I found my old tumblr the other day, and yesterday I spent lots of time getting onto Mastodon (i.e. the Fediverse). And I’m realizing in just how many places I have “published” significant “content” (not even counting Amazon reviews, say, but maybe I should).
While procrastinating from the NaNoWriMo book (back at 15,623 words; I’m currently at nearly 29K, and nicely on target, although I did only about 1000 today), I started to list some subset of them here, and tonight I thought I’d just post it. In no particular order at all:
Me on Twitter, where I would doomscroll endlessly, and also post some AI images and things, and retweet and make snarky and otherwise comments on lots of political stuff, and so on. I am coming to sort of wonder what I’m doing there, especially in contrast to the next thing. (Note that I exist there under my Second Life identity, because reasons.)
Me on Mastodon (aka @ceoln@qoto.org sometimes), my brand new Mastodon (Fediverse) place, which is very much like Twitter except friendlier and not constantly fiddled with by malicious algorithms and billionaires intent on making me angry and unsettled for I’ll click more. Which is very nice! Many friendly people, many of them fleeing Twitter.
Me on counter.social; originally a Fediverse fork or something, now um… its own thing, albeit with a somewhat familiar feel. If you aren’t on counter.social, you maybe can’t see anything at that link?
Me on reddit, where I have at times been active in r/zen, r/aidungeon, r/gpt3, r/novelAI, r/buddhism, r/alanwatts, and other obvious places.
The Beauty Of Our Weapons dot tumblr dot com, my old tumblr where I would pretty much just repost pictures of pretty girls and odd things and the occasional experiment in Photoshop or something. Now I’ve posted a (very) few Midjourney images there also. Hopefully there’s nothing too embarrassing in there that I’ve forgotten.
Me on Quora, where I have apparently been quite active now and then over the years, and some of my answers (and some of the questions I’m answering) are pretty funny iyam.
Me on NightCafe; open to everyone, I think: those images that I’ve “published”. Look through my Collections! See the beginning of Yeni Cavan!
Me on Midjourney: Probably visible only if you’re signed into Midjourney? I’m not sure. See every image I’ve made there (minus the few I’ve deleted) and their prompts and everything! Midjourney is very open that way (unless you pay extra haha).
Me on Instagram; I post there more sometimes than others. Less now that I’ve not been going much of anywhere! For the past few years! I mostly post real-world photos there.
Me on PixelFed, the Fediverse (e.g. Mastodon) answer to Instagram (or maybe flickr). As of this writing I haven’t put much there, not certain that I will, but we’ll see! So far I mostly post images I make with Midjourney there.
I should make this into a Page (as opposed to a Post) on the site, and then I could point the profiles of those things above that have profiles, at that, and knit everything together.
Back in the day (and especially back in the day), I used to just, y’know, chat a lot more than I do now. Rather than posting a particular thing about a particular thing, or a bunch of AI-generated images or whatever.
Speaking of which:
Ink on Rice Paper: Cozy
Why that is associated with “cozy”, I don’t know. Which is part of the fascination of this; exploring the odd mind of the AI. (See also of course GPT-3 and additionally Semantle for that matter, in the textual sort of area.)
I don’t think I’ve linked to semantle before, so there you go! I’ve become very much in the Wordle habit (even in the New York Times period here) (haven’t lost one yet!), and Semantle is also fun. It’s much harder, but on the other hand you get an infinite number of guesses. I realize in writing this that I got distracted and didn’t get yesterday’s, although I was within like two or three words of it.
(Long pause here while I do today’s Semantle in a mere 442 guesses, hahahaha. Toward the end there I was just typing random words that sprang to mind. In retrospect, though, it makes sense and I should have gotten it quicker.)
I also I used to use other fonts and stuff more often, because that is fun, and I used to write in raw html rather than in this WordPress environment here, which gets easily confused if you try to do anything too fancy, and often just deletes random markup that one might add in raw mode, oh well. Also it often looks radically different on my phone than on the computer here, in ways that I don’t have the patience or energy to look into to understand.
(Like, will this be in a different color everywhere? I dunno!)
I am reminiscing about Back In The Day, because for some reason that I can’t recall at the moment I was digging around in the ancient weblog on the personal site (whose front page still says “COMING SOON” and I really ought to fix that) looking for a particular funny story, and I read all various old entries while looking for it.
