Enough already. I am utterly sick of posts on social media that take a famous (and, usually, dead) celebrity and tell a protracted, schmaltzy, cliché-riddled story about a life lesson that they (allegedly) learned which the person sharing it obviously thinks is a useful way to signal that they're some sort of spiritually advanced human being. Instead, they just end up looking like a complete chump. Why? Because none of these posts was written by a human being. Instead it was vomited out by a large language model or LLM (which the media insists on calling generative artificial intelligence, even though LLMs are about as intelligent as Joseph Weizenbaum's original chatbot Eliza, i.e. not at all). The practice of spamming my socials with twee, made-up garbage has become endemic this week. I'd already encountered five of the damn things this morning before I'd finished my coffee; GPTZero assessed the text of the first to be 100% AI-slop and the rest as 99% AI.

Andrew O'Neill called out the practice this morning on the Book of Face after he'd just read yet another one of these posts. The example he gave was one that I'd managed to avoid reading, but it followed the pattern perfectly and his reaction resonated strongly with mine.

I can't stand it any more.

These stories have a number of distinctive tells. The first one that I look for is incredibly common: the article will suddenly pause to make three single-sentence statements which read as if they're bullet points written by a kid who didn't actually read the assignment properly. You're probably already thinking of a post which you've read in the last couple of days that does exactly that. And yes, I'm aware of the irony in warning you about articles that make three simple points in a post when I'm in the process of doing exactly that here.

The second tell that you'll encounter every time is that the text always reads like the worst sort of hyperbolic press release. Rather like the former Conservative education secretary Michael Gove, LLMs believe that everyone can be above average; everything reads like amped up and overly dramatic advertising copy; nothing will ever be described as being a minor setback when instead it can be framed as a devastating blow and AI will always couch the most trivial of insights as if it was sharing the secret of life with you.

Thirdly, AI is weirdly fond of specific phrases which crop up, over and over again; with apologies to Marks and Spencers (which may be where it was scraped from in the first place) AI is really enthusiastic about starting paragraphs with "This isn't just..." Oh, and LLMs love to begin these stories by telling you the exact date on which they think that all of the events which they have just hallucinated (which is the current media euphemism for "making shit up") took place. Those events never happened, of course. But people are much more likely to believe bullshit when it's laden with peculiarly specific details from unattributed sources rather than the vaguely plausible recollections of named witnesses that an authentic article would have to rely on. So that's what the algorithm pukes up for us. And go on, admit it: you've already read a story like that today too, haven't you? Once you start to see these patterns, you won't be able to unsee them.

There's another post doing the rounds on social media at the moment that tells me that the way most nine-year-olds are calling out bullshit these days is by saying, "That's so AI" and quite frankly that fills me with hope for the future.

If you think that the reason Marco Rubio desperately wants to stop the use of the Microsoft font Calibri by US government departments is because it's "too woke," you might want to think again.

The bathroom is almost finished. There are minor issues with a bunch of things (the wood supplied for the windowsill wasn't big enough and a new piece is on order to be delivered after Christmas; the button for the "small flush" option on the toilet doesn't work at all; and the funky, Bluetooth-enabled mirror is chipped, so it needs replacing) but the bathroom is back in use, and it looks amazing. The outstanding problems won't be fixed until the New Year, but that's okay. Once they have all been sorted out, I will of course post a photo of the final results here on the blog but even in its unfinished state, the new bathroom is a huge improvement on the old one.

Since yesterday, I've got the house to myself once again and peace and quiet reign once more. As I'd suspected, I was getting really stressed out by all the noise and disruption and now that it's all gone away, I've stopped feeling so overwhelmed. And after a shave, a once-over with the hair trimmers, and a nice long bath with a good book last night I don't look quite as frazzled as I did. I feel so much better than I was feeling a week ago.

iZotope's very useful Insight 2 analysis and metering plug-in is available as a free download right now and if you haven't already got it installed in your DAW, you should get it immediately.

It'll do useful stuff like tell you how loud your tracks are in LUFS so you can make sure you're not overcooking things, show you if there are any phase issues for people listening in mono, see the stereo field to identify potential balance problems, display a spectrogram of what's going on so that you can check for stray frequencies, and it can provide a loudness history so you can keep levels under control for the duration of the song.

Highly recommended. And once again: right now, it's free!

I spent an hour last night soaking in the bath, just as I'd planned. It was bliss. As I'd hoped, the steel bath retains the temperature of the water nicely, and I can confirm that it's a great shape for lying back in, particularly if you've got a book to read. My first impression was that it's quite a few centimetres longer than the old bath, because I seemed to be able to stretch my legs out more than I'm used to. As a result, I felt very comfortable.

