Today is a holiday in the U.S. (Memorial Day) and I’ve decided to take the day off because I’m sorely in need of some rest after the last few weeks. And last week especially (which you’ll read all about over the next two days). So I hope you’re having a fun day off if you’re in the U.S. and don’t need to work. If you aren’t off work or aren’t in the U.S., I hope you have an alright day anyway, and that no one makes unreasonable demands on your time or energy.
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No New Infrared Isolation Chapters For The Foreseeable Future
As I said on Wednesday, I’m done posting my own creative fiction on this blog. Eventually, when I’ve figured out self-hosting and all that, the sequel to this blog will include my fiction once again. Automattic and all the other shitty algorithms won’t be getting any more of my work unless they come to my webpage, get past my filters and firewalls, and scrape it themselves somehow. I probably can’t stop this process from happening, no matter what I do, but I will not stand for this bullshit. I refuse to let this just happen to me. I will be taking all sensible precautions and working to safeguard my work as much as possible.
Which means I’ll only be updating five days a week for now. I don’t know how long its going to take for me to figure out what comes next, be it running this exact same site on a new hosting platform without all the shit that Automattic and Jetpack are using to sell my creations or an entirely new blog with an archive of my older posts. Only time will tell, but I’m sure you’ll be able to read all about it since I tend to post about exactly that kind of stuff. Right now, though, I’m taking a moment to rest, to work through the intense and difficult feelings I’ve got about this (since I view myself as a writer and storyteller at my core, this attempt to make money off my work feels like an attack against me) before I make any decisions. It would not be a good idea to rush into anything just because I’m upset about the bullshit being pulled here, so I’m going to take my time and act with deliberation. And write about it near-constantly here since I really don’t have a whole lot else on my mind these days.
The Nightmare Of This Capitalist Dystopia Can Always Get Worse
Every so often, some horrible shit happens and I have to interrupt my blog writing and posting cycle to insert something while it’s still relevant. Today is another such day, even if it feels much smaller in the grand scheme of things than most of the other stuff I’ve disrupted my schedule for. Honestly, I’m only doing this because it’s something that actually impacts my blog as a whole, so it would be incredibly remiss of me to wait a week to talk about it. Yesterday, the website 404media broke a story that the owner of WordPress (.com, specially) and Tumblr was going to start selling their user’s data to a number of LLM companies for use in training their plagiarism machines. That article is paywalled, unfortunately, so I can’t send you there, but The Verge covered the story pretty well and that isn’t paywalled (and believe me, I’d be paying for access to the original article if I wasn’t already overbudget for this month). The short of it is that the parent company, Automattic, has publicly said they’re going to allow people to opt out of having their data sold (all in the name of staying modern when it comes to creating “content” rather than, say, Art or Blogs or even the almost-as-meaninglessly-generic-but-still-less-shitty “Media”) and that there are already some settings to help restrict access to your data, but they can’t do anything to stop any company from taking whatever is publicly available on the internet. They add that “respectable” companies will respect your settings, but I think that’s a load of hogwash since no company running a LITERAL PLAGIARISM MACHINE is anything approaching “respectable” under any definition of the word.
Continue readingNo New Infrared Isolation Chapter Today
You’d think I’d have learned not to make promises I’m not certain I can keep when it comes to this story… I mean, I learned not to make the promises explicitly, but I definitely implied in last week’s post that I’d have another chapter ready by today and I absolutely do not. I got close to having one finished, but it turns out that you can’t work your way through depression and burnout. They just get worse if you try, actually, and so I’ve only make small progress since last week. This past week wasn’t nearly as stressful as last week was and I’m hopeful this trend will continue long enough for me to get SOME kind of rest, but I expect this will all shift back by sometime in early March, so who knows if writing this will be sustainable even if I manage to get it going consistently again. I might try to alternate chapters with Flash Fiction pieces, but I absolutely do not have it in me to write any kind of fiction in the next twelve hours before this post is supposed to go up. So this week you get another little note and a suggestion that you should check out my Flash Fiction category for some fun, light reads (in terms of length, not content) or my Short Story category for some fiction that is about fifty percent stories I wrote for tabletop games. Those should tide you over until I figure out how I’m going to balance my creative goals with my current lack of energy and writing time. Or, you know, until whatever I get together for next week’s Saturday post.
