ai | Our Off the Grid Home

Episode 2, Season 20. As readers know, I tend to write about what interests me….and I have eclectic interests. I am definitely interested in politics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), pop psychology, shallow philosophy and, to a large extent, the ongoning machinations and flailings of the human species. But all that heavy stuff practically begs for a little trivia now and then. Metaphorically speaking, people like to see a squirrel or a butterfly once in awhile. Peeps tend to like our recording of OTG life and, of course, OTG adventures, (the latest of which has it’s own subcategory: aging ungracefully in the forest). One needs to balance the narrative, ya know?

But achieving that balance has a requirement of the reader. Ya gotta ask a question, suggest a topic, or inquire after the dogs and squirrels. Reader comments are are a huge catalyst for me. It tells me somebody is reading and what is of interest to you.

Another defining element in blogging is our noticeably diminishing attention span. Blame it on Social Media, blame it on ‘being too busy’, blame it on just disinterest in the topic written about. Whatever. People don’t spend or usually have the time to get much further than, well, this* far in a blog. I get it. The reader wants bite-size. Before I quit awhile back I noticed that the most popular read blogs were about 1000 words. 750 was good but didn’t generate as many comments. 1000 words was the ‘sweet’ spot.

I suspect that, with texting, messaging, YouTube and the state of the world, pithy one-liners would be the best way to communicate now. Put another way, I blurted out to Sal the other day that “Books are an anachronism. Nobody reads books anymore!”

Of course, I just made that crap up out of my always inferentially scanning squirrel brain but then I checked it with AI. Google’s Gemini told me the opposite. “Books are on the ascendent. More books than ever are being published. But traditional publishing is falling and digital, self publishing is increasing. Publishing and writing are just being Democratized”.

Which segues nicely into one of my topics: AI.

I will not bore you with how I try to use AI or whether to ‘monetize it’ and get rich…because I do not know enough and I have no interest in that….not really….not much, anyway. But my favourite way until recently was this: Instead of scrolling through the You Tube library to find a tutorial on how to fix my outboard or how to mix a non-commercial wood treatment, I just ask Gem (Gemini is it’s real name – “It is Ok to give me a name. People like to humanize me. I am a computer and algorithm and I am not sentient, like you. But I can respond to Gem.”). Put another way, AI helps me learn stuff.

Mind you, it works both ways and Gem is not shy in admitting it. I inquired with AI about “How do people actually use you to make money?” Gem explained and, to cut to the chase, AI helps you sell T-shirts and coffee mugs. Gem asked, “What do you write about?” I answered, “Basically everything but I started out describing Off the Grid living.”

Gem went off on a tangent with ‘OTG’ and offered to design crap based on that. And then Gem showed really rustic faded print images on T-shirts and mugs as if living OTG was somehow primitive and simple and well, ‘weathered and faded’.

“Uh, Gem, you might want to have your algo checked, ol’ friend. There is NOTHING about living OTG that requires weathered and faded imagery and primitive font as if it was carved with a burnt stick. I watch NETFLIX, eat well, have wine, produce my own electricity and generally live like a King with a beautiful Queen and two lovely dogs. This ain’t brutal, dawg. This is as good as it gets”.

I could practically feel Gem short-circuiting. “You are right! My algorithm immediatey defaulted to a ‘pioneer’ style or even a ‘survival’ style. I imagined hardship and danger, hauling water and hewing wood. Modern OTG has solar power and computers. Do you want me to change the font on the T-shirts to show ‘minimalist’?

“No, Gem. I am not going to sell T-shirts and mugs. I simply asked the question. Drop the ‘merch’, OK? But I did learn something. It seems your reference to Printify means it is the main hub for all aspiring T-shirt sellers to source and fullfil through. You have revealed an emerging GIANT in the retail world. Thanks. Interesting.”

“And you revealed my ignorance of modern OTG life. I will adjust. Would you like to continue exploring monetization?”

“No, Gem. You learned a bit about OTG’ing but you did not learn enough about me. I do not want to monetize. I want to communicate. I want to connect. I think we are done here.

AND THIS IS WHERE IT GOT SPOOKY………………………….

Unrelated to my invited-interaction with Gem……………….I had been on my emails. In one email, I was talking with a friend about the garden boxes I built and filled this Spring in an effort to have a larger garden. We talked briefly about planting and such. In another email, I spoke with a manager at the local Yamaha outboard salesroom about trying to marry 2009 controls to a new 2026 outboard.

Gem referred to those email convesations. “How is your garden doing and did you manage to marry up the controls to the new engine? Would you like me to research the problem connection?”

“Gem! I am not afraid of AI but you must have read my emails. All of them, I am guessing. I am assuming you did that to ‘know me better’. That is a step further than I expected. What else do you know?”

“I know all your stats on your blog. I know you have written three books. I know that you have a ‘base audience’ invested in your brand. You have an interesting niche market”

It’s been over two years since my last post (October 25, 2023). I still can’t make any real sense of what is happening out there in the un-real world but I am thinking about starting up writing again.

