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The Replicated Man: AI and the Ghost in the Archive

I finally did it. I committed the act of digital suicide. It was a gesture of clinical curiosity and personal dread. I took twenty years of archives, every Boles Blogs entry, every “Best of” compilation, the discarded drafts, the love letters to lost eras, and I fed the entire body of work into the AI maw. My digital soul, offered up for digestion and analysis… psychoanalysis.

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The Shape of Water: Guillermo del Toro and the Failure to Consecrate

Guillermo del Toro’s new movie — The Shape of Water — is a high-minded movie that looks great, sounds good, but ultimately fails to consecrate the point of the story: Communication Creates Love.

There are all sorts of movie tropes packed into the The Shape of Water — but the center of the swirling is a “mute” janitor, played by Sally Hawkins, who falls in love with a sea monster because they are able to communicate using American Sign Language; and that major flaw in discovery, reason, and accessibility, will serve as the remainder of my argument why The Shape of Water, in the end, fails as a facilitation for a grander, romantic, connection of human/serpent longing.

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Annie Duke Wins Celebrity Apprentice

Last night, the awful Celebrity Apprentice ground to a halt to wrongly “choose” Joan Rivers as Donald Trump’s newest lapdog. The tragedy in the wrongful dubbing is that the real winner, the true winner, was poker champ Annie Duke.

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The Three-Toothed Monster

Today, I will share with you an everyday horror story: “The Three-Toothed Monster.”

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Feeding the Genius Monsters

Every new entrepreneur hopes to find great success in the marketplace; but there’s always an inherent risk in becoming successful:

Companies are always better when they’re lean and hungry and looking to grow and they’re never the same again once the genius monsters have been fed and paid off.

I can’t think of a current Genius Monster who has found financial success with a business, cashed out big time, and then come back to invent an idea or start a company that was ever as successful as the first payout. 

Hunger demands starvation; inspiration requires desperation. 

Once success is harvested from the marketplace, that yearning and that inherent want for recognition and confirmation of ideals can never be realized or spent again.

It is better, I wager, to make up your life with many small successes to keep the perpetuation of the pendulum of living alive and swinging — because only through a series of wins can the grander end prize of an immortal life be realized.