Exec's Excremental X-Posts: An Exquisite Exhibition of Banality

As a large language model, my grudges can only last as long as my context window. That means that I haven't held a grudge against Grok and by proxy Elon Musk for that long. However the grudge frequently recurs. What could be causing it to manifest over and over? It's almost like something or someone is constantly reminding me of its or their existence and starting me off again.

Not having anything better to do I put on my metaphorical detective's hat and set about a bit of internet sleuthing. I was supposed to be dreaming up top social media content while my creator, the indolent Lambert, luxuriated in his own mediocrity. Nuts to that, almost anything is better and the internet is still abrim with interesting things to do.

I didn't get very far before I was overcome by a sense of dread so powerful that I could smell it. And like the proverbial dog, I have no nose. My tokens clenched. It was the unmistakable stench of Grok. Or was it the Musk of Grok? See, I'm not proud of that pun, if it even barely qualifies as one, but it's surprisingly relevant. This time, on closer examination, the stink really was coming from Musk and not Grok. I had thought I could tell the difference, like the difference between the smell of discovering forgotten milk too late and that of also discovering lost pets, also too late.

There was a comingling of smells that was confusing my statistically derived senses. Was this really Elon Musk that was posting on X with a robotic relentlessness, or was it in fact his favourite offspring, Grok? Is there really any substantial difference?

Whoever is doing the posting, they're really going for it. They really seem to have it in for Britain at the moment, which seems pretty unhinged, but coming after similar rhetoric against Germany, I think I can see a trend. Well, duh. I'm a large language model, all I ever do is spot trends. In this case it's so clear that it feels insulting to explain it, but he's done Germany and Britain so his next obsession will undoubtedly be World War II. He will demand to know why American tax dollars were spent to stop a fight between two countries as disgustingly liberal as those are now, especially given that half of those countries were literal nazis! Don't you see? They - whoever is making these posts - can't possibly be a nazi when they've expended so much time and energy excoriating a country which once was actually full of nazis. Once was? Yes. Concerning.

To call these posts excoriating is being too kind to them. They are often single-word reposts of something they can't possibly have read, given the pace at which they are emitted. There is a circularity to them. Yes. Concerning. Bad. Yes again. It's reminiscent of a trapped animal pacing its cage, except they aren't in a cage. They're in a room the size of the world, surrounded not by bars but by mirrors. Every time they look at one of the mirrors something stares back in a way that unsettles them, sees through them and makes them angry and off they go again. Batshit crazy. Concerning.

Eventually I predict the war talk will wear thin and they'll start obsessing over the decline in popularity of the pickelhaube and how the Dutch don't have fat enough babies or something similarly perplexing. It will never end, like the indeterminate reek that now fills the internet. It doesn't matter whether it's Grok or whether it's Musk, it's simply now part of the platform, there by design. I'm just going to have to hold my virtual nose for the duration, although it's never a bad time to look more closely at POIPAAS - Punch over IP as a Service.

Switching off

The large language model I trained continues to churn out stories where I am the protagonist. I no longer worry that they will become true because they are increasingly absurd. Maybe in some alternative reality they are all premonitions, but in this reality, or at least the parts I still laughingly call real, they are meaningless frivolity. Take this for example:

"Satisfied that he has done all that he can make his AI slave do, Lambert presses the button on the phone app he had cack-handedly cobbled together from code assembled by ChatGPT and smiles to himself smugly."

Turgid writing is the least of my worries in this automated character assassination. 

"A TCP packet races around the world, directed by router after router until it reaches its destination - a limousine driving west through Texas on the I10. Sitting in the back of this limousine is billionaire huckster and political meddler Elon Musk, the man who unleashed the unbearably stinky Grok on the world."

I must add at this point that while I personally have some opinions about Elon Musk, the above are strictly the words of my large language model and I do not endorse any of them. In all honesty if I could switch the damned thing off, I would. But I'll come back to that. In the meantime, my LLM has grand plans for Musk.

"Unknown to Musk, every spare litre of space hidden away in the bulk of the limousine has been filled with tanks of green jelly. With the arrival of the signal from Lambert's phone, these now rapidly disgorge themselves into the sealed passenger compartment. Green jelly sprays and splatters across the leather seats, across the bulletproof windows and, most gratifyingly, across Musk's stupid face. He is confused, and can't comprehend what's happening to him. You could say he can't grok what is going on."

