Paul Arden | Tuesday, 16 July 2024
This week’s Masterclass is a two-parter. Part one is for beginners explaining that they need to learn to control line shoot in addition to the first video. The second part is something which I consider high Intermediate or even Advanced Level. I rarely teach it until later on in my Zoom courses. At this level it’s more about sharing ideas anyway, but recently I’ve found myself teaching it more and more, for competition casting and saltwater shots, as well as the Snakehead Shots where it is essential.
It’s not the first more advanced aspects to appear in Masterclass round 2, and it’s certainly not appearing in the sequence I would teach Intermediates either. But it’s nice to be able to draw from the Drills in my lessons to supplement my teaching and at some point you may find it useful too, if not already. The die hard Sexylooper may already be doing this of course, or something totally different, which I would love to hear about.
I have three other videos to make soon. One on rod spine, another on how to look after your rod, and the third being a video on what we sometimes say in teaching is not always to be taken literally.
Two of these videos will have come as a result of YouTube comments. I’m not very happy with YouTube by the way; I was having a conversation with a chap about teaching yesterday and YouTube AI deleted it. Why I have no idea. The conversation must have run afoul of their Algorithms Ignoramus, but what I would say to anyone commenting anything on YouTube apart from “that’s awesome, dude” or “wicked, bro” or “dope”, is to login to the Board and comment here. We have real moderators, who are generally missing.
I experienced a similar thing with Facebook recently where the Advanced Idiot software deleted one of my posts linked to one of Mika’s great pages on fishing in Sungai Tiang. This somehow broke “community guidelines.” How those datapoints were assembled, I have no idea.
This is the problem with AI… it’s shit. But the whole world seems to think it’s a good thing, that when you try to talk to customer service you end up with a machine. To claim that this can in any way be described as “intelligent”, or even an improvement, is total nonsense. It may save businesses money because they don’t have to employ quite so many real people but for us customers we now have to waste time dealing with programmed stupidity.
Do we really want to live in a world where everything is “smart”? “Oh I love it when my fridge talks dirty to me and says we are out of milk!!” Incidentally I’ve worked out, that if you find yourself in customer AI hell hole, then just writing “can I speak to a real person please; you are obviously a dick” usually works. And if the real person is not very helpful too, you can always try the same line on them to see what happens!
Finally finally we have rods moving out left and centre. Three being sent this week and five early next week. We have made some adjustments now so that all rods currently going out are X numbers. This means that if you accidentally manage to break any section of any of these new rods, then we can post you out a new replacement section, without the necessity of you having to return the rod to us. That’s a huge bonus and possibly I think a first for a high end rod manufacturer, where we often use different sloping mandrills between sections to get the action we want, which in turn makes ferrule fitting an art.
Have a great week! Video comes soon; I’m editing it now. Fashionably late as usual.
Cheers, Paul