A.K.A. Should I buy the banana or kiwi flavoured lube?

The contract with my previous employer was not renewed when new owners took over (who then decided two weeks later that they actually did still need me. But they weren’t willing to keep me on the pittance I was being paid before, so fuck them). So I’ve been looking around for my dream job, something in events management. I’m sure most of you are familiar with the job hunting process. It’s long, grueling, and disheartening… at the best of times.

You submit your resume, a bog standard cover letter that you’ve mail merged with the position title, place of employment and HR persons name, because if you had to make a unique one for every role you’d go insane. And then you see the same job advertised next week, even though they never even sent you a bog standard rejection letter by way of reply. Bastards.

So it was a breath of fresh air when I saw one role that was actually basing its decisions on the actual quality of applicants work. Whilst you had to submit a resume, that didn’t matter nearly so much as following the process by which you had to actually apply. For starters, you had to apply on a specific date. Not have applications in by, nor after… But that one day only.

That’s not the most interesting part though. What truly set this job out from the rest, and I’m certain weeded out a lot of the standard applicants that just shotgun blast their resumes out there was that you had to design an event for this event management company. And not any event. You couldn’t just rehash an old plan you may have had lying around. You had to create an entirely new event, with budgets, mood boards, layouts, pictures, etc., of how you would announce to other people in the events industry that you had just been hired by this company.

What a fantastic concept for selecting candidates for a job! Actually looking and seeing if they’re capable of producing the actual work that you’re hiring them to do. It staggers me that more places don’t do this, but simply look at a resume, and often don’t even look past the education details, let alone to what you’ve actually done in your career so far.

Not at all like what (IMHO) I now consider the worst employment agency in Australia, with a poor record of data retention, and rude HR people that will reject your resume in less than 2 minutes after sending it… Is that even enough time to open it let alone read it?!

Either way, it got me thinking that there are all these jobs out there that seem totally goth, but simply aren’t when you get into it… Other than fashion and cosmetics retail, what out there is really all that goth?

• Owning the Haunted Bookshop
• Being a professional psychic / ghost hunter
• Grave digger and/or Mortician
• Forensics
• Drug Dealer
• Model

In fact, looking up “goth job” on Google even returns modeling… and porno, which is kind of modeling anyway. Now let’s compare this to what about 95% of the goth community are employed in:

• IT (Software)
• IT (Systems Maintenance)
• IT (Engineering)
• McDonald’s
• IT (Consulting)
• Part time modeling and creative arts career (Read: The Dole)

So what’s a guy to do if he wants a job outside of these areas, has training and experience outside of them, and yet still can’t find work outside? Give in? Certainly looks like a reasonable option. This is the great year of You Have To Give Up.

Or strike out, and be the most bizarre, attention grabbing whore you can possibly be.

And that’s what I aimed for with my event proposal.

If people are wondering what event I proposed… I think you’ll like it: Read it here.

And if you’re wondering, Im happy to organise your next function

Remember the Honey & Cherry Vodka we made a few weeks back?

Having had 5 weeks for it to sit now, it’s not only ready, it’s delicious.

If you bothered to make some yourself the weekend I posted it, crack it open and congratulate yourself on how well you can follow instructions.

Yeah, pretty much until the end of January, you’re being subjected to the drinks that were at Solstone. In my defence, these drinks are delicious, and if you don’t like them then you suck a lot more raping tentacle than most of the girls in the hentai that seems so popular nowadays.

So this week’s cocktail is something that will fit in perfectly for Summer. It’s cool, it’s jazzy, it’s Hawaiin… it’s inspired by getting really drunk while watching Cowboy Bebop. (more…)

This post may come off sounding like great plot to a SciFi film, and it probably is. The problem is that every link I’m putting in here is either an academic paper, or a research project that is actually currently underway, usually for military contract.

So how do manage to destroy ourselves?

Self adaptive robots: designed to survive, read situations, help each other and self evolve. Basically the Godel machines that DARPA already appears to be working on.

The robots mimic basic animals to begin with, and are too basic to be called AI. They do have limited survival drive and can share information. They could also reproduce given the availability of finished materials. To think that it would start out with some grandiose A.I., like in the Terminator films is misguided for numerous reasons, least of all being the complexity of creating a real A.I. system which requires more than mere binary states of current non-quantum computational architecture, and basic safeguards one would hope the folks DARPA are smart enough to install.

It begins with basic models escaping field tests and self reconstructing due to limited processing power of single units. As more units develop by scavenging parts from available sources (and places like electronics stores would basically become a spawning ground) they become faster at building their own basic models, as well as constructing new models, due to increased numbers available to help construct others and the processing power of working in hive like networks. Other designs are quickly developed through trial and error processes to make them better suited for specific tasks.

What starts out as basic survive and adapt units has now become a colony that has specialised roles.

• Hunter Gatherers
• Guardians
• Builders
• Processing Units

The threat would be initially ignored as science fiction, until Guardian units started attacking people to defend colonies, or hunter gatherer units identified human dwellings as optimal material gathering grounds, or worse, that some human tissues would be naturally useful.

Further specialisations would occur in Guardians to specifically attack humans who are active threats. Units from different colonies would pass on information and designs to other colonies, if they exist which is likely at this point as some units would have fallen out of the communication net, when they randomly pass each other buy.

True A.I. would be highly unlikely to come about in this instance as self adaptation routines are unlikely to create anything more advanced than methods for dealing with issues. The necessity for actual thought and reason would simply not exist, and the ability to further improve on designs to achieve this end are equally unlikely.  “Smart” behaviours would that mimick thought, at least in a tactical sense, would be present and slowly become more advanced. Electronics stores & warehouses will become hives. Places that humans have to go to, such as petrol station, will become assault grounds should humans become widely identified as a threat. In this instance, retaliation would occur, but be largely pointless as colonies and hives that are attacked will quickly learn to hide processing units and some basic HGs and Builders as a means of continuing the colony and starting over.

Whilst they may be rudimentary compared to the robotic swarms we expect from post-apocalyptic science fiction films, they still hold two major advantages over us. 1) They don’t work as collective individuals; and 2) they will have a learning time of zero for replacement units, versus the at least ten years it would take for our own. From a purely mathematical stand point, there’s no way they could lose.

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