Social Media Branding

I made a post last year expressing my disdain for Artificial Intelligence, specifically regarding the image generator Midjourney and the language learning model ChatGPT. At that time people were most upset about Midjourney but now ChatGPT has taken the helm.

Google has been slowly rolling out their own language learning model, which they're calling BardAI. I've got to say, with access to these near-omniscient artificial minds that can conjure all of human knowledge and produce optimized creations in seconds, you'd think the branding would come across a bit more transcendental. 

ChatGPT is painfully literal, like the CEO asked "So what's this technology? A Generative Pre-training Transformer? And what does it do? Chat? So call it ChatGPT". BardAI sounds like a Dungeons and Dragons nerd came up with it. The Bard class is a musician anyway, so you'd think it would be used for a music-producing AI (which exists). Lee-Anne didn't know what a bard was, which is a bad sign for its public appeal. Also, Bard sounds like "barred", as in, to have your autonomy revoked, a horrible implication for AI and what Lee-Anne initially thought it meant. It also sounds too close to "banned", and "bad", both negative words.

Branding in general seems to be taking a weird turn. Germany tried making an alternative to Twitter (which has rebranded simply to "X", which its consumers have essentially ignored) called "Mastodon". To me, three syllables seems too many for a popular brand, especially a word that translates to "nipple teeth".

If I were to come up with a name for a language learning model (which I wouldn't, because I hate them), I think I would call it "Polly" and the mascot would be a parrot. Research has shown that humans respond better to female voices and identities when it comes to electronic assistants. This can be seen in the examples of Alexis and Siri. In addition, a parrot is known to be an animal that can mimic human language, but doesn't possess the ability to comprehend it, which makes it unique but unintimidating.

Taking the example of Mastodon, I would rebrand it to Mammoth and its mascot would be a woolly mammoth simply referred to as "Woolly". Shorter name, also the word more easily implies a sense of largeness, which I'm guessing was the reason for the name Mastodon. A social media platform is better the larger the network of people on it is, so the slogan I would use would be "Mammoth: the giant of social media". Posts would be called "SoundOuts" and have the image of Woolly trumpeting. I thought about calling them "Trumpets" but unironically I believe that it's dangerous to use a word that contains "Trump" in it during this specific point in history.

I should probably offer the caveat that maybe "Mastodon" works better in German.

Anyway, these are the competitive branding decisions that I've come up with using only my primitive, mono-conscience human brain.

I've always hated the format of Twitter. Even before Elon Musk took it over, back when it got popular when I was just out of highschool. I always thought it was the very worst social media platform. At the time, Facebook was the predominant social media, and Twitter was literally Facebook reduced only to its status update function. Literally, all Twitter did was reduce functionality to only allow for your thoughts to be presented in small sound bites. I resent so much that it became the platform used for political discourse.

I had a Twitter for a bit and found that it brought out the worst in me. I would unconsciously spit out my most controversial hot takes and offer no context or nuance. To my additional horror, it quickly became the platform I was most popular on, with people referencing it when I talked to them in my personal life. I set my account to private and never looked back.

I think Elon is deleting all accounts that have been inactive for a certain period of time, which my account assuredly qualifies for. I'm grateful to Musk for his horrible business decisions, which appear to be erasing the worst of my online presence, and also destroying the worst social media platform online. He's also losing a ton of money, which I'm also happy about.

This was going to be a post on Artificial Intelligence, but it's devolving into a tirade against social media in general.

Right now I've got an account on Facebook and InstaGram. All I use them for is posting major life updates and to say how many sunflowers I managed to grow that year. Facebook has become so consumed by bots and scammers pretending to people that you know that I don't trust any friend requests until I make voice contact with the person.

In fact, there have been two instances where someone has made accounts with my name and image and has been friending people. They both got reported and taken down.

Apparently Facebook is now known as the platform for "old people" of which I am one. InstaGram is where the young people are.

