Out Chasing Crows

Beryl. No crows.

 I'm not really following along with Blaugust as closely as usual this year. I may or may not get into the reasons for that when we hit Lessons Learned week at the end of the month. I would like to chip in on this week's topic, Creator Appreciation Week, though.

Before it got rolled into Blaugust, it used to be a separate event known as Developer Appreciation Week, often abbreviated to DAW. I haven't noticed anyone calling the new version CAW, which is a shame. I love crows.

Mrs Bhagpuss loves crows even more than I do. She has an imitation stuffed crow somewhere in the house and she's taken to feeding the large flocks of the big, black birds that hang around on the recreation field where we often take Beryl for a run. 

While Beryl was in her puppyhood she was a very picky eater, a phase that's left us with a cupboard full of experiments that didn't meet her strict culinary standards. Since most of them were either baked or dried foods, they've just been sitting there, inert and safely out of sight, waiting for their expiry dates to elapse or for one of us to think of something better to do with them. 

We've already donated the unopened packs to the local dog food bank but that still leaves plenty of bags and tubs and packs that were opened and presented to Beryl for the approval she never gave. No charity accepts opened packs of food for very good reason so they'll either have to go into the recycling or we'll have to find someone - or something - willing to eat them.

Crows are more than willing. Crows will eat anything. They're like the goats of the air, crows are. 

Flux's Beryl. With crows.

Jackdaws, oddly, are far more fussy. We've tried giving several types of dog treats to the gangs of jackdaws that swagger around the playing fields but they aren't remotely interested. The much larger corvids that keep clear of the jackdaw packs - carrion crows, I think they must be - have no such misgivings. They can't get their beaks on the stuff fast enough.

They recognize us now and come over to see what we might have for them. They come within about fifteen or twenty feet of us, hopping about, daring each other to come closer. We throw the food towards them and the braver ones crab-walk up and grab it or flurry into the air and drop on it from above.

Beryl chases them about, usually at a gentle trot. She likes to make them fly up and away although since none of the crows take her at all seriously as a threat, just an annoyance, they merely flutter a few yards and come down again. It works very nicely as a way of entertaining her and giving her some exercise while also getting rid of some of our excess, unwanted dog supplies and supplementing the food supply of the local wildlife all at once.

It's at this point that, if I was a genuine Content Creator, I'd either embed a video I'd taken or direct you to my YouTube channel so you could watch it there. No creator worth the name would miss either the opportunity to record the events I've just described nor to publicize themselves off the back of it. 

Mrs Bhagpuss and I, unfortunately, haven't even thought to take a single photograph of Beryl and the Crows (Decent name for a band, that...) let alone shoot any video. That's why I've had to resort to describing the whole thing in long-form prose, which obviously no-one is ever going to read.

It's also why blogging is dead as people keep saying. I mean, who reads nowadays? 

Luckily, there are people with a lot more creativity about them than me and that's what we're here to celebrate this week. I'm going to express my appreciation for a couple of creators whose work on YouTube I very much enjoy and also sometimes find useful.

The first is Sitting With Dogs, the YouTube channel of Rocky Kanaka, a man who sits with dogs.

Seriously, that's what he does. And millions of people watch him doing it. 

Mrs Bhagpuss is one of them and now I am too. How I started was I'd come into the room and there'd be this guy, talking in a pleasant, resonant voice and sitting on the floor next to him would be a dog. Sometimes it would be a big dog. Sometimes it would be a small dog. Sometimes the dog would be still, sometimes it would be jumping about. 

Whatever the dog, whatever the situation, Rocky would be talking. His channel could just as easily be called Talking At Dogs. Not really to them, most of the time, at least not until he gets to the affirmations. He talks to the camera, to himself, to the shelter staff, to the air... 

Most of his videos last an hour or more and he literally never stops talking for a second. That's partly because he's a consummately professional performer but also because it's his method. Dogs find the constant stream of chatter reassuring. That's the theory.

It seems to work because the dogs almost always come around. And in the meantime we learn something about their history and their possible future. It's educational as well as socially constructive.

Rocky works with animal shelters to raise awareness of the problems they face and to assist in the never-ending process of re-homing abandoned animals, specifically dogs, although he likes cats too and some feline or other occasionally makes a guest appearance. He fund-raises and he also has his own business producing dog supplies of various kinds but for our purposes during CAW he's an entertainer.

I can say that with confidence because he entertains me and I had absolutely no intention of watching him at all. I just happened to walk into in the room one day, when he was talking, and somehow I was still there half an hour later because Rocky is a natural story-teller. He's adept at setting up a scenario that almost immediately creates a desire for resolution. I find it very hard to stop watching and listening until Rocky gives me closure and he's excellent at not letting it come too quickly.

Of course, it helps that he has a canine supporting cast but it has to be said that not every dog he sits with is cute or cuddly or telegenic. A lot of them are the dogs you'd walk straight past if you were at the shelter, looking to adopt. 

Nearly all of them have issues, some behavioral, mostly involving fear, lack of trust in humans or poor mental health, some more physical, like blindness or extreme old age. Rocky sits with them all, sometimes facing them, sometimes with his back to them, always talking, occasionally singing. He flicks treats that he makes himself in their general direction, working towards having them take the treats from his hand and eventually, if all goes well, to the inevitable "scoop", when he gets the dog, however large, onto his lap.