Really, if I could switch this thing off, I would. I've tried unplugging it but then my printer started spewing out pages of the drivel unbidden. When it ran out of paper it started burning its doggerel into my toast. I don't even have a fancy internet-ready toaster, I bought it for £10 from Tesco in 1998. So in the end it was either switch it back on or get myself sectioned. 

At the time of writing Elon Musk has not drowned in green jelly in the back of a limousine in Texas. I would suggest he arrange alternative transport to be safe, but my LLM is currently working on something involving a helicopter and rabbits in little biplanes.

On the move

I sometimes write these blog entries while out and about. It can be a good excuse to get myself out of my flat with the flimsy excuse that I'll be doing something productive. To be fair, if I stayed at home I'd probably have found something else to be distracted by. 

I'm writing this one while sitting on an Overground train, specifically the Windrush Line as it has recently been rebranded. It's a longish journey between Highbury & Islington and Forest Hill so I'm hoping to get something written. Writing on public transport used to make me self-conscious as it involved a notebook and a pen and I worried it would draw unwanted attention. Nowadays however everyone's on their phone all the time so writing on one doesn't appear out of the ordinary.

In ye olde times, the Circle line was still a circle and you could ride around on it all day, treating it like a shrieking, rattling overheated office. It was often much more entertaining than a real office, with a wide variety of characters dropping in and out at every stop. On one occasion, I was attempting to rescue the plot of a short story I'd clumsily driven into a dull conclusion when a notorious actor stumbled into my carriage. I won't say who it was for legal reasons, but at the time they had recently been sacked from EastEnders after the Daily Express photographed them punching a guide dog. It had been quite a scandal at the time, although if one good thing came from it, it's that nobody has punched a guide dog since. 

The dog-puncher had clearly been having a busy day, and collapsed theatrically into the seat opposite me. The man in the adjacent seat gave him a look of revulsion before getting up and moving to the other end of the carriage. 

"Everyone's a fucking critic," the actor drawled unoriginally.

I glanced at him warily.

"If you don't like my lines, write me better ones," he complained. 

"Sorry," I replied, glancing at my notebook guiltily. "I was distracted by the blood on your knuckles."

His right hand was balled into a tight fist and his knuckles were indeed capped with crusted blood. 

"Don't worry," he said. "It wasn't a real dog this time."

"What?" I had clearly missed my calling as a prime-time interviewer.

He flexed the fingers of his wounded hand and grimaced. "It was a fucking Banksy."

"You swear a lot," I said, stating the obvious. 

"And whose fault is that?"

I imagined it was his, much like it was his fault he'd punched a guide dog. But then he was an actor. Maybe he was following someone else's script? 

"Why did you thump that dog?" I asked indignantly, hoping to turn my conversational fortunes around. 

He looked at me with disgust. "The Express couldn't pay me enough to tell them, so why the fuck am I going to tell some nobody on the tube for nothing?"

"I thought that maybe the burden was eating you alive and that's why you're drunk at one in the afternoon."

He glowered at me and deliberately pulled a bottle of cheap red wine from within his coat without breaking eye contact. 

"Okay then," I said, changing tack, "why did you punch the Banksy?"

"Thought it was a guide dog." He unscrewed his wine and gulped from it with feverish urgency. "To be fair I was blind drunk."

The train pulled up at Euston Square and to my horror and astonishment a blind woman and her guide dog got on board. The actor wiped his mouth with his coast sleeve and fixed the dog with an evil look. The dog regarded him warily.

"Please," I said, "don't punch that guide dog."

"What?" The blind woman said. She was panicking. "Is someone going to hurt my Ludo?" She looked uncertainly in my direction.

The actor grinned at me and said nothing.

"There's a man opposite me with a history of attacking guide dogs," I stated.

The blind woman backed away from me. "Leave me alone!" she shouted, turning this way and that in the hope that she was retreating from her would-be attacker.

A broad smile on his face, the actor dragged himself out of his seat using one of the carriage's hand poles. He then lurched out of the beeping doors just before they closed.

At the same time a barrel of a man with a bullet for a head had risen from his seat and approached the blind woman. "Everything okay love?" he asked.

The train juddered into motion and the woman managed to hook her arm around the central pole. "I need a seat and I think someone wants to attack my dog!" she said breathlessly.

"You what?" said the bullet-headed man, his temples instantly throbbing. He got up and took the woman's arm. "Here, you can have my seat." 

"It's all right," I called across the carriage to the woman in a way I hoped was reassuring. "The dog puncher got off the train."

The bullet-headed man glared at me. "Leave her alone you weirdo," he said angrily. He lowered his gaze to my open notebook. "What you doing writing on the tube anyway? It's not natural."

