Hello everyone, welcome to the most pointless Update of all time. Its pointlessness is so pointless that it exists on multiple vertices of reality simultaneously; this Update can fold space with its own futility. Not only do I not know what’s in the Budget today ahead of it being delivered, but this will arrive literally as you’re sitting down to watch it.
So I’m completely goosed. No-one wants to hear about what might happen because it will either be happening or have happened depending where on the Update-space-time-continuum you sit.
I am extra goosed because earlier this evening Mr Steven Nelson, that scamp, sent me an AI-generated 750 word Update on the subject of the futility of doing an Update this week. Now, it wasn’t completely amazing and I’m not going to use it, but there were a couple of quite decent phrases in there.
“We’re writing a Wednesday Update in the style of Sisyphus pushing a boulder made of longform marketing content up a hill greased with Treasury leaks” said the Robot. Sisyphus is obvious, and the boulder bit doesn’t work really but “a hill greased with Treasury leaks” has a little tang about it.
The issue is that now I can’t write anything without the robot version trying to muscle its way into my subconscious and so now Steven has to be punished. I am open to suggestions, the more frightful the better.
(Of course, everything up to this point might have been AI-generated, or none of it at all, or I might have played it totally straight. Will I play it straight from here? You’ll never know, because you’re not reading this.)
Or maybe you are. Maybe you want a break. Maybe you’ll do literally anything other than concentrate on a bunch of braying try-hards shouting at each other from low-rent choir stalls, high on self-importance and whatever the catering staff have slipped into their tea. What fun!
I thought about giving you a tight 500 words on the relative merits of active and passive guitar pickups, just to see what happens. But I’m not sure you’ve been good enough boys and girls to deserve that level of high quality content.
I thought about penning a short polemic wishing robust harms. Upon the people who’ve started doing lengthy LinkedIn posts. With little sentences.
And gaps between.
Like they’re writing haiku.
Like their self-aggrandising excrescence has meaning beyond “I am a massive tool”.
But I thought better of it.
Because it’s nice to be nice.
And isn’t that the lesson?
No, it isn’t. The lesson is…oh, never mind. You’re not reading this anyway. But when the dust settles, and it turns out that everything is broadly the same and you remember that you work in an industry, sorry, profession, that by design helps people get to a financial position where they are relatively insulated from the vagaries of the State*, just remember who turned up and wrote an Update even though he didn’t have to, and didn’t even subcontract it to the robot.
*This gets called ‘walkabout money’ sometimes, but John Goodman in The Gambler has a better term for it.
Your music choice this week is Breathe by Eluveitie; you get them periodically in the Update but you haven’t had Breathe before. I got to see them a week or two ago; they’re one of the best live bands in the world, and what with one thing or another it was like coming home. Enjoy.
