In my earlier post, I talked about how authenticity is an effective tool against LLMs and it got me thinking about how my own writing changed since ChatGPT got mainstreamed three years ago. First, I tend to write less as automation has made it extremely easy to generate every day texts. Second, the act of writing itself became pointless because it felt that every writing exercise became the foundation of for another datapoint for LLM's (to illegally) train on. Third, my overall vocabulary for things has shrunk vastly than the previous years, which intersects with lesser time spent reading and more time spent watching short form videos and interacting with internet speak online, especially on social media.
I want to address the last point specifically, where the way we use language on social media is not the way we'd use words otherwise, optimized for maximum engagement which means a shrinking vocabulary and speaking the zeitgeist which effects the way we think. After we are the words we use and if this part shrinks so is our ability to express complexity and revert to black/white thinking. See any kind of political nuance on a social media platform of your choice and it eventually transforms to right wing skullduggery devolving into name-throwing and simplistic narratives and if anyone tries to counteract them with nuance then they're presented with the sleight of being intellectual.
In my own experience the ability to write is a way to think, and the removal of this skill from the everyday means that I think less and my brain gets used to not putting effort in seeking information. I no longer do much mental math, go hunt sources, read a whole book when all the information I need is served to me as a digestible glop, like a mass market newspaper going for the dopamine jugular. So I have ever more information but lesser ways to truly figure out what I think and where I stand, which also removes me from the democratic decision making loop where I see any information as being absolute (there is no way to edit LLM based information atleast on the user end or report it being false) and go with the flow rather than finding my voice and expressing it.
So I am exposed to an ever more fatty version of information, one that hooks and titillates but that doesn't want me to engage or question. I ask myself, whose purpose does that serve? Not mine definitely, if dear reader you're reading this, it doesn't serve yours either.
The rise of generative Large Language Models has made me write less, as the friction to write has reduced and also the large scale LLM generated slop across the internet made it less appealing to indulge in the hobby. Everywhere I look now are Claude-coded websites with all too perfect writing that takes away the joy of both reading and writing. I didn't think much about the loss of this creative faculty for me, until someone reached out to me after reading this website and their words were “I wondered if anyone maintaining a blog like this could be bad” and then it clicked. In an era of cookie cutter websites and content, being authentic has its own currency. Artisanal typos, unstructured thoughts and unclear human thought looping, things that an LLMs can't do without sounding fake which I can do without much effort.
Maintaining one's own website, curating thoughts and ideas as they come by and being intentional in purpose are all the things missing from an LLM generated website, which are by default stolen words gambled through a predictive model. As the peak times of LLMs use come near with every passing day, the one tool the ordinary pleb has in their hands is to communicate more without the help of LLMs tools and be more unapologetically themselves, authenticity in the end is what breaks the computer, as its one space where it cannot be human.
In a future after we've all come to terms with the rise and fall of LLMs, we will look back at the voices that remained untainted by this mass scale of machined perfection. In all that noise, you will hear me saying hello.
Note: I refrained from saying AI and used LLM instead because I didn't want to fall for the marketing hype. There is no AI, the machine is not intelligent, yet.
A friend of mine handed me a nice camera “to give it a spin” and see if I needed it. A few years ago this would've been a godsend, with ideas trickling out of every orifice of my body I'd have set forward to doing something with it. Now as a resident corporate slave who's firmly attached to the teat of the system, this event was stark in the way it non-registered. I used to reason earlier that the reason I didn't do more creative projects was the lack of money, resources, the Ausländerbehörde not accepting creativity as a valid excuse for having a work visa, laziness, lack of network.. the pit of excuses has no bottom. Now, coming from a place of plenty where I have the resources to make things work, years spent trying to find stability have eroded any last figments of creativity in me. There are days when there are no dreams in my head, the hunger has died down both in the stomach and the brain and I think more about tax efficiency than lighting, so I am on the good path to being a good middle-aged person who has given up on their dreams and gets salty as the years pass by.
Having a voice is also important and the time I spent trying to figure out corporate Germany stymied any kind of creative voice I've had. Working with career drones who can only talk about sport, profit margins or cars means a day spent without thinking about Philip K. Dick's exegesis or the latest Linklater (there seems to be two of them and I've skipped them both). This stability induced lethargy, combined with the dullness of the everyday makes me a non-questioning, almost non-human, just a piece of flesh existing for pleasure hits and bonuses.
What is the way foward from here? Only time will tell, but this is exercise in trying to keep the writer in me a bit out of the vegetative state. Will I survive?
For a long time, I've obsessed over the quality of tools than what I can do with them. Am I buying the best pen and best paper to take my notes on, is my computer the best the money can buy and is the software I am using resilient and be able to last a long time and is the bike I want to buy outlive my grandchildren. Spending months and sometimes years making a decision [1], time's spent finding the right tool and not actually spent using it.
