Posted on by markusoreallyus · 2 Comments

Meta bollocks

You have to love social media. A friend (cousin, actually) posted, as a joke, a hilarious video of some whacked out conspiracy theorist talking about AI and vaccines and quantum entanglement — managing to get all three wrong. I commented, “where can I get those drugs?” Because only someone on a crazy trip could be so delusional.

Within seconds, Facebook notified me that my comment had been removed for violating “community standards”. They thought my comment somehow promoted the sale of illicit drugs.

What humourless community came up with these standards? And who allowed them to train Facebook’s model?

Their notification offered me the option of having my comment reviewed. I took them up on that. “You misunderstood my comment,” I selected from the list. On the next screen they provided another list. I chose, “It was a joke.”

A few seconds later, I was advised that they were putting restrictions on my account. I am not allowed to create ads, start or join calls, or create live videos for a month. All because their shit algorithms took offence to what I said, and further offence to my request for a review.

There is no option to appeal beyond this point. The algorithm has found you guilty, and that’s that.

This might be less galling were it not for Facebook’s role in spreading the kind of disinformation that makes cooks worry that quantum entanglement will trigger the nano bots implanted by vaccines when in the vicinity of a 5G signal. And that is hardly the worst of what they do.

Once upon a time, Facebook and other social media platforms at least pretended to be about sharing with people with whom you choose to associate. But it’s rare to see anything posted by someone you know. The majority of the slop in our feeds is advertising, and much of it promoting disinformation.

The only reasons I have accounts are to (try to) keep up with friends and family I don’t have an opportunity to see face-to-face all that often, and to promote my band. Otherwise, I would kick Facebook, Instagram & every other platform to the curb. I’ve done that before, and it may come to it again.

Posted on by markusoreallyus

Happy New Year?

Barely mid-January, and it’s a crazy year already.

The pumpkin-coloured pedo ostensibly running what used to be America, who insists he should have won the Nobel Peace Prize, has launched an illegal military operation in Venezuela, threatened to do something similar in Columbia and Cuba, and to send troops into Mexico to battle drug cartels, and is planning to invade Greenland. All while attacking his own people wherever they didn’t vote for him in sufficient numbers, even killing an unarmed woman for the sin of not complying with the orders of masked ICE thugs.

NATO countries plan for the previously unimaginable scenario of one member attacking another. How can they stand up to the US? How can they not? Putin must be laughing himself silly at the prospect.

The people of Iran, and especially the young, have had enough of the oppressive theocrats who have governed them since deposing the corrupt Shah back in 1979. Said theocrats have responded by massacring protesters in the thousands. Still the people refuse to back down. I hope they succeed. I hope they win their freedom, and are able to write the story of their country in the terms of their choosing.

The world is pivoting, like it or not, from the “order” that was formed in the wake of the Second World War: an order that was responsible for 80 years of relative peace (at least for some). That peace, of course, didn’t extend to much of what we used to call “the Third World.” There, proxy wars raged. In Afghanistan, in Vietnam, in the Middle East. But nothing on the scale of the two wars that defined the first half of the 20th century.

And so, I haven’t been writing much. I haven’t been reading or listening to music enough. Haven’t been playing music enough.

I have wasted too much time doomscrolling on social media, where much of what is presented has been generated and distributed by algorithms. AI generated images and videos and even music have become difficult to distinguish from reality. The idea of reality begins to seem quaint, as does the concept of truth.

How should we live in such moments? I turn to the late, great Neil Peart for some inspiration. In particular, these lines from the Rush song “Faithless”:

Like a stone in the river
Against the floods of spring
I will quietly resist

Like the willows in the wind
Or the cliffs along the ocean
I will quietly resist

Posted on by markusoreallyus

It’s been a while…

I haven’t updated this blog in quite some time… It’s been more than five years. That’s too long. I’m going to fix that.

