Summer of Idiocy?

Well, Summer's here at last. Meteorologically speaking, that is, yesterday being the start of meteorological Summer.  If you go by astronomical seasons, though, you'll have to wait until the 21st.  Personally, I prefer to follow the meteorological calendar so, as far as I'm concerned, it's Summer.  Typically for the UK, though, as soon as Summer officially begins, the sun vanishes and the heavens open.  I got drenched on my way to and from the pub last night.  It's become very fashionable, I know, to complain about the heat whenever we get a run of consecutive days of sunshine, as we did here at the end of May, but personally, I love the heat.  It wasn't always so - when I was much younger I suffered badly from hay fever, so associated summer heat and the sun with raised pollen counts and me suffering excessive congestion and coughing and wheezing miserably.  But I eventually outgrew these allergies, (I still suffer some reactions to high pollen counts, but they are usually very mild these days), so nowadays I welcome the sun and warmth and embrace summer wholeheartedly - even when it kicks off with torrential rain and thunderstorms.  Apparently global warming means that we'll have to get used to living in a warmer climate.  Yeah, well bring on those post thirty degree temperatures that we had last week - they help compensate for the damp and freezing Winter months we're forced to endure.  

Of course, the climate change deniers would tell you that it's all bollocks, that the increasingly early occurrences of very hot weather we've been experiencing in the UK for the past many years isn't evidence of global warming, but rather some kind of 'natural cycle' which they can't actually explain because they are talking bollocks.  But they're generally all extreme right-wing loonies who nobody in their right mind would pat any attention to, would they?  Would they?  Would they?  Well, with Reform UK allegedly polling highly in the UK, (I say 'allegedly' because a lot of these polls are becoming increasingly suspect with regard to their methodology - take that one claiming that Farage is more popular than Labour amongst trade union members: as union membership lists are confidential, how exactly do they know that they are polling actual members?), which indicates that a lot of British people are fucking idiots.  Certainly, anybody who actually votes for Reform UK is a fucking idiot.  Especially if they say they are doing it as some kind of 'protest' against mainstream politics - all you are doing is enabling a bunch of fascist thugs led by an oafish grifter.  If you really want to register a protest, then simply spoil your ballot paper or vote 'Monster Raving Loony Party', or maybe even Liberal Democrat.  But then, personal experience has taught me that most people are fucking idiots.  Uneducated idiots who revel in their own ignorance.  There really should be some kind of restrictions put on who is allowed to vote - an intelligence and/or morality test, perhaps.  Because, as Winston Churchill once opined, 'the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.'  Still, at least Summer's here, so can at least look forward to some nice weather before the idiots vote the fascists into power, then wonder where all their rights have gone and why we don't have elections any more....

After Hours: My Life as an Urban Gorilla

 

Another episode of 'After Hours', which can be heard here:

After Hours: My Life as an Urban Gorilla 

Once again, keeping the running time down was a challenge - this one's just over thirty minutes, but not by much.  It did, however, result in one segment, which was scripted, being dropped in favour of a shorter piece.  It will, however, be held over for the next episode.   Editing this episode taught me another lesson in how carefully you have to monitor AI apps when you use them for producing content.  When I did my first listen through of an edit of the complete show - in movie terms it would have been a 'rough cut' - I realised that Google Ai Studio had duplicated one stretch of scrip, (the duplicate being in completely the wrong place) and had skipped part of the script for another segment.  While the former problem was an easy edit, the second required a re-recording of the whole segment's script as, due to my laziness, I couldn't recall which AI voice I had used originally, (I really need to start taking notes of which ones I use for which characters), so I just started from scratch.  Ultimately, though, I'm reasonably happy with this episode - which was largely created during those hot nights last week when it was impossible to sleep due to the heat.

 'After Hours’ was created using Google AI Studio and Chat GPT Reader.  Music and sound effects by Freesound Community and ShadowsandEchoes- all via Pixababy.

Once again, for the benefit of the knee-jerk AI-haters out there, I should emphasise that the AI part of 'After Hours' is simply the AI generated voices that provide the dramatis personae.  The words they speak are entirely scripted by a human being: me.  So think twice before you go off on some rant about 'AI Slop'.

As a final footnote, the show art, as ever, was generated using an AI app using the simplest prompts possible - in this case 'gorilla sitting in armchair, wearing trilby hat and reading newspaper in a cage in a zoo'.  While the resulting imagery was actually pretty good, I find it disturbing that the gorilla appears to be wearing my new hat. (Which, strictly speaking, is a fedora, not a trilby - the latter traditionally having a shorter brim which rolls up at the back).  How did the bloody app know that I'd just bough a brown fedora?  Is it trying to mock me?  If I was Richard Dawkins, I'd take that as proof that it sentient, rather than simply accepting it as an amusing coincidence...