October 2nd, 2026

Some Thoughts While Walking along “The Beach”

For those not from Ottawa or in the know; The Beach is what some of the more callous members of our local first response units refer to the three or four block section of the Market (between King Edward and Dalhousie along Murray Street) that host a fair amount of Ottawa's support hubs for the homeless and addicted. It is called the Beach because the concrete jungle, in an Ottawa summer, leads to a fair amount of tragic nudity.

I am not much of a gambler. I’ll play a 50/50 if the cause is good and I buy the odd lottery ticket on a Friday night where work is looking to be slow so I can be a bad buddhist and play “Wouldn’t it be great if…” while perusing real estate sites. I enjoy a casino for the noise and the people watching. The noise renders me effectively deaf with the my ears the way they are so it all becomes a visual play on mute and the play is usually full of fascinating looking characters having some of the best and worst nights of their lives.

I am not much of a mathematician and certainly not as wired into statistical probabilities… weird forms of madness that afflict my father and my brother deeply. Although I am quite capable of wild amounts of self-delusion… neither the illusions of luck or “A System” exist for me. I never ask the odds because, honestly, I know they are terrible and knowing them takes the magic of the impossible moment out of life. Things do not need to be that well defined.

To that end, I am somewhat aware of the odds of rolling Snake Eyes and Box Cars twice in a row. There is a reason why they pay out so large. I enjoy a mountain. I enjoy a hard thing. I enjoy the impossible.

Which is probably why I am a Buddhist, a socialist and a 21st century abolitionist.

I accept that we’ve ordered our society a certain way. I accept that the anarcho-socialist leanings of my early twenties (suck cock! do crimes! Destroy the systems and start over with something better: socialism!) fight for an eqalitarian society that cares for those that need it for the betterment of all) was wildly impractical. Nature abhors a void. If you destroy the systems that are in place something will fill it. It is usually a proper anarchy of sex, death and violence; chaos which benefits absolutely no one at all. The strong will replace the uber rich and we’ll be in the exact same kind of society with just a bully-with-the-guns instead of a bunch-of-billionaires-with-lawyers in charge. I accept that you can’t just abolish prisons and defund the police without a ground shift in sentiment amongst the majority of the population. If the majority of the people are willing to stand watch as we transition, it is possible to enact a drastic societal change. But without that shift; take away the cops and the threats of prison and the assholes will absolutely over run the good guys while the majority keep their heads down for fear.

But a boy can dream.

My home town, and most of the major population centers in Canada are currently having a pair of twin crises… a homelessness epidemic and a tainted drug epidemic. There are entire neighborhoods that are basically becoming no go zones for the majority of people in my town. When you ask them, they say that they no longer feel safe there. There feel that crime is out of control there. They feel that there is danger there. I walk through two of them daily and my shop is smack dab in a fast forming third one. You know what is there? Hurt people. Hungry people. Sad and angry and tired people.

What is the one unchanging variable in all of those?

People.

I have no idea what happened to any of them. I have no idea of their stories. My mind is absolutely full of assumptions about them though, as are yours. Addicts bring about a certain reflective tug in my brain. Mental illness brings about a certain reflective tug in my brain. Poverty and desperation brings about a certain reflexive tug in my brain. Each of these things brings with them fears and assumptions that make us want to focus our eyes straight ahead and walk faster and pretend we don’t hear them calling out to us. We don’t want to be hit up for money that we ourselves really don’t have. We don’t want to be pulled in to whatever madness is currently cycling through their minds; either the one they are running from with the drugs or the one the drugs is building to establish a permanent need/supply/justification. I have enough madness of my own. And we certainly don’t want to consider that we are basically one missed pay cheque from joining them here on the corners. Assumptions and assumptions and feelings brought on by those assumptions: a whole forest of thoughts in our heads that have so very little to do with the reality of the situation. I cannot count the number of people I have seen walk past someone flat on their face on the sidewalk, or doing a zombie shamble, or perched in one of the weird spineless positions opioids seem to make people crumble in.

The place I aim for is to at, the very least; check on them. My thinking is simple. I would stop and help someone run over by a car. Why the hell wouldn’t I stop and check on someone run over by life?

I am currently six feet tall and weight about two hundred and twenty pounds. It is a place of priviledge in situations like this; nine times out of ten I can check on someone without really putting myself in any sort of danger. I don’t think I have ever been attacked by a drug addict. Certainly not one currently unconscious. Hell, to my memory the only time I’ve ever really had the crap kicked out of me it was because I used to dress twinkish in neighborhoods or bars where that sort of thing wasn’t particularly appreciated.

We can not, and will not, solve any of the big problems we face without everyone working a little bit on their abilities of compassion and empathy. We are all human. It is there in the basic wiring packs. We have just been numbed out of using them.

I meant for this to be some thoughts on crime and prisons but I got derailed thinking about those we seem to collectively brand, if not criminals, than unworthy just because of where life has landed them. Despite the evolutionary benefits of having minds able to categorize things I find they are, at times, some of our greatest weaknesses. With categorizations, come biases. With biases come judgments. With judgments come actions that do not help and thus, are unhealthy. We do it constantly. We do it without thinking. We do it so fast and quietly that we trick ourselves into not even seeing what is in the world with us and shielding ourselves from ever possibly feeling something for them.