Like most things in life, writing is a habit. Like mental exercise. If you don’t give your mind regular workouts, it begins to atrophy. And nobody wants that. At least, I don’t.

In the time since I last posted, we’ve seen the Covid pandemic wax and wane. We’ve seen governments come and go – in some cases because of how they managed (or mismanaged) the pandemic. In some other, notable cases, people have been re-elected, in large part due to the forgetfulness of the masses.

Two cats - Bill (a tabby) and Opus (a tuxedo), named after characters in Berkley Breathed's Bloom County

In my own life, I’ve changed positions at work multiple times. But work, for most of us, is the least interesting part of our lives. We’ve had to put down one cat, and adopted two others. I’ve focused a lot of my personal time on music.

The Bad Pennies Jeff Baker - g/v Francisco Bonilla - g/v Markus Milner - b/v Guenter Schulz - d

Since 2020, I’ve joined and left a few different bands. At least one of them is still active, which makes me happy. I’ve been playing with one band now, The Bad CatsPennies, for a couple of years. We’ve been active since 2023. We’ve played in bars, restaurants and legions around the Metro Vancouver area, and represented the Fraser Valley Blues Society at the 2024 International Blues Challenge, in Memphis. We mostly cover other people’s songs, but we have written and performed several of our own, including a couple I wrote. If I could make my living playing music, I would do that.

That’s enough rambling for now. I will try to post more than once every five years from now on.

Posted on by markusoreallyus

Summertime, such as it is

Every now and then, someone offers me a helpful nudge that I haven’t posted anything in a while, and perhaps it’s time I do. I got one of those nudges this morning, and looking back it’s been much longer than I’d planned since I last premeditated here. Then it was spring, such as it was, with much of the western world under lock-down orders, and the rest of us behaving as if we were. The daily briefings from health officials were the top news of the day, and the term covidiot made its way into our lexicon.

A lot has changed in the nearly three months since I wrote my last post, suggesting to no none in particular that we should take the opportunity of the economic world being turned on its head to introduce a Universal Basic Income. Since then, the murder of George Floyd became the last straw for the millions around the world who’ve had enough of racism and police brutality. Public health orders notwithstanding, people turned out by the thousands in cities around the world to protest for change. In the United States, in Canada, and in the United Kingdom statues celebrating a history of racial oppression (and sometimes others, presumably in error) were pulled down or covered in graffiti supporting Black Lives Matter and decrying the ongoing attempted genocide of Indigenous peoples.

Economies began to reopen, in most places gradually, but in others with reckless abandon. People flocked to restaurants and bars, beaches and parks, seemingly forgetting that the novel coronavirus is still active among us. In many parts of the United States, cases, hospitalizations and deaths have spiked, overwhelming intensive care units, and unfortunately morgues. A debate has raged there and elsewhere about wearing masks, with many people foolishly succumbing to pseudoscience and conspiracy theories. Never mind that doctors and nurses wear masks – along with a lot more protective equipment – for 12 or more hours a day in hospitals, people have begun to claim that masks themselves are a greater health threat than the virus, some claiming mask wearing impairs oxygen intake, or that it can lead to carbon-dioxide poisoning, or even cancer. They doubt experts, and believe quacks. Worse, they often heed the advice of shadowy, anonymous conspiracy theorists over that of public health professionals.

Even without that sort of crackpot thinking, many people seem to believe that because we got bored with it – or perhaps because our media did, and so moved it deeper into their websites – the virus was no longer a threat. Many stores stopped limiting the number of people who could be inside at one time. They cut their $2/hour top-up for working in emergency conditions. Their staff, in many cases, were no longer required to wear masks or gloves. And so many of us have followed suit, let our guards down, ignored social distancing and let our bubbles of contacts expand.

Perhaps this was inevitable. As T.S. Eliot observed, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” and is really happiest when “distracted from distraction by distraction.”

