This blog post is the result of a conversation in the blaugust discord about using GenAI to make it look as if it was not generated by AI. I took a post I had already written and asked ChatGPT to rewrite it in the style of Frankie Boyle. You can see my prompts here. Posting without comment 😊
During August, I’m taking part in Blaugust, a month-long blogging challenge: thirty-one days of attempting to convert the vague electrical activity in my brain into words before it returns to its natural state of low-level panic and biscuit consumption.
This post is an answer to Roger’s Blaugust post about the Bernard Pivot Questionnaire. Roger omitted question 4, presumably because even questionnaires now have to make cuts. I’ve answered all ten, because if there’s one thing I enjoy more than being asked pointless questions, it’s answering them publicly in a way that will eventually make me unemployable.
Q1: What is your favourite word?
There are lots of Scots words I love, but dreich has to be up there.
It describes so many Glasgow days: damp, grey, miserable and faintly threatening. Not rain exactly, because rain would at least have the decency to commit to being weather. Dreich is the atmosphere slowly leaking its depression onto you.
You look out the window and think: “Well, fuck. Of course.”
Q2: What is your least favourite word?
Any word that describes dead animals.
Steak. Bacon. Ham.
Yuck.
Human beings are apparently quite happy to look at a dead cow and think, “Yes, but what if we called it something else and put pepper on it?”
Q3: What turns you on?
Creative challenges.
The Daily Create, things inspired by the DS106 community, the annual calendar project we do as CLMOOC. I like remix, bricolage, taking ideas apart and making something else from the pieces.
There’s something reassuring about it. The world is already mostly made of fragments: half-remembered conversations, old photographs, abandoned projects, bits of string, and whatever horrifying nonsense the internet has dragged into your brain that week.
You might as well make something with the wreckage.
I also enjoy talking about remix and bricolage, and writing about them, which is probably fortunate because otherwise I’d just be the sort of person who corners you at a party and says, “But what is originality?” until someone calls security.
Q4: What turns you off?
Selfishness.
Arrogant arses taking other people for granted.
Competitive games.
All sport.
I know this puts me at odds with a significant proportion of the population, for whom watching twenty-two millionaires kick a ball around is apparently a sacred cultural experience. But I simply cannot generate the required emotional investment.
“OUR TEAM WON!”
Did they? Fucking well done. I assume you’ll now be sharing the prize money.
Q5: What sound do you love?
The sound of a cat curled up in an Amazon box, licking its paw.
It’s a tiny sound of safety and comfort. The cat has found a cardboard rectangle, declared it sufficient housing, and withdrawn from the world.
Honestly, the cat may be onto something.
The human race has invented war, advertising, hedge funds and LinkedIn, while the cat is sitting in a box thinking, “This will do.”
Q6: What sound do you hate?
Any song by Dido.
I realise this is subjective, and that somewhere there are people who find her music beautiful.
Those people are wrong, obviously.
I don’t know what Dido did to me personally, but when one of her songs comes on I feel like I’ve been trapped in a television advert for a luxury candle designed to smell like unresolved grief.
She’s fucking awful.
Q7: What is your favourite curse word?
I like the phrase “hell’s bells and buckets of blood”.
My dad used to say it when I was young, and I can still hear it in his voice.
It isn’t even particularly offensive, which perhaps makes it better. It sounds like a curse invented by someone who has seen something genuinely terrible but doesn’t want to upset the children.
“Hell’s bells and buckets of blood!”
And you know something has gone catastrophically wrong.
Probably the printer.
Q8: What profession other than yours would you like to attempt?
I’d quite like to have been a politician.
Not one of the current variety, obviously: those professionally polished human thumbprints who spend their lives explaining why the thing they promised yesterday is impossible today because of “the fiscal environment”.
I mean someone who actually believed in “government of the people, by the people, for the people”.
Though, if I’m honest, I’d rather have lived in a genuine anarchist society, or a direct democracy. At least then we could all be involved in making the decisions that eventually ruined everything, rather than watching a small group of exceptionally confident people do it for us.
Still, perhaps that’s a subject for another post.
Q9: What profession would you not like to participate in?
Anything involving sales or marketing.
I did some sales jobs when I was young and discovered that I wasn’t very good at them.
This may have been because sales requires you to look another human being in the eye and say, “You need this,” while marketing requires you to find new and innovative ways of making people feel inadequate about things they had never previously considered.
“You have a kettle.”
“Yes.”
“But is it a smart kettle?”
Fuck off.
Q10: If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the pearly gates?
“Well, I could quip here about God being a woman.
But given the amount of evil in the world, I suspect I’d be far too busy shouting at her to hear the reply.
What the fuck was all that about?”
I used to really enjoy teaching philosophy of religion, and I still think the problem of evil presents a pretty devastating challenge to the idea of an all-powerful, all-knowing and wholly good theistic God.
Because if such a being exists, then there are questions.
Quite a fucking lot of them.
And frankly, eternity is probably going to be needed to answer them.