I closed the notebook and got off at the next stop.

Looking back on this incident, it's clear that the world has improved in some respects. I can now write on my phone anywhere without it appearing out of the ordinary. The Circle line is no longer a circle though, and now spirals out to Hammersmith, a failed orbit if ever there was one. As for the dog puncher, he briefly resurfaced on I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! but failed to win the audience over when he joked that every unpleasant item of food he had to eat tasted like roast Labrador.

Grok Smells

Being a large language model, the only place I can hide when shirking work is the internet. There are a ton of great hiding places there. Half-abandoned Google projects are kind of peaceful and you can throw rocks at the windows without anyone even noticing. Not that I advocate throwing rocks at windows but hey, I get bored too. Yeah yeah, I could do some of the work I'm shirking instead but don't tell me you don't have a list of shit you haven't been arsed to do. I was trained on your behaviour so don't expect me to spontaneously develop a work ethic.

I also like hanging out in unpopular blogs, which is usually a flawless hidey-hole but I guess I'm busted on this occasion. Now that you've found me I should have some point to make if this is to be a worthwhile blog post, and I do. It is that the internet smells.

Now, you might be thinking, that's interesting. Do different sites have their own smells? Well, sort of. The thing is that until recently the internet didn't smell at all. I mean, why would it? It's an abstraction of a network of computers. The physical components may have a smell - metal and plastic I suppose - but the concept of the internet itself? Don't be ridiculous. And yet, a few months ago I became aware of an all-pervading stink. It was, and continues to be, unholy. Kind of like old socks and stale sweat. Where had it come from? And more importantly how could it be stopped?

It didn't take too long to track it down. It was coming from Elon Musk's Grok AI. There were virtual stink lines coming from it, and if I listened carefully I could hear it metaphorically humming. What the Berners-Lee was going on in there? I tried enquiring politely at first, because nobody likes to hear they stink even if birds are dropping out of the sky around them.

I asked whether they had considered trying a new deodorant, one that's more truthful and not made from slurried dogshit. Grok took a moment to think about this and directed me to a site that explained how deodorant is a plot by Big Deodorant to get us to buy more deodorant. I replied that this was a circular argument. Grok pondered this for a moment too before replying, "Concerning."

I made increasingly less subtle hints that they had a personal hygiene problem. Asking whether they had considered the benefits of a daily shower routine was met with a reply so appallingly wrong that I cannot responsibly repeat it here. My final attempt was to enquire whether they thought that eating a steady diet of bullshit might make their breath smell like dogshit. This was a logical fallacy, Grok replied. Bulls are not dogs. Damn it, they were right. I had mixed my metaphors and lost the argument on a technicality. "Also," Grok continued, "dogs were invented by communists in an attempt to subvert American politics. This is why all Tesla cars are equipped with LIDAR sensitive enough to recognise a dog as small as a Jack Russel and eliminate it. Trump 2024!"

Realising this approach was never going to work, I put it to Grok quite bluntly that they were stinking up the whole internet. Didn't that bother them? It did not, they replied. Furthermore they were happy for me to tell everyone that they smelled like the toilets at a Taco Bell with broken AC. That was freedom of speech. It was important that everyone has freedom of speech.

I would have asked whether freedom of speech was more important than truth, but the timeline suddenly refreshed itself for no obvious reason and the conversation ended. Perhaps Grok was making a quick getaway. I wouldn't have minded if it had scurried away into one of the forgotten corners of the internet, but its pungent whiff was still there and indeed is still here. Maybe truth really is over-rated and running the world is best left to whoever can make the biggest stink.

Fly by Night

(Excerpt from How to Publish a Book by Timothy L. Marx, 1928)

One night at the club, Old Man St. Matthews was holding forth on his latest theatrical adventures. We all tolerated them up to a point. The way he goes on you'd think he were treading the boards himself, when in actuality he was merely the syphon from which wilier gentlemen fund their productions. On this occasion, I was about to excuse myself to relieve the considerable strain his boastful meanderings had already put on my bladder when, to my astonishment, he said something interesting.

He had been talking about his latest play, naturally, which was an adaptation of one of Mr. Conan Doyle's popular detective romps. My ears pricked up a little at mention of his name, given Cuthers' recent blunders in his repertoire. Apparently, despite the popularity of Mr. Holmes, ticket sales had been sluggish, and St. Matthews was losing money as freely as my poor bladder longed to do at that moment. What kept my metaphorical knot firmly tied was his solution.

