sleuths able to call its bluff.
What makes Google Veo 3 truly foreboding, though, is not just its uncanny facsimile of human-born imagery, but also its $250-a-month price tag. Like an old port town renovated by the creative class, tools like Google Veo 3 are trained on untold billions of hours of human ingenuity, only to be gated and sold for the wealthy’s unfettered use—gentrification in its most resource-hungry and accelerated form.
I don’t have high hopes for the future of this new, gentrified internet. At best, corporations and content creators will succumb to the siren’s song of cheap, predictable labor, and culture will begin to stagnate. At worst, propaganda will become more virulent and convincing than it’s ever been, as the forces of oligarchy drip poison in the well of political discourse.
The real mystery is, what happens when genAI has nothing left to consume? Already it runs the risk of becoming a self-diminishing ouroboros, devouring its own outputs. The disingenuous push of the Technocrats against IP laws is a testament to this fear, as they look for the last remaining scraps to put in the belly of their beast. What frontiers are left, when even the settled places have been recolonized?
Sooner than later, genAI will have no web left to conquer. Maybe then the internet will weep, longing for the grit of originality again.
When I was a kid, there was a saying: don’t believe everything you see on TV. “Everything” was the operative word there. With TV, you could be reasonably certain that at least some of it was true. On the internet, I’m not sure anymore.
I used to be confident in my ability to discern generative AI content. The output of Google Veo 3 has me taking a knee. I’m not convinced that if I swiped through it on a scrolling video platform, I would distinguish it as artificial. We might be swiftly reaching the generative AI endgame.
I don’t think the world is ready for it. I think people still approach the internet with a level tacit credibility. But those days must by necessity be over. Without scrutiny and context, and with the indiscriminate faucet of algorithms spewing content at our eyes faster than we can process, we are in a golden age of lies.