And also, I found it! Here is a copy of it, as well as that link there. The context (also interesting in itself) is a journal that I needed to get to someone in Indiana.
Then after lunch I took it down to the “Post Office”, where a lady agreed to take it to Indiana for me. I also had to buy her a little paper package to carry it there in. (That seemed sort of odd; why didn’t she just factor the package into the price of the service, the way she presumably does with gas fare and stuff?)
I’m not sure she’s really got a viable business model going here; the price was so cheap! I mean, she agreed to take the journal to Indiana (a particular place in Indiana, even) for like six bucks (including the price of the little paper package). I gather that there’s an economy-of-scale thing here, that she waits until she’s got a bunch of things all going to Indiana, and takes them all at once, to save on travel costs. But she also promised to get it there in just two days, so if no one else comes in and wants her to take something to Indiana by Wednesday, she’ll have to go there on just my six bucks, and there’s no way that that’ll even cover her costs.
(She’s probably got to pay someone to keep the place open while she’s going to Indiana and back, also; and then there’s rent, and utilities, and all sorts of other stuff.)
Probably she’s selling at a loss right now to get people used to being able to send things cheap, and she’ll raise prices later, once she’s got mind share. Sorta like pets.com did so well! *8)
Still, it was nice that she was still in business today, so I didn’t have to, like, drive to Indiana myself…
Apparently this lady or her successors are still in business, which is nice!
That journal was part of a project which is probably (although not certainly) the same as this 1000 Journals Project, about which there is apparently a book and a documentary and stuff, which is pretty cool. I had (briefly) number 278, about which the old weblog talks a bit. Do go take a look! I wonder if it still survives, somewhere out there. Or even in the book or documentary!
There is some extra space for eyes
So that was all fun to discover and reminisce about. (Ha, I’d forgotten that I scanned the whole thing and burned it onto CD (remember “CDs”?) and included a copy of it in a little paper slipcase inside the journal itself. How clever of me!!
Hi-Tech Comix!
One thing that’s rather different from Back In The Day (in addition to having less control over the HTML, and not being in the habit of doing one catch-all entry per day, with the date as the title), is that I no longer feel guilty about putting more-or-less-huge images in the weblog here. On the assumption, I guess, that hardly anyone is reading this on like a 4096 bps modem or something. (But if anyone is, or is otherwise bothered by all of the huge images, do let me know! You can even leave a comment right here in the weblog and I might notice it.)
I am still very enamored of NightCafe and the inexpressibly vast universe of images that it’s willing to create. It feels (still) like I’m a tiny kid wandering through a vast library of lavishly illustrated books, dashing joyfully from shelf to shelf, delighted and overwhelmed.
I felt roughly that way about GPT-3 for quite a while, too, only with words instead of pictures; and, as the structure of these words hints, I don’t really feel that way anymore, at least not at the moment. I’m not certain how or why, but one theory that I have is that I gradually came to realize that there is no “there” there; that is, as far as I can tell, when interacting with a GPT-3 or NovelAI model, it’s easy to feel like the funny and crazy and suggestive things make sense in light of some thoughts or model of the world or way of thinking, and that by continuing to interact with it, one will come to know more about that way of thinking, and that’s cool. But after interacting with it for awhile, that seems less likely, or at least it’s more like “this writes stuff superficially like random fanfiction but without even that much sense to it” than it is like “wow, this crazy alien being I’m talking to sure has some interesting ideas!”.
I can easily imagine the same kind of thing happening with NightCafe; looking at the panel from “Hi-Tech Comix!” up there, my first fascinated reaction is that those enigmatic machines and blurred speech bubbles must be About Something, must be Saying Something in some enigmatic language and universe into which the image offers us a preliminary glimpse. But perhaps one ultimately realizes that it isn’t; it’s just a mindless imitation of stuff on Flickr or whatever.
If indeed that’s all it is. :)
What else what else? The family still exists and prospers. The little daughter is working remotely from Queens for an IT company (“IT company”) and going to tango events again now that there are vaccines and things are opening up somewhat. M and the little boy and I still live here in the ‘burbs, but I went in to work in Chelsea a couple of days last week (yay!), and I intend to do the same this coming week.
