Not Gonna Change

 

I like short sentences. I like lists of three. And, yes, I love me an em-dash.

Apparently, those are all “AI tells” that’ll make an Artificial Intelligence detector flaps its little wings and sound an alarm: Beep beep - suspicious human AI use detected.

Cute. But I didn’t build my voice in a prompt window. I built it in drafts. In meetings. On deadlines.

I earned my word scars. And now I’m supposed to stop writing how I write because some detector wags its algorithmic finger?

Nah.

I’ve been writing professionally for a long time. Long enough to know what works. Long enough to know what’s mine. Long enough to know I’m here to connect with readers, not impress a robot.

If a machine thinks I'm a machine, that’s not my problem, that’s a design flaw. File a bug report. Tell tech support the human has too much rhythm. 'Cause I'm not changing. Not gonna write like a middle-school book report to make a silicon hall monitor feel safe.

I was here before the detectors. Before the red flags. Before the breathless warnings that creativity might be “generated.” I write like this because it’s how I think. I’m not gonna scrub the fingerprints off my voice.

I write with teeth. And breath. And the occasional verbal middle finger.

If that trips your digital tripwire? Good. Means I’m still weird enough to be human.

And I’m not gonna change.

Not for detectors. Not for flags. Not for whatever robot snoop evolves next.

And if that’s a problem for the robots, fuck ‘em. I’ll be over here … typing with intent, smirk fully engaged.

PS Here's proof that Shakespeare used AI to write his plays:

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Check out my song: Spot the Bot (The I Miss My Em-Dash Blues)

Schedule your hardest work when your brain is strongest.

 

My most productive writing times are 7am to 11am and 4pm to 6pm.

Those times have changed over the years, but I’ve consistently enjoyed about 6 highly productive hours a day. Sure, I’ve had to grind out work outside those hours. I’m a pro and can get the job done well any time, anywhere … just maybe not in peak efficiency.

So I try to schedule my most important, highest priority work into that time frame I know I’m at my best. And recharge during “off” hours.

How ‘bout you? Have you figured out where your productivity “sweet spot” is?

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The story behind "Crank It Up To 11"

The Future That Expired Before It Arrived

 

In 2021, Facebook renamed itself Meta. A bold move.

The name Meta came from “the metaverse", an idea from dystopian novels of a place where people escaped from a hellish real world. And the move was based on a simple idea: the future would happen inside headsets. We’d all wander into a glossy digital elsewhere while the real world quietly smoldered in the background.

Mark Zuckerberg seemed convinced this was where life was headed: goggles on, reality optional.

Now that whole push toward virtual reality has mostly… evaporated. Not dramatically. Not with a cinematic collapse. Just a slow corporate shrug, the way trends usually die …fading like a New Year’s resolution.

What fascinates me isn’t that the bet failed. Big bets fail all the time. It’s the speed of it.

The company renamed itself after something that was supposed to be the future… and that future never managed to become the present. It skipped straight to the past. It promised disruption, but ended up speed-running obsolescence.

There’s something oddly perfect about a tech company doing that. The tech industry worships the future so intensely that sometimes it trips over it, face-plants, and accidentally invents nostalgia for last week.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are still just using our phones to text people and watch cat videos. Reality, stubborn as ever, refuses to go out of style.

Battery Panic

Modern batteries come with dashboards, warnings, and color codes ... your phone practically files a missing persons report when it hits 20%.

So kids today don't experience battery panic. Real battery panic. The 1980s kind. The scavenger hunt kind. The panic that drove you to check other devices to see if they had a fresher pair to steal.

Back then, batteries were household currency. Your quality of life was dictated by AAs and they were always in short supply. The Walkman ate them. The Game Boy ate them faster. Music dragged. Flashlights dimmed. Toys became haunted plastic bricks. And every smoke detector in America seemed to wait until 3 a.m. to announce its dissatisfaction with your battery management system.

Every house had a supply of new batteries rolling around in a kitchen drawer alongside pens with petrified ink, keys to long forgotten locks, and rubber bands fossilized into strange geometric shapes. But along with the fresh batteries were a handful of batteries too dead to trust but too alive to throw away. You never actually knew how much power was left. There was no way to tell them apart, so you’d grab a handful and test them in three different devices before you got the power back or admitted defeat.

That uncertainty is unacceptable today. Now we just plug our phone in before bed and wake up to it fully recharged. The whole thing happens quietly while we sleep, like technology tucking itself in for the night.

Kids today will never understand why my entire childhood felt like a combination of a low-grade energy crisis combined with a desperate treasure hunt.