Adventures du jour!
Tropical Storm Nicole is a bit of a fizzle, but WOW am I loving sitting here all day by the patio with the door open, listening to the wind and the rain. The air is fresh and cool.–You are welcome to laugh at me next summer while I’m complaining about the heat. But this is lovely Portlandesque weather.
Yesterday the gray weather put me in a weird mood, quasi-depressed; I eventually had a cup of coffee to actually speed myself up. That does NOT happen often; usually it slows me down. I had the coffee at 5p and fell asleep at eleven or something, no issues.
I was tackling: exploring a new AI (the word-based one), editing the chapter I was worried would be Too Much, chatting with a bunch of people, clearing out emails, and bouncing around. I let myself get a bit spun up, not stressed out about anything but moving faster than usual. (When I type it sounds like a blur; I’m constantly moving; I can react to things very quickly; I can actually switch tasks quickly for once.) I *usually* overdo it and end up feeling hungover and drained the next morning.–I did wake up in the middle of the night last night to down a bottle and a half of water. Completely dried out. I always keep water by the bed for times like this, although I rarely remember WHY. I just know that if I don’t, bad things happen.
AI:
Midjourney was down last night and is still moving at the speed of NOPE today. I am dying of envy, seeing other people’s posts.
I’m also playing with an AI by a potential client on the marketing side. They’re hoping the AI will have genuine insights into business and other matters. I’m trying to test its level of intelligence, making extensive notes as I do so. The controls are awkward, but eventually I got it to upload a copy of Borges’s “The Circular Ruins,” a short story about a man who creates an artificial son using the power of a god named “Fire.”–I think everyone working in higher-level tech and intellectual fields should make an attempt to read Borges; he’s intelligent, wrote some fundamentally insightful fiction and essays about what it’s possible to know and think, and was both a poet and a freaking smartass. Just this lovely, dark, dry humor.
At any rate, I fed the AI the Borges short story, figuring it would be complex enough to force the AI to fail to extract a lot of meaning from the story and therefore helping me understand how it was currently analyzing the material. (Things generally tend to be easier to pick apart when they’re broken.) On the one hand, I succeeded; the AI’s attempt to summarize the story sounded like a high school English teacher having a mental and moral breakdown. On the other hand, if I look at the other parts of the AI’s analysis, it impressively close.
The AI figured out that the piece was fiction rather than nonfiction, that fiction should make the reader feel something, and that it was possible for fiction to play with or manipulate the reader. Pretty cool! And it showed a level of analysis that was leaps and bounds past other AIs that I’ve played with (although I haven’t been able to “teach” any of the others about Borges). There was no genuine insight to be had, but I can see something more closely resembling insight happening pretty soon.–I’ll have to try to put that into clearer words, but it felt like the AI mostly just needed to take the extra step of analyzing the statements it was generating as part of its analysis, instead of just analyzing the text it was analyzing, if that makes sense.—the AI was just missing the step of standing back and assessing one’s own opinion, as it were, which is often where insight comes from.
Writing:
I went back over the scene that had me in fits, having determined that I was going to cut as little as possible.—I ended up writing another 1600 words to add context. I’m just going to trust whatever beta readers and hopefully Mia say at this point. I think the scene is long but valuable.
Nobody has actually asked me, “But you’re so smart? How did you let yourself get abused? Are you sure it was really abuse? I mean, it wasn’t like in the movies? Maybe it doesn’t count?” But I ask myself that all the time, and I finally found ways to define how it happened.—People do say, “I don’t understand how that happens,” but they never address me as though I were an idiot. Which is an act of grace somehow.
So how does someone train you to ignore everything your body and mind and spirit say is creepy and wrong and just give them control over your life? Wait, wait…let me tell you! In the book, anyway.
Although if you’re reading this and you need to vent or you need an answer like that, message or email me and I’ll tell you. Otherwise you’ll probably have to wait for the book. I’ll need to be drunk when people first read the book, though.
Yoga:
Because it was raining and I didn’t feel like walking in the rain, I did all the yoga. And the foam roller. My legs were shaking by the time I was done. I read more of the yoga anatomy book. I’ve had people tell me all kinds of things in the (admittedly cheap/free and perhaps suspect) yoga classes I’ve taken about what actions to take when they didn’t come naturally. “Just relax your shoulders!” “Why are you so tense? Just relax!” THIS book is actually helpful, helping me think through the different actions that need to happen to effectively relax my shoulders: the joints at both ends of the clavicles, placement of the shoulder blades, arm sockets, spine. “Just relax your shoulders” my ass.
Other cool projects continue apace; I had a good leap on one of them this morning. I bugged Ray about doing the shirt art and what she wanted to get paid for it–I’m hoping this will be a good excuse to talk about ongoing profits vs. one-off jobs. Also I want a shirt with roses with eyeballs on it. I still have to type up the song. I spent a good bit of today handwriting all over that graphic novel. It continues to be quite satisfying.
Mood:
I woke up this morning and felt wonderfully secure today. I’ve felt unmoored since I found out the ex wasn’t really the person he said he was, and probably long before then. Not that I’ve been completely without security on an emotional level; I’ve had Ray as a source of love since the day she was born. Even when she was a little bitty thing, she was an overspill of constant affection. I told her yesterday that I didn’t know if I’d have made it without her. But today? I just feel settled. Happy. It’s good.