It’s wild how, after living up here and barely visiting the City at all for decades, once I started working down there I fell in love with the place, and have been going somewhat crazy not being able to get in for months and months.
Ah, Chelsea, how I missed ya!
I skipped my usual bowl of cold cereal at home, and got a Bacon Egg an’ Cheese on a Roll, Salt, Pepper, Ketchup from the vendor on the way to work the other day. It was glorious.
So that is a nice completely random weblog entry, as in Back in the Day. Now I will probably generate many more images (Twitter link assuming it works, and NightCafe link similarly), and perhaps play some Computer Games (although I’m kind of plateaued on everything I play, including WoW and Satisfactory and No Man’s Sky, but that doesn’t always stop me), and perhaps read some books (Oh, I was thinking I should do a weblog entry on a couple of rather meta books that I finished lately, maybe I will some time), fight some entropy, and/or go for a walk in the sunny chilly day.
In the Old Days, each weblog entry was just dated, without any overall title, and therefore without any presumption (presupposition?) of a unifying theme of any kind. Each one was just “Here is what I am writing in my weblog today”.
I could still do that, of course. This one I’ve just titled “Saturday”, but (probably?) one doesn’t want to have too many (even more than one?) weblog entry with the same title, so that won’t do as a recurring pattern.
There’s a short (short-short) story that I’ve had swirling around in my head since some evening, years in the past, when it occurred to me while sitting in some yard of some rental house on I think Linekin Bay. I’ve never quite written it down, and I thought that perhaps today I would, and put it in the weblog here.
So I got up the energy to finally write down a draft, and it’s sitting in Drafts in the ol’ Weblog Content Management System here, but I don’t think I’ll post it today. I can’t decide whether I’m happy with it, or will be happy with it after a bit of fiddling, or if it’s entirely wrong and I should delete it and try again. I suspect it’s that middle thing, and that I’ll fiddle with it some today and tomorrow perhaps, and (perhaps) post it as a weblog entry tomorrow.
It strikes me that in a way it’s thematically similar to this year’s NaNoWriMo novel :) and therefore somewhat thematically similar to some of the others as well, and probably to most of the thoughts that interest me the most. But I won’t disclose any more than that.
I’ve probably already gotten your hopes up too high about this story. :) It’s very short and probably not really All That Much, just so ya know.
What else? Spennix is max level in the new World of Warcraft Shadowlands expansion already. Traditionally that should go in the secret Second Life (and other virtual words and games and stuff) weblog, but I really haven’t written in that in ages, and returning to two weblogs in the same week would require more energy than I’m willing (able?) to devote to it.
Leveling from 50 to 60 was basically a walk in the park. The new content seems mildly interesting, although many of the things in the new expansion are either very much like things in prior expansions (blue people, annoying little servant guys, blobby evil things) or are (rather inexplicably) exactly things in prior expansions.
(I mean, the Drust were one of the big enemy groups in BfA, and just by coincidence they are also one of the big enemy groups in one of the areas of the Universal Afterlife? I mean what a coincidence, eh? Maybe they’ll explain it, but heh. Given that every planet in the universe supposedly sends its dead here, an awful lot of Azeroth seems to be around. And for that matter the place should really be much more crowded!)
It’s the end of the year, and especially given that we didn’t take the traditional vacation this year (we had a place near Portland, Maine reserved with M’s sister’s family, but due to You Know What it was all canceled), I have considerable vacation days left, and am taking lots of them in November and December; I think I have like six working days left in the year (yes, I’m spoiled!). This is nice for relaxation purposes, but not as nice for Imposter Syndrome.
Also it turns out that unlike Previous Employer, Current Employer doesn’t throw away vacation days at the end of the year at all (there’s just a maximum number that you can accrue in total), so there isn’t really any reason to take a whole bunch in December. But I’m used to it, and other people do also, and I reserved them as vacation before I bothered to look up the policy, so here we are!
And today it’s cold and rainy and grey for the second (third? not sure) day in a row, and I feel like just crawling back all warm under the covers, possibly until Spring and/or easy and reliable vaccination. Maybe I will for an hour or two before or after dinner, at any rate. :) Stay comfy!
