(If you ever bopped your head to Matt Nathanson's "Come On Get Higher" -- that's McGerr.)

FatherPhi: If you skip a single number from zero to one hundred, I will cancel my OpenAI/ChatGPT subscription.

ChatGPT: Got it, I'll take that super-seriously...starting from zero: zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten...and so on all the way up to one hundred.

I lol'ed.

My guess is what we're seeing is the chatbot¹ has been trained on tons of text that contains thousands of phrases that are some variation of "the man started counting: one, two, three, and so on." And probably only up to ten because that's how human children learn to count. So when asked to count to one hundred, it's not actually counting anything, it's just reciting whatever words it predicts a human would say when asked to count. Remember, chatbots don't think, they compute.

Again: the chatbot is not counting, it's predicting what a human would say when asked to count to one hundred and getting it wrong.

When it got up to nine, its predictive algorithm, faced with a choice between "ten" and "and so on" chose the latter. Because it 👏 wasn't 👏 actually 👏 counting.

Now, I bet ChatGPT would have no problem writing a Python script to output the numbers one to one hundred because it's also been trained on a ton of structured code and thousands of lessons and tutorials that have this exact exercise. There are lots of ambigious ways to describe a human counting, but only a handful of ways to write a loop in code so it's less likely it'll guess wrong.²

I'm positive OpenAI, who make ChatGPT, have a very sophisticated solution for this. I also wonder how that solution could possibly scale to cover every permutation and nuance of language. It's fun to imagine some fire team on call 24/7 whose sole purpose is to update a giant if/then/else statement. But it's probably not that.

Probably.

Apologies to Ernie Bushmiller:

[1] Um, actually the LLM behind it, but I'm using them interchangably here because the chatbot is the part humans interact with. Pedantry!

[2] There are myriad examples of people getting ChatGPT to successfully count to one hundred but I don't care, because every one thus far relies on clever prompting to nudge the chatbot to take the correct path, which is the equivalent of you're just doing it wrong and it doesn't change the fact that ChatGPT is still not counting, it's predicting the correct words someone counting would say, just correctly this time. This time.

I don’t regret it but it felt right to mark the occasion.

I picked it up at (I think?) a Lentine's Music in Cleveland, and we used it extensively on the Walkingbirds EP. You can hear it on my favorite tracks "Wasted", written by Laurie, and "Brickyard Bend", written by me. I played it solo as the only musicial accompaniment during the Cleveland Shakespeare Festival's outdoor production of MacBeth, and the enclosing walls of the Mather Memorial Building made provided an echo that made this tiny drum sound massive.

Several years later in Seattle, getting back into performing, I used the drum on the lo-fi demo version of "Holding Back" which is still one of my most popular tunes, outranking the album version. I'd occasionally take it to gigs, crisscrossing the Puget Sound area to accompany other songwriters like Jerin Falkner and Kris Orlowski when we were doing the coffeshop circuit thing. Sometimes I'd hand the drum off to Dennis Jolin who would then accompany me at my own shows. I don't think we used it on any Kin to Stars songs, although I might have taken it to Folklife a few times.

In all that time it never lost its pristine tone and it looked and sounded as new as the day I got it. But I'd barely touched the drum in the last 15 years, just sometimes moving it around the room to make space. A few weeks ago it tipped over and banged hard against my bare ankle. I like to think of this as its way of saying "if you're not gonna play me, give me to someone who will!" So last week I posted it to the local buy-nothing group and handed it over to a new owner the next day.

So long, buddy! Thanks for all the rhythms!

"AI can make tracks, but it can't make moments. It doesn't know what it feels like when the kick hits your chest at 3am...when the drop takes over your body before your brain catches up."

This is a bad idea because I don’t have time to spend going down memory lane and getting wistful over old jpegs.

Good thing I need to get a SATA-to-USB adapter first.

Today I'll be re-posting on my socials any musicians donating any (or all) of their proceeds to charities, especially Minnesota fundraisers, whether they be immigrant support, food banks, rent assistance, or otherwise.

I'll be promoting my own music there too, and I'm donating all proceeds to one of the many orgs at Stand With Minnesota If you're unfamiliar with any of the music I've released in the past, uh, twenty-five years, you can find a bunch of my Bandcamp links here.

Tell your musician friends to use the #bandcampfriday tag or topic, and consider giving them a boost on your socials as well!

Stand With Minnesota

Stand With Minnesota is a hub for supporting, learning, and taking action to support Minnesotans impacted by ICE and federal enforcement.

Stand With Minnesota

Keeping Bandcamp Human

My guess is that Bandcamp doesn't want to be cloud storage for Suno slop in the way that almost every other digital music service has. As Brad points out, Bandcamp has no algorithm to exploit. The people generating slop albums are doing it to stuff Spotify playlists but they're probably also uploading it to Bandcamp because why not.