Obviously, this does not always go as well as he'd hope, but in all the videos I've seen the dogs do eventually come around. I can't say if there are times when they don't that just don't make it onto the channel of course, but I like to think his success rate is pretty high. It should be. He's doing everything right.

I'd recommend the channel to anyone who likes animals, not just dog people. It's entertaining, informative and despite the very concerning backdrop and inevitable emotional triggering, Rocky's relentless optimism is always uplifting. If we lived anywhere near wherever it is that he makes his videos I'm pretty sure we'd have more than one dog by now. As it is, if and when we ever do get another, we'll be getting a rescue. That'll be in big part thanks to Rocky.

My second Appreciation couldn't be much more different and yet in some ways it's really just the same. Theoretically Media is another YouTube channel, this time focused on the entirely inanimate world of AI. 

It's all the work of one man, Tim, who I am just now realizing doesn't appear to have a second name. He does have a Patreon, which has 179 members at time of writing. I am not one of them because I'm a mean bastard, like the rest of his hundred thousand YouTube subscribers, I guess. It's amazing anyone makes a living doing this stuff, isn't it? I'm sure being thanked for your service on a no-name blog you'll never read makes up for it, though.

Tim is like Rocky for several reasons: he's a fit-looking, fairly young, white male with a confident, easy-to-hear voice and a light, somewhat generic American accent, who never, ever stops talking. He doesn't say "You're a good girl" in an excessively imitable tone the way Rocky does so maybe Tim could work on a catch-phrase or two but otherwise they could be creative cousins.

What Tim does is keep me up to date on the latest developments in what he and we are calling AI, particularly in the field of the arts. Or "Media" as he has it. He covers image generators, video generators and audio generators, mostly, and it saves me a whole heck of a lot of reading to have him in the background while I'm playing a game.

That said, I mostly sit and watch the channel. His videos are commendably short and to the point. Most of them run around ten minutes or so and he handily includes content breakdowns and links so you can skip to the part that interests you if you want.

I mostly don't because I like to listen to him talk. I like the sound of his voice and he has a dry sense of humor that amuses me, once in a while. Mostly, though, I follow his channel because he tells me things I want to know.

A while ago I might have said "things I need to know" but the whole AI scene has moved on since then. What was quirky and weird and cultish a couple of years ago and cutting-edge and exciting this time last year is now just more of the same, a background drone we're all having to learn to ignore. I got an email from Google last night, telling me all about how "Gemini is becoming a truly helpful personal AI assistant" and how it's going to be unavoidable in Google products and services from now on and instead of getting all excited I just found myself thinking "Well, that's not going to end well..."

Tim's channel is great both for keeping me informed of all the latest developments and keeping it all in perspective. Like Rocky, Tim is always optimistic, always enthusiastic but also always pragmatic. He's seen enough of this stuff not to be swept away by the makers' claims and yet he retains enough faith in the future to be able to imagine the use to which artists and writers and musicians will be able to put all this new technology, when it truly is able to do all the things people imagine it can do already.

Most importantly, watching Tim test and demonstrate the capabilities of the services and apps and models he highlights has heavily reduced my own desire to experiment with them myself. I've come to realize, in some part from watching his channel, that I'm wasting my time messing about with AI. 

When I started, I was hoping for something that would let me press a couple of buttons and type a sentence or two for a complete novel or album or movie to be delivered to my hard drive. In minutes, if not in seconds. I'm fairly convinced that the day will come. As it was in Carole and Tuesday, much popular entertainment, maybe most of it, will be created by AI one day.  I just no longer imagine I'll live to see it.

Whether that makes me lucky or unlucky I'll leave you to decide. In the meanwhile, I'll just send Rocky and Tim and all the others like them my thanks. So long as they keep doing the work, all I have to do is sit here and watch. 

I mean, that's the dream, after all. Isn't it?

Notes on the AI used in this post.

Since I chose a video that goes on about Flux, I thought I ought to use it for the illustration. I had five free credits for Pro services on NightCafe and I blew one of them on Flux and the other on Google's newish Imagen 3.0. The prompt was "Black and white Poochon dog chasing crows on a flat, green field." All settings were at whatever the NightCafe defaults are for the two services.

Other than that it's clearly a border collie or collie cross in the picture, the Flux image follows the prompt exactly. I give it a pass on the breed issues because no image generator ever really recognizes "Poochon" as a specific type of dog. I think that's fair enough since it's not an actual breed, just a portmanteau for Poodle-Bichon Frise, which isn't a very well-known hybrid. I get better results if I just say "small fluffy black and white dog".

The image I got from Google Imagen, however, was completely unusable. The dog is chasing crows but not only is the dog not a poochon, it isn't black and white and it barely looks like a real dog. It looks like a bear-cub made out of marshmallows. The field being covered in thick fog really doesn't help, either... I've included it for the sake of curiosity and because it ties in rather well with my feelings on the prospects for Google's love affair with AI, as mentioned in passing in the post itself.