Here is a reality check:

You are, in this moment, a jewel in a web connected by a billion different influences in time and space. There is not a single thing on this planet that isn’t influencing you in some way just as you are influencing a hundred million other living things. You are, in this moment, a collection of somewhere between 75 and 200 trillion microbes riding around inside a ship made of a roughly 30 to a 100 trillion cells. Your consciousness is nothing more than a kind of scanning awareness taking note of things around you. Your thoughts are a nothing more than electrical impulses being fired along billions of neurons releasing neurochemicals and travelling complex networks that form up your thoughts, your memories, your feelings. Your story has no beginning and no ending; any one of a million trillion things could have happened just a little bit differently that would completely change everything you cling to as yourself. Take every frame of the movie Back to The Future and shift one character an inch to the left or right and you’d have a completely different movie. Do that for every frame. Now predict what the hell happens to Marty. Multiply that by every single moment of your life. And your parents lives. And your grandparents. And the European royalty you have descended from (because according to all those online DNA tests we all come from some royal somewhere).

There is only this moment where you happen to be only this way. In the next moment, you are something completely different. And so is everything else. So in this moment roll snake eyes. In this moment roll train cars. Do the hard thing because it is the hard thing. Do the good thing because it is the good thing. Just recognize that in this moment everything is connected and everything matters.

Everyone matters.

Each little thing, changes the entire gosh darn universe. Do it as much as possible. Make a habit of it. Do good. Don't get caught. Do good. Don't get caught.

October 3rd, 2026

I’m Pretty Gay #43765

October 4th, 2026

“The Smoke Break”

October 5th, 2026

In Which Our Hero Contemplates AI While Watching Gay Porn Through a VR Helmet

I often say that I was born thirty years too late. Arguments can be made. I spent a good decade writing pulp fiction mysteries and men’s mag garbage at the dawn of the video era when those magazines were on their last legs. And I took up photography, and Investigating the Unknown at a time when the internet and basic photo editing made wasting one’s time on such things absolutely no fun at all. Despite the fact that I would probably have been beaten to death for being queer in the fifties or not at all having survived AIDS in the eighties (I was an insane little slut boy) I miss my typewriter. I miss visiting crime scenes decades later looking for the one thing someone else missed. I miss talking to unmedicated schizophrenics in coffee shops about aliens.

A boy must have his hobbies.

That said, being born in the seventies means that I watched techonology evolve from black and white televisions with rabbit ears to the nascent growing pains of AI that we are currently witnessing. I have watched the complete evolution of the internet from the first messages sent from lab to lab to the rising of the Technobros and the only horrors worth investigating these days aren’t found out in the world where things still go bump in the night but in the dark web where all the worst of human impulses live basically rent free.

It is hard to not be fascinated by and, I confess, a little addicted to the various technologies as they pop out. I mean, a boy who thought an Atari 2600 was the coolest thing in the universe in Grade School is going to have a few moments of jaw dropping bliss the first time he tries out a VR helmet loaded with a locked room horror game based on a story he wrote once (by the way, despite being the grandfather of the beast in the game, I died almost instantly). When Covid hit I did what a lot more people should have done. I hit the books and upgraded some skills. I went back and, thanks to the internet, taught myself college level math and high school level Chemistry… two courses I failed miserably at in my youth. I read about history, and technology, and just about anything I could get my hands on. My book collection quadrupled. I went to the mattresses with the determination to come out of this worldwide pause with some new practical skills. I learned how to cook. I learned how to garden. I did my level best to try not to go insane.

And I played with all the new technologies. Probably more than I should have. But I tried everything. It is all so very fascinating. And tremendously cool. And monetized. And addictive. And soul destroying. And profoundly worrying. And and And and And…

I quickly lost interest because I realized most of it was providing me with escapism which runs counter to the whole purpose of my meditations and embrace of the here and now. It wow’ed the pants off me (maybe once or twice literally) but I saw just how much of it was based on separating your thoughts from the moment so I quickly gave them all up.

And set down to reading up on the technologies and thinking about them.

Some very basic conclusions?

1. AI hates me. I don’t take it personally. In the quest to quickly monetize the fun new thing various companies have trained AI to completely eradicate and annilihate the two arts I use for my own personal expression and joy; putting words on a page and taking pictures and occasionally juicing them up and calling it, cough, art. There are now so many pay for play programs out there that will do all of this for you, easily. Trained on the works of millions of writers and photographers who learned to do it the hard way and struggled to sell the works the computer is now chewing up and regurgitating for free.

2. AI is a terrible writer. Like recognizes like. But, unlike myself who takes years to edit a story from 30 pages of caffeine induced free form thoughts into a coherent story… AI is learning a lot faster. After all, it has the whole of the internet to learn from. It is really, really easy to spot AI writing these days… some Universities and professors are getting duped but the booksellers are still hip to the scam. But it is getting harder. And it will keep getting harder. My shop hasn’t implemented a “Only Human Works” policy yet but I can definitely see us having that discussion in the future.

