The Sorcerer's Apprentice


Posted On: Monday - February 12th 2018 12:45PM MST
In Topics: 
  Curmudgeonry  Artificial Stupidity



The video that I just spent 10 minutes unsuccessfully searching for was a cartoon with a sorcerer's apprentice who had kind of deputized a bunch of brooms to do work for him. The brooms would screw up the jobs, and as the apprentice sorcerer tried to stop them from doing any work at all, the brooms would just multiply, go crazy, and screw up the job even worse. It was the stuff of bad dreams, in fact, but I cannot find this one. Any reader who may know where to find it, please write in, in the comments (put the letters "PS" FIRST, to keep the Ruskies at bay - that's my only beef with the Ruskies - we are not Neocons here at Peak Stupidity, we just hate crazy broomstick-bot spammers!)

I think over 4 decades have gone by since I've seen that video (but hey, youtube, get on it, you slackers!). It came back to me after almost that long after having messed around with electronic devices this morning. The amount of time just purely wasted trying to use a piece of software required for work that I had used a few months back on the same damn device is shameful. Pieces of software are supposed to be used as TOOLS, dammit, the Peak Stupidity blog mentioned a few months back. As tools, they can make jobs easier, or just make them possible at all. I GET THAT! [/Carlson]. They don't need to make more work, like the brooms in that scary (to me at the time, anyway) sorcerer's apprentice video that I can't find.

It's really like that video. You get sent round in circles, first by worthless IT people - this one WAS in America, BTW, but not a white guy - then, the various pieces of software involved each want to get updated, but updating one makes another stop or have problems. Then you've got to come up with passwords that you made up months ago. Yes, I know, synch em up, right, but that doesn't help when some of them want changing every month or so. How did we get our pieces of electronics to run our selves around in circles, trying to appease them? I can't even remember what happened at the end of that out-of-control crazy-ass brooms video. Did the apprentice win, and stop them all somehow, or did they take over and destroy everything? I think to recreate the former, I would have to take this piece of shit electronic stupidity, and smash it onto the concrete, an expensive, but happy ending.

Again, youtube has really let me down here, as the right video would really ring true with all of us familiar with modern artificial stupidity. I know there is a famous Mickey Mouse scene from Fantasia with the classical music of the name "Sorcerer's Apprentice" that goes with it, but it's not what I was looking for. This was a lot darker than Mickey Mouse's style. However, I did find it, with albeit very poor video quality (what do you want, from 1944 or something?), with some great rock guitar by a guy named Joe Stump:



I'm running out of time here, but I'll continue later, hopefully this evening, with more on the point of software as tools, more about modern password-related stupidity (to explain myself better on this), along with some thoughts about throwing out garbage - very much related.

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[UPDATED 12/18/19]:
Video with Joe Stump music is gone off youtube. This is from Disney's Fantasia.
I dunno. That memory is from long long ago, maybe a bad dream, which cannot be found on youtube.
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