“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.” - Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
astro-
From ἄστρον (ástron, “celestial body”)
-pithecus
From πίθηκος (píthēkos, “ape”)
Hi, I'm one of the 7.8 billion humans being. You are a collection of almost identical molecules with a different collective label. Let's be friends.
[ he / him ]
I like personality tests, but as an ENTP 7w8 Di Leo, I don't put a lot of stock in them.
👽 bio
I'm an elder Millennial that moved to Portland, Oregon in Summer 2025. I have a day job where I send a lot of very important e-mails. The rest of the time, I make music, draw, write, argue on the internet, and occasionally go outside. I've been married to my best friend for roughly half my life and we have three beautiful cats together.
👁️🗨️ this blog
A largely unstructured stream-of-consciousness about whatever's rattling my skull at the moment, a travel log of my trips around the sun. Some original content, a lot of reposts of things I found funny or interesting, forays into self-indulgent armchair philosophy, and a hyperbolic rant about politics or the human condition now and then. You probably shouldn't take me too seriously, I don't.
☣️ content warnings and tags
I'm practically middle-aged, so I doubt I'm even interesting to anyone under 18. Consequently, I use rude language sometimes and talk about "grown-up things" from the titillating to the mundane. I personally draw a line at images or videos with real-world violence or gore, though, and I typically avoid posting anything truly sexually explicit.
🏷️#reblog is the tag for content from other Tumblrs, and 🏷️#not mine is the tag for content I repost from outside Tumblr. I try to credit original authors and artists when possible, but if your work is misattributed or you'd prefer it not to appear here, send me a message.
🏷️#original work (just my original posts)
🏷️#doodlings
my drawings
🔗obligatory self-promotion
Listen to music I recorded on SoundCloud
Play games I made on itch.io
Explore my uniquely terrible taste in music with my playlists on Spotify
Follow my other blog consisting entirely of cultural artifacts from my formative years at mt-ephemera.tumblr.com
Buy me a cup of coffee and help maintain the delicate balance of psychoactive chemicals required to turn me into something resembling a functioning adult on ko-fi
📆 Last Updated October 27, 2025, a rainy autumn afternoon
I ain’t happy, I’m feeling glad
I got sunshine in a bag
I’m useless, but not for long
The future is coming on
I ain’t happy, I’m feeling glad
I got sunshine in a bag
I’m useless, but not for long
The future is coming on (That’s right)
It’s coming on, it’s coming on
It’s coming on, it’s coming on
original midi at http://www.sortmusic.com/indices/ind_G/gorillaz/mid/GORILLAZ_-_Clint_Eastwood.mid
She paints her nails and she don’t know
He’s got her best friend on the phone
She’ll wash her hair
His dirty clothes are all he gives to her
And he’s got posters on the wall
Of all the girls he wished she was
And he means everything to her
Her boyfriend, he don’t know
Anything about her
He’s too stoned, Nintendo
I wish that I could make her see
She’s just the flavor of the weak
There's an irony to me about all the nostalgia around 2000s pop punk/emo, because I was there (I was 16 when this song was released) and I hated it.
To teenage me, taking punk rock and turning it into poppy music about boy/girl romance and life in the suburbs was "defanging" of the genre. I used to rant that it was inevitable - since the invention of recorded music, whenever a genre challenged the status quo, industry gatekeepers would eventually start selling back a diluted version of it, and the establishment would profit off a movement meant to criticize it. I would've argued that Elvis, the Beatles, disco, hair metal, grunge, and then emo were all commercialized forms of music that had originally challenged mainstream American society, reframed as radio-friendly love songs, sanitized to the point of self-parody. Teenage me was kind of an edgelord buzzkill.
The condensed version of this argument was singing "too stoned, Nintendo" in a whiny falsetto.
The ironic thing about nostalgia is that after two and a half decades, even a song you hated can feel comfortable and familiar.