A lot of fun bad-faith arguments are being made in the comments ("what if I use AI to create the chord progression but then PLAY it on my guitar? Checkmate, Luddites!") but I agree with the commenters that say the issue is authorship. You're still playing the guitar, you're still making editorial choices. That's different from telling Suno to "write a sea shanty about pirates" twelve times and uploading that as your own work.

Analogies to drum machines or MIDI files or whatever fail when applied to AI because AI is a completely new thing. We've never had computer programs that can spit out a full song complete with lyrics in any genre. Used this way there's no authorship, just output. I've written before, AI has never experienced heartbreak, or joy, or love, so all it can do is compute what a song about those feelings would sound like. That's not how human creativity works at all.

I don't know how Bandcamp will enforce this. Albums that are nothing but slop are sometimes recognizable as such, but I'm wondering if they've opened a can of worms by asking people to report suspected AI-generated music. Some innocent artists are probably gonna get dogpiled.

It's been a long, long time since I wielded Trogdor, my Peavey T-40. Thirteen pounds of low-frequency artillery, currently slumbering in my guitar closet. I'd have to do squats and lunges for a month to get back in the shape needed to lug that beast around.

Without a doubt my most noteworthy accomplishments were finishing two long-languishing projects: HERETICAL, the adventure comic I started eight years ago, and The Plot Of The Phantom, a text adventure game I started forty years ago when I was a teenager. The latter got some attention from some old-school websites and as a result people actually played through it. I got some nice feedback and requests for hints. There's an upgraded version out now that has a hint system and a few Easter eggs.

The Plot of the Phantom

A web-playable text adventure!

Scott Andrew

HERETICAL

Superstition and survival in an unmade world.

hereticalcomic.com

I also leaned into doing longer comics. I churned out CHROME SANDS, a sequel to HERETICAL, in only three months. Both stories are up on a dedicated website now, and I'm currently scheming on a third installment. Also in late spring were two more short-form stories: Finders Keepers and Los Ojos del Desierto. I released From The Shallows, a literal fish-out-of-water story I'd been holding onto for awhile.

Los Ojos Del Desierto | Neat Hobby!

A supernatural tale of greed in the southwestern desert

Comics by Scott Andrew

Finders Keepers | Neat Hobby!

A fan comic for Alien Day 2025.

Comics by Scott Andrew

From The Shallows | Neat Hobby!

Comics by Scott Andrew

Comics by Scott Andrew

And for no real reason I drew a hand every day in May. And I'll do it again! Well, maybe!

I also did a bit of computer stuff:

• A free responsive webcomic template.
• a simple photo gallery generator for static websites.
• Some tools to connect a Buttondown email list to both Eleventy and Wordpress and create a "soft paywall" for subscriber-only content, although I never did end up using this myself.
• I started Tiny Details as a library of small webcomponents to improve old websites but only finished a handful.
• I hacked together a Clip Studio-compatible version of the Flexioki color palette, which I used to color Finders Keepers and Los Ojos.

Those are the wins, and given the...uh, tenor of this past year. I'll take 'em. Among all of that, I was lucky to find a new day job this past summer, which is at times great because it's work I love to do, and with health insurance, yay! But it immediately put the brakes on other things. Now I'm back in the familiar sleep-work-eat-repeat cycle and finding ways to break out of it is one of my goals for the new year.

I don't have a great way to end this part of the post, so: the end.

Some music

I tried to listen to a lot more music in 2025 and I'm not sure I succeeded because podcasts are a still a thing.

Scarlet House, Homecoming

Since wrote about them last spring, Scarlet House took the top spot in my Spotify Wrapped*, dislodging Rush and Power Windows years-long reign as my most listened-to artist and album, respectively. That is...a notable thing!

Homecoming, by Scarlet House

13 track album

Markow, Inc.

The videos on Scarlet House's YT channel are filled with comments like "I'm 57 years old, I love you guys" which I find really sweet but also really funny to think about being a Gen-Z artist with a huge Gen-X following.

screenager, Striker

Women are keeping indie rock alive. Like Scarlet House, I found screenager through an Instagram ad and I'm a sucker for interesting production choices wrapped around a solid pop song (note: when advertising your music through IG, use the best part of your best song as your clip).

Striker, by screenager

4 track album

screenager

Matt Nathanson, Please Pet But Do Not Ride The Horse

A collection of live cuts from his early 2025 tour that will give you a sense of how Nathanson has evolved into a top-notch lyricist while remaining so darn affable as a performer. We saw him on this tour last year in PDX and I got kind of emotional over it.

* I know, I know.