As a soak test, I think it was a success. Nothing untoward appears to have happened—there don't appear to have been any leaks, and the water all drained away perfectly afterwards, which is a bonus.

Afterwards, I felt properly clean for the first time in weeks. I enjoyed the experience so much that I'm going to be extremely self-indulgent and have another bath today. And I really can't wait until the rest of the fixtures and fittings are in place with the towel rail hooked up to the central heating system. The final cherry on top will be the day when I can enable the room's underfloor heating (which is embedded in a support matrix that needs to be left to set for a couple of weeks). I've already installed the app for controlling it on my mobile phone...

This year I will be experiencing Christmas for the first time with the knowledge that I am Autistic. I can already tell that it's going to be a very different festive season for me.

Yesterday afternoon I got the Christmas decorations out of the loft. I have strung up a set of lights across the shelves in the living room as I always do, and they look very nice this morning. The Santa Claus tea light holder has claimed his rightful place on the mantelpiece once again and the multilingual Christmas greetings embroidery which my late Aunt Mary gave me decades ago is back on the shelf behind the sofa.

But when I got to the point of assembling the seven-foot artificial tree which normally sits at one end of the living room, I realised that not only did I not have anywhere to put it this year without spending an hour or two moving my furniture and loudspeakers around to make room for it first (which would really screw up my audio system's carefully calibrated Dolby Atmos sound field), I really couldn't face the faff of spending an hour putting it all together and another one covering it with my collection of lights and decorations. I've become very aware of the need to look after my mental health this year, and my gut was telling me that it was too much of an ask for me at the moment. I wasn't expecting that, but I knew I needed to pay attention to what I was feeling, so the tree stayed in its box and I've returned it to the loft. Maybe I'll change my mind when the work on the bathroom has finished and all the disruption that's going on at the moment is over. Although I feel like I'm coping okay right now, I think I'm still rather more stressed out than usual this month.

I'm not enough of a humbug to simply ignore the idea of Christmas decorations altogether, though. When I was in the depths of depression many years ago, I made the mistake of doing exactly that and as a result I had the most miserable Christmas I have ever had. I learned my lesson and I'm never going to do that again. So I've already ordered a smaller tree as an interim solution, and that one will come ready lit (a few years ago I would have rejected such laziness as not being in the spirit of Christmas at all, but times change and so, apparently, do I).

The wardens at Pensthorpe, just outside Fakenham in Norfolk, have discovered an unexpected beaver living on their nature reserve. It was filmed by a trail cam after they spotted signs of beaver activity there, and it's the first beaver to be recorded in the wild in Norfolk for approximately 400 years.

However, beavers have been breeding a few miles up the road at Sculthorpe for a while now. Even if the Sculthorpe beavers are all accounted for, my immediate reaction is that someone else read about them and released their pet into the wild close by, so that it could join them.

Lisa at Real World tells me that they've seen beavers on the river which flows through the grounds of the studio. My pal Mik has even spotted beavers on the Little Avon River, just downstream of the village where I live, so you might have some living a lot closer to you than you thought...

It now looks like the bathroom will be topped out on Tuesday next week. The windowsill, toilet, and sink should go in on Monday with some final tidying up to do on Tuesday (when the skip on the front drive will be taken away) but I'm already delighted with how it's all looking and the new steel bath is built like a frickin' tank.

The guys putting everything together have been taking great care to make sure that absolutely every aspect of things is done exactly right, and oh boy, you can spot their attention to detail when you stand in there right now. Taking an extra day to get everything finished is not going to be an inconvenience for me, because the work is already at the stage where I'm able to take a bath again. In fact I've been encouraged to use the tub, even though the bathroom isn't finished yet. I'm going to be doing a literal soak test and I will be doing so tonight for the first time since the middle of September. To say that I'm really looking forward to that is putting it mildly.

I've had a blast seeing the design go from Barrie's original computer graphics to tangible reality and I can already tell that aside from being an absolutely epic place to luxuriate in, it's going to make a really interesting live room/reverb chamber. With big ceramic tiles on the floor as well as the walls, the room really rings out, just as I'd hoped it would.

My social media feed has been full of pictures of a passed-out raccoon for the last couple of days. After falling through the ceiling of a a supermarket in Ashland, VA the furry miscreant went on a rampage through the shop's selection of booze before passing out in the toilet. The ranger who rescued the comatose critter explained that "He needed to lie down for a little bit" and let's face it, we've all been there.

