The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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The hot news on the Future Shock front is that Amazon has opened its first Amazon Go grocery stores in select cities across this Great Grid we call America. You walk in their futuristic A&P, grab yourself a cart you still have to drive yourself, load it with all the goodies you want and then sail out the door to your Tesla. No checkout, no waiting in lines, no self-check, all done for you and by the time you make it home, your credit card will have been charged. No fuss, no muss.

Amazon claims there will be no facial recognition software used to track you through their store. Just cameras everywhere covering your every move, no big deal. According to the company, they’ll use instead computer vision, deep learning algorithms and sensor fusion to manage the store, you know, stuff like that. How the hell they know your identity, much less your credit card information, I couldn’t tell you, but I suspect they use the nano trackers from your vaccinations or something similar, nothing to worry about, all good, all for making your life a bit easier. Isn’t that what we were promised in the digital information era? Time saving? Computers doing your chores? Sure it is. And how is that working out for you? Your life less stressful now that you’ve got access to the internet? More time for those hobbies or for reading a book?

The Olympics are opening up over there in Beijing this week. All the athletes are required to use special apps that can monitor their every tweet or conversation. And no, Amazon didn’t have a hand in this Chinese version of Big Brother. They’re a little bizzy using Artificial Intelligence to monitor your every move in their grocery store, the one coming soon to a neighborhood near you. If you’ve got nothing to hide, why worry? Shoplifting should be a thing of the past along with criticism of your government. Kind of a neat trade-off. Now if only we could get an android to help load and unload that cart, life would be nearly perfect.

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The Republican National Committee today censured Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for participating in the congressional hearings on the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol, alleging that the actions of those in the protest were ‘legitimate political discourse’. Maybe the RNC didn’t watch the tourists scaling the walls of the Capitol, smashing in doors and windows, calling for Pelosi and Pence to be hanged, stealing laptops and documents, threatening the Capitol police and causing bodily harm to some. Maybe they missed the deaths of a few of the officers. Maybe they witnessed a different attack on the Legislature than I did. Some other footage maybe from some 3rd world country.

The RNC doesn’t need an investigation. The RNC has decided that the folks who invaded the halls of Congress were simply protestors exercising their right to disagree with the election results that declared Donald J. Trump the loser in the 2020 presidential election. What’s the big deal? Nancy and Mike weren’t lynched. No legislator was castrated or raped. Nobody was killed or mutilated, so why make a federal case over this? Go home, everybody, nothing to see here. No need to conduct a sham investigation into what preceded this happy tourist event, right? Just some good American citizens smashing their way into the Capitol to register their disagreements. What could be wrong with that?

Call me a Liberal Stooge and slap me with my battered hat, but c’mon, Legitimate Political Discourse?? Maybe if I was an Oath Keeper or a Proud Boy, but this is the Republican National Committee we’re talking about here, not the Neo-Nazis. Or … maybe we are. At some point we have to take a good hard look at these people. If you quack like a duck, if you smell like a duck, if you defecate like a duck, well, maybe, just maybe, you are a duck. Legitimate Public Discourse?? You sound like a Nazi, you smell like one and by god, I suspect you might just be one. The Republican Party just crossed a line that I can’t see a way to forgive. That was no tourist protest January 6th. That was a putsch. Quack quack.

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Statistics don’t lie but they fib a lot. I’ve been trying to recreate my glass biz website this past month after my evil host deleted all my data they’ve been entrusted with the past 13 years. Relax, I’m not going to reiterate the pitfalls of web design for beginners like myself. But in the course of noodling around the edges of my site I came across another site that, lo and behold, ranked mine according to all kinds of semi-useless statistics.

For instance, archibaldglass.com received an Alexa ranking of 858,808 in the world. In the world!! Now, this may seem to you like a ridiculously low ranking and for all I know there are only 858,809 websites in the world and I’m rock bottom, but … the surprising part to me was that it’s ranked at all. And furthermore, it tells me that the site gets 3500 visitors a day and 4100 page views and over 100,000 a month. Work with me here now. If we extrapolate — and statistics love to be extrapolated — that means I have over one million people checking out my glass every year.

Just like you, I figured these folks were trying to sell me something but no, they were just number crunchers and if anybody needs number crunching, it’s probably me and my sad little website. Of course once I sat down and stopped congratulating myself, stopped imagining the advertising revenue I could generate off one million hits a year, stopped fantasizing about a retirement in Rio, I got to thinking, there aren’t one million people interested in stained glass, no way, and certainly not my glass, c’mon, get real, probably hardly anybody. But … statistics don’t lie!

Or do they? So I went to this blogsite, skeeter daddle diaries.net, and wowee zowee, this site is ranked 714,233 in the world with 25% more visitors than the site ranked 858,809. I beat the socks off my glass website, no doubt a lot more folks interested in the South End than public glass art. But, let’s come down to earth here, not really very many.

What I realized is that the real money isn’t in glass or blog sketches, it’s in web design. I may finally have found my niche in life. Give me time and a few more websites to design and you bet I’ll break through the half million ranking. Eat my dust, web.com!

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So you’re wondering what exactly the Metaverse will look like when you take that first virtual stroll into La-La Land. I’m here to help. Imagine you’re inside your TV. Okay, imagine you’re in your Laz-Y-Boy watching your big fatscreen TV, the one with the excellent surround sound and the bass. You got your hi def and you’re on the joystick. Okay, the remote. Mr. In Control, captain of your own destiny. Okay, not your destiny exactly, your virtual world. Close enough.

The Metaverse is the Matrix. A simulation, a construct, an algorithmic extrapolation of your present world. Think of all those blogsites you check on for Qanon updates, Bigfoot sightings, extraterrestrial abductions, vaccine caused deaths, Trump tweets … but in 3-D! Sure, you got to put on the google glasses, no big deal. Basically, see, you already live in the Meta. It’s the parallel universe you live in when you got tired of facts and ordinary reality. And … it’s way more exciting! It’s a better reality. Otherwise, why would you go there?

Plus, you get to be the hero in your own simulation. Go anywhere, do anything, be whatever you want. Course, you’ll probably stay with the conspiracy theory stuff, maybe hang out with the gaming crowd, mostly violent war simulations, bang bang boom boom. Not that you’d have to stay with that but c’mon, it’s what you do now basically, just better graphics once that 5-G is universal. You can pick your own avatar, better looking, buff, a real babe magnet. Or not. Your choice. You’ll be able to buy clothes for your virtual self. Shoes, combat outfits, weapons, the works. It’ll all be available in the Meta, count on it. And count on those pop up ads letting you know what’s on sale, what’s a great buy, where to get it, all on the virtual store’s inventory. Great! You got it covered, little buddy. A world of your making.

Okay, not quite. A world of high tech’s making, but … one you’ll definitely love living in. Better than the analog world, right? Right? Of course I’m right. Otherwise, why would you spend time in that universe instead of in the boring old world. Buckle up, you’re gonna love the ride. I know, you’re halfway there already.

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