While this, your favourite newsletter was only rebooted in January 2024 it’s been a full year since I moved to Mumbai, so what better time to take stock, welcome new readers and sum up what we’ve all learned. ‘Previously on FROTH…’ if you will.
I guess anyone who works in an office is used to asking chatGPT to summarise boring documents/create confusing lists/do all of their work, but despite my self-confessed tech-nerdery, I’ve not gone far down the AI rabbit hole just yet… Untiiiiiil noooooooow
Rarely a person to time-waste by halves, I skipped chatGPT and went straight to Google’s notebook ML, which effectively lets you input text sources and then ask questions about them. So far, so standard AI shenanigans. However, it also has one INCREDIBLE feature: after inputting your sources (eg the last 10 issues of this newsletter) it can create a ‘conversation’ about the topic. This is effectively something like a short podcast hosted by 2 effervescent morning TV anchors and is frankly MIND-BLOWING.
I implore you to listen whilst HOLDING ONTO YOUR GODDAM BRAINS
I cannot stress enough that this is COMPLETELY AI-GENERATED - the script, the voices, EVERYTHING. Therapeutically speaking, it’s a really great glass-half-full pat-on-the-back smoke-in-bum stock-take of the last 9 months of this missive. MADE BY ROBOTS WHAT WILL I DO FOR A LIVING IN 5 YEARS OMGGGGG 🤯🤯🤯
As a tool I’m not really sure how I’d use this right now but I bet if I was revising for an exam or studying in a new field I would absorb the information so much easier if 2 ‘people’ (I’m calling them Cindy & Troy) were chatting about it rather than just reading a bone-dry text book.
Entirely coincidentally, last week The Verge had a (real) podcast episode about this which I am only listening to now but is very insightful and shows how powerful this tool can be in less idiotic hands.
And for those of you not quite as excited as me to listen to a 10-minute ego-wank, I made this 60 second fun-size video
In improv we talk about ‘heightening’:
After you’ve found a funny thing in a scene, you want to repeat it a few times, but each time you need to take it up (or down) a notch - so after really hammering the food poisoning chat recently1, I had to heighten. It’s all very well being in a Bollywood movie (my debut fleeting appearance2 in JIGRA, is out in October!), but surely now it’s time for Bollywood to be in me.
Nothing says, “I’m a man of a certain age” more than discussing a colonoscopy. (except maybe the excitement in the expats whatsapp group last week about Coldplay tickets). This is my second, so this time I threw in an endoscopy too, to liven things up (heightening!).
The first time I let a camera crew into my private quarters was in the UK some years ago, so we could rule out all the bad stuff and settle on the frustratingly vague “You have IBS” catch-all diagnosis.
During this I remember being ‘mildly sedated’ and wheeled into the studio (is that what it’s called?) and then half-remember it happening but no details. Here in Mumbai, I was like, “this is a mild sedative right?” and they were all, “yes don’t worry” then I woke up 20 minutes later having been digitally spit-roasted in dreamland3.
Afterwards we perused the fleshlight catalogue of internal instas to discover my guts were inflamed (possibly due to the cavalcade of antibiotics they’ve been subjected to over the last 2 months or perhaps their ears are burning from being talked about so much here) but thankfully no major issues🤞.
While there’s a lot to laugh about with anything involving a GoPro up the pooper, you never hear about the part that I think is actually the worst (since they effectively Men In Black mind-erase the main event) which is the pre-game Emptying The Tank For Inspection. Imagine drinking a litre of seawater in 2 sittings and then… well… sitting… for several hours while you turn into a one-man Fringe show of the Great Molasses Flood. Brutal.
All of this has also provided a great follow-up to last episode’s Indian-English language discovery that ‘loose motions’ means diarrhoea here, when the doctor delightfully referred to this condition as ‘loosies’. Loved that.
I actually wish I’d fed this newsletter into the podcast talk show generator too. What a treat that would be.
Oh I also made another idiotic travel guide by this American dude. He doesn’t have a name yet. Suggestions welcome in the comments below 🦅
And one quick final recommend of a movie I really enjoyed in recent weeks: Rebel Ridge. Find it on your friendly neighbourhood Netflix. Director Jeremy (Blue Ruin, Green Room) Saulnier turns any expectations of gnarly violence you might have, based on those afore-mentioned flicks, on their head in this pressure cooker thriller about small town cops picking on The Wrong Guy. A star-making performance from Aaron Pierre, grizzled Don Johnson and a fistful of JUSTICE. What more could you want?
Maybe pair it with another recent excellent small-town-with-Ridge-in-the-name movie, Jericho Ridge. This time our hero is the cop and the fan is well and truly covered in faeces in this small-scale action-packed (BRITISH!) siege thriller.
And that’s a wrap.
NO WAIT that just reminded me of another language thing. On a set, in ‘the West’ they say the well-known phrase “that’s a wrap” at the end of the shoot day but here in India they say “Pack up!” like it’s the end of a science lesson in school. Big fun.
Mumbyeeeeeeeeeeee!
Simon
All clucking year Simon
Cutting room floor notwithstanding
Added this to NotebookML for future reference as an autiobiography title