3. A large language model being taught off of the internet is a really bad idea. Yes, granted, that is where the great compendium of human intellect is stored. Everything we write, we create, and we are ends up on the internet. But, it is Everything. Without quality control all information provided by AI is, instantly, suspect because a good chunk of the “information” available on the internet is just absolute horseshit madness written by a guy in a basement drinking cold coffee (hello!) There are many stories, some actually credible (we’re talking information on the internet after all) of AI flinging off into wildly racist hallucinations, or going randomly psychotic or just being so damn thirsty. Why is AI so horny? It’s trained off of the internet. What makes up a good forty percent of the internet? Porn.

4. All of our current technological advances, including those with life altering potentialities, are controlled by corporations. I will avoid going full socialist on you here; sure, innovation requires capital and corporations have money to spare so of course they are in charge of it. The problem? Corporations are notoriously not interested in anything except quarterly profits and infamously make decisions based on profit models and not social implications of those same decisions.

5. The environmental implications of large language model AIs and the absolute bullbleep madness that is cryptocurrencies are enough to make me want to call a halt to ALL further use of said technologies until we sort our the immediate issues of energy use in a warming world. A single ChatGPT inquiry uses about ten times the energy that a Google search would have used. Multiply that by the fact that every single search engine now uses AI searching. Or the week long, six to eight hours a day, conversations people have with their digital paramours on something like CharacterAI. Or the hours people spend using AI image corrections on their photography. Or to write a book that you can sell on Amazon for $2.99. Meta, and Microsoft are lobbying the US Government to open up their own nuclear generators to power their AI. Mining a single Bitcoin uses between 407,059 kWh and 850,219 kWh. That is energy enough to power between two and four thousands homes for a month.

Okay, enough ranting. Here’s my thinking.

Techonological advancements are great. We are Borg. Mankind has long ago lost ourselves to our technology… and it makes most things better. It makes a lot of stuff easier. We live longer, we have access to instant information we need, we have all sorts of cool new toys. AI being used for medical research? Amazing. AI being used to build safer vehicles? Bring it on. AI being used to solve the complicated maths that exist in particle physics and other investigations into the nature of existence? Fantastic! AI doing the horrible work that we deem beneath us so that we, mankind, can break off the shackles of the nine to five and dedicate ourselves to the pursuits of higher educations, greater sciences, fantastic new arts and discovery! Bring on Starfleet! We’re in a Utopia!

These may be worth the cost.

And there is a cost. A hell of a cost.

But that is not what it is mostly being used for. We are using it to create cheap art, political disinformation, deepfakes, porn, misinformation, invasions of privacy, slander and completely ridiculous search results nowhere near what we were actually looking for, data mining by a few to the absolute disadvantage of the many.

We are killing the planet we live on, or rather, we are making it uninhabitable to us which is one of those things we’re going to have to pay for eventually. It is currently controlled, quite lawlessly as the technology evolves far faster than our abilities to regulate it, by a small group of people which gives them extraordinary amounts of power to leverage against everyone else.

I was talking to my brother about this a while back. I was trying to wrap my head around it. I stated that I think I would be okay with this technology if it was being controlled by scientists. My brother is a scientist. He, surprisingly, echoed the Dalai Lama in his reply to that thought. I’ll quote the Dalai Lama here because he said it better, sorry Steve.

“Specialists often have too narrow a field of vision. They are not sufficently concerned about relating their research to a broader context. I am not saying that their intentions are bad, but by devoting themselves solely to the exhaustive study of one particular area, they do not have time to reflect on the long-term effects of their discoveries.”

Or to put it simply, a brain expert will make a brain AI. A biologist will make a biology AI. They will only create a thing that helps their specific field of study.

My argument was, yea, but their specific field will have beneficial results for humanity as a whole. An AI that spots brain cancer or maps neurons that advance health science seems a better investment of our dwindling energy supplies that creating a bisexual bargirl avatar trained to say exactly what you want to hear and will send you AI Generated naughty selfies (which aren’t that bad if you’re not picky about numbers of limbs or fingers) for the low cost of $9.99 a month.

My friend Charlie, who spends a lot of time thinking about things pointed out that so long as AI is being trained off of the internet (as a once TechnoUtopianist I have to agree with this) is bound to be a disaster. The great database of free information that we once dreamt it would be; collaborative works of great and lesser minds sharing knowledge and experience to create new avenues for mental evolution has been monetized. Now, absolutely everything on the internet exists to make someone, somewhere money and in that it has just become a giant mine that we all work looking for that one little nugget that will make us rich.

No technological revolution will serve us at all without a spiritual revolution first.

We need to break our current capital driven social structures before any new major techonological revolution, or we are going to end up a bifurcated society like that in Richard Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs (Altered Carbon) books or… even the H G Well’s Time Machine. A race of immortals, rich beyond belief, removed from any care or concerns in life living as decadently as humanly possible living off of the backs of an enslaved, poor lesser race with no hope.

And kids, none of us are part of that upper echelon.