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Takes on a Train 7 – Backcountry Backrooms

The vibe is weird in the middle of the night. Everyone is asleep, mostly, but looking out the window is a trip.

Fleeting glimpses on the rail line every so often. Small town. Railside work camp. Uncontrolled crossing. Lights of something in the distance.

Punctuated by stops, waiting for the trains going frantically in the other direction, always hauling some heavy load. Must be something going on, eagerly needing all that the land can provide.

And every now and then the flash of red from the track lights, casting an eerie glow throughout the cabin.

It’s giving a backrooms vibe, that office /shopping mall creepy pasta floating around the internet of endless rooms and mostly unoccupied offices.

Like the monorail introductions to the various Half-Lifes, scenes from an ongoing story glimpsed through the window, though more creepy for being real.

Or is it? It’s mediated after all, caught only in glances through the window, continually almost seen, as the attention is diverted elsewhere.

Takes on a Train 6 – Deprivation

Here’s the trick, finally coming home on night 1: your willingness to take a long distance train journey is impacted heavily by your ability to fall asleep on the moving train.

For me, someone of my height, this isn’t great. There’s a couple factors in the way: fitting in the space of any of the seats as they’re currently configured; the ability to sleep with the cabin lights set to “on”; constant braking, decelerating to wait at a stop, then taking off again; other people in the cabin returning from a 1am smokebreak smelling like they ate the whole thing.

All of which are deal-breakers for me.

The thing is, I don’t know if the more high class lux fares would solve this problem either. Certainly it can help with a few, but the berths and sleepers are a) still too short, leaving me folded up in some way, and b) still subject to physics in the same way as everything else on the train.

Alas. Only 4 more nights to go. this one’s barely started.

Bonus: I do like having the dining car to myself at this hour though. Nice stuff. Peaceful. Able to get the first five posts typed up. There might be some unseen bonuses to this type of travel yet.

Takes on a Train 5 – Snowpiercer

Looking back out the dome to the rear of the train

Just capturing something notable from the Caporel stop mentioned last time. They opened the whole train for this one, because the siding at the station was long enough. So the people from the more Lux cars stepped out too. Not enough to mingle, but enough to see that they were there.

Kind of a reverse Snowpiercer (2013) thing happening: the nicer cars are further from the engine, due to Noise and the like, and fewer disturbances with people walking through.

Given the cost for those lux fares, this is effectively separation by class as well.

In 2025, it might be impossible to make a post about train travel without referencing Snowpiercer, Bong Joon Ho’s creative filmic adaptation of the french graphic novel Le Transperceneige, in much the same way that earlier posts would have talked about Murder on the Orient Express or some other cultural referent. (Did we ever get “Speed but on a train” as the high concept for a film in the mid 90s? I know that series stopped with the boat).

Point being, there might be something endemic about trains, especially the passenger variety, and how they’ve been serving customers for travel for the past two-hundred and twenty some-odd years.

(Is that all? It seems like such a dominant form of travel for the modern era, since eclipsed by passenger flight in the second half of the twentieth century. The speed at which the railways grew must have been mind boggling to those who witnessed it.)

Those early passenger trains, built in Britain and serving the particular nature of that class system of the Victorian era, echoes through time to how they’re experienced now (still), and how we feel ourselves experiencing the rails, mediated through the images and movies we’ve seen before we even step foot on the stairs into the car.

The built environment is not just the buildings around us, but the ways we move as well.

AI Creativity

Can an AI be creative? Well, of course it can. Can the AI Tools and Generative tech like ChatGPT be creative? Maybe. They can assist in creativity, and have the opportunity to come up with novel solutions, so the potential is there.

We can see how via the following axioms:

One: there is a lot of stuff out there
Two: Creativity can come from bringing something new into the world (which is rare) or recombining existing stuff in novel ways.
Three: AI can recombine existing stuff that faster, in ways that we had never thought of before
Four: A lot of the combinations will still suck though

Part of the reason is that humans will engage in a curation process at multiple steps during the act of creation, and this can weed out some combinations that we may consider (prematurely?) non-viable. No one is going to bother with a Battle of the Planets / Balenciaga AI meme, until a lot of other options are exhausted. (Or until I figure out how to do it.)

It’s likely the meme trend will have moved on to the next big thing (and it already has between when I started this post and when it got pushed out of the drafts; the Balenciaga meme was from 2023, I think) before the design space of the first one is exhausted. Nothing wrong with that. Maybe it’ll re-emerge years down the road, or maybe it’ll disappear completely, or maybe it’ll show up someplace cheugy like Facebook does with Minion memes.

Regardless, that curation step, that culling of boring, cheugy memes, can happen at multiple points along the path. Stuff might not get worked on because there’s little or no benefit either. A creator that’s creating an AI image meme is more likely to work on something that’ll get a lot of likes, or “engagement”, or whatever provides them that frisson of a dopamine hit when they create something that keeps them doing what they do.

My “Balenciaga of the Planets” bit from above is unlike to provide that for most, f’rex, so it may go unmade. The “Capitalist Realism” that pervades everything in the attention economy is going to shift development along certain lines that (may be) more “economically” rewarding, at least in the near term.