Except they're the exact same platform. They're both owned by Meta, they both use the same Direct Messaging system, called Messenger, and they both do exactly the same thing. Literally, they both offer you the option of syncing your updates so that they go to both platforms. Despite having a reputation for serving different demographics, most people have accounts on both platforms, and most people sync their updates so both their profiles contain the same content. It's pretty well just a filter, a simple cosmetic difference differentiating the two. The idea that they're different products is completely and totally an illusion.

I've considered playing around with some of the AI systems, but at this point you still have to make an account and either pay them money or agree to review the quality of their work, and I'm just not willing to support them in that way.

The closest I've gotten is with Goblin Tools, a free online service with a bunch of different tools. It's main thing is "MagicToDo" which takes a task and breaks it down into smaller steps, paired with an "Estimator" that lets you know how long it should take to do something. You can also use a "Judge" which detects the tone of a message, a "Formalizer", which converts your text to portray a different tone, making your message more or less professional, emotional, direct, or sarcastic. You can also select the degree to which you want the message altered by choosing between one to five levels of intensity using peppers as a symbol. There is also a "Chef", where you enter ingredients you have in your house and it conjures up a recipe, and a "Compiler" which takes a "brain dump" and converts it into steps.

This seems to be marketed toward people with cognitive disabilities living independently, usually people with ADHD or autism. We've begun using it at work. There's a motion to advocate for it as a tool to help people figure out what to cook at home, and I used it to edit a cover letter. The person I was supporting wrote a cover letter, and the Formalizer converted it to be more formal. Then I edited the script the formalizer came up with (it needed it).

As far as branding goes, this seems like the smartest of the examples I've given in this post. For some reason, neurodivergent people seem to compare themselves with goblins a lot. Also, the use of peppers was smart, because the term "neurospicy" as slang for people that process information differently has gotten popular, and it introduces the Formalizer as a tool to convert "spicy thoughts". I know "Goblin Tools" is three syllables and I said to avoid three syllable branding, but maybe chunking it into two words helps, because it doesn't feel as clunky as "Mastodon", at least to me. 

It doesn't advertise itself as AI, but it is. I've seen people on the ADHD subreddit advocating for the use of AI as an accessibility tool to help with writing emails and cover letters, to act as a prosthetic for their broken brains, or to convert boring tasks into exciting missions. Remember, I have ADHD so I'm involved in this discussion. I find the idea of filtering your voice through artificial intelligence disgustingly disingenuous.

I'll probably make a blog post playing with the Goblin Tools. That was going to be this post but my unfiltered spicy goblin brain got side tracked and so you get this for the time being.

Encampments Part 3

There have been some developments since the last time I spoke on our homeless encampment situation. My last update was September last year. We had two encampments, one by the train station, and one on Roos Island in Victoria Park. The city's plan was to let the weather get cold enough that the residents would leave. That didn't work. 

There were talks on whether or not to evict them. At the train station they went as far as issuing a notice to leave by the end of the month, but no one complied. So they did this thing where they would extend the eviction deadline by a month at a time for awhile before they eventually stopped bothering. 

A while later there was a discussion on whether or not to move out the Roos Island residents, and it was eventually decided that they couldn't because the city didn't have any alternative shelter options available.

A public discourse was held on whether or not to take down the statue of Queen Victoria in Victoria Park. That may sound unrelated, but Roos Island residents issued 13 demands concerning affordable housing, drug laws, and oppression toward marginalized groups. One of the demands was the removal of colonial imagery, starting at Willow River Park (their proposed name for the park). The largest local colonial symbol is that statue of Queen Victoria. It has routinely been used as a medium for people to express their distain toward Canada's roots, specifically regarding the residential schools, by splashing red paint on it and by putting children's shoes around it.

Some locals complained that a decision would be made with bias in favour of the encampment residents, especially because the mediator said that she would prioritize marginalized voices. At the time I thought that this might be a token effort on behalf of the city to show good faith to the island residents, as it would be a nod to one of their demands. But it's easier to take down a statue than it is to create affordable housing or change drug laws, and it didn't come with a promise to further decolonize.

