Light, Camera, Zit: The Shoot & the Spiral
Shoot day at the office. Not a cameo, not an extra—just me, front and center, starring in our new Data & AI promo video.
Two full hours of setup, takes, and re-takes to craft a sleek 90-second clip. You’d think I’d be focused on posture or remembering my lines. But no—my thoughts spiraled. Not just into tech or storytelling, but—classic Mike—onto the rogue zit that appeared just beneath my right eye. Maybe smart glasses could save the day. Save the face. Save the frame.
I almost wore them. Dual function: conceal the blemish and showcase AI form factor chic. But would that be honest? Would that be… me?
Would wearing the smart glasses have made me look more confident—or just less exposed? They could’ve worked. But then came the deliberate pause. The System 2 moment. If I believe smart glasses are the future of AI, do I wear them to prove a point—or hide a flaw?
That’s when my mind wandered. Necklaces. Screentime-less devices. Ambient AI. But that rabbit hole deserves its own post. For now, I just noted: my mind’s UI is glitchy. Or just gloriously human.
Scripts, Shades & System Prompts
In the end, the glasses stayed off. Transition lenses shaded over outside and the crew said I looked too closed off. Too Terminator. Too distant.
So we went raw. Zit and all.
Surprisingly, it worked. There was freedom in speaking lines I didn’t write but trying to sound like myself. The trick? Skim the script, get the vibe, then talk human.
Lately, I’ve been tweaking my system prompt. My AI assistant sometimes skips parts of my ramblings—not just at the start or end, but right in the middle. The chewy, chaotic middle. I wanted more awareness. A second pass. A kind of self-audit.
So I rewrote the prompt. Pivotal moment. No more ghosting—this AI had to show up like a real copywriter.
Be ruthless with hooks. Thoughtful about cuts. And most importantly: review what it trimmed after the draft. Reflect.
Which raises a bigger question: does it think sequentially—or in parallel? If parallel, that means it’s folding time. But no quantum digressions today. Just prose and process.
The Rambling Mind Archive
Sometimes I wonder—should these ramblings tighten up? Get structured? Become op-eds or sleek think pieces? But this is the structure. This is the music. Rambling is jazz: off-beat, but deliberate.
Mike’s Mind began as a blog. Then it morphed into a scrapbook of my talks, interviews, writings. Even cross-posted some entries to archive.today—a digital capsule of sorts. These aren’t just for now. They’re for future-me, or future-AI, to dig through, one messy layer at a time.
Like old vinyl pressed into the cloud. Analog. Heavy. Etched into a digital breeze. Not just backup. Echo. Waiting for a needle to drop.
Memory Has Weight
Driving home, one last thought stuck with me: If a device stores more data, does it weigh more?
Of course not.
But maybe we do.
Not physically. But emotionally. Cognitively. Temporally. The more we remember, the more weight we carry.
Maybe that’s the point of journailing. Not offloading thoughts to lighten the load—but anchoring them. So they don’t float away.
That’s Mike’s Mind. A slow orbit around tech, humanity, memory—and the occasional zit.
What's on your mind?