Isn't it better to make a quick choice and put the tool to use and figure out along the way if there's the need for a better one? When I look back at all the tools I've purchased in the past, the ones for which I found the most utility were the ones I didn't think much about, cheap notebooks filled to the brim, a phone camera bought on impulse that did its job well [2] and writing software that actually is free and designed to make notes without thinking much – I am looking at you Notepad. I did buy Leuchtturm notebooks that I didn't end up using, have had decent SLRs that I rarely touched and have paid for writing software that I've never used after the first days. In this case it seems to me that using a tool is better than using none and what's easier to use is the one that's free or accessible rather than fretting about the right configuration and build quality.
Having noticed this, going forward my focus will be on building and doing things rather than fixating on the best way to build or do things. This gets momentum growing as a way of treating myself down the road perhaps I can invest more in shiny tools.
[1] I've been researching over a good home projector for over half a year now and now all my research is moot as new models are released
[2] Case in point, phone cameras. I've been told that I take decent pictures and people often ask me if I have an expensive camera but I always remind them it's not the camera but the one using it that makes pictures pop. A sub $300 phone can take decent pictures with enough experimentation.
I've been watching a few Apple TV shows over the past weeks and a doubt has been troubling me, is there a clause in the contract of these shows that Apple devices should be a prominent plot point? I cannot unsee the amount of subtle Apple advertising I've seen in The Morning Show and Slow Horses and something tells me it's not intentional, considering that no other brands in the show have this kind of prominence, if at all.
In the The Morning Show for instance, almost every character of them working close on an Apple device, with hard zoom-ins into the devices, sometimes even showing off their funmoji stuff, which I don't think is accidental. Imagine being a company so big that you can pump billions into producing content that serves as subliminal advertising for the very product that makes your billions. I love this stage of capitalism, but a part of me worries about the kind of stories and narratives we lose in the process.
I am keeping my eyes open to see if I find this to be a recurring pattern across the Apple TV content slate, and keep your eyes open too.
Sitting in a foreign country, I often tune into Telugu cinema for a reminder of the past, just to have the language play passively in the background and the occasional hunt for a good piece of dialogue that I can recycle back into my rusting conversational Telugu. But Telugu cinema of the past years was consistent in its failure of delivering the right amount of dopamine, as with passing time the jarring sexist, macho heavy films just became reminders of a culture that I deeply wanted no association with, to the point of losing respect.
Rahul Srinivas' The Great Pre-Wedding Show was one of the few exceptions, with a focus aimed dead center at the story and characters, weaving an image of rural Andhra Pradesh that will stand the test of time, enough for repeat viewings with guaranteed laughs. It's the kind of movie that I was texting friends and family back home in India about before the midway point as a “must see” and the movie's writing is elevated by it's cinematic deftness (special mention, the editor of the movie Naresh Adupa who manages to squeeze a few laughs in the oddest of places, it's almost magic) and on-point casting.
After this year's smash hit Little Hearts this is the second best Telugu movie of the year, I hope this movie makes enough money to steer some money from the big budget borefests to something more meaningful. There's still hope for Telugu cinema.
A Tuesday evening in Berlin, one of the first autumn days after a few months of hot, humid weather. Shorts and T-shirts are out, jeans and jackets are in. A perfect day to spend an evening inside an empty kino, feel the warmth of the weeks before that were spent daydreaming under the sun. The movie – Wim Wender's Perfect Days, there were only a handful of patrons in the kino, I counted perhaps ten. There were two men in business suits and leather bags who came alone, and the usual background noise of popcorn crunching and beer bottles popping was absent, the air was filled with a deliberate silence, this was going to be an intimate screening, strangers who chose to be there in the kino to watch a movie that has been released for almost all year.
It's the kind of movie you'd come out of and say, “I am going to Tokyo to visit their famous public toilets” or “all I want in life is a cute book of poems recommended by an old bookstore owner”. It's a movie only a person who has lived long enough can make, unbothered by quick cuts or jarring music, I look back at Perfect Days as as a spiritual ceremony that I stumbled by accident, one that I was glad to be a part of. Since that viewing I started taking more pleasure in the little things of life and finding ways not to complain about things, so a passing cloud, a nice shadow or a blossoming flower become my highlight of the day, something to fall back asleep on and have a reason to wake up the next day.
Perfect Days shows that everyday can be a perfect day if you're willing to pay attention and thank you for this warmth Mr. Wenders.
In a city where escaping a screen is almost next to impossible, the last temple of peace left is the kino. Nothing much has changed about going to the cinema, when I was younger it was to escape the harsh reality of everyday India, to sit in silence and dream with my eyes open. Now, I go to the cinema to enforce a strict time limit on not using my phone and I often find that the effects of going to the movies has lingering effects throughout the day. After a long day's work, I go back to my temple, to sit in stillness and meditate together. If only kinos could rebrand themselves as digital detox oases that they'll find newer generations hooked to their phones from birth have them interested. Long live cinema, as dreams should never die.