So there are always some constraints on creativity.

By the axiom’s above, Is it Cake is on par with Succession in terms of creativity. (yes, really!) Both copy the formats of other existing media. One is the fictionalized retelling of a family much like the Murdoch’s, and the other involves guessing if something is cake. Now, Succession is one of the best produced shows of all time. But just because something is well done, well crafted, does not inherently make it creative. Don’t confuse quality with creativity.

Something can be completely new to the world, but fail in execution. Just because something is novel doesn’t inherently make it good. Moxley force-feeding a handful of tacks to Matt Jackson was a novel spot. Stupid as hell though. Wardlow’s swanton on the ladder spot was also novel. And dumb. So was the Submission Daisy Chain in the title match. Novel, kinda obvious, neat that they went for it. Kinda mid. “Sports entertaining” at least. (And granted, now I’m trying to figure out which PPV this was, because Moxley just tried to dunk Darby Allin in a fishtank last weekend, and the lesson here is post your thoughts in a timely manner and don’t leave stuff in drafts for years on end.)

But creativity doesn’t equal quality. A lot of new stuff sucks, and it can often take someone to pick it back up and do it in a new context, or refine the process to make it really come alive.

Except for Is it Cake? Clear winner right out of the gate. How could you improve on it. Peak civilization right there.

So, can AI be creative? Absolutely. As established, it’s possible to put together things in new ways that we wouldn’t have thought of. AI can come up with a lot of stuff, relatively quickly.

But output on it’s own isn’t a marker of creativity either. You can put out a lot of EFP (Extruded Fantasy Product) and it might not be very creative at all. Brandon Sanderson might be a creative writer, or he might just excel at writing big books. I dunno. Science Fiction Author Patrick F. Johnson may be a more creative writer. I’ve never seen them in the same room. There needs to be some output, obviously, for it to be recognized as creative, but a torrent of sewage is simply what it is. “What an incredible smell you’ve discovered.” Novel? Likely. Creative? Perhaps not…

Which gets us to the last point: can an AI be creative? Well, when one exists, then surely the answer is yes.As of October 21st, 2025, there are no known or revealed sentient AIs. But can a generative algorithm or LLM tool like ChatGPT be creative? They can assist in it, but they lack the agency or intentionality that would use to attribute the creative act to them wholly. They are an aid in poiesis, not auto-poietic. This is a good thing. Much of the fears about AI floating in the zeitgeist are of the potential of an auto-poietic AI.

But whether something is creative or not will not be judged by the AI. The criteria for whether something is new or not, novel or not, creative or not, will be the humans. “Creativity must…be seen not as something happening with a person but in the relationships within a system” (Csikszentmihalyi, p.36).

And those systems are our cybernetic machines that we spoke about the other week. Much like an artist with a pencil, or a brush, or camera, or any other tool for working media, our creativity is not diminished with the advent of AI, but expanded, able to grow in new ways.

Some of those ways allow us to do things that we have done previously faster, quicker, more efficiently. It also allows us to iterate through potential options, curate the results, and work on refining those results so they match our vision that much quicker as well. It’s easier to chase down rabbit holes when you match the rabbits for speed.

But as artists get more proficient with the AI tools, and the systems that they are situated in, we will see how they can be used in more creative ways. The defining works of a cultural form of media rarely come from the first few attempts, ground breaking though they may be. Superhero comics existed for decades, but some of the defining works in the form didn’t come until the 1980s, with Watchmen, The Dark Knight, Days of Future Past, Maus, and others. So too with film, and rock music, and video games. And AI Art will follow the same trend.

Right now, no one knows what it’s going to look like. And that’s fantastic!

Can’t wait to see what’s next.

Notes: as hinted at above, this post sat in the drafts for a bit, being originally written on May 30th, 2023. Mostly based on the wrestling reference, which apparently took place at AEW’s Double or Nothing card on May 28th, 2023.

Also, Is It Cake? was very much a thing of the moment, which has since passed. Up next, Competitive German Slicing Videos. (Seriously).

Also, see: Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (1996). Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York: Harper Perennial.

Takes on a Train 4 – Microcosm

The political economy of economy? Hmm. Perhaps not yet.

The train is a microcosm though, as we’ve had a chance too happen across more of the passengers the longer we’ve been on board. The evening stop at Caporel was where we had more of a chance. A guitarist was playing in the dome car, and some of the passengers were participating, singing along with some of the old standards.

There’s a real broad mix on the train, from the Hutterite family (three generations, perhaps), to the indigenous couple on their way back from the Jays game. There’s the young guy playing Raw v Smackdown on his laptop, who’s taken the trip 10 times, to the Turkish girl, to the two friends travelling together. The older lady who got off the train at Parry Sound (quick stop there), to the people who just don’t like flying. There’s the French-speaking backpackers, and some German speakers too. There’s a lot of language being thrown around.

Not a bad way to get around.

But it is a look at the country in miniature, with a broad sample of the population. “Sample size” would be the title, I guess, but Microcosm came to me first.