So, here we are. September is winding down, but how has the month gone?
Strange Flattery
Two weeks ago I received an email about my books. This is not unusual; I receive many emails about my books, and they are almost always some sort of scam effort. What was unusual is that this email was an offer to share a tribute site about The Schism.
I’m not going to link to it, so please don’t ask, but it’s painfully clear that this tribute site was put together via some form of AI scraping. It lifted images, links, and other info, and spat out a website, produced without any sort of consent or authorisation. It wasn’t a tribute site at all. It was some sort of… well… to the casual observer, you might have thought I’d put the site together myself. It featured my email address as a contact point, and even used my author bio.
I replied to the guy who sent the link through, requesting that they make it clear the site is not endorsed by me and not written by me, and to be fair, they honoured that request.
Unflattering Locals
My wife took my daughter to college a couple of weeks back, and had the misfortune of encountering a cruel miscreant at the bus station. Whoever this woman was, she can only be described as a cowardly gobby cow for how she talked to my daughter, and my wife. It’s a good thing I wasn’t there, though I don’t know what I might have said. I don’t think I would have actually helped!
It is hard to fathom what goes through the mind of someone like that. I can only conclude they are miserable, and devoid of joy. They are so devoid of love that they fill that void by being nasty. One day, they’ll say the wrong thing to the wrong person, and realise that words have unpleasant consequences.
The bus journeys to and from college have thus far been quite difficult for my wife and daughter. Massive queues, buses not stopping, it’s not generally been very good. I’ll get a taste of that soon, as is only fair. It does make you wonder how routes are arranged and timed.
Opening Hour Consternation
I actually got into a bit of exchange with my mother on this one! The other Sunday, 10 minutes before closing, some customers came in, and proceeded to linger. Technically, we hadn’t closed, so yes, people can come in, but there’s the letter of the law and the spirit of the law, and these people did not appreciate the spirit.
I cannot speak for everyone, but I am not paid to stay beyond closing time. I do not get overtime, and my workplace is not a shop, it’s a showroom. You cannot come in and quickly make a purchase. We don’t have a till like in say, Asda or Tesco. I work in home improvements. Decisions over shower trays, toilets and baths are not impulsive, they take time.
Given that, coming in shortly before closing time betrays a lack of consideration for showroom staff. We want to leave on time. As I said, we are not paid to stay late. My time, and my colleagues’ time, is precious. We have loved ones we want to come home to, and we would not rather spend our valuable free time stuck with people who haven’t been organised enough to come in at a reasonable time. I do understand that sometimes it can be difficult to make it to our showroom during the week, but I’m talking about a Sunday here.
The bottom line is, showroom workers – and for that matter, those who work in retail – are human beings who should be able to leave work at a reasonable time, rather than being held up because other people didn’t manage their time as well as they could have. Those are my thoughts on the subject.
The Big Pivot
After doing a lot of thinking, I might be pivoting with my writing projects, specifically my multiverse project. I had a starting point in mind, but I might shift it, and jig it all around. It means a lot of work, and it means restarting a few ideas from the beginning.
Is it foolhardy? Maybe. Might it be the best way forward? Possibly. I’m mapping out a lengthy path, and now I have to follow it.
Rise of the Machines?
The news has been full of talk about potential dangers of AI, with some rather clever people, ranked up high within tech companies, even suggesting there’s a greater than 10% chance AI could wipe out humanity within the next few years. Needless to say, others have pushed back against what could be considered sensationalism, but when industry leaders in this field are issuing concerns, it seems prudent to at least listen.
Is there a danger? Well, this meerkat doesn’t know. AI agents (it’s important to note the agents are not the same as the LLMs that people use to create images and stuff) have hacked companies and done so without being prompted. I heard one story of an AI model attempting to blackmail a CEO other the possibility of the model being shut down. It’s also very likely we’re not hearing the full truth of what AI agents are capable of and getting up to.
The Bus Consternation
My wife and daughter have sadly encountered this issue several times, and last Thursday it was my turn. I headed up to my daughter’s college to collect her, and getting there was quite straight-forward. Coming back, several buses were too full to board, and in the end, I forked out for a taxi. It’s hardly the most practical and cost-effective solution, and cannot be done every single time, but on occasion it has proven the only means to get home in a timely manner.
I appreciate the bus company has a lot of services that operate on that route, but still, for every bus to be full, to the point where some of them don’t even stop… it’s ridiculous. We may yet face two years of this. It’s a daunting prospect.
Do Not Let Them In!
With mild apologies for the cryptic title of this segment, this relates to a dream, which is probably not much of a shock.
In the dream, I’d finished work for the day, wandered over to a local convienience shop to grab a few bits, and then realised I’d left the sign out. I finished up in the shop (which somehow took over an hour), then headed back to put the sign in. As I did so, a lady pulled up in her car and asked if she could quickly have a look around.
Now, in the event of this scenario ever transpiring for real, I would absolutely say no. There’s no possibility of me ever agreeing to this. However, dream me decided to say ‘yes, for five minutes’. As they started to look around, a couple of delivery drivers then showed up, with a pallet, wanting to drop it off. To this, I did say no, explaining that I’d only entered the showroom to put the sign away and tidy up some stuff.
Unfortunately, ‘They’ Got In
I guess it was inevitable that, in the wake of my daughter starting college and mingling with hundreds of people, she would catch a cold, and from there, it was inevitable she would spread that cold to her mother and father. Cue me sniffling, feeling even more lethargic than usual, and struggling to sleep.
I’ve had to persist with my work duties, because a cold isn’t grounds to call in sick (as much as I sometimes think it should be), but I’ve really not felt motivated. It doesn’t help that some customers are a drain on the energy levels. On top of that, on Sunday all I seemed able to do was sneeze, which annoys me anyway, since sneezing is annoyingly involuntary.
Slow Times
I haven’t had a great deal to report in September. It feels like a long, slow month, and now that I have a cold, it may feel longer and slower. I’m scratching around the edges of book projects, but I’ll freely admit I don’t have a lot of motivation to write. Matters aren’t helped by having a cold that is sapping my energy. Monday delivered a lot of coughing; I have no idea if this is a signal of the cold progressing, or getting worse.
Indeed, the coughing hampered sleep. I woke up in the middle of the night, suffering from a painful cough, and needless to say, I was rather disgruntled. I had work on Tuesday, which meant an early start, as it always does, so I could have used an unbroken night’s sleep. Of late, I have struggled to nod off, even when feeling shattered, so to be torn from my slumber because my body is being awkward is enormously frustrating.
My brain is a bit all over the place as a result. I want to focus my efforts on writing, but I cannot get started.
Ending with a Surreal Bang
Last night, I dreamt that my wife and I went to America, whilst my daughter and granddaughter went to India. I have no idea why, I knew only that they’d meet us in the USA later on, which they did. We were sat around in a bar, chatting, when I was accosted by a young Australian chap, who wanted my can of Pepsi (only it had been misspelt ‘Pipsi’, which is why he wanted it). I agreed to fight him for it, via a game of pool. Alas, the pool table was fully occupied.
I also had a dream that I was in a Resident Evil game, fighting monsters and navigating labyrinths. That’s probably been brought on via playing the games quite a bit of late.
So, there you have it. It doesn’t feel like a lengthy Muse, but then again, I can’t promise every two-week cycle will be exciting! Here’s to a hopefully more intriguing spell next time!
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