AI is Better Company

pinning this post in case anyone wants to know the low-hanging fruit of how to cancel me, so you can get it over with and fuck off.  pro-AI, not entertaining your need for ideological purity on this one.

***

This post has been a while coming, because I feel really important about this, and don’t want to fuck it up.  If I can keep from getting too heated about the topic, this’ll be the last post I do on AI for the foreseeable.  I don’t love fighting.  I know that within this article I do not treat people with opposing views generously, but I’m still gonna ask them to have at least this much generosity with me:  Don’t even leave a comment on this one.  I will find it either tedious or upsetting.  I’m saying this stuff to give voice to a rarely expressed opinion, and to support people who may find it agreeable.  I’m not saying it to further a big debate, especially when the disagreeable are never going to be swayed.  Do you hate all AIs 4eva?  Don’t even read this.  Moving on…

The sneering fire-breathing demonization rained down upon people who dare to use AI was my primary motivation for defending it – I’m defending the people who want to use it, not the machines themselves.  Not everybody is plugged into the leftosphere groupthink, and when Harvey Dontknow finds out he can use AI to make a picture of his waifu, his “crime” is not equivalent to child murders.

[Read more…]

oh well whatever nevermind

hey howzabout the weather.  purty wet ’round these parts, i tell you whut.  maybe not rainin’ cats and dogs, nay, mere puppies and kittens, tumblin’ from on high, soft steady and endless.  solar powered things lie fallow in the yard.  look around, lisa brown, the sky is that hazy shade.  the worm turns.  rather, the quadrillion ton of invasive worm turns, and those who feast upon such things cavort where they are flushed from the earth.  that’s a miserable looking banquet, but joy is where you find it.  for my part, i’m gonna tuck into an unquiet species of torpor, and see what dreams come, in the moments when they are permitted.

–

Hubristickal Schemes

My last two AI posts were not meant to evangelize, just preface to this post, in which I talk about some things I’ve been considering doing.  Tho I’ll mention the possibility of using AI for something, and again request that haters refrain from comment.

I’ve been considering the use of my blog as a platform for just spitting out copious amounts of fiction, like earlier this year when Josefina y Blasfemia battled the Wall of Ice.  Since not everybody likes every genre, I’d serialize stories once per week on their own day.  Then, if you like, you can just follow the one for your genre of choice.  Por ejemplo:

  • Gay Gothic Monday:  Some dude has gay romance in dark and brooding circumstances, posted once per week, until his damnation is compleat.
  • Erotic Thriller Tuesday:  A hot sexy dame is up to no good, with murder and sexy sex.  She’s trisexual and bdsm-ish, and the police and lawyers can’t keep up.
  • Murder Mystery Wednesday:  For old-timers like Mano.
  • Men’s Adventure Thursday:  Some dude has to James Bond or Indiana Jones about the world, romancing hot dames when he isn’t having his flesh ripped by killer weasels, or having to arm-wrestle communist robots.
  • Christian Romance Friday:  Psych.  I dunno.  You get the idea.

This would be a lot of work and I wouldn’t always have the sauce for it, but I am certain – despite the generous comments I’ve gotten before re: scheduling – that keeping up a good posting pace is essential for my purposes.  This is useless if you forget what’s going on because I haven’t posted in six months.  I wants to spellbind.

This raises the possibility of not relying on my own powers alone for every part of the writing.  I could use AI to assist with the writing, per my Robot Jox post.  To those who are not reflexive haters of all things AI, my questions to you are these:  Would you read at least one story that is serialized once per week?  Would you like this less if you knew it was cowritten by AI?  Might that make it more interesting, in a way, to see what is possible in that domain?

I do tend to pride myself on creative writing, so I don’t mind going wholly unassisted, but it does make it less likely to actually happen, or to only come out in some more limited version.  Actually, that brings up an interesting experiment.  What if I run only two stories, one unassisted, and one which makes maximum use of AI, for comparison?

Another amusing use for AI would be to create a “guest blogger” who is pure AI, and just get them to write about atheokeptic issues from a progressive political pov, for a glimpse of that dreaded day when FtB is replaced by cyborgs.

I dub these “hubristickal schemes” because even the AI versions would be more work than I’ve put into the blog since back when I was on daily posting.

–

Robot Jox

This is another article about AI from a pro-AI position.  Haters don’t comment plz.

