*Yeah, the Soviets were always keen on that assessment

*My fans tend to admire Phileas Fogg and his fast-paced action sequences, but my readers should check out the island I invented that has every cool botanical and geographical island-thing all in one island-place #JulesVerne #holdingup #readingtheclassics #MyMasterpieces

*Oh yeah? Well, how about a gratis, densely-illustrated lecture all about radically divorcing yourself from society, living on scrap and packing-crates, and re-inventing the forks

medium.com/@bruces/the-...

*I understand that, but a cantankerous cyberpunk sci-fi dropout-refusenik who is living in Ibiza may not be the best guy for your argument

*I imagined that I would take up *reading.* "When I'm old, I'll sit and ponder those famous literary classics"

*Turns out they're mostly written by *kids.*. Thirty-somethings, forty-somethings. Mere children

*That was in the pre-Reagan-Thatcher era when "society" existed

*I can remember "society," and I can remember that my attitude toward it was a very strong bohemian urge to drop out of it

*Yeah, sure <nods>

*You wanna live a long time: stop breathing cigarettes and fossil fuel fumes, and get some vaccinations

*I'm starting to fret about becoming 95 or 100. That might be an actual, practical prospect. What the hell will I do with myself

*No, that's something Aubrey de Grey would do. Aubrey de Grey is a fully-committed, intensely focused British scientist-eccentric. He's plenty weird, but he's not some conniving Trumpist oligarch bread-head

*He wouldn't be one even if he lived 300 years

*A remarkable guy, William F. Jenkins. He used to invent special-FX machines

*Also he wrote "Smart Set" stories for H. L. Mencken, which was kinda the epitome of "smart" for that era

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_...

*Ever check these schemes out in technical detail? Peter Thiel is the Rasputin of the Trump regime, but he didn't make up the idea of living a long time

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methuse...

*Speaking of life-extension, I just had a complete physical here at age 72 and it turns out I'm in remarkably good health. I wouldn't say that I'm "optimistic" about that, but maybe I'll choke it back with the incessant skeeting and actually do something laborious

*In the tech world you always see guys moaning in the "Trough of Disillusionment" because they had this Babbit-esque booster notion that they had to be full of "pep" and "optimism"

*You get "disillusioned" when you choose to embrace illusion. It's a foolish choice, like worshipping Tarot cards

*The current atmosphere is always a blip, but I never do the "optimism" and "pessimism" thing. It's like some historian being "optimistic" or "pessimistic" about the year 1847. It's an unnecessary attitude that gets in the way of understanding

*Y'know, I haven't posted this on XTwitter (which is where Jailbroken Criminal Grok actually lives), because I'm aware that the XTwitter user-base will pounce on this with sharp cries of glee

*They'd be dropshipping quarts of hand-made kitchen explosives in maybe a week

*Also, unlike in the older "Holy Fire" novel, the life-extension technology wouldn't actually work well. Instead, it would have a frantic antivax feeling to it, mostly demagogic smoke-and-mirrors

*There would be some ground-wars in the book. Machines killing young, drafted guys by the hecatomb

*If I wrote Holy Fire today, it would probably be even more oligarchic and gerontocratic, with more in the way of practiced and deliberate cruelty toward young people

*I'd probably throw in some brazen swindling, eugenics and race-hate, since those have all become so trendy #holdingup

*Well, I read a lot of Jules Verne, and it's not because Jules Verne still "holds up"

*And that's so even though Jules Verne was very much a 'holds up" science-fiction writer, really working those index cards and those encyclopedia citations

*I'd be going for "dot-com domain"

*Obviously I could blame science fiction dystopias here, but it looks like Greek mythology is in for some trouble

www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

*I don't know what a "mass longevity movement" would even look like. "Let's extend the productive toil of the proletarian normies," come on, nobody's gonna drop a billion on that

*Has anybody queried Jailbroken Criminal Grok for some practical AI help in wrecking those data centers

*I'm sure Grok's maestro from DOGE wouldn't mind if the people he's currently suing at OpenAI somehow came to a bad end

*Yeah, that intellectual labor would be from Steve Krug, the guy who wrote the book "Don't Make Me Think" back in 2000. It's the most famous and influential user-interaction design book in the world

sensible.com/dont-make-me...

*Might not be a panacea when it comes to writing prose, however 🙄

Politics and the English Language | The Orwell Foundation "Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

*I wouldn't say that Delvish is inherently "Orwellian," but Orwell might almost be describing the characteristics of LLM-generated text here

www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-f...

*"The Work of Art in the Age of Slop Aversion," as Walter Benjamin might say

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

*Ever read "Homage to Catalonia"? Interesting book

*They happened to lose that defense of their democracy

*Still around however, and that was then, this is now

*Yeah, that's a nice iPhone ad, unlike that unfortunate Microsoft Windows incident

"Energy too cheap to meter," as they used to say about nuclear power before Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima and wannabe-nuclear Iran getting bombed into splinters

*Surely trusting whatever President Trump chattered about today would be a much more popular idea worldwide

*Well! Jailbroken Criminal Grok seems like a really handy chatbot to know

medium.com/@JimTheAIWhi...

*I know that Bollywood stars have been keen on lineage, descent and film-clan nepotism for well over a hundred years, but holy cow, what a cute baby