The good news is that we seem to be making progress towards vaccines, although it is still early days. Even once a vaccine is approved, it will take some time to scale up production and distribution, so we should really be sticking to what preventative measures we have for the time being – the same ones we seem to be ignoring.

So, where do we go from here? The first wave of infections seems not to have crested and declined in the U.S., as it has elsewhere. Here, in Canada, we’re seeing another rise in cases after the flattening of our curve earlier in the spring. It seems likely we’ll be hit again, probably around the time schools are reopening in September, shortly before the annual epidemic of influenza.

We’ll have to hope that future waves are smaller than the first.

Posted on by markusoreallyus · 1 Comment

For what it’s worth…

There’s been a lot of talk lately about ‘reopening’ or ‘restarting’ the economy. A lot of this talk comes from politicians and media pundits. Most are for it, with varying degrees of caution, and very few against it. Almost no one questions who will benefit most from reopening or restarting.

Usually, the argument is framed in terms of being able to get haircuts or sit in restaurants or watch sports. Everyday people kind of stuff. Occasionally there is some acknowledgment that some everyday people – hair stylists, cashiers, childcare workers – might face more risk than others as a result. Many already do. But we can’t be afraid, we’re told. We are warriors. (That last part from a coward who lied his way out of going to war multiple times.)

Even before the current pandemic closed so much down, the economy we are currently told we should be willing to – literally – sacrifice lives for was not working for the majority of people. This is, in part, what has allowed populist movements to take hold in the U.S., Europe and parts of Latin America and Asia. Why would the poor vote for someone like Trump, who clearly does not have their interests in mind? Because the alternative didn’t care about them, either.

The economic system we are all so keen to restart – as soon as it is safe to do so, however we define that – really only ever worked for a very few. The gap between those who have much and those who have little has only increased since 1980. The number of those between those two polls has only diminished – and the majority of them retreated to the latter camp. As corporate profits increased, their payrolls shrank. As the stock markets surged, the real economy of everyday people became ever more tenuous.

Now, I need to be clear: I’m neither an economist, nor a historian, nor a political scientist. I have, however, read the works of economists, historians and political scientists, and not just those with whom I’m likely to agree. I live in this world that we’ve created, and I pay attention to what I see happening around me, and I think about what I observe. I consume facts, and modify my opinions accordingly. These are my opinions.

There are facts here, too. The current pandemic will eventually end, and economic activity of some kind does need to begin again at some point. Those are facts. But, in my opinion, it is time now not to simply ‘reopen’ or ‘restart’ our economies, however tentatively or rashly, but to reimagine them in a way that will benefit more people and harm fewer, and lead to greater freedom and equality for everyone.

 

Posted on by markusoreallyus · 1 Comment

Meditation at Lost Creek

There are spots along the creekside path — if you can tune out
the highways’ hum, and overlook the pipe from the storm drain
spilling its effluent into the stream, and the plastic bag
caught in a tangle of tree branch reaching down into the water,
between the graffitied bridge supports and the signposts warning
against littering — where you can almost imagine what this place
would have seemed like a hundred, or more, years ago. The anglers
on the banks with their lines trailing in the current, the moss
hanging down from sagging trunks, the way that rock jutting up
from the creek bed snags the surface of the water and roils it
briefly before letting it pass. Walking here gives the mind space
to open, to branch out, drift in the current, allows time
for the mind to breathe in between the buds on the young branches,
a place for memory to grow in the shade beneath the trees.
Step. Step. Each one slightly different in measure, in tempo,
in pitch. The off-key deleted, like the drain pipe and the traffic
noise, the screeching of rails from above, leaving only
the whispered echo of the twenty-three Japanese rail workers
who died here, a little over a hundred years ago, according
to the plaque embedded in a stone along the creekside path.