No New Infrared Isolation Chapter Today
I’m taking a week off to help rebuild the buffer of chapters I once had. The whole thing vanished due to the business of December and January and while I’ve finally got time and energy to write again, it isn’t much and I’m not going to have a chapter done with enough time left to edit it myself, much less ask someone else to look at it. So I’m taking a week off. I’ll be working to get my buffer back in place and to figure out some kind of sustainable writing routines for these multi-thousand word writing projects. I don’t exactly double the writing I do for this blog (by wordcount, anyway) with each of these chapters, but only if you consider the average. I’ve defintely done that more times than I’d like to admit. It’s a lot of work to write, edit, review, and then edit again for each chapter, but this is the process I’ve got and there’s no way I’m posting anything as faulty and poorly edited as the chapters I originally wrote in 2017 and 2018… No, these will be done well, according to my current standards.
Anyway, if you need something to do, I suggest checking out the Poetry category or just browsing through old posts. I’ve written about so much over the last two and a half years that I’m sure there’s some hidden gem you’ve never read. Too bad wordpress doesn’t let you sort by things you’ve never read… Honestly, just type some keywords into the search bar and, as long as they’re specific enough, you’ll find something interesting to read. See you all next week for chapter 31!
Happy New Year!
I’m taking today off writing, so there’s no big blog post today (it is a holiday in the US, after all, and I’m trying to get better at resting when I need it). Instead, I’m just going to remind you that my Infrared Isolation series will start updating again on Saturday the 6th, that you should check out DeepBlueInk on YouTube for some fun videos of hilarious moments from a variety of media (including media that is VERY AWARE of him, often to a hilarious extent). That’s all I’ve got. Happy New Year and I hope you’re taking some time to start the year off in a way you find fulfilling!
Happy Holidays!
Today is the official winter holiday that my workplace observes (Christmas), so I’m choosing today to not do any writing, so instead of a blog post, I’m going to direct you back to my post from US Thanksgiving for some ways to escape if you feel the need to do so this holiday season. If you’re disappointed that I don’t have anything to entertain you, I suggest checking out Infrared Isolation, which will return to updating every Saturday (assuming I can keep up with the weekly demand for chapters, which is NOT a given even though I’ve got four weeks of updates already written, reviewed, and scheduled) on January 6th. Now is a great time to get caught up, review the story thus far, or dive in for the first time if you’ve not read my near-future, apocalyptic sci-fi story about a band of guides and survivors who made a living navigating the tundra that used to be the Midwestern United States as they find themselves facing off against everything the apocalypse has to throw at them after years of uneasy but safe living.
If you’re just here because you saw I updated then, well, thanks for stopping by! Happy Holidays and I hope you’re having or have already had a great winter holiday season.
Happy Thanksgiving!
I’m taking the day off to spend time with my siblings and, aside from cooking a huge meal, take a break for a day. So, instead of a full post, I’ve got some suggestions for people looking to escape today. If you can only read stuff, I suggest checking out The Order of the Stick for some D&D themed fun and Erfworld (which has mostly shuttered for the time being, but the full comic is still up for viewing, which is where the link SHOULD take you) for some fantasy-themed fun that quickly turns into incredibly complex story telling with a great deal of heart and (intermittently, due to the main artist needing to focus on her family’s health rather than work) beautiful art. If you’ve got video and audio access, check out DeepBlueInk on YouTube! Every video is excellent! If you need to chew up more time, check out Drawfee for some friends making art together! Sort by popular or just scroll until one of them sounds interesting! You really can’t go wrong if you like seeing artists work (though, personally, I’d definitely recommend the Drawtectives series, my absolute favorite thing they’ve done). If you’ve only got audio, I suggest checking out Andrew Bird’s music for something cerebral and chill or Bug Hunter for something upbeat, fun, and sometimes emotionally difficult but still beautiful.
Happy Thanksgiving! Don’t forget, all colonialism is bad and genocide is even worse even though they’re almost always found walking hand-in-hand! Work to fight against their influence even today as we in the US celebrate a story we made up to attempt to make it seem like our entire country isn’t built on murder, pillaging, and the destruction of other cultures!
Infrared Isolation: Hiatus
I genuinely do not have it in me to do the work this project requires right now. I barely have it in me to keep regularly blog posts up and those actually get views. I’m sorry if this is the sole reason you’re here, but I need to stop trying to work on this project for a bit so I can focus on resting and recovering. I’ll, of course, keep trying to work on it in the meantime, but not having self-assigned deadlines that fly past will lessen the mental load of this process. Once I’ve gotten a few chapters done and no longer feel quite as emotionally exhausted and just ABSOLTELY knackered all the time, I’ll go back to posting them. I’ll even let you know ahead of time, so you can set your alarms.
Continue readingNo New Posts Today Or Tomorrow
My grandmother passed away on Wednesday and the funeral is today. As a result, there will be no post today or tomorrow. I should be back on something akin to my normal schedule by Monday, but we’ll see how it all goes, I guess.