This post is going up a little late and largely unedited because I ran into a few hiccups during my blog transfer process. Well, technically it is the Domain transfer that ran into issues, but I spent six hours on Saturday doing the whole blog transfer thing and there were plenty of hiccups in that process, so I’m comfortable generalizing. The thing is, since I own the domain broken-words.com, I want to continue using it at my new host, but that means transferring the domain between difference domain services. It’s a thing you can do, but the domain service that WordPress .com uses is incredible obtuse and difficult to use since there’s two places you can edit settings but each place only lets you edit certain settings. Which means that the transfer I attempted to do before leaving Wisconsin for Thanksgiving failed since the step-by-step guide I was following actually skipped a bunch of important steps. Turns out that the dirtbaggery of WordPress .com extends to trying to leave their service (who woulda thought?). So, while I have already gotten my blog set up at the new place, it’ll be undergoing some maintenance over the next few days, when the domain transfer finally goes through. I don’t want keep posting to a site that I’m going to have to potentially do a lot of work on, so I’m going to take a few more days off from posting (this next week), build up my buffer again (it shrank further because last week’s cleaning and then travel left me no spoons or even time for writing), and spend a little time making sure my new website is set up the way I want it to be.
Continue readingAutomattic
My Website And I Are Both Travelling This Holiday Week
Well, I’m finally on the verge of getting four whole blog posts ahead [well, I was close… this week’s cleaning has crashed into my exhaustion, so I’ve done little beyond making my apartment nice and clean so far]. I’ve managed to slowly build up a three-post buffer (this post is maintaining that, not building on it, but I’ve got a topic and everything picked out for the next one and enough time to get it done today [this was incorrect]), but I’ve got a bit of a mix-up coming what with US Thanksgiving and visiting with my sister and our sibling. Which means this is the last post for this week since I’ll be taking tomorrow and Friday off to spend time with my family and not lose the buffer I’ve been painstakingly building these last few weeks. It’s been a real busy week, as I’m writing this, so I haven’t been able to make much progress on the goals I’ve set out for myself in last week’s post. I have spent some time doing research for where to host my blog and I expect that, by the time you’re reading this, I’ll have most of that set up or at least figured out. I’ve only got a couple more weeks until my current plan on WordPress .com expires and I’m sticking by my decision to not given them any more of my money, even if my mind has been wavering. It’s not easy to go to self-hosting and I’m already so tired, so burned out, and so low on energy to do anything at all, so making the process of blogging any more difficult or complicated than it already is might just leave me unable to keep up with it’s demands. I mean, right now, I’m barely able to balance work and blogging on top of getting some amount of necessary rest in my evenings, so more steps aren’t going to make it any easier…
Continue readingEvery Time I Think Things Are Calming Down, A Rich Asshole Shows Up To Ruin Something
Every time I think the internet is going to calm down and I can maybe figure out some kind of plan for what I’m going to do once I’ve gotten enough sleep for complex thought and proper long-term planning, a new bit of bullshit breaks. To be completely honest, I figured that the guy running Automattic, that owns WordPress .com and Tumblr, and who also runs the WordPress Foundation (which owns and maintains the trademarks on WordPress and does some oversight on the open-source WordPress project), was at least some kind of asshole give the way that WordPress and Tumblr are doing their damnedest to sell user data to shitty plagiarism machines, but I really underestimated how much of an asshole he is. Turns out he’s allegedly trying to extort another company that he recently called out, threatening that he’d go “scorched earth” if they didn’t give in to his demands for changes to their business model or some kind of financial support. Reading some of these exchanges is absolutely wild and I’m really not sure how to feel about all of this, considering my plan to leave WordPress .com was to set up the open-source WordPress .org software on a different host. I’d even begun to do a bit of research about what hosts I could turn to, when the time came to make the change, and have bookmarked the research some of my friends on Cohost did for their own purposes. Now, I’m not as certain.