It all went out with a fizzle though, as indeed the discussion seemed in favour of removing the statue, but it's still here today without further pursuit of the topic. At some point, a plaque was added at the base, saying that the city acknowledged the harm done to the Indigenous peoples.

Eventually, some more shelter options were developed. Single room houses with communal washrooms which allowed the city to say that they had provided an alternative to the encampments before making moves to evict. The new space is next to a dump, a detail that gets mentioned by the unhoused and the housed alike whenever it's brought up. Some people voluntarily took advantage of the new shelter, but many felt the location was less convenient due to it being further removed from resources.

So residency on the island didn't dip as much as the city had hoped, and they resorted to a classic Canadian trick.

They decided to "renovict" them.

In Ontario, we have renter protection for anyone living in a residential unit constructed before 2018. That means rent increases are limited to a certain percent per year. Because housing has increased so drastically and so quickly, that means that people who have been renting for longer are getting nicer and nicer deals compared to anyone that needs to move currently. So landlords typically are not fond of long-running tenants, because they know they can jack up the price if they move out. To get around the renters protection, it's a classic move to go with what is popularly known as "renoviction". This is the act of providing renovations to the unit. If the alterations are significant enough, they can justify a rent increase that bypasses the usual rent limit, often to an extent that renders the unit unlivable to the current tenant.

In these pictures, barricades have been placed in front of both of the bridges that act as sole access to Roos Island. Apparently they've got plans to renovate both bridges at once, fully cutting off access to the island. In the meanwhile, they just have fences up as a symbol of their future promise to construct.

It's still not quite as drastic a move as fully and completely cutting people off. They stationed security guards at each gate, and they allow for residents living there before the gates went up to continue to access it. They don't allow new residents to move in though.

It did make living there uncomfortable enough that the residents slowly moved away from the site. Right now, there is one lone resident occupying the entire island, constantly monitored by four security guards.

Less action has occurred at the train station encampment. Residency there has decreased by about half, and it looks like the city has paved over about half of the previously grassy space. This could be the key deterrent, as it's hard to pitch a tent on pavement.

Take The Heat Off Complete

For the past three weeks I've been teaching de-escalation to firefighters. I talked a little bit about it in a previous post after we'd workshopped a presentation and done a run-through. 

Our head of training was approached by a firefighter that caught wind of the fact that we had a crisis intervention training, and wanted to know if we could develop a more targeted workshop for firefighters. I was asked to help with developing and facilitating the presentation, as I am one of the people that teaches the training that earned this request. Very important to point out here that what we came up with was an amalgamation of our general knowledge as it applies to firefighters. We did not use any material from our crisis intervention training.

We named it "Take The Heat Off" as a play on their role of putting out fires, and the goal of the training, which was to cool down fiery emotions.

I'm not going to go too in-depth about my experience for confidentiality reasons. There were sixteen sessions total, and I taught nine of them. The people tasked with developing and presenting the material were myself, another person that facilitates our crisis intervention training, and then the person who is head of training that received the request in the first place.

Our head of training did (almost) every session, while me and the other facilitator traded days. This was because I still have a day job and I can't just peace out for several weeks to train firefighters full time. To emphasize this point, the other facilitator is not only a crisis intervention trainer like myself, she also works at the same branch of our organization. That leaves my main gig stretched pretty thin for staff, so it was agreed that only one of us would be training at a time. Although I did sub in once when the main trainer couldn't be there, which is how I wound up teaching an extra session.

I'm sure we annoyed the other staff quite a bit with our absence, but the agency was pretty highly incentivized to make this happen.

It was cool to work with the head of training. She used to work at the branch that I work for now, and through absurd chance, I've never worked with her before. When I came on as a student, she went on maternity leave the day before I started. When I completed my placement, she came back the day after. When I came back as a paid employee, she left for this training position the day before I started! That last one isn't such a strange coincidence, I was hired because a position opened when she left.

