Please, if you know the answer, tell me. I’m desperate. As of writing this, it has been almost a week since I finished this momentous task, this three hundred forty hour undertaking, and nothing compares to the soaring highs and wonderful emotional lows (that were also soaring highs, let’s be real, because I love a tear-jerker) of Veilguard. I’ve tried playing other video games, things I set aside to brute-force my way through Inquisition, and none of them seem fun. I’ve tried to read, but my mind can’t focus on something that doesn’t feel as real as Veilguard did. I tried taking a night off, to do something other than play a Dragon Age game, and yet I found myself unable to focus on anything but thoughts of how nice it would be to start a new file. Nothing compares to the depth of character and delight I felt while blissfully escaping into this latest Dragon Age game, so how can I tear myself away from the fresh character I made on my second night after beating the first one? How can I deny myself what my entire being desires so deeply and clearly?
Continue readingWriting
November Without A Writing Project
Today is the first day of November. The eighth, as you’re reading this, I guess [it got bumped due to election bullshit]. Normally, I’d be deep in my feelings about my writing challenge for the year or how I had to set it aside due to personal issues happening in my life. This year, though, is different. I’ve already written about how National Novel Writing Month has compromised their integrity in a number of unforgivable ways since the start of 2023’s NaNoWriMo, so I’m not going to rehash everything in too much detail, but suffice it to say that they sold out to Large Language Model garbage (still masquerading as “AI”), decried pushback against allowed generated text by saying that not allowing it would be classicist and ableist, doubled-down, and then fell apart as people withdraw from supporting the organization. All of which is terrible but doesn’t come close to the harm done that came to light in 2023–NaNoWriMo hadn’t been protecting its youngest writers, allowing them to be groomed by people who were representing the organization in location-based chats and writing groups, not doing anything about it until the community blew up about it in the middle of November that year. Both of these events were real shitshows, to put it lightly, and a lot of people, myself, included, have sworn off participating in any future NaNoWriMo events. I stand by the decision, of course, but I do find myself missing the excitement and distraction the yearly writing challenge usually brings me. I wasn’t aware of how much I relied on it to buoy my spirits as fall and its attendant early nights come crashing down on the Midwest.
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 readingSaving My Inspiration For Later
It has been a long time since I was last struck by inspiration. Most of the time, when an idea “comes to me,” it’s the result of me chewing something over in the back of my mind for a long time before coming up with whatever thought or idea will form the center of what thing I’m going to produce. Poetry, short stories, a novel draft, all these blog posts… None of them are the result of inspiration even if I’ve often claimed to have been “inspired” by something. Even those times, I came up with an idea after thinking about some media or idea for a while. Which might sound a lot like inspiration, but I would define inspiration as something external that plops a fully-formed idea into your head. All of my “inspired by” ideas are a result of my internal processing coming up with an idea based on thinking about something else. It feels like quite a thin hair to split, which is why I haven’t written about this before and am somewhat hesitant to write about it not (mostly because it doesn’t much matter to me which side of the split hair you’re on since it’s all a part of the writing process and the only person the precise definition of this stuff matters to is the person doing the defining as a part of their process). Still, this feeling of actual, true inspiration is rare enough that I feel compelled to say something about it now that I’ve been on the receiving end of it for the first time since I set up an online D&D campaign back in 2019.
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 readingDaylight Saving Time Is Bullshit And Other Monday Thoughts
Daylight Saving Time is back in the US and continues to be some absolute bullshit. My entire rhythm is fucked up. You’d think that, with how messed up my sleep schedule already is, that I’d be a bit less troubled by other disruptions. You’d think wrong. I’m just as susceptible to the disruption of having the sun’s position relative to only my external clocks suddenly change. So, despite getting a decent amount of sleep over the weekend, I’m still starting this week with less than I’d like thanks to having my sleep cut short by an hour on Sunday and then struggling to fall asleep later that same day. I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to do some course correction as I go through this week, but I’ve got a lot of potential events on my calendar for this week (mostly in the evenings [and none of which wound up happening]), so there’s no knowing how long its going to take for me to sort this out [the answer was still “all week” though]. After all, a lot of my struggles around getting to bed on time are a result of trying to make some time to enjoy myself or play some video games in the evening and I might be even shorter on that time than usual. Plus, thanks to all those events, I have to make sure I’m getting out of bed on time so I can actually get my usual ten-hour days in before I have to leave work for my evening events, which means my usual release valve of “sleep in a bit” isn’t available until Friday at the earliest and even then I’ll want to avoid being too late to work on Friday since I don’t think I’ll be able to bank any extra time this week to balance out any days that have to end early.
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 readingThe 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 readingThe End Of National Novel Writing Month 2023
Well, National Novel Writing Month is basically over at this point. Sure, there’s still a bit over a day and a half left before it ends and I’m certain there are plenty of people working their butts off to wrap their goal up in whatever time they’ve got left (I used to be a regular member of this club), but I’m pretty much done. I’ve got all the time I need to finish and, depending on when you’re reading this, I might have already finished. I was just over three thousand words away from being doing when I started writing this blog post and that’s an achievable amount of writing for a day where I’ve suddenly got more time than I expected because, say, a Dungeons and Dragons game I was planning to play in got canceled just two hours before it was supposed to happen. So now I’ve got all kinds of time and while I might use some of it to run an errand, make myself a nice dinner, or finish a normal day’s writing early so I can enjoy some time to myself, I might also just push through the end of this month’s goal so I can stop writing it down as something to do on my to-do list.
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