I was talking to a friend today about how she’s been doing writing exercises of various kinds that sound like a Good Thing in various ways. And I said that I’ve been thinking about starting to write more in my weblog, which I have (been thinking about), but I’m not sure how serious I am about it. :)
I’ve always found it a nice feeling to write something here again, and certainly this year writing about NaNoWriMo has been fun because NaNoWriMo was fun (and I’m rather liking the finished novel as I read it over). But also it’s generally been true that after writing something here once or a few times, I then stop again. I’m not sure why!
Partly because I had less time, what with commuting two hours each way into Manhattan four days a week or so. But I haven’t been doing that since March (or, as it’s still March here, since the very beginning of this extremely long March), so that doesn’t apply now. I’ve been filling that commuting time partly with extra sleeping (yay!), and partly with playing WoW (the Shadowlands expansion is out!), and partly with lots of interacting with GPT-3 (not quite as crazily nonstop as I was early on, but still quite a bit), and even like reading books sometimes, and even more even going into Second Life a bit (most recently trying to figure out the most recent variations on Mesh Bodies and Mesh Heads and Bake-On-Mesh and other things that seem needlessly complicated but maybe fun).
But maybe I will try to write here more. The little boy mentioned, as we were going down to Queens to pick up the little daughter (who is now gainfully employed and lives in Queens, if you can believe it!) that he had at some time in the past in an idle moment found my old weblog (probably the pre-wordpress parts) and read some of them, and thought it was pretty neat. Which warmed the very cockles of my heart, it did.
Which does, naturally enough, make it seem even more attractive to write more here now.
Another reason I haven’t, I think, is that I have been giving so much mental time and space to stuff that is so quotidian (politics and elections, the global pandemic, etc.) that it seems more suited to Twitter, say, than to writing longer and quirkier and more leisurely and obscure things here, which is the kind of thing that this space feels better for.
Not that I couldn’t write longish thoughtful posts about how bad Trump is, and how and why none of the “evidence of fraud” is actually evidence of fraud, and how likely I think it is that everything will go more or less normally with The Transfer of Power, and when and how enough people will get vaccinated to get R below 1.0, and so on.
But there’s so much stuff like that on the Web already! My thoughts on the subject might be slightly above average, but that’s a pretty low bar (haha), and you can find better things with a quick web search on the obvious terms.
I’d rather write about more obscure things that are more my own, like using neural network language models to generate recipes, and how language can’t express truth (which I know I’ve probably overstated, but still), and whether there’s free will in heaven, and what one ought to do with absolute power over reality (and what “ought” might mean there), and other themes dealt with in my recent novel. :)
And even things that might have been dealt with there but didn’t happen to be.
It would be healthy to open up more mental space for those things (although having written a short novel about them in twenty-one days is pretty good evidence come to think of it that I’ve already devoted some space to them), but it’s not immediately clear that I’ll be able to, or that I will choose to, or that I will, to the extent required to actually write here regularly.
But maybe I will! I’ve certainly managed to write some words here tonight :) although admittedly they’re sufficiently meta that they aren’t really about anything in particular. Maybe next time there’ll be some first-order content!
I thought I would try writing in this here weblog again, because I like writing.
It’s hard to write stuff, because one doesn’t want to write endlessly about how Donald Trump being President was always a signal that you were reading a probably-cheesy dystopian-alternate-timeline story, and as it turns out, it still is.
But that is such a big thing, that writing about anything else seems like ignoring the Elephant In The Room, if you know what I mean.
As weblogged about previously, I’ve taken part in various marches; the Women’s March, the Not My President’s Day March, the March for Science. Maybe some others I forget. I have a rose (🌹) in my Twitter ummm name-thing (not the @-thing, the other thing) because I have joined the Democratic Socialists of America, and I have been all too often debating with Trump fans on Twitter.
This is a challenging thing to do, as one inevitably wants to prevail in debate, and try to convince the interlocutor(s) and even onlookers of at least the plausibility of one’s position, and one also wants to in some sense defend against the inevitable ad hominem attacks. (Or ad Eminem, as WordPress suggests.)
And yet those people are me also, fellow parts of the universal mind and all, fellow fragments of the Big Block, albeit apparently fragments from rather far away, and difficult to enjoy or understand.
Which brings me to what is, for me, the hardest thing about compassion (Compassion). I may have written about this before, but that’s okay.
I have, or think I have, no problem feeling compassion for people who are being mean to me; as long as there’s no dangerous physical assault involved, I can joke with them and try to tease out what they are upset about, and not mind that they have silly ideas because hey we all have silly ideas let’s help each other find better ones.