I won't share the material we used, but in general, we explored biases and stigmas, we offered de-escalation techniques and resources, and we covered compassion fatigue. The demographics they work with most are the homeless population and people with addictions, which often overlap. This is pretty topical, as we've got those two tent cities that I've blogged about twice, and which I need to make another update on.

It was kinda peculiar that we were called in to do this, since our main demographic is disabilities, and while that can and does intersect with poverty and addictions, there are definitely agencies that address that more directly. Still, we used the knowledge and experience at our disposal to provide as much relevant information as possible.

The compassion fatigue piece was the most popular in general. We were initially barely going to touch it, as it's only tangentially related to de-escalation. But after doing the runthrough, it came up as something people wanted more of, and that proved to be consistently true.

The first four or so sessions, I came away with suggestions on how to tweak the presentation to be more relevant. I really wish I could redo my first day, because we ended a lot stronger than we began. A lot of it was just learning specific examples of what they go through, learning their lingo etc. Also, learning my co-facilitator, her stories and what she brings to the table. She said that whenever I'm co-facilitating, she tried to fill the void of the other facilitator, and when I wasn't there, she tried to use my style. She said she thought of me as the "science one" and the other facilitator as the "story one".

The reason I developed that reputation is because we talked a lot about brain science and fight-flight-freeze reactions. I got pretty comfortable about speaking on studies and stuff.

At the main office, people that I'm not that close to know me as a firefighter trainer. Our CEO is apparently really happy that this happened. 

Regardless of how we were received (and I think we did okay), I certainly learned a lot. And I can now say that I am not just a Community Facilitator and Crisis Intervention Trainer, I'm also a Workshop Developer. People pay for my thoughts, I don't just present the thoughts of others. Even if it's only happened once.

Clay and Glass Art Gallery

Kitchener has a place called the Clay and Glass Art Gallery. It's one the places to see if you're in town. I'd been to it once before when I was doing direct support work many years ago. Despite it being next to one of our walking routes, me and Lee-Anne had never gone together. We finally got around to it.

This is a recreation of one of the terracotta warriors from Emperor Qin's tomb in China. I'm not going to be able to give context for each of these.

This one was supposed to be ironic, as cornucopias represent abundance, but when one is filled by additional empty cornucopias, it evokes a sense of scarcity.

I think this was in the machine made section. Works done with newer technologies. I remember there were displays made with CNC machines, and there were 3D Printed works, among a few other techniques that I don't remember. 

That piece in the back was pretty mean on my mild trypophobia.

I liked these circle glass ones. I think this was in the gift shop, which was full of work by local artists. Easy to confuse with the actual museum itself.

The art gallery is right by Waterloo Park, so we went for a walk there after and I got another picture of a crane.

There's a little outdoor zoo there as well. Last year we missed their llamas, but this year they were back

And they had their donkeys and miniature horses as usual..

I'm pretty sure they had peacocks one year, but we didn't see them.

While I'm sharing pictures, I'll mention LORENTZ

That's a bad pic, but trust me it says LORENTZ. On the Iron Horse Trail, there's a train bridge that runs overhead at one point, which serves as a canvas for graffiti artists.  It gets painted over regularly, but it doesn't take long to get redecorated.

One reoccurring tag was LORENTZ. We became fans and I started a collection of his work (I'm assuming male because of the similarity with the name Lawrence).

These two are older pieces, as tragically he appears to have stopped producing almost immediately after I started keeping track of them. You can still find some of his tags in places that don't get painted over as frequently.

The good news is, I feel like he's continued working under a new tag, L8Z.

My reason for thinking this is because L8Z started appearing almost immediately after LORENTZ stopped showing up. They both start with "L" and and in "Z" and one of the first L8Z tags that I spotted had a spider web, while the last LORENTZ used one as well. Since I didn't make the connection at the time, I didn't get a pic of it. I'll be making sure to appreciate all future L8Z appearances.

Met the Landlord and Saw a Drone Show

We finally met our landlord in person. When we checked out the place for the first time, the guy that gave us the tour was the tenant moving out. We received our lease over email and made our legal arrangements remotely. We moved in without seeing our landlord or hearing his voice, although we did wind up talking to him on the phone a couple months in, because our laundry room flooded.