All I know is that to me
You look like you’re havin’ fun
Open up your lovin’ arms
Watch out, here I come
You spin me right ‘round, baby, right ‘round
Like a record, baby, right 'round, 'round, 'round
You spin me right 'round, baby, right 'round
Like a record, baby, right 'round, 'round, 'round
(rip flash)
original midi at https://bitmidi.com/uploads/38327.mid
It'd be a cliché to call Zed Records an institution, but it'd also be true. For 26 years, Michael Zampelli's Long Beach record shop has satiated the aural jones of many a music fan; it was one of the few places—if not the only place—where you could find such items as imported LPs of obscure Swedish grindcore bands, or rare vinyl singles by the Pretenders, Depeche Mode, the Misfits or (insert name of your favorite band here). What's more, Zed's sharp salesclerks actually seemed to know what they were talking about when they recommended something—unlike your average Best Buy worker, they liked the same kind of music you did. But now Zampelli has decided he's had enough of the retail life, which means that unless someone comes along to buy him out—and people have expressed interest—Zed will shut its doors forever by the end of July. You can only partially blame the usual factor—competition from huge, deep-discounting chains and the Internet—that figures in to the shuttering of any much-loved indie store. Zampelli also blames a proliferation of independent, underground-music-specializing record shops that just didn't exist when he opened in 1974. “What killed Zed is that now there's a Zed everywhere,” Zampelli said. “When punk hit, during that heyday, that's what made us. But now punk is everywhere, though it's nothing but nostalgia, like what the '50s used to feel like when we first opened. Now, bands have T-shirt deals before they have record deals. Everything's gone corporate.
By the time you hear the siren
It’s already too late
One goes to the morgue and the other to jail
One guy’s wasted and the other’s a waste
It goes down the same as the thousand before
No one’s getting smarter
No one’s learning the score
Your never-ending spree of death and violence and hate
Is gonna tie your own rope, tie your own rope, tie your own…
original midi at https://www.angelfire.com/wv/weirdnesscentral/images/laundryday.mid
saw a twitter video of a dude making like fried broccoli with bacon or whatever and everyone in the replies was going “can’t believe he took something healthy and turned it into poison!!!!” i don’t really know how to explain to you that you’re still eating broccoli, and the healthy nutrients do not magically leave the broccoli just because you fried it
Ten years ago now, a registered dietician changed my life by assuring me that onions and jalapenos count as vegetables.
It seems like a small thing, but I'd always considered myself as a person that didn't "like" vegetables. The larger conversation was pointing out that there were lots of vegetables I willingly ate and even enjoyed already, so advice like "eat more vegetables" didn't have to mean steamed broccoli and kale smoothies - things I can't stand. Onions and jalapenos are still vegetables, even rolled up in a burrito. Baby spinach is still a rich leafy green even if it's on top of a bacon cheeseburger.
This ultimately helped me confront the "all or nothing" mentality I had about food choices, which was one of the "pillars" of my disordered relationship with food. In a classic example of "you spot it, you got it," I notice that same "all or nothing"/"poisoning the broccoli" mentality in lots of other people now.
Hypothetical scenario: You're attending a wedding, and at the reception it turns out that no alcohol is being served. You know that the couple getting married don't drink alcohol often, but also that they don't struggle with addiction. You don't know anything about the drinking habits or restrictions of anyone else in attendance.
Would you be surprised and/or disappointed if you attended a wedding and there was no alcohol being served?
Surprised and disappointed/upset
Surprised, but neutral, not disappointed/upset
Disappointed or upset, but not surprised
Not surprised and neutral, I'd be fine with it
I'm more surprised when there IS alcohol
Other
I don't know the expectations re: there being alcohol at weddings/show results
Voting ended onMay 21
We ask your questions anonymously so you don’t have to! Submissions are open on the 1st and 15th of the month.
The last wedding I went to shut down two blocks of St. Charles Ave in New Orleans while we drunk-stumbled up and down the street complete with a brass marching band. If you don't have alcohol at your wedding, I'm going to question if you even actually love each other.
I don't understand the order of this list. Alcohol is much deadlier than prescription opioids or LSD; besides the risk of alcohol toxicity, it causes cancer. Putting mushrooms and LSD in the same risk category as experimental research chemical psychedelics is madness. I'd really consider cocaine and ecstasy the most dangerous things on the list by far; they basically don't exist in a pharmaceutical grade and even in pure form, overdoses cause multiple system dysfunction disorder, which is effectively a death sentence. A prescription for methamphetamine is significantly safer than the random pill that the dude at the EDM show promises is Molly. Meanwhile this poll lumps borrowing half a Xanax to relax on the airplane into the same category as shooting up black tar heroin with a dirty needle.
There’s this pattern with new tech businesses where they lure in new customers with a really cheap or free product and a bunch of investors pump money into it because it has a lot of users but the company is losing money because the product is too cheap or too free. In this scenario three things might happen.