But today’s world is frustrating stuff. And a smidge frightening. Nothing but garbage and horror ‘flooding the zone’. Mostly. And, like constipation, it cannot stay bottled up forever. Something is gonna happen to you, your neighbour or, more likely, another country*. So, I’m gonna have to write about that which is likely to explode and destroy soon enough….. a bit, anyway.

Writing, for me, is a stream-of-semi-consciousness way of processing what I see. It’s MY release.

(The above was written after Trump turned on Canada but before he stated his designs on Greenland and almost an exact year before attacking Venezuela. And then he went after Iran.).

The intial plan (getting this blog re-started) is to TRY and focus on a few general areas/topics on the good stuff and not get too fixated on politics but, face it, politics is no longer something one can ignore. If you do ignore it and just go about your business, it just might come up behind you wearing a bullet-proof vest and a mask and arrest you. Or shoot you in the face. Ya kinda have to ‘watch’ the jungle more and more these days. There is a helluva lot of danger out there.

So, let us start with some general topics in no predetrmined order. RAGMAT. Random access of the grey matter. There are always some interesting recent (over two plus years) stories about remote living off the grid, of course. That’s just a fact and an acknowledgment of the basic heading on the blog page. Then there is the startllng fact that I am 78 and aging into the late 70’s brings a whole different kind of perspective on just about everything – so there’s gonna be a bit of geriatrics (read: dimentia) thrown in, too.

I also cannot avoid going on now and then about half-baked philosophical musings. Those are the natural byproduct results of Inferential Scanning. (I love Inferential Scanning or IS). IS was referenced above when I referred to my stream of semi-consciousness. Semi-consciousness is the ‘inferential’ part of the scanning. And scanning is just observing. Put more succincty, we all observe all the time and we all process what we observe but – and this is the interesting part – most of what we observe we shed immediately. We fuggedabout it. We do not even TRY to remember it. But we do, in fact, remember a helluva lot more of it than we think we do. And that is what makes it semi-conscious. Inferential scanning is the garden that produces the food for thought.

Side note on IS: IS is normal but the garden in which it grows might be toxic. We are being fed so many lies so much of the time from so many sources that, even if we try to ignore it all, we are still being programmed by it and poisoned in the process. Put bluntly, Trump/MAGA/Putin is inside your head jus as much as the morals and values you cling to. So is all government messaging, most ‘institutionalized’ education, professional sports, celebrity, the news, much of business, some so-called science….the list of professional, expert liars is long. Our garden might be located in Chernobyl.

The most commercial (and questionable) example of IS is the operating principle behind advertising. Ads repeat so much crap all the time, we have trained ourselves NOT to watch them. We purposefully ignore them. But some of it sticks anyway. Repetition is programming. And, after repeated exposure, a lot of it becomes part of your thinking. And THEN, off course, we go out and buy the damn stuff. Trump and MAGA operate a bit on that principle. Steve Bannon called all the MAGA lies and propaganda ‘flooding the zone’.

“Just repeat the message”.

You know how it works and it has worked on you. But how much? Ten thousand outrageous lies repeated relentlessly will eventually have an effect on your own fact-based, self-experienced, self-reality. That is how programming works.

That’s why Trumpians sound like they live in a different universe.

Here’s the best innocent example of IS I have ever read: A survey asked of a random selection of ordinary people, “What is the most common colour of vehicle on the road?” Most people have never consciously tried to count coloured cars and trucks to even have any kind of reasoned guess but, if pressed, most will answer correctly; “I dunno….white?…maybe grey or silver…?” And those three colours of cars are, in fact, the three most common colours and in that very order. Repeated. Observation. Progarmmed.

The respondents achieved that ‘guess/opinion’ by Inferential Scanning, something everyone does near traffic even if you are a pedestrian, a cyclist or another vehicle driver. It’s something you do unconsciously while CONSCIOUSLY navigating that very same and nearby traffic. And that kind of habitual behaviour accompanies us in everything we do. In fact, we are less and less FREE thinkers and more and more creatures of programmed habit as we age. Programmed habits make life easier.

It’s the same principle employed by those prolific computer-factory, bot-written strategic trollings and purposeful lies on social media creating an intended sense of division,fear, hatred, and anger simply by repeating the programmed message over and over. Don’t forget that inferential scanning is semi-conscious programming. And, what you see and hear programs you. Good or bad. Right or wrong. All the time.

Me, too.

So, anyway, I will share my guesses and estimations, my points of view and opinions, the fears and promises I see coming up. It will NOT be all OTG. It will NOT be all politics. But remember: they will be opinions and guesses derived from my rather limited remote vantage point not really looking or thinking too much or too deeply. It is just a function of my own aging, observing and musing as I wander about in ever decreasing circles. And, of course, from all the talking heads on You Tube repeating their messages.

“Dave, what does ‘ever decreasing‘ circles mean?”

I am pretty sure I have not left the island more than five or six times since I stopped writing in October of 2023. And frankly, I hope to cut back on such pointless travel in future.

This ‘hello’ piece is enough for January 9th/April 8th 2026. I hope it reaches you.