He's been pretty quick to accommodate, but arrangements had only ever been made over email or occasionally by phone. I'm not really complaining, he's been far less intrusive and much quicker to help than my previous landlord. I just haven't been in a living situation where I'd never seen the person I'm renting from face-to-face before.

But recently we've been having an issue with our shower. Probable mold due to worn down caulking, bloating the baseboards outside the bathroom and staining the trim at the base of the wall. Apparently our maintenance guy decided to make a career shift and there isn't an obvious person to replace him, so our landlord decided to come take a look at it himself.

He lives in Toronto. He brought his wife and one of his kids. We learned that he's only owned the place for about four years, so the guy that lived here before us was the first tenant and only stayed about a year. Our upstairs neighbour wound up running into us that day, and it appears that they had met our landlord before, so it's only us that had never met him.

They fixed a closet door that had come off it's frame, and they trimmed the branches off of a couple trees that were getting close to the house. 

The same day that we met our landlord, our local hospital was hosting something called Rally for Health. Bunch of food trucks, The Strumbellas were doing a concert, and there was a drone show.

I'd never been to a drone show before. It was pretty surreal

Each point of light is an individual drone hovering in the night sky. Apparently they were being operated from the football field of a nearby highschool

Still images don't quite do it justice. They were all in motion. This syringe was pumping itself.

This is for mental health. We were standing in front of a guy who was very enthusiastic. He seemed to be involved in setting it all up. So we overheard him mention what this symbol meant

The guy behind us shouted "WORLD'S LARGEST KIDNEYS! IT'S TRUE!" when this one came up. Don't know what that references. Maybe the world's largest kidneys came through Grand River Hospital? Maybe he's just talking about this drone show display?

This says "Care Never Stops" It's their motto. From this vantage point you can only see "Care Never Ops"

Engagement Photos

Me and Lee-Anne had engagement photos done. The entire album is pretty substantial, so we narrowed it down to 17 and I posted them on my Gallery blog. Here's a link: https://gryphonsgallery.blogspot.com/2023/06/engagement-photos.html 

This is not the kind of thing I ever thought about doing. I don't even think I knew what engagement photos were before I was told that we had to book them. Now that I see the finished product, I can recognize them as something I've seen other people post on Facebook. But I just thought of them as pretty couples pics, not considering the effort that had to have been put into making them.

Going through the process of having them done, I also realize that I've definitely seen people having them taken on the Iron Horse Trail and in Victoria Park. We had ours done in a little park near where Lee-Anne's parents live, one that we've walked in a lot. It's a cute spot, but the photos make it look like paradise.

As an aside, Brampton is really good for its network of parks. It also has a huge number of community centres, generally with really good resources. The city doesn't have the best reputation, but in these two categories, it's very strong.

I didn't know how to dress for the occasion. Lee-Anne told me to pick something that wasn't too dark, to avoid something pattern-heavy, and to avoid green because I'd blend into the foliage. I tried to bring a bunch of clothes so that we would have a selection, but she told me I was going overboard. Once we got to Brampton, she wished that I'd brought one of the shirts she'd told me not to take.

So we went shopping and I got four more shirts. Of them, she said I looked best in a dark green plaid. Seemed like it went against all previous guidelines.

We took these a little after we were flooded with wildfire smoke, so I was worried that we would be working through a haze. Thankfully it had mostly cleared up by that point. The photographer said that he had been taking pics in the smoke though. Wonder what that looked like.

The photographer scoped out the place a little before our session, as he'd never been there before. He found the bridge that's in some of the better pics. It's a tiny thing, maybe only eight feet long over a creek, but he used it for all it was worth. We weren't even aware of it when we requested the location.

