Alchemical research and development from Transmutable Explorations

My 'metaphysical' lead in last month really spawned some great conversation.  I guess it's not a coincidence that this month found me also spending a bunch of time in a similar space. 

Some of you might be aware that I spent quite a bit of time as a Field Investigator and SEPA State Section Director for MUFON (Anyone remember the Bucks County UFO flap of 2008?).  That stint arose out of my long time love for the TV series the X-files and my brief Air Force training.  I'm no longer affiliated with MUFON, as I feel that they became a fairly biased organization when they began to pursue television exposure more than actual facts.

Because of this, I was probably one of the first in line to see the information dropped by our government as part of their 'UFO files'.  I'm still not sure what to make out of all of this.  One of the most interesting things that I've seen mentioned is the concept of a UAP Dog Whistle.  If you're interested in playing around with this, check out the UAP Dog Whistle Generator.  IMHO, it all seems to be more 'distraction' than substance, but I guess we'll see as more files are released!

Google I/O was this month and I'm sure I've mentioned before that I used to go every year.  The last few years though, at least from watching the overview sessions, it's getting more and more difficult to identify discernable leaps forward compared to prior years.  This year was much the same.  Many of the announcements have been years in the making... Full Fitbit assimilation into Google (anyone pickup a Fitbit Air?), more AI in more things, other incremental 'improvements'.

I can tell you already that I'm feeling the full Enshittification effects of the latest Gemini being 'integrated' across the Google ecosystem.  My lights barely work (nothing like trying to turn on one dim light at night and having Gemini turn everything in the whole house on), my cameras aren't identifying things that they used to very easily.  Fitbit won't properly auto detect workouts at this point.  I'm used to waiting months after Google I/O until they shake out all the bugs in things that used to work.

One thing that Google did get right though is an interesting way to generate income by using AI hype(as I'm writing this, Meta just announced a similar plan)... extreme bundling.  I've been a Google One subscriber for quite some time and it always annoyed me that I had to keep many disparate (and usually incompatible and overlapping) Google subscriptions for the different features I was interested in using.  Now they started bundling things under the Google One umbrella... with additional AI features.  I migrated all my Google subscriptions immediately.

I can now get full Gemini access, Google Home, Youtube and Health Premium as part of my upgraded AI tier Google One subscription, for everyone in my family at no extra cost (in fact, it costs significantly less than having these separately before)... Now I just need to wait for everything to start 'working' again 🤣If you're interested, I've got a few free for 4 months trials of the Google AI Pro tier.

On the gardening front, it's going to be a bad year for fruit of all kinds.  After the weird cold snap we've had, flowers have dropped off of just about everything.  Paw Paws and apples never seemed to have recovered.  Surprisingly, many of the berries seem to be ok.