When Mel Brooks as the 2000 Year Old Man was asked for the secret to his long life, he said, "Don't die."

Sage advice (don't use too much sage in your stuffing), if harder to follow every year. But the real secret to the long life of the 2000 Year Old Man - and Mel Brooks - is that they have both attained some degree of immortality which won't be stopped by a small thing like dying. (Not to be confused with a little death, which is much more fun.)

QUICK CUTAWAY

I was thinking about this earlier this week, as I passed a new nail salon next to the hot dog shop, in the spot where my old barber's shop used to be. (perfect location to get your hair in a bun) Said barber died in a random accident last year, and now his shop is replaced as if it were never there. But he lives on in some manner, because so many people have fond memories of him.

The massive outpouring of love on social media last year when he died was impressive. (It's a shame he wasn't around to see it.) People coming out of the woodwork to talk about how much he meant to them, talking about his rapping, his work with youth, his connections in the community. His achievements live on, the difference he made to people lives on, and people's memories of him live on.

I still remember the first time I met him. We were at a local poetry slam, and he had performed a poem titled "I Am King" that felt very powerful. I honestly have no recollection of what poem I performed, but I ended up winning. First prize was randomly a stuffed lion, so I decided to give it to him because it felt right for his poem to win that prize. He thanked me and gave me a copy of his first rap CD (neither bohemian nor in blue), and a few years later I left my previous barber and began patronizing (spendy, not snobby) his shop.

I guess it's no wonder that some people say memories are how we live on after we die.

BEWARE: ZOMBIE GRANDMA

Unfortunately, there's sometimes a thin line between being immortal and being undead. Both involve living on past the normal time of death, but there's a question of whether what remains is still you, or an evil twisted mindless abomination. As fans of Full Metal Alchemist know (and the rest of you are about to be told), if you're trying to bring a loved one back to life and don't actually have sufficient magical power to make it work, you'll only end up with a creepy monster and you'll hurt yourself and those you care about in the process.

That was certainly on my mind when I saw a recent article about an AI app that will recreate a facsimile of your dead family members for you to have conversations with. We may not have the alchemical technology to resurrect horrible creatures stitched from a few parts of our loved ones and forbidden magic which should be destroyed for the good of humanity, but AI is certainly the next best (worst) thing. This is cursed.

Far better to have authentic memories than a zombie abomination. I'd rather take 15 seconds to reflect on a fun childhood memory with a family member than talk to a robot with their face. Or even just tiny authentic anecdotes - one sentence of "When I was little, Papa always used to say..." or "You'll never believe why your aunt once grabbed some crayons while leaving this restaurant..." has more value and humanity than all the AI servers in the world.

DRINKING MY AI HATORADE

I know, you thought after last issue's brief mention of AI recipes I might be done hating on AI.

Never.

In fact, I wrote this week's column about it, so please enjoy

* A holiday message from SlopGPT

We at SlopGPT are pleased to announce that this holiday season, we'll be giving you the gift of adding more AI to everything! No need to thank us, this is just a special gift we're happy to make increasingly difficult to avoid.

After all, we put in so much work stealing and ingesting content from the rest of the internet that it would be a shame NOT to continue pooping out AI-generated slop to fill up the world wide web. So look for us when you're baking dessert over the holidays. Or don't look for us, but expect to find us anyway! If you're searching for holiday recipes online, you're likely to find one of our "helpful" AI-generated summaries which provide untested recipes with random inclusions or omissions of ingredients, and even random temperatures. Critics say we're "ruining" recipes, but we like to say we're providing new experiences in the realm of taste!

Fun, right?

...

But we don't want you to think that AI is just for cooking! No matter what you're trying to do, SlopGPT is here to confidently present information that looks helpful and informative at a first glance! Trying to build a house? No problem! SlopGPT will generate an entire floor plan for you, complete with made up dimensions and side views that don't even belong on a floor plan. Who wouldn't want a tiny bedroom in the bathroom, and a "coat bath" for keeping your jackets clean? Our inventive floor plans label multiple open areas as kitchens because you can just put a hotplate anywhere and it becomes a kitchen!

Trying to learn more about your favorite celebrity? Why not ask SlopGPT for a quick summary! In our testing labs we asked for information about a certain famous author and AI was happy to tell us details including exactly how many cats he had, and what their names were. We asked a few times in a row, and got different answers each time, which just proves that AI is so powerful that it can keep up with minute-by-minute cat adoptions. Sure, maybe it gets some facts wrong, but when SlopGPT generates a biography of a celebrity, some of the facts are also right! It's just up to you to determine which is which.

Even when it's not wearing the faces of your dead relatives, SlopGPT is absolutely the biggest source of zombies today (George Romero, eat your heart out)(in a gory fashion), especially on zombie Internet sites where AI-generated posts receive AI-generated comments. Dead Internet Theory is truer than ever. It's all pretty grim (but not pretty like Brothers Grimm, a dumb but fun movie), and with most platforms now using all your content to train AI, everything is terrible and it's being driven by plagiarism and environmental destruction so we can make everything worse in the hopes it might generate profit for a few people at the top.

REMEMBER WHEN THESE NEWSLETTERS WERE FUNNY?

Oops, I looked at the world again, there's my problem. But we'll always have Paris. (It's non-Parisable)(ou non-Parisablé)(Pardon my French). If nothing else, there will be no need for AI-Seths when I'm dead because you can just go back and read old newsletter issues and it'll be just like I'm talking to you (or at least at you)(near you?)(sorry for prepositioning you)(I really wanted to work that into an indecent proposal pun but preposition and proposal are just slightly too far apart even if you offered me a million dollars.)(although at that price I'd totally try anyway. any portmanteau in a storm.)

This is the last newsletter before Chanukah and Christmas, so whether you celebrate those holidays, other ones, or none at all, I bid you a pleasant December filled with warmth and hopefully minimal zombies. As always, I thank you for reading, will be back in two weeks with another column, and remind you not to use the forbidden magicks or AI to resurrect any soulless husks unless you're making corn decorations.

Your favorite soulful husk,
Seth