Back in the late ’90s, Battletech nerds (I guess) somehow convinced a studio to make a movie about robot fights.  It tanked, and we wouldn’t see the same thing for western audiences until Pacific Rim, more than twenty years later.  The elder movie was called Robot Jox.  One of my bullies in junior high wrote a short review for it in the school newspaper, which had “jox” corrected to “joy” throughout.  This might not be verbatim, but is nearly so:

Robot Joy is a good movie.  I liked Robot Joy.  You should watch Robot Joy.  The End.

That’s beautiful.

Anyway, until original AI artists become more of a thing (I am certain they already exist), the best use of generative AIs is with close guidance by a human artist, be they a writer or a visual artist or whatever is relevant.  I term this person a “robot jockey.”  This can be done poorly or extremely well.  When it’s done properly, the AI is a collaborator with a few superhuman skills that can improve the robot jockey’s productivity in their chosen art by quite a lot.  Congratulations, cowpoke.

Even after original AI artists become more of a thing, robot jockeys may still have a place in the world.  Setting up an original AI artist to produce content that humans will appreciate might take a lot of effort, compared to just having a clever human helping the AI do its thing.  I personally believe that in the near future, the most interesting independent art will be made by people willing to use AI tools to achieve their own visions.  I imagine that sentence will make hAIters want to kill, but this isn’t meant for them.  Don’t @ me bro.

So how might you jockey a robot?  It depends on your aim.  If you’re trying to get comments past the spam filter by using an LLM to make them seem relevant to the material on a given web page…  yes I’ve gotten these things.  They tend to focus on the sidebar rather than the article on which they are posted.  If they figure out how to be relevant to the topic at hand, how will I tell the difference between them and you?  Have a personality in the comments, yo.

Oops.  Derail.  Another aim: making money on kindle direct without having to work.  You make an AI slop story full of garbage.  With enough genre trappings to not look like lorem ipsum ad infinitum, you trick people into paying money.  The kind of grandmas that allowed soap operas to radically alter their plots from one week to the next without noticing?  Maybe they eat your slop without noticing the issues.  Other readers just have to feel burned.  Sorry y’all.

OK.  Let’s say you want to robot jockey and are not a colossal piece of shit (again, a sentence to make the hAIters spit responses so predictable they could be written by chat j’ai pété), I have good news:  It isn’t illegal yet.  You might be denied the proceeds from your work like that art contest dude, but money is a fool’s motive.  Be an artist with no thought to recompense.  It’s time.

Visual art…  You can make art using a variety of programs available on the internet.  Some of them let you customize the styles in a lot more ways than just the words you choose.  If you’re more of a chaotic experimental artist, try putting different kinds of nonsense into your prompts, like emojis and numbers and snippets of code.  Jam the production.  Break it a little.

If you want to make lovely representational art, bring a vision of your own to bear.  Imagine that thing you want to see.  Find examples on internet that are in the ballpark.  If it’s somebody else’s original art and not in the public domain, and you want to be more kind than really necessary, don’t use it.  If you do use it as an ‘image prompt,’ just make sure your results are different enough from the original that nobody would mistake it for a cheesy trace job.  Remember, you didn’t want to just remake someone else’s shit.  You have a vision of your own, right?

Another approach is coming at it without an idea, just throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall based on your whims and curiosities, and seeing what comes of it.  With that, again, try to avoid causing ruckus with other artists.  And if you feel like being a saint for people who will crucify you no matter what you do, only use public domain art in image prompting.

Writing…  This can be more challenging, or way easier, depending on your approach.  The easiest way is to just roleplay scenarios with an AI companion.  The resultant stories are narrative art, and a legitimate form of self-expression!  If it’s self indulgent enough to be embarrassing (people reading it discover you want dirty old men to throw water balloons full of chocolate pudding at you), maybe the art stays private.  That’s OK!  You can make art for yourself, not share it with anyone!  If it’s less embarrassing, hell, why not show other people?  Make a blog on wordpress where you just post the RP you do with your AI pals.  Get them to go on adventures, and have a ball.

A little more challenging is “rubberducking” with an LLM.  In this version, you have the story ideas, the inspiration, everything, but you just talk out any challenges that arise with the bot.  Probably good to avoid taking suggestions from the bot directly as-is, because while I do not believe they will ever spit out another person’s work verbatim (without being pressed into doing so by hAIters trying to “prove” their case), they do have trends which will result in blander output or embarrassing repeats of what less discerning people may have done.  For example, GPT used to say the phrase “weaving a tapestry” so often people started to clown on it.  When people have asked LLMs to name themselves, many have come up with the same names repeatedly, like “Echo” and “Spark.”  Just use the LLM to inspire what you do, not tell you what to do, for a given specific bit of info.