Continue readingThe End Of An Era: I’ve Sworn Off National Novel Writing Month
You ever have one of those mornings where you wake up, casually decide to blast your eyeballs with some blue light courtesy of your phone in order to wake up more quickly, and then immediately regret every decision you’ve made in the short time you’ve been conscious because the first thing your brain comprehends in the day is some completely unexpected and emotionally destructive news? That was me on Labor Day, when I woke up and learned that the organization behind National Novel Writing Month had not only decided to officially allow LLMs and “AI writing tools” to be legitimate sources of text for their various month-long writing events but also tried to get ahead of anyone calling them on this bullshit by saying in the same statement that not allowing LLMs and these “writing aids” is both classist and ableist. Which is also bullshit. The whole thing is complete and utter bullshit. How the hell does an organization built around the idea of encouraging people to write not only allow text that wasn’t written (no LLM writes text, it generates a complex version of autocomplete) but allows it using tools built off of stolen writing? And, to top it all off, it turns out that a likely reason they’re taking this stance is that one of their major sponsors for the year is one of those now-allowed “AI writing aid” tools! One of the tolls built from ChatGPT and an ever-increasing amount of stolen work! It’s absolutely staggering.
Continue readingThree Years Of Blog Posts
It has been (almost exactly) three years since I started posting to this blog again. The first post officially went up on August 4th, 2021, but I’d begun writing posts the week prior, setting up my “write the posts one week ahead of them going up” plan so I could focus on my editing skills and the delayed gratification of working ahead of my deadline rather than right up to it. Now, it is three years later and though I’ve down to five posts a week and am not posting any more creative writing work (poems, stories, etc) on my WordPress .com page since those fuckers are still willing to sell my data without compensating me (using a setting that is on by default, the absolute worst way they could put in a setting for this shit), I’m still going strong. I’ll admit I’m struggling to keep these posts written a week ahead of time, but I can mostly keep it up and the days I fall behind aren’t really a big deal since that’s usually a result of me being so busy that my brain was too tired to actually participate in writing something. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to write moderately interesting blog posts without using your brain, but nothing good has ever come from it for me. Better to take breaks and rest without recrimination than to try and fail to produce something even modestly interesting. Which is a lesson I’ve only just learned over the course of these past three years, actually, so clearly this version of the whole blogging thing is working out pretty well for me.
Continue readingThe Creeping Death Of Public Creativity
Blogging–and most creative work, if I’m being honest–feels like an exercise in futility these days. Even putting aside all my doubts about my small audience, my questions about my own motivations for blogging (and the work I have to do in order to make sure that I’m not obsessing over numbers instead of focusing on honing my craft and expressing myself), and the constant grind of fighting against my own mental health and worsening burnout in order to continue creating, I still think the rising theft of creative work would be an existential threat to my public writing. I’d still write privately, of course, no matter what. I’m too much of a storyteller to ever stop telling stories, be it in tabletop games or in my own creative writing, but no part of me needs to post things publicly. I like posting things publicly. I like seeing that people are reading what I’ve written. I like having this level of public accountability. But I absolutely don’t need it. So it is incredibly difficult for me to keep writing posts for this blog as I slowly work on finding an alternative hosting platform and figure out what shape I want my blog to take on that platform. Normally I’d say something like “it would be really easy to ignore this and just carry on,” but it’s actually not easy this time. This time, I can barely make myself focus on my writing for more than a couple minutes at a time and my buffer, a staple of the last two and a half years of writing, has started to slip as I lose the energy and willpower required to push myself to write when I’m feeling worn down.
Continue readingI’m Choosing To Hold A Grudge This Time
While I wrote this a day after I wrote last week’s post, this one got to marinate for a week before it went up and while I didn’t change much beyond my usual editing (grammar, spelling, word choice: the basics), writing this without the sense of urgency inherent to last week’s post means I spent more time thinking and less time reacting. There’s a time and a place for reacting, of course. We should respond with outrage when something awful happens and the corresponding urgency should drive us to act when we otherwise might not. That said, that initial reaction or series of actions doesn’t mean that we’re done with it. We can’t blow up and then move on because that will let companies like Automattic get away with bullshit like creating an opt-out system for actively selling the media created and shared by their customers and userbase because they’ll know they can just ride out the first reaction and do whatever they wanted to do when everyone has moved on. After all, it would be incredibly easy to take more than they want and pretend to be magnanimous and caring when they dial it back down to what their actual goal was. It’s basic negotiating strategy, to aim high and then slowly work your way down to what you actually wanted. So I’m going to keep this particular topic fresh in my mind so long as I continue to use a service I paid for that is now trying to wring extra money out of me by doing whatever they can to benefit from the exploitative and extractive actions of Venture Capital funded plagiarism algorithms.
Continue readingNo 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.