Update August 2026

Tie from the wedding I attending, fiber-optics are so cool :D

Well, I knew this update was coming but with work [still short staffed 🙄] I have been occupied mentally. And besides working with Zach on “Last Job 2” I haven’t done much in the way in writing. I had in mid July wrote a few chapters in a new project but not ready to talk more about that.

I have been really deep into the podcast, “Best Movies Never Made” which has been a fascinating listen while walking or consuming meals. Saying that, I have not engaged with Anime or movies lately. Which limits me to saying very little, because I love to listen to the podcast and learn about interesting movies that never happened, but work has been frying my brain.

A friend of mine got married and the wedding was short and sweet. I have been invited to another wedding which should be fun. Haven’t done much else socially lately. Zach and I explored a used book store and I discovered a couple of treasures.

“Asimov’s On Numbers” which should be an interesting read for the math nerd in me that has been dormant for like . . . twenty years or so, lolz.

But the big find for me is a collection of Cosmic Horror short stories from Chaosium, the same publisher of the Call of Cthulhu RPG. I have been looking for Chaosium’s old published short story collections from the 1990s. This was a find I could not pass on “Singers of Strange Songs” which is a tribute to Brian Lumley. I know next to nothing about Lumley other then he is the author of the horror series: “Necroscope.” So exploring more about this author may lead me to some new and interesting discoveries.

Well, once I get a chance to read any of my finds, I will share my thoughts on the site.

I always try to avoid talking too heavily about my personal life but being short staffed at work has eaten up my free time. I had a conversation with a customer and he understood because his place of work is also short staffed.

“No one wants to work anymore,” he said.

I have been thinking about that and suggested, “Well, maybe no one knows how to work anymore?”

“Yeah! No one has common sense anymore.”

That is the scary thing about the working world, the true horror we are face in the modern age. People have all of this information available on their phones but no one knows how to interact with the world around them anymore. I mean, I am guilty of that too because we all live and breathe the internet. I try to be more in “meatspace” but with the dawn of AI, we might be living in an era where people have no thinking skills or put effort into anything anymore.

I like to write and see no point in letting an algorithm do all the heavy lifting, since the act of writing is one of the few things I find joy these days. I look back on Colorify and my fun time making AI pictures and joking about them and that was fun but soon AI is going to be good enough to do anything. All these date centers being built and we are getting closer and closer to an AI like HAL9000 and Skynet. I’m legit scared of what the future of humankind will be once we surrender creativity and basic desk work to AI.

Heck, I work at a grocery store and once scientists can build the perfect humanoid robot, my job will be a thing of the past. We as an intelligent race have spiked in technological achievements so much in the last thirty years alone . . . damn, it truly is scary. I don’t want to live in a post-apocalyptic world where most of humanity was fried by a rogue AI. And people say we will never get there but thirty years ago we never thought smart phones or even the internet could be a thing.

And we are not a smart enough people to stop an AI that can learn quicker than we can react.

Wow, this got heavy. But I had to say it. It’s been on my mind and besides cracking jokes about AI, I’d like to avoid using it for my creative work . . . at least while I still can. It would be nice to rewind back to analogue and pretend the internet is not slowing driving us all mad and destructive. Whenever I get a chance, I’m going to open a book and read. And enjoy, like people have with books for centuries.

And maybe I will share that joy here . . . once I can be motivated after my brain can recharge.

Good Luck and READ A BOOK!

—Buck