One of the arguments that people use for the legitimacy of AI generated art, is that when photography was invented many traditional artists opposed the technology because it was able to capture the beauty of nature, which previously could only be done by artists that had committed their lives to the craft. Over time, our legal systems decided that photography could be done in a way that used enough human creativity to be considered art, and now this is relatively unquestioned. The idea is that the outrage, followed by eventual acceptance of AI art as a valid form of human expression is inevitable.

That argument mostly just turns me off of photography, but listening to the person that did our photos and his process, there definitely was an artistry to it.

He gave us a lot of prompts. He told us how to hold hands. For the walking pics he told us to bump into each other intentionally. He had us tickle each other. He told us to tell each other our favourite date stories etc.

This picture was surprisingly uncomfortable to take, but it looks really relaxed.

In this one, she's sitting on the railing of the little wooden bridge. I'm scared of heights, and even though it really was just a slight elevation over a creek, I had to work through some nerves. She was fine though.

This one isn't in my collection of 17. Lee-Anne told him about a bridge she used to walk on with her dad when she was young, and that it had recently been renovated. So we took a detour and checked it out. The photographer felt a creative inspiration. So, because of the improvisational nature of this shoot, I really like it conceptually. I don't feel like it quite bore out in execution.

For some of these shots, he had me lean against the safety rail. Terrifying.

Here's one where she looks like she's just falling into my arms, but this actually took some muscle on my behalf. Not the way I would choose to lift her normally either. Good for visuals but not efficient on a biomechanical level.

And then I just really like this one.

Canadian Wildfires 2023

 There were a few things I wanted to blog about, but I guess I've got to talk about the wildfires.

Due to the dry weather this year, forests in Nova Scotia and Quebec have come up in flames. The fires have spread rapidly and gotten out of control. The resulting smoke has wafted into many nearby cities. In Kitchener, a haze formed over the sky and there's been a kind of campfire smell. 

Our family Whatsapp chat has been popping, with everyone exchanging notes on how bad the smoke has been in their respective areas. I have family in Toronto and New York where the air quality is said to be really bad. My New York connections have said that it is indeed as bad as the press makes out, whereas the people from Toronto say they've avoided the worst of it. I've got people in Guelph, Brampton, and Northern Ontario also saying that they've been effected.

Wildfires are not new to Canada, and indeed we had some pretty nasty ones in recent years, but this is the first time that I've experienced such a sensory impact to city living. I'm not being chased out of the city or choked out by smoke, but the effect is still unignorable.

It's interesting to see people re-adapt some of the COVID measures without being told to. A lot of people are wearing masks again to filter the air, and some people are staying home to avoid exposure. I don't think these things would have been instincts pre-pandemic. I guess this is how we respond to natural disasters now.

In 2020, Australia dealt with some really destructive fires, and in the following years the Southern US had the same issue. I guess it's our turn.

I used to think that climate change would turn Canada into a tropical paradise before it burned us up, since so many places are warmer than we are and they're able to sustain life. It would obviously be bad globally, and people would migrate away from the more impacted areas creating issues of population density. Canada would eventually suffer the same as everywhere else, but I thought it would take us a while to get there.

I suppose the difference is that those warmer places had a much longer time for their environments to adapt to that climate, whereas the ecosystem here is equipped for colder temperatures and it can't keep up with the speed at which we're warming.

Despite having a low population compared to our size, Canada hasn't done great in terms of environmentalism. I've heard that we're heating up twice as fast as the global average, and that we were the worst in terms of emissions among the G7. This is partly due to the fact that we're such a vast and sprawling country, so things need to be travelled over longer distances, and we're also a major oil producing nation.

I'm getting some mortal pangs, similar to the feelings of early COVID. In a way this is even worse, since the pandemic was a threat to humanity, whereas this is a threat to all life on Earth. 

We live on a planet that is home to the only carbon-based life in the Universe that we know of. Our proximity to the sun and our abundance of water is nothing short of miraculous. We consider ourselves the most sophisticated animals for our self-awareness, compassion, and innovation, but while almost every lifeform contributes to the ecosystem, humans are the only species that inhibit it. If we cause the end of the miracle that sustains all life as we know it, think what losers we'd be.