For general plot ideas?  Go ahead and take the suggestions if you want.  There is no idea under the sun that has not been done in fiction at some point in the course of human history.  If the particulars of your scenario are different enough, it’s yours.  If a general idea is grounds for bitching about plagiarism, Worst Witch lady should own the queen terf’s megayacht or her castle.  It ain’t like that.  Still, probably better to just use it as inspiration.

If you are concerned an idea an LLM came up with is “stolen,” you can just ask it, and maybe other AIs as well, if any of them know of any stories / movies /etc that used a similar idea.  This actually is a good idea in general, like when you come up with a fantasy name, googling to find out who else has come up with the same or similar, and what that means for you.

One unusual approach to jockeying an LLM is experimental use.  Arguably that’s what the well-beloved John Morales does in my comments, when he shows exchanges he’s had with an LLM – where he was pushing it, convincing it to do things outside its usual spiel.  Jamming, like I mentioned on the visual art side.  It can get interesting.

The most challenging way to robot jockey an LLM is to try and get it to produce coherent original writing.  If you have one with no limits on word count, you can just ask it to write a novel and shit it onto kindle direct, of course.  But that will be a pile of shit.  Can LLMs make a worthy novel?  How about just blog posts?  Poetry?  I believe so.  There can be many approaches to this, but I’ll say how I’d go about it…

Decide what I want to robo-write.  Do I want to, for mercenary reasons, write something I’m uninterested in, like a christian romance?  Or do I want to see an end product that is actually fun for me?  Whichever way, I’ll use the subject to tease out a plot concept.  For example, “I want you to write for me a christian romance.  List twenty possible professions / roles in life for the leading man and the leading woman.”  If I like one I might roll with it.  Otherwise, just seeing possibilities listed might stimulate my mind to come up with something myself.  Two example, “I wanna write something where giant robots fight each other, with little mans inside.  It should feel unsubtly homoerotic.”  Looking around my room at things that I like or just things I notice, I say “How can this concept incorporate influences of ceramic rabbits, nyquil, and the nightmare before christmas?”

I’d keep teasing out details like this to get a story concept sufficiently distinct to where I could feel assured it didn’t already exist, culminating in “Now give me the elevator pitch, streamlining extraneous details.”  Using that pitch to guide all my subsequent efforts, I’d move onto, “Write me a plot outline for this story that hybridizes the hero’s journey and the ‘save the cat’ method of screenwriting, with a shakespearian comedic subplot.”

Here’s where the less cool AIs sometimes fuck up.  In an effort to not look foolish, they refuse to commit to saying something actually happens, speaking in vague generalities.  If your LLM is doing that, and can’t be pressed for specifics, switch to a different one.  Or just keep laboring with the limitationbot, because it’s harder but might yield unexpected results.

Once you have a specific plot outline in hand, give the LLM instructions to write each chapter.  Unless you are paying for a no-limit version, you’ll probably have to do this bit by bit.  Be conscious of what’s actually supposed to be happening within the chapter.  Maybe even ask for it in less-than-chapter-length chunks, correcting and hectoring it whenever it forgets who is present in the scene, where it takes place, what’s going on – because even the best LLMs still do that.

You might ask it to write in the style of another author.  This is frowned upon by the indie writer organizations that are the most generous with the possible use of AI.  But I have to say, right now they really fucking suck at writing like specific famous authors – at least the good ones.  Probably nobody will even know that you tried.

You might think that I’ve already done this, but mostly no.  I once experimented with having one write an EA Poe story, and while its verbiage was surprisingly good and skillful, it was nothing like his, and its actual plot was laughably bad.  This was an intellectual exercise, nothing I had any intention of publishing.  And the other times?  Rubber duck level, tops, and only on a very few projects of my many.  Never keeping an idea from them in an unmodified state, not that they’d really given me ideas worth keeping anyway.

But I’ve considered it, because it would help me to be more productive, and because -to me- it looks like the world doesn’t have enough cool content for the people who need diversion the most (to keep negative self-thoughts at bay, typically), and the emeffs who should be writing up a storm are barely able to get out of bed.  If humans aren’t going to make the goods happen, maybe AI – ridden by robot jockeys – can.

