Adventures of the day!
This morning: another wallop of a headache, but it went away relatively quickly. Shoulders tense but not terrible; knot in the back of the neck still gone; hips tender but not terrible.
Yoga: I determined my hips were the issue this morning and focused on them, including using the foam roller on my lower back. Once again, the feeling of unrolling to find extra length from my waist down is just weird. Very sore back there, so I put the foam roller away. It seems like it’s better not to use the foam roller to stretch areas that are the kind of tense that gets worse when you try to relax.
Mr. Assassin wanted to come out this morning. He was STRESSED about the scene he’s in. “What happens next? Do you not know how terrible this is for me?” I told him that worse was to come. He wanted to walk. Very fast and a lot. He’s the same height as I am, but thinks he’s shorter, which struck me (again). I had him walk beside me for a while but he got restless and almost wandered into “you’re not paying attention” territory. I told him that every time he wanted me to pay 100% attention to him, he had to pay 100% attention to me–that’s just how that works.
He kind of snapped out of his deep-stress mode at that point and decided that we could just walk Really Fast in order to burn off steam. I probably gave people a lot of resting bitch face today as he got himself together.
After a while we chatted. His big concern was how to get the unconscious person in the back seat to safety, without endangering anyone by risking the Psycho Cousin coming into contact with them unprepared, or going anywhere public like a hospital. We talked out a solution and he was relieved about it; it also just so happens to point toward characters I was noodling around with for the next section of the story.
The rest, he thinks he can cope with on the fly. But getting that person to safety really spun him up.
After that we talked about my business stuff. A lot of what hampers me is a fear of becoming more public about things. (I know, it really makes no sense.) I’d talked about it with Jamie yesterday, but it must have been still on my mind, because he brought it up.
“Look, what you have is a situation where you have the time and capability to explore interesting business ideas. If you had come to me and asked for me to be your angel investor, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it.”
“Me? Why?”
“Aside from being my writer,” [insert sly look here], “you’re in a good place to translate how to conceptualize AIs. The plan you talked over with Jamie is about as crude as a crayon drawing, but it’s not wrong. Investors look for things to invest in that not only profit them, but help create the world they want to see. Follow that potential and see what happens.”
“Also, you’re an angel investor? Since when?”
“I don’t work for free,” he pointed out (re: the assassinations). “There’s a lot of laundering going on, but I have a lot of money invested in various places. I can even spend some of it on interesting projects. So the next time you start tearing yourself up over whether you ‘deserve’ an opportunity, just tell yourself that I’m funding you. Just because it’s a lie doesn’t mean it’s not a useful thing to tell yourself.”
“Do you ever listen to your own advice?”
“Not if I can help it.”
The rest of the walk was mainly companionable silence. We agreed that Goth Girl was on the edge of having issues soon (she’s been pushing herself) and that the only way out of the situation they’re all in is to get through it.
I talked to a potential client about writing AI articles today, using the AI that their company is building. We didn’t really come to an agreement about what the pay would be like; it’s going to really depend on how well the AI works and how much of the writing SHE can do at this point (they identify her as female). I told them my hourly rate that I was shooting for, though, and that went okay. They’re going to get me a copy of her to play with; I’ll be documenting how it goes and either get paid for that as articles or be posting it on my own. We’ll see.
I WANT TO PLAY WITH ALL THE THINGS.
I usually have one print book that I read, in addition to everything I read via Kindle or my phone (like webcomics). Right now it’s Jorge Luis Borges. In my opinion, if you haven’t read Borges’s Fictions and you’re in AI, you’re missing out on a great resource. I’m working through Selected Nonfictions now. The early pieces at the beginning of the book are abstruse but gorgeous.
A quote (“After Images”);
“We must make manifest the whim transformed into reality that is the mind. We must reveal an individual reflected in the glass who persists in his illusory country (where there are figures and colors, but they are ruled by immutable silence) and who feels the shame of being only a simulacrum obliterated by the night, existing only in glimpses.”
–I feel like AI is a great tool for making manifest the whim transformed into reality that is the mind.
