Adventures du jour…
The hurricane has majorly disrupted my sense of what damn day it is. IT’S SUNDAY.
This morning, no massive headaches, but some minor ones of the same flavor: sinus aches, pain up the back of the neck and the base of the skull. The muscles feel softer, just as the traps did when I first figured out how to release them (and still do). The neck muscles aren’t as soft and pliable, but they are better than they were. They feel achy. I seriously think that rebalancing my head on my neck must be a Big Stinking Deal as far as those muscles are concerned. The knot on the back of my neck was less pronounced by yesterday evening, and is almost gone now. I put my hands back there and I feel like I’m missing a body part.
Yoga: worked a lot on the lower back stuff, which feels like I’m unrolling something. Like, the types of bones that are there should prevent any kind of compaction or curling, other than the normal front-back tilting of the hips, but that’s not what it feels like. I looked it up online to see if anyone was feeling the same way, but “unrolling the spine” demonstrates several types of back arches, and that’s not what I mean. I don’t know how to explain it.
Anyway, unrolling the spine felt good this morning. I felt fresher.
Walks: Everyone was friendly and chatty this morning, whether I wanted them to be or not. I had to give one guy the brush-off, but nothing serious. I talked to a guy about a neighbor’s dog, another guy about whether or not I was going for a walk (“Going for a walk, are ya?” “New street every day.”), and a third guy about who got to give way to whom on the bridge, the sort of thing where you try to out-polite each other. The brush-off guy looked like he was doing the pimp version of the walk of shame, if that makes sense. No, buddy, I do NOT need to stop and talk to you; you make my stomach nervous.
While on the walk I pondered AI shit: I feel like the process I’ve observed the AI using to produce images is, on a macro level, the same sort of process that I use to create things.
1. Take stuff in.
2. The stuff cross-pollinates itself in my subconscious.
3. I have to create something to some sort of prompt.
4. I grab the prompt, toss in some stuff that seems related on a conscious level, and make stuff.
5. The subconscious stuff bubbles up through the project.
I was talking to a potential client about an approach I’d love to take with writing about AI, which is to teach people how to treat AI as less of a secretary and more of an oracle. What surprising-yet-applicable things can it come up with? What are the best ways to elicit those surprises? I feel like I’m wrapping my mental hands around the problem with Midjourney; I really want more access to play with different tools that are working on the same level to see if I can make AIs produce those elegant surprises.
I got to talk to Jamie on Zoom today (yay!) and got her to sanity check next steps on business stuff. I have a personal meltdown at making the tiniest adjustments. Edging toward success means walking through the black swamp muck of relationships designed to punish me for making the other person feel insecure. So even the smallest shift feels like one of those yoga-type adjustments that leaves me with horrific headache but also feels better once the muscles are reset.
Food stuff: I made chili with the meat from the Great Freezer Bag Experiment of 2022. The chicken thighs, in particular, had stayed so frozen that they hadn’t thawed, then refrozen into a block. They were still separate. Anyway, cooked the unholy shit out of chicken and mooshy chorizo, added tomato products, spices (including pumpkin pie spice, nyaa), chocolate, alcoholic root beer, black beans, and vegemite. I assure you that you don’t get to have any. My only regret is not having any chipotles on hand.
Writing stuff: mainly cycling back through the last chapter (one of the Mr. Assassin ones) to make sure I hit the points I needed to hit. As often happens with Mr. Assassin, he brought up some of the Goob’s backstory that I hadn’t thought through. OH BOY. The psycho cousin brought up something I hadn’t thought about before, too; multi-level marketing would be the perfect tool to hide illicit black market activity. I looked it up; of course some fuckwad had already done it:
“Nxivm founder Keith Raniere has been sentenced to 120 years in prison for his role in an offshoot of the organization in which women were treated as sex slaves and branded with his initials.”
Every time I think I’m going over the top on this story, I discover that I’m reaaaaallly not.
On characters + yoga:
I feel like having my goob character work on head adjustment stuff was both useful and revealing. Useful: I now know how to unkink the knot at the back of my neck. Revealing: I figured out that I have a type of story that I REALLY like. I don’t know what to call it, other than something like “head, heart, guts.”
One example. There was a goofy kid’s cartoon that Ray used to watch on Cartoon Network called Ed, Edd, n Eddy that I really liked: rough art style, three characters constantly at each others’ throats, very offbeat humor with characters who are unabashedly weird. There’s a guy who has a pet plank (versus, say, a pet rock).
One of the characters was the superego/head character; one was an ego/heart character; one was an id/guts character. (Not that superego and head, etc., exactly line up. But they did for that particular cartoon.) Another example, my most recent one, is Yuri On Ice!!! Victor’s the head; Yuri is heart; Yurio is guts.
Some people like some form of the Hero’s Journey; I particularly like stories where there are Three Characters Who Must Get Along in some format or other.–I suspect that I’m always searching for stories about how to resolve this feeling that various aspects of myself don’t quite work together well. I often feel disconnected.
At any rate, after the head-adjustment thing, I realized that Mr. Assassin is the guts, Goth Girl is the heart, and the Goob is the head. If I’d had to guess before I did the head-adjustment thing, I would have said that they were all ornery cusses who didn’t line up in that pattern at all. None of them fit logically. But at this point I know them well enough to say that I was simply mistaken about what a “heart” character was like, or a “guts” one. Shouldn’t Batman be the intellectual of the bunch? NO, as it turn out. At any rate, they know who they are and where they belong.
It also occurs to me that it’s kind of like the Transformers when the different robots assemble into one big mega-robot, a gestalt character with an emergent personality and powers. (I can’t remember the name of that character at the moment, which shames me.) I’m not allowing anything supernatural or futuristic in the story, though. So no mega-characters in this one.