1. The company goes under because it can’t keep tricking its investors forever (extremely common with most free or cheap startups)
2. The company is forced to turn into an advertising business to survive (early days Google, most social media sites, etc.)
3. The company drives out all other competition and then raises its prices once it’s the only viable option left and its customers are trapped with it (Amazon, uber, etc.)
Now here’s the thing I can’t figure out, which is what all of these AI companies are gonna turn out to be. Because investors are seemingly holding onto this AI thing very tightly, it’s unclear how they could be an advertising company unless they’re selling their products to advertisers who can already use their products for free, and they’re kind of filling an unnecessary niche. I mean, a lot of people clearly find value in AI chatbots even if I don’t like them, but is that enough value for them to be forced to pay for it? I don’t think so. I think for most people it’s like a novelty they can interact with and like every company has a large language model these days so if you start charging for it they can just move to Google or Microsoft’s AI which are large corporations that don’t need to charge extra for the use of their AI.
This is why a lot of people think we’re in an AI bubble and that the bubble’s gonna pop, taking half of the investment market with it. There’s just no way for these individual companies to become profitable in the long term unless they choose to be bought and become subsidiaries of larger companies, but those larger companies have the resources to just create their own LLMs so why would they? Not to mention all of the copyright issues.
The thing is though is that the bubble hasn’t popped yet. Which is weird. It’s pretty obvious to like a lot of people across a lot of industries including the finance industry that an AI large language model isn’t really profitable in isolation, especially if you get people used to using it for free.
It makes me wonder how long until the bubble bursts. It might deflate soon at the very least because currently they’re building more square footage of data centers than is physically needed for basically anything, including generative AI. A lot of communities are also protesting the building of these large data centers in their regions because they’re loud and they bother residents and scare off local wildlife and don’t even create a lot of jobs.
You really don’t need a lot of people to run a data center so once all of the data centers are built and the construction jobs dry up and they have more square footage than they can use there’s not gonna be a good economic impact from all of this and the noise pollution is gonna piss people off.
Anyways beyond even my personal moral reasons for not liking these companies, as someone that’s interested in economics and the numbers involved in business and finance I can’t help but look at all this and be baffled. It’s like a gold rush where the gold doesn’t exist and even the people selling the shovels seem like they’ve built their stores right next to a dam that’s about to break open.
a) "Sponsored results" that have little or nothing to do with your search terms, baked right in at the top of the list in almost every app or platform that offers a search feature
b) Elon's highly public and unsubtle manipulation of Grok's responses on various subjects (and the userbase's complete lack of concern about a single person being able to control access to information in that way)
c) The general tactics of telecom providers and tech companies over the last 50 years
My prediction is that the monetization of LLMs will come from people paying to make it lie. Right now we're in the honeymoon phase where the user experience and factual accuracy are priorities. But:
a) People have proven they're willing to uncritically accept advice from LLMs that are wrong 30%-40% of the time, and
b) The data centers will benefit existing LLM providers by creating a high barrier to entry shutting out competition. Data centers are expensive, making the initial investment to build one a roadblock to new startups anyway. Then the more public resistance there is to new ones being built, the more valuable existing data centers will become.
The enshittification will follow a pattern:
a) LLM providers will stop trying to make it any more accurate, users have deemed it "good enough," so further improvement is diminishing returns for investors
b) Anyone with a product to sell or an agenda to push will be able to pay to affect the LLM's responses. Just like Google AdWords, controversial topics and terms related to highly competitive industries will fetch the highest prices. Asking ChatGPT about your symptoms will give you a sponsored answer from a pharmaceutical company selling a drug to treat them. Asking Claude about what car is the most reliable will give you a sponsored answer from Toyota. Asking about election polling will give you an answer sponsored by whichever candidate had the most money to spend on altering the response. The LLMs may or may not be transparent that you're being advertised to. It will likely be swept under the rug as something like "better accuracy with replies on complex topics specially crafted by domain experts."
c) The companies currently pushing for more and more data centers will suddenly start "greenwashing" their public image and supporting environmental protections that restrict new data centers while "grandfathering in" their existing ones. This will shut out new competition, and ensure if any new products want to enter the AI space, the "old guard" will have a monopoly (or at least a cartel) on the data center capacity it needs. Even if everyone stops using THEIR product, they'll continue making money by renting all this excess data center space to their competitors.
