Well, hello!
It's that time of the year again.
Midsummer, you say? No, that time of the year when I get an urge to write something for the homepage /slash/ blog. I really ought to be better at updating, but you know: life, time, energy and all that jazz.
Anyways, today's the big day - Sweden's actual national holiday. Midsummer's Eve, or Summer Solstice, however you want to look at it. It's a pagan tradition that survived the christianity takeover where we celebrate the light, life and fertility. You may have heard about or seen the horror movie Midsommar, and let me tell you - it's exactly like that. Except everyone's drunk.
A colleague of mine showed me the other day this utterly hilarious video - which unfortunately, I haven't been able to find since - where someone had prompted "true Swedish midsummer's eve" into a generator. The result was somewhat as you'd expect: People eating herring and strawberry cakes, toasting with snaps and falling over, raising the May pole and basically doing every Svenne-banan midsummer cliché imaginable.
Except for one major detail in every scene.
Everyone was shouting. Like, from the top of their lungs. As if they were frustrated over life itself or giving birth to an 8 kilo absolute unit. We chuckled and scoffed at this obvious hallucination on the LLM's part.
But then it hit me. It must have been trained on the movie, where they do this exact thing. There's this intense scene where the protagonist Dani is brought into a ritual where everyone collectively screams in order to release repressed feelings (I bet you've at least seen the memes that were based on this very scene!)
This apparent screwup of the generative engine makes me both gigglish (haha, what an useless twerp) and sad (content on the internet will be ruined forever.) I just hope that we'll get tired of it soon and go back to human created content.
But I digress.
As for us, we'll be ditching my family gathering this year and instead celebrate in the village of Sillviken, just outside of Inntertavle where we live. I assume there'll be dancing around the pole singing "Små grodorna" ("The small frogs"), hopefully without any murderous cult inviting us in to any drug-induced cathartic screaming rites.
Glad Midsommar!