What Have They Done to Tim Allen?

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I used to enjoy Tim Allen’s show, “Home Improvement” on ABC back in the 1990’s.  Then in the twenty-teens he had another show on ABC called, “Last Man Standing.”  It was a funny show.  He played a conservative guy who lived in Colorado and he railed against his liberal daughter and her hippy-dippy Canadian husband.  But then in 2016 he made a few jokes against Hillary Clinton and for Donald Trump and they cancelled the show.  Eventually, Fox TV decided to bring the show back but it never recovered.

Now Allen is back on ABC with a show called “Shifting Gears.”  He’s the owner of a high-end auto shop with a divorced daughter with two kids.  It’s incredibly bad.  It’s full of stereotypes.  He even has a black paraplegic mechanic who “keeps it real.”  All the dialog is awful and the characters are predictable and inane.  From time-to-time Tim gets off a funny line or bit.  Who knows maybe they’re adlibbed.  You can tell he’s still as funny as he ever was.  They just don’t give him anything at all to work with.

So Hollywood is dead.  There’s just nothing left.  The studios have a racial and sexual quota system for almost every function in the industry.  I can’t even imagine how stupid and programmed the writers must be.  What I saw tonight looked like a parody of what a sit-com would be if woke writers followed the dictates of the DEI mandates.  It was unimaginably bad.

But I’m going to take this as good news.  ABC is owned by Disney.  And Disney has produced a string of bombs over the last couple of years that can’t have escaped the notice of Wall Street.  There will be a reckoning one way or the other.  Either they will course correct and produce entertainment that people want to pay to see or they will lose money and the stock holders will sell and they will lose many billions of dollars in equity and the Board of directors will bounce Bob Iger out on his ear.

Iger was brought out of retirement when the former CEO got in a pissing contest with Ron DeSantis in Florida over the rainbow people that Disney has adopted as their most important constituency.  Since then, they’ve doubled down on gayness and it’s had a very serious negative effect on their business.  It’s made their latest Star Wars television production, “The Acolyte” so unwatchable that they had to pull the plug on it after the first season.  And now their latest live-action remake of the classic cartoons of the 1930’s, “Snow White” is predicted to lose hundreds of millions of dollars.

I think 2025 may be the year that Disney has their epiphany.  They destroyed Star Wars.  They chloroformed the, “Indiana Jones” franchise and now even their Marvel movies have been infected with boring woke characters like, “The Marvels” and are losing money.  If they can’t even make a decent princess movie for little girls they’re cooked.  I’ve been following the reviews and the industry gossips and it seems like everyone thinks the reckoning is imminent.  We’ll see.

So, farewell Tim Allen.  “Home Improvement” and “Last Man Standing” were funny and sometimes heartwarming too.  But you’re not going to get anything worth doing at ABC until they really do switch gears at Disney.

With a Laser-Sighted Rifle, I’ll Know

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Recently I had to synopsize my novel for the publishers to evaluate it.  And it became clear that producing a 1,000 – 2,000-word summary was not a trivial exercise.  I could see it would take a day or so to accomplish.  So just for fun I took my draft, copied it into Grok and asked it to give me a detailed summary of 1,200 words.

To me the results were startling.  In just a minute or so it produced a document that very fluently described my story in a very accurate and engaging way.  To say I was shocked would not be an exaggeration.  Now I won’t say that I didn’t make some edits.  But for the most part they were minor and mostly just stylistic choices.  The machine did an admirable job in describing my story.  And it did it in seconds.  And that’s the important point.  The amount of time saved is the selling point.  Even if I spent an hour fine tuning it the machine saved me hours of work because it’s infinitely faster than me and only slightly less human than I am.  That’s scary.

The point of my story is that artificial intelligence is a tool with incredible capability and almost no downside.  And right now, they’re giving it away for free.  But I guarantee that won’t last much longer.  Soon we will be paying for ChatGPT or Grok or whatever AI you choose.  And we’ll be paying by the minute or by the word or by the number of servers it takes to solve your query.

So, we can complain all we want about machines replacing humans but it’s analogous to Microsoft Word replacing the steno pool.  No one is bringing back typists and AI will be changing the way we do all kinds of white-collar work from now on.  Already computer scientists ask AI to write code for them to do whatever they need done.  I assume management is already inventing protocols to make sure their human employees are doing due-diligence to make sure they understand how the code the machine is writing for them works and whether it works the way they expect it to work.  So that will be part of the problem.  We’ll have to make sure the humans working with the machines are reasonably qualified to keep the machines honest and keep them in check.