I mentioned last month that after effectively being retired for six years I was struggling with returning to the routine of getting up at 07:00 (because Ash and Jamie have been arriving at 08:00 every weekday to work on the bathroom) but yesterday evening I had a couple of glasses of Malbec and they completely wiped me out. I hadn't realised just how tired I was. I was going to attend a friend's listening party on Bandcamp last night but instead I emulated that raccoon in the story above and fell asleep. I only woke up again at half-past eleven, at which point I anointed my back with Ibuprofen gel and then toddled off to bed.

This morning I didn't get up until 10:00.

The sun will set here at 16:00 for the next week. That's the earliest it does so all year, and if I could hibernate I strongly suspect that I'd be doing exactly that for the rest of the month. Even without booze.

The announcer on Radio 3 this morning reminded me that it will be Christmas Day three weeks today. For the last decade I've spent the big day (and most of the rest of the festive season) on my own, eating too much and feeling sorry for myself. But I'm not going to do that this year. This time last year, I had absolutely no idea that my sense of who I am or my approach to life was going to get the radical shake-up that it's been given over the last twelve months. I'm literally not the same person I was back then, and because I've changed so much, I think my festivities are going to have to change accordingly as well. For one thing, I'm going to be out in the world rather more than I've become used to in recent years. This December I have multiple events to attend and lots of people to see. My social calendar in January is already looking a lot busier, too. That's not usual for me at all.

But this will be the first Christmas I've experienced since I discovered how neurodivergent I am. I'm hoping that my new-found self-awareness will help me to focus on simply enjoying the festivities rather than spending most of them wondering why they were making me feel anxious and stressed out (which I'm sorry to say they have done for many years). I want things to be different this year, and I do not intend to spend the next few weeks shut away at home like a hermit, not seeing anyone. Doing that had become a habit (because that was how I'd learned to protect myself). It wasn't doing me any good, and it has to stop.

It's unlikely to be plain sailing, I know. I'm still learning where my limits and boundaries are these days. But this year I will be watching myself carefully to make sure I'm managing my stress levels, checking that I don't get overwhelmed, and practising some self care if things get too much. If I can manage all that, it should make this a Christmas worth celebrating.

Before you get to Christmas, though, there's another Bandcamp Friday for you to enjoy. I don't have a new album for you this month (I've been working on music, but it's mostly been for other people's songs) but should you wish to support my work by buying an album or two of mine you can find an extensive discography on the Bandcamp site.

There are still some albums there which are marked as name your price, and that includes free.

And even if you don't buy anything of mine, please remember: never, EVER give any of your money to Spotify. Seriously. Because they're dodgy, skeevy, fascist assholes who don't pay artists for their work.

At present it looks like work on the new bathroom will be finished on Monday. Today Ash, Jamie, and James are at work finishing off the tiling and installing lights in the alcoves at the end of the bath. It's really beginning to take shape now; I've got a much better idea of how it's all going to look when everything's done. It's looking good!

Not gonna lie; yesterday I was very tired and run down and I ended up feeling rather sorry for myself. You can see exactly how low I was if you read yesterday's blog and by early evening I really didn't feel like staying up any longer, so I gave up and went to bed...

...where I spent the next couple of hours turning the events of my life over and over in my mind and completely failing to get to sleep. That has become a habit for me every night recently, so that didn't come as a surprise. But then something new and unexpected occurred to me, and it's something which casts my mental health, particularly my struggle with chronic depression, in a different light.

I'm still thinking about it this morning. It feels like I may finally have achieved a form of closure on a particularly painful part of my past. I've felt like this before, though—and each time it happened I would realise after a month or so that I was just kidding myself and that nothing had actually changed, so I'm not going to jinx things by discussing what happened yesterday here. I need to process what I discovered and give it a chance to either sink in and do its work, or fade back into the general tumult that passes for my inner thoughts. But today, I don't feel as down as I did yesterday. I hope that feeling continues to stick around.

I still feel as exhausted this morning as I usually do. But for the second half of last night I slept like a log, and that never happens.

Tired or not, I got some work done in the studio yesterday afternoon and even did some work on graphics for the blog. That's more than I've managed to do in quite a while. I hope this means that I'm beginning to get my creative mojo back. It was largely absent for the second half of last month. The bathroom refit is still under way here, so I'm unlikely to get much done this week, though. Today the ceiling is being painted and more of the tiles are being fitted.

I'll be very glad when it's all finished and I'll have the house to myself once again. And I can't wait to have a bath.