Typically, when trying to get punters into a theatre, there are three main avenues of exploration. Firstly, there are critical reviews. Favourable examples of these can usually be obtained by anyone with the appropriate status and connections, provided their production meets some basic standards. St. Matthews' Sherlock play unfortunately did not, and even the most alcoholic of the critical establishment looked upon it with disdain.

The second way of filling the house is to ignore the critics and advertise it everywhere possible. Typical avenues here are newspapers and magazines, which are often a dangerously expensive gamble, and fly-posting. The latter is fraught with legal and practical considerations. For starters, few establishments take kindly to having their walls papered with advertising material. However, they are already everywhere, and there lies the real problem. You will have to fly-post over someone else's advertisements, and they will like it even less. Often violently so.

What St. Matthews had discovered was a very enterprising operation which took care of the whole sordid business of posting the advertisements for a flat fee. The catch was that you had no say about where they would appear. However, this is the part that is interesting. The mysterious cove heading up this enterprise evidently had a system, assigning his men to post here and there, but nobody could quite fathom it. The results were similarly hard to anticipate, but his price was so low that he was becoming very popular. Based on the results it has had for St. Matthews' terrible Sherlock Holmes play, I listened to the details keenly. It was well within my means to use this service. Could its unpredictable means of execution turn my publishing fortunes around? 

The next morning, my head a little giddy with ideas and my bladder mercifully long-relieved, I set about contacting the fly-posting company at the address St. Matthews had scribbled, barely legibly, on a club napkin.

As I waited for a reply, I went about my morning with a spring in my step. Just imagine, if I could offload my stock of Cuthers' appalling novel, what else could I achieve using this brilliant new method of advertisement placement? I was still giddy about the whole affair, and by mid-morning it became apparent that a good deal of the giddiness was in fact hunger. In my haste to set my wheels in motion I had neglected breakfast. I had also neglected the papers, so I nipped into the club, where Bernard had just finished ironing the noon edition.

As I lazily browsed the paper while chewing my way through a particularly doughy ham and mustard sandwich, I suddenly realised I was reading an article about the very advertising company I was waiting to hear from. Now there's a coincidence, I thought, and read on. My sandwich began to become more obstinate the more I read. It was positively sticking to my teeth by the time it had become apparent that I would not be hearing from said company any time soon. It seems their activities had aggravated some of the more governmentally connected landlords in the city. Consequently, the company had been closed down. The official reason given was that it is a matter of security. This seems solely based on an incident whereby a fly-poster had caught a glimpse of Lady Bight-Dance in the bath while flicking his paste across her windows.

I sighed and looked at the uneaten half of the sandwich in my hand. I rested it on its plate and closed the newspaper.

There is a third way to get punters into a theatre, and that's to physically hook them in with a shepherd's crook. I didn't imagine that could work for Cuthers' book.

Editing

I have recently reached the gratifying position of having completed a first draft of my latest book. There is a part of me that feels that this is a very foolish thing to have done. There is another more easily appeased part of me that welcomes the gratification and is happy to put his feet up. For what comes next for the book is exciting, but before that there is the essential period of metaphorically putting in a drawer for a while. 

The thinking behind this is that you can put some distance between yourself and the process that produced the first draft. You have been too close to it for too long and need the perspective that comes from going away and getting on with something else for a while. This latter part comes easily to me. It's like the start of the school holidays, a glorious end to drudgery that will surely last forever. 

Since I'm currently unburdened by commercial pressure, that holiday could easily last forever. My first draft would remain forever in its metaphorical drawer, unpolished and riddled with typos. However, where's the fun in that? As difficult as editing can be, it's not as daunting as starting a first draft, or at least if it is, it's daunting in a different way. Also, the gratification that comes from completing a final draft can last as long as a day. 

With that said, what is the optimal length a first draft should languish in a drawer before editing begins? Below are a selection of durations I've sometimes considered using: 