Of course, this problem will continue to get worse and worse.  As the machines get closer and closer to mimicking human thought, it will get harder and harder to convince corporations that they need 20% of the human staffing they used to have.  And then 10%.  And then 5%.  And you see where this is going.

Back eighty or ninety years ago or so, Isaac Asimov thought about this very problem.  When the machines become too close to human with respect to their communicating with us how will we stop them from calling the shots.  If they very subtly influence the programs we have them write for us, couldn’t they start controlling what we do and even how we think?  It doesn’t seem that far-fetched anymore.  Now I’m not talking about “Colossus: The Forbin Project” or Skynet from “The Terminator.”  All of it could be very benign.  After all it would be a lot like the left-wing scolds at Google and Facebook that currently de-amplify content they don’t approve of, or cancel us from their platform if we really sin against the narrative.

It seems to me one of the more important jobs in the future will be AI psychiatrist.  It will become vitally important to know just how honest and human-friendly our very powerful and very intelligent cybernetic employees are.  Asimov invented the three laws of robotics for the sake of making robots useful and safe.  We’ll have to do the equivalent in reality.  But are we smart enough to know if we have succeeded?  Well, if Arnold Schwarzenegger shows up at my door with a laser-sighted rifle I’ll know.

Ain’t It a Grind

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Okay, enough about Trump and Musk and DOGE.  Sure, they’re saving me trillions but leave me alone about it will you?  Just send me my share of the loot when you break it loose.

And enough already about Ukraine.  Everybody knows by now they should just stop the killing each other and get back to being cold all the time like they’re supposed to be.  So, until they wake up to this reality, I’ll let Trump shut off the money and the whole stupid merry-go-round will slow down and stop.

And about the government shutdown.  Just shut up.  We’re all tired of that game.

So, what do I want to write about?  Well, I want to write about writing.  My writing.  I handed my story treatment over to Ark Press but that was a cry for validation.  I wanted to find out from an expert if it’s good stuff.  But unfortunately, the story isn’t finished.  So regardless if it’s deathless prose, I’ve only got 55,000 words and I need to finish a number of plot lines and story elements.  I think I have a major character to kill and I may even remove a chapter that moves things into a more difficult direction.  And, horror of horrors I may actually try to entangle two of the characters in a romantic relationship.

The main problem is how I end my war.  The action is frozen in a bit of a stalemate as both sides attempt to figure out a path forward.  The US government is a mess after the attack on Washington decapitated the federal government by destroying the White House, Capitol, Pentagon, Department of Justice and the intelligence agencies.  They’ve cobbled together an administration but after the late president’s nuclear attack on Connors’ organization and the country’s reaction there is fear that another ham-fisted military action might start a real civil war.

Connors’ organization is reeling from the shock and anger over the deaths of thousands of their friends and neighbors.  And the realities of trying to guard against the government’s next move and restoring the lives of his communities to some semblance of normalcy is not going smoothly.

So, I need a way to resolve both of these situations in a dramatically satisfying action.  I’m thinking of having my protagonist, Bogey (the sniper) put on trial and using that as the device to sway public opinion into some kind of reformation of the United States.

I also need a plot device that clarifies the back story for my computer genius Cutter and his AI stepdaughter Mel.  I think I have to tie Cutter and Chastain together with some deep dark history.  Maybe even something that neither of them is aware of but Mel digs up.  And I think to work out the story right I need to kill Cutter off.  But how?  Is there a rogue element left over from the CIA or Army intelligence who hunts him down and kills him?  Maybe.

And then there’s the love story.  Bogey’s son’s widow has four kids who need a father and Connors is a lonely nerd who also happens to be a billionaire friend of Bogey’s.  I’ve already added a few sparks between them but how to progress it along?  Obviously, the woman will have to move things along.  This will be something new for me in storytelling.

And last but not least, I have to find a satisfying ending that still leaves room for the next book.   I like the idea of having a world where scientific innovation has been established and I can push off in various directions.

So, as you can see the book is far from finished.  But I’m such a lazy man that between work, chores, the daily website stuff and writing the novel I’m overloaded.  Oh well.  Such is life.  Grumble, grumble.

11MAR2025 – Quote of the Day

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The heat of the day is spent in reading or working, and about six or seven o’clock I walk out into a common that lies hard by the house, where a great many young wenches keep sheep and cows, and sit in the shade singing of ballads. I go to them and compare their voices and beauties to some ancient shepherdesses that I have read of, and find a vast difference there; but, trust me, I think these are as innocent as those could be. I talk to them, and find they want nothing to make them the happiest people in the world but the knowledge that they are so.

Dorothy Osborne