Yesterday I downloaded the updated archive of this blog from Google. I do this every year or so as a back-up for obvious reasons. As a hedge against the worst case scenario. As the years have accumulated behind me and time continues to march forward, these back-ups have started to gain not only in size but in importance. This project has become rather massive. In a few short years I will be staring down the 20th anniversary of the first words written in these pages. And lately, the scope of that accomplishment has been landing with increased force.
1.55 million words. 3,286 posts and counting. If the entirety of this blog were printed in book form, that book would be 6,000 standard format pages long. Just to put that into perspective. Roughly 35-40 average length non-fiction books. This doesn't take into account the graphical side, the blog images, the logos, comics, memes, posters, videos, drawings, banners, and various other forms of graphical expression contained within these pages. If someone wanted to start at the beginning and read the entire project, it would take about 200 hours. Give or take. About a month if you read for 8hrs a day.
It would be easy to simply consider this in light of Eve Online. And certainly the entire project from beginning to end has been focused on this massively multiplayer game of ours. But I'm coming to understand that thinking of it in those terms is missing the larger picture. As an autobiographical work of unprecedented scope, a public conversation with the world, and the evolution - the journey - of the author behind those words. In that light the archive becomes something much more than a series of posts about a video game.
Part of what set me down this path has been the recent unfortunate trend of people casually throwing around the pejorative "this is AI" or "AI slop" when talking about a piece of work I've created, be it written or visual. And, of course, this is far more widespread than myself, this trend is everywhere now. But it did open the box of my mind to examine in more detail the sheer scope of this specific project and what it means, in a much larger sense. As a piece of work. An expression. A massive creative project that will soon, Bob willing, encompass two decades of my life.
As if, having written 1.5 million words before the advent of ChatGPT, I would now suddenly need it to continue. Or having created 40 years worth of professional imagery, I would suddenly need AI to create visual artistry. The idea itself is abhorrent. And disrespectful to the collected works of an entire life spent in pursuit of creative expression. And yet, as a curious mind, I've also been completely open and honest about my forays into exploring these new tools. As is my nature.
I did the same thing with Kai Krause's Power Tools back when Photoshop didn't even have layers. Or when I purchased the first Media100 digital editing suite east of the Mississippi river. I could go on and on with examples of my creative curiosity over the decades. There are a tremendous amount of examples. And AI is no different. I am curious. I am cautious. And I, like most thinking and intellectually considered humans - find myself extremely concerned.
All of which is a roundabout way of bringing this conversation back to the original point. As a collected work of massive proportions Eveoganda itself is rather daunting to consider. Even for its author. An unintended masterpiece of modern social expression. And an experiment that is ongoing. As we've seen from this post.
What does it all mean? I think I'm still exploring that answer.
One post at a time.
Comments