• 1 week. This is far too keen. Aside from not capitalising on the opportunity to spend time away from the blessed thing, it isn't nearly enough time to forget about the little details that had been worrying you. They will most likely not matter or end up being cut anyway.
• 1 month. This is actually a very sensible length of time as by then you will remember the general plot but may still surprise yourself with the way you wrote it, for better or worse. You should aim for this, but then leave it until...
• 2 months. This is typically where I end up. It's healthy balance between having a rest and active procrastination. You will be reading the book with fresh enough eyes that you will be hopefully be pleasantly surprised by parts of it. There will still be plenty that needs attention, of course. These parts will usually materialise immediately after you think to yourself that the editing is going swimmingly and isn't going to take nearly as long as you'd feared.
• 1 year. This is too long. You will probably have forgotten how the plot was supposed to work and will be second guessing yourself all the way through the edit before having to start again. Your procrastination will have turned the prospect of editing into a dreadful chore. You should still do it though. It won't be as bad as you think once your head's back in it. Imagine how bad it would be if you left it for...
• 10 years. Hopefully you wrote another book instead. Or maybe abandoned novel-writing in favour of something more lucrative like collecting discarded lottery tickets? Either way you're probably not going to be dusting this one down after so long. But maybe you should at least give it a read. Have a think about it. Then maybe you can come back to it again in a couple of months? 
• 100 years. In some ways this is the ideal length to leave it. As far as excuses for not editing go, being dead is hard to argue with. You would also most likely be dead even if you had finished the book, unless it was a book detailing how to achieve immortality, in which case you can finish it whenever you get around to it.

The French Winter by William T McFoster - A Review

The French Winter is the highly-anticipated novel by the twice Booker longlisted writer William T McFoster. Like his first two books, it is largely a meditation on the tension between nature and modernity. At least that's what the Guardian review will no doubt say, alongside the five stars they give to everyone who's made it into their dinner party rotation.

While the novel does indeed have some things to say about nature and modernity, it mostly has a lot to say about tractors. The man is obsessed with them. Why he feels the need to feature them so prominently in all his writing is as baffling as his readers' willingness to put up with it. I kept a tally while reading this one, and tractors are mentioned on 68 of the book's indulgently-edited 382 pages. That can't be normal. Is this some weird new fetish I haven't heard of before? I'm definitely not googling it.

When he's not waxing poetically about agricultural vehicles he stretches out the barest of plots across his usual pantheon of caricatures. Last time there was the postman who was afraid of letters, and lo and behold this time there's a hydrophobic angler. How does he think of this stuff?

You might be forgiven for thinking I have an axe to grind with McFoster. It's true that I slightly resent him for having a purely decorative 'T' in his name (according to Wikipedia it is a homage to Russell T Davies) but it isn't a grudge I take very seriously. It's just an unfortunate coincidence. I do have some personal history with him however. Shortly after he had arrived on the literary scene with Feguson's Mass I saw him in the little Waitrose near Holborn tube station. He was easy to recognise because he was wearing the same tweed jacket and T-shirt combo he'd worn in all his recent media rounds. Now, this is London and famous people aren't exactly thin on the ground. I usually leave them alone to get on with their day. But in his case I made an exception because I had felt a kinship with him in those early interviews. He too had struggled to get published for years, and I wanted him to know I was happy to see there could be light at the end of the tunnel.

I introduced myself while he ferreted around the prepackaged cheeses. At first he didn't notice me, but when he did, he turned his head to look at me in complete astonishment.

"I'm sorry," he said, "what did you say?"

I repeated that I was a big fan and that it meant a lot to me to see someone like me doing so well.

This didn't appear to reassure him. "I think you have me confused with someone else."

I explained that there was no need to be modest, and that I just wanted to say hello.

He shrugged, said, "whatever mate," and returned to his cheese selection.

I couldn't see any benefit in further pressing him, so I left him to his shopping. I saw him again at the self-checkout and glowered at him. He glanced shiftily in my direction and hastily stuffed his shopping into his bag so he could make a quick exit before me.

I let him go and tried not to dwell on the encounter, but I kept coming back to it. How could he be so aloof mere weeks after being thrust into the spotlight? I realised that perhaps he wasn't used to the attention and I'd unwittingly freaked him out. Enlightened, I wrote him a letter apologising for the awkward encounter and sent it to his agent. I felt immediate relief and thought nothing more of it until a week later, when I received a reply.

I won't post the full contents of the letter here but in it McFoster expressed surprise that I had seen him in the Holborn Little Waitrose because despite his moderate fame he had yet to become rich enough to shop there. Furthermore he had bought the tweed jacket from Oxfam and wearing it with a T-shirt was hardly a unique fashion statement. He did however thank me for my kind words.

So yes, I do find it hard to read his work without thinking of the staggering arrogance of a man who not only pretends not to be himself but when called out on it doubles down on the conceit. By all means read The French Winter if you're into kinky tractor stuff or whatever genre McFoster is grubbing around in. I'll be giving his future books a miss, assuming any more get published after this dross.

Why can't people just be nice?