This is an ongoing list – includes older movies I watched for the first time in the kinos. Making this is still in progress and will keep adding any other movies that I missed this year in this list over time.
Longlegs: A measure for a good horror movie is for how long your butt stays planted in the seat after the curtains come down and Longlegs ensure that time is longer than the end credits sequence. The first words that came out of my mouth were, “wtf did I watch?”. And indeed, wtf did I watch? The horror is the kind that breathes on your neck in the shadows and makes you look at the corners of the screen and away, the tension simmering and managing to persist even after the screen fades to black. Nick Cage delivers a performance of the lifetime, a literal crawling under the skin of the character. One of 2024's favorite watches, going to see this again to deconstruct it's making because it wasn't apparent at all in the first viewing.
Love Lies Bleeding: Rose Glass takes her inspirations seriously and crafts a taut romantic thriller of two lesbians played by dependable Kirsten Stewart and the absolute force of nature that is Katy O’Brian in this movie. Doesn’t waste any time in setting up the characters and gets the story on fire till the last frame. A thriller to revisit again the coming years.
The Substance: Demi Moore is Margaret Qualley and Margaret Qualley is Demi Moore in this extreme body horror thriller from Coralie Fargeat. With a pulsating soundtrack and eye searing effects, chicken legs aren’t the same after this movie. Saw it slinking sideways and with one eye open in the kinos, not for the weak hearted but if you aren’t, the reward is fantastic.
La Chimera
La Cochina
The Holdovers: The early January release seemed a bit off considering the movie is a perfect Christmas movie, part happy and part Paul Giamatti tearing you up, this movie is going to be my Christmas trump card for 2024, has a lot of rewatch value. Can Paul Giamatti stop being the Patron Saint of Adorable Losers? It’s getting a bit too much.
Zone of Interest
Poor Things
Challengers: For two months in the summer, the OST by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross was on repeat all day, everyday. Watched the movie itself four times and the story gets even richer with every subsequent movie. A near flawless tennis threesome, this is the movie I think I’ll remember well into the future when I think of 2024.
Ghost in the Shell (1995)
Kismet, Kismet (1987)
Anora: Sean Baker refines his form further and presents a chaotic comedy with almost surgical skill. I find writing about Anora hard (and have another longer essay on the way) because the movie had me absorbed for its entire duration and made me want to watch it again and again. My top choice for 2024 with Challengers coming a close second.
All We Imagine As Light (AWIAL): During my first viewing the film flowed over me, with its complexity of structure and character a dizzying experience. Payal Kapadia is a poet with a camera and extracts so much from her characters and the movie’s lead, the City of Bombay. A treat for the eye, the soul and the ear, the praise for AWIAL is well deserved. Needs another rewatch to deconstruct the full meaning of the movie and for me to form an opinion.
Over the past two decades I've watched countless hours of TV, starting with watching Ruturaagalu and Antarangalu with mom and then graduating to the Balaji Telefilms School of Twisted Relationships which produced Pavitra Bandham and then moving on to Ballika Vadhu and Uttaran. Once the Telugu/Tamil dubbed/Hindi TV soaps were done I graduated a healthy dose of American TV shows through Friends and Breaking Bad and I've forgotten the number of TV shows I've watched since. If you ask me to summarize the TV shows I watched in the past year, I could at most talk about one or two shows but I am certain I've watched more than 20 shows during this period. The plots and character arcs of these shows all blend into each other and form a wordless thought mass that plopping off the corner of my brain somewhere.
Idle watching TV has its benefits, I don't have to pay attention to the horrible atrocities happening across the world , nor do I have to pay attention to the parts of my life that need tending. It's a kind of personal unwinding where one forgets that existence of oneself and outsources the processing of emotions to the recurring characters on screen. These days this connection also ceases to exist, dulled from the daily dose of capitalism the brain can no longer remember the names or follow plots – there's an occasional flash of a scene that demands attention but that too is forgotten in an instant. When people talk about specific shows or make a reference to them, my brain gets excited for a microsecond at the vague recognition but instantly falls back into the confusion of forgetfulness.
I don't know what this kind of viewing does to one's brain but information overload cannot certainly be good. The fact that background chatter is needed to maintain personal calm would seem strange just a century ago. Cutting down on TV increased my will to learn new things considerably, having replaced that time with books, movies and video lectures that help me go through a topic in-depth than laterally.
This doesn't mean that I'd stop watching shows altogether but just the ones that are made “binge worthy” aka addictive by default. Doing a first watch of Columbo and the shows feels far more deliberate with an intent to matter, which is the kind of media I want to entertain my time with.
