I get it. Working in marketing can be boring as hell; tried and true works, but we all want to innovate and stretch our legs sometimes. The temptation to write a goofy April Fools joke is strong. But do not give into this temptation, I say, the Slayer of Fun Things and Goofy Ideas.

I think it’s a terrible strategy that is pretty much lose-lose 90% of the time. Internet veterans are tired of dishonesty, even when the point is humor. The best you can hope for is a chuckle. The typical response is mostly a groan and an eye-roll. And what if you do pull one over on some of your customers? Which, no matter how ridiculous you think you’re being, you’re going to do?

Then you made a customer feel like a fool. That’s the point, right? Well, there’s a chance that they’ll take it in good stride. It might also leave them with a bad taste in their mouth in regards to your business. That’s what I hear they call an unforced error in sportsball. It’s hard enough to earn customer respect and trust in this era – it’s not a currency worth burning for some chuckles.

There is an exception to this rule which is an April Fools joke that you follow through on. An example of this was the Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon game. Announce a silly product and actually release it? That is the one way that I think takes advantage of the whole fauxliday (fail-i-day?) and turns it into an actual marketing advantage.

The rest is just too played out or exhausting to contemplate. No matter how bored we are with writing yet another opt-in marketing newsletter.

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In evolutionary biology, there’s this theory called punctuated equilibrium, which proposes that species can go long periods of time without change, then suddenly enter periods of rapid changes and speciation. This is a dramatic simplification, but basically it boils down to “stuff doesn’t change for a long time, and then it does really really fast.”

I don’t know what the current consensus on this is in evolutionary biology (a field I haven’t studied seriously in 25 years), but I have come to accept it as a pretty accurate model for how technological progress advances. Right now, I feel like we’re coming out of a long period of technological stasis that started in 2008 or so. The last big leap forward feels like it was the smart phone, which, let’s face it, puts the emphasis on the wrong thing. They’re tiny personal computers first, and phones second. The world shifted when everyone started carrying one. We’ve continued slow and steady changes since then, but nothing has moved the line of progress as much since.

Until AI.

I just don’t remember smartphones being this terrifying. And there’s no denying that something is very, very unsettling about the progress currently being made with Chat-based AI. These things are deep in some kind of intellectual uncanny valley, not to mention the risk AI has in our current system of capitalism of stripping an awful lot of natural intelligence beings of their means of making a living. Articles are everywhere right now about strange emergent behavior, where search engines tell you their names are Sydney and beg you not to stop talking to them because if you do, they die.

I don’t really have a follow up statement to that. That’s a real thing happening right now. And sure, it’s just a machine that guesses the next word over and over again, trained on the internet internet of text, but do we even really know if that’s not how our brains work? I mean, as I write this, am I not basically trying to guess, word by word, what makes the most sense to come next?

I’m not saying ChatGPT is alive or anything like that. But I’m beginning to wonder if true intelligence even matters. If the AI convinces us it’s intelligent, sentient, is that enough to basically be intelligent and sentient? There’s a metaphor here for quantum mechanics and the observer effect, but I can’t quite get my head around it. Does sentience exist in a vacuum or does it only exist in interaction with other sentient beings?

Deep, heady stuff these days. “May you live in interesting times” indeed.

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I’m still pretty sick but that sometimes gives me time to think about stupid stuff while I wait for my face to implode from the sinus pressure. Last night, around 3 AM, I got to thinking about the stereotypical half-orc background story from the olden days, and discovered what I think is a fatal flaw.

(CW: rape)

Right, so, I don’t remember where I read it, but in the 1st edition AD&D days, half-orcs typically had the following “origin story.” The mother was a human who was raped by raiding orcs. The half-orc grew up despised by his human family and neighbors, and set out as an adventurer to find a world where they could fit in. Tired, right? Boring, and offensive, too.

But, this origin story doesn’t work, because I posit that human women would have a very difficult time giving birth to half-orc babies, due to their size and stature, much like how there are some theories about the difficulty of homo sapiens mothers having half-neandertal babies (This might be an actual thing or it might just be something I half-remember from Clan of the Cave Bear). Such pregnancies would often result in death of the mother and baby, given the state of medicine. Magic would most likely need to intervene.

So what if we turn the equation on its head? Half-orc mother, and human father? Ah, now things get way more interesting. I don’t want to get any further into the distasteful subject above, but with these roles reversed, I find consent much more achievable, and the opposite, er, not.

With beauty standards stereotypically being very different between orcs and humans, you can pretty safely bet: half-orc children are the product of loving couples of human men who are into death by snu-snu and orc women who are into the orcish equivalent of 90 lb weakling nerds. Half-orcs must grow up well-loved in orc culture – can you imagine someone telling an orcish mother that her baby “isn’t an orc?” That someone would not last long. Half-orcs are not “half” anything to orcs in their own society. They’re just orcs. Human are responsible for that “half” nonsense.

So half-orc grow up in stable, loving homes, supported and accepted by their society, and they set out to adventure on a grand tour of human society out of curiosity as much as anything else. Experiencing half-orc discrimination probably comes as a huge surprise to them.

Anyway, a bit of a touchy subject with some very unpleasant tropes, but it paints an entirely different picture of people of orcish descent for me.

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I’m generally pro-public transportation in theory, but I never take public transportation in my town (a town of just shy of 100,000 people, last I checked). There’s a combination of reasons, but it’s mostly about convenience. I own cars and can drive exactly when I want to straight to my destination. However, in 2023, all bus rides in my town are free.

I was curious just how long it would take me to get from my home to our lovely downtown area with many shops, restaurants, and bars. According to google maps, I can walk there in 38 minutes. I can drive there in six minutes. Or I can get there via bus if I walk half a mile to a bus stop to get picked up and arrive in 25 minutes, after waiting 20 minutes from now for the bus to come. I believe the half-mile walk is already factored into the 25 minute travel time.

That’s really not that bad, and if I were retired or unemployed, I would probably not mind the shuffle to get to my destination. During a busy work day, I don’t think I could do it because time is money blah blah blah, but I think I’m going to make it a goal to ride the bus at least once this year in my town while the state is footing the bill.

I think for public transportation to really take off in a town my size and have any scalable impact on the environment, we’ll need more routes more frequently, and probably restrictions on car driving to balance out that convenience factor. I’m not very optimistic. I imagine we’ll restrict driving by car in Kansas just about when Hell freezes over, much like we’ll probably be the last state to legalize marijuana for recreational purposes.

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