 

 

© Mark Milner, Burnaby, 2020

Posted on by markusoreallyus

Self Portrait

not as i am, but
the way i’d like to be seen
(by myself most of all)

any resemblance
to what you think you know
is just a tactic in support of that strategy

surprises couched
in the comfort of preconceptions

the bald head
and general roundness
somehow make the rest more believable

i never imagined he was
such an accomplished musician

the bass makes sense
he was always preoccupied with rhythm

and will you overlook the exaggerations
of my virtues
or at least forgive them
if i overstate my vices?

i will show them here
like a badge of honour
like scars from not yet rumoured duels

such honesty
you will say
so brave

not at all
i will say

and that will be the only truth i tell you here

© Mark Milner, 2019

Posted on by markusoreallyus · 1 Comment

Work

Voices in another room are speaking important
Meaningless words. Something about process,
Workflow, who needs to do what before some
Other thing can happen. I know all the words
But the sentences are empty. And I know
I often speak such empty phrases, too.
I’m not judging the speaker. It’s their job
To empty language of significance,
Reduce words to simple cyphers and glyphs,
Just as it is my job, when I am not
Trying vainly to accomplish the opposite.
The job of the professional versus
The job of the poet. The voices are calm.
They lack urgency. Schedules and budgets
Will shift, humans will be reduced to resources.
Tasks will be performed without personality,
And these words, these words will be forgotten.

 

© Mark Milner, 2019

Posted on by markusoreallyus · 1 Comment

poem

Last night I dreamed you were running
away. I chased after you
like a confused dog, followed
you through strange cities and airports.
I climbed the outsides of office towers and hotels,
searched libraries and salons. When I found you
alone in a café, you closed your notebook
(in which every word was goodbye)
and you stood without looking
at me, and walked away in silence.

When I woke, you were lying
beside me, dreaming
you were traveling alone.

 

© Mark Milner
Vancouver, 2019

Posted on by markusoreallyus · 2 Comments

The Way – post script

We got up early, and after a light breakfast we walked down through steady rain to the Oficina to get our credenciales recognized and obtain our Compostela certificates.we queued up and got our numbers: 484 and 485. They were just processing number 60, so we left to do some shopping and have coffee, returning a couple of hours later.

Eventually we received our certificates. One to say we did it, and the other recording the distance. Interestingly, they recorded Adele as having walked 20 km further than me. Maybe they make an adjustment for shorter legs.

Afterwards we went for lunch in one of the many cafes that populate the streets and alleys that surround the cathedral. Adele had an enchilada, and I had huevos. If you can’t get them at breakfast, you may as well order them for lunch.

On the way back to our hotel we stopped and bought a bottle of Mencia, a red wine local to this region of Spain, to bring home with us. It’s a fantastic wine, very soft and round, but we’d never had it before this trip.

Before I sign off for a siesta, a few last observations about the Camino:

  • Spain is great, as too are the people of Galicia, but Portugal has captured my heart more deeply. The people, the language, the food & wine, the art and architecture…. I have rarely felt more at home anywhere, and that’s without speaking more than handful of words in Portuguese.
  • Walking is an excellent way to travel, especially if you don’t have to cart all your stuff from place to place. If you choose to do a Camino, here someone to transfer your bags and book your accommodations. It’s well worth the expense.
  • If you do any kind of walking trip, make sure you have good shoes that fit well and are worn in before you start. I saw so many people limping, so many blown shoes left behind as miniature monuments. I got through it without a blister. Tired feet, but no blisters. Winning.
  • You don’t need to spend a lot to eat well.
  • Pack as few things as possible. You can always do laundry, or buy new stuff if needed.
  • If I were packing again, I wouldn’t bother bringing a camera in addition to my phone.
  • Don’t think too far ahead. Live in the moment. Absorb what’s going on here, now. Always.
  • Tomorrow we fly to Barcelona. I won’t be blogging that, just enjoying it. I hope you, whoever you are, and whatever your reason for following along, have enjoyed tagging along with us on our Camino.
  • Ciao.
  • Markus