But what do I do when someone is being mean to someone else? How do I have compassion for the attacker? What form should that compassion take? If I am kind and joke with the attacker, am I normalizing their negative impacts on the victims? It doesn’t feel like a good idea to pal around with Nazis! (Internet or otherwise.) But I still want to express compassion, in some form.
Is punching him in the face in fact the best way to show compassion for not only the people that Richard Spencer helps oppress, but also Spencer himself? Or does one punch him in the face out of compassion for his victims, and then help him bandage up his nose out of compassion for him? Neither one feels quite right. Or maybe both do?
Speaking of Compassion and Oneness, I’ve been playing the game (“game”) Everything, from The Steam, and it’s wonderful. It’s a thing that lets you be all sorts of different things, from a hydrogen atom to a cow to a galaxy (and things off both ends), and that plays numerous Alan Watts discourses while you do it. What could be better!
Also I have been playing The Sims 4 some (see also the Sims 2 Stories, which are mostly back online now, woot!). I sort of skipped The Sims 3 for whatever reason, and now I am playing 4 in sort of vaguely but not really Legacy Challenge style. I started with a single Young Adult sim, Tolerance Boatwhistle, in a huge lot without much money, as required, and I’ve been playing just that one lot, without extending anyone’s life, as required, but I haven’t been keeping score or using the approved trait-picking methods for offspring or anything.
So far Tolerance Boatwhistle married standard sim Liberty Lee and they begat Prudence Boatwhistle (who never had a job, but survived on her paintings, and), who (with the help of standard character Alexander Goth, who has a female voice at least in my game, and who never moved in, but did die on the lot so we have his tombstone and ghost) begat Gladstone Boatwhistle, who married townie or something Hadley (heavens I’ve forgotten her last name), and together begat Consideration Boatwhistle (who became the ultimate Bodybuilder Bro, and) who married Giovanna something (I am terrible with names, aren’t I?), and who together begat Carlton Boatwhistle and his little sister Charity Boatwhistle.
Gladstone and his Hadley just recently died of old age within minutes of each other (the Grim Reaper, who is vaguely a friend of the family by now, didn’t even have time to leave in between), so they will soon be coming in at night to eat food and chat and possess various household objects, and there are just two adults and two elementary school kids on the lot (and six gravestones and therefore potential ghosts), and things are relatively simple.
Too simple, in some sense; the family has enough liquid cash and random income sources that it seems like no one has to actually ever get a job unless it’s required for an aspiration, and everyone’s moods are always pretty high except for a few days after the prior generation dies of old age.
But it’s a very soothing sort of world to spend time in and watch and give little non-urgent instructions to.
I‘ve also been playing WoW a bit, but it’s really boring now and I tend to doze off over it. I’ve tried to start playing No Man’s Sky again, but I dunno meh. Similarly for Spore. And Elite Dangerous’s bizarre controls still keep me from bothering to go back in there.
What else? Lots of books! And work! And Manhattan and things! But this is getting longish, so I will try to remember how to “post” it.
Thanks for following along! This was fun, I’ll try to do it again soon (“soon”).
… composing a really tiny weblog post, from the iPad, using the special wordpress iPad app (“app”), rather than the web page via Safari.
It works better! Which isn’t surprising, but… shouldn’t safari have worked right in the first place?
Back in the old days of (wow what was it even called?) the special quasi-HTML just for cellphones, I opined that it would be short-lived, because cellphones would just get smart enough to do normal HTML; and I was pretty much right.
It’s more complex for “apps” of course, they aren’t just about being lighter weight, but also about being friendlier, better-behaved. But still, why not just have the website work?
So we are going to experiment with a WordPress-type weblog for at least a bit, to see if in fact we post more often and/or get other benefits which more than offset whatever costs (costs?) or disadvantages or downsides (downsides!) there turn out to be.
The original weblog will of course remain there in all of its glory until the heat death of the universe, or other similar event. (If this WordPress thing doesn’t work out, I might go back over there and weblogify over there again; or I might do something else; who knows!)
I will fiddle around with the (what’s the word?) template or whatever here until I like it enough, and then I will put up a post to the original weblog, pointing to this place here.
ceoln 