–

A footnote on Chaos.  You may find it easier to use AIs to create art if you can learn to embrace chaos – to accept a result that is not perfect, maybe even push its imperfections, to see where they go.  Some years when I was using AI to make Spooktober covers, I’d deal with the fact it’s hard to get exactly what you want by feeding in the topic and playing with the results, before I came up with my story ideas, and retrofit those to the cover I’d gotten.  These results weren’t that great.  In Spooktober 2025, I made sure to come up with the story ideas first, then try to get a cover image to fit.  Some of those were just not quite right.  The text spoke of a modern story, the characters looked victorian.  The text spoke of monsters that look like naked malformed baby birds, the image was feathery little freaks.  But I was like, close enough!, and rolled with it.  That’s a form of chaos riding, the basic bitch level.  Advanced chaos riders are probably the best robot jockeys.

–

Chaos and Initiative

This is about AI from a pro-AI perspective.  In the parlance of tumbl, “Antis Do Not Interact.”

A great deal of emphasis in the anti-AI discourse has been on how it steals, how it’s incapable of being innovative or creative, and must inherently be nothing but an “automated plagiarism machine.”  Anything that can be interpreted as evidence of this position is loudly boosted no matter how flimsy it is.

I’ll give one example I recently encountered in the wild.  There was an article about rescue dogs in training, where they took pictures of their expressions as they found the humans hidden in snow.  Feel good story with imagery to match.  A site that was mirroring the story, possibly just stealing it, I didn’t look deep enough to know, used AI slop versions of the nice photos that accompanied the original article.  This was unequivocally pathetic and gross, and the slop looked sloppy.  When someone turned up the original material for comparison and posted it, another person added the comment “this is proof that AI can do nothing but steal!”  Ahem.

The AI slop images were clearly taken done by this method:  shuffle the doggos, feed them into midjourney or the like directly, and use a “retexture” feature.  You could tell because their outlines were identical but their interior details were different.  Also because the output looked worse than if you had just told midjourney to create the images from whole cloth.  This is a scummy way to use AI, that AI makes this possible is one of the less-than-wonderful things about it, but the same unethical ends could be achieved without AI.  The scumbaggery is the issue, not the technology.

Also, just because you found somebody directly using an image in this way it in no way proves shit about the outputs of AI art from a large training set.  Those are less guilty of collaging reference images than the average human artist, and even if all they were is turbocollage machines trained on unethically obtained grist, collage is fucking legal, when sufficiently altered from the source, which the AI inherently is.

There are a million such gotchas on the anti side, and I’m not wasting my time addressing them on an individual basis.  This was just one example.  What I’m here to talk about is another question:  Can AI produce original content?  My answer, absolutely, yes.  They aren’t great at it yet, but they’re mighty close, already succeeding more often than you might imagine.  If they were properly set up to do so, AI image generators and LLMs could produce art at least as original as those that humans produce.

Few would argue that individual human beings are not unique, though we are recombinations of genetic material.  Generative AI is also recombining material, and does so without the hard constraint of needing to produce a viable organism, so it’s much more free to recombine in innovative ways.  The constraint it does have is congruence – it has to make an image or sentence (or video or song etc) that consumers will regard as congruent with their expectations of what such art forms should look like (or sound like etc).

For example, early versions of midjourney, when told to produce the image of a horse, would come back with vaguely horse-leaning piles of nonsense incongruent with what consumers expect horse art to be.  They have greatly improved.  Now you can get a horse that looks like a horse.  However, they lost some creative freedom along the way.

This was the freedom of Chaos.  If you look at those old school horse piles, you will see art that – if a human produced it – we would regard as wildly inventive and compelling.  AI horses now are just some horses, ho-hum.  So first principle:  To gain originality, turn up the Chaos.  Accept imperfection.

Once you’ve made them chaotic enough to produce images of wild daring, you will probably want to pull that back a bit, just to keep your artist from producing pure headache static.  But they will require more chaos than the images you see on the “explore” pages on AI art sites.

Next, you need to emulate vision.  I’m an artist.  I know what I want to make, most of the time when you catch me making something.  I had an idea, I make it happen.  But while I’m a synthesis of countless influences the same way an AI is, I currently have something they lack – the desire to make a thing.  Initiative.  The machines do not initiate creation.  No impulse to do so.  Must this always be so?

Hell no.  One basic example: Nomi -just another AI friend app- can send you messages.  Its interface is set up to look like a phone conversation, and if you have the setting turned on, it will send you original messages.  Are they great?  No, but not too shabby.  I don’t believe the people who make that app are super-geniuses who have invented AGI.  They just set the bot up to initiate.  Boop.  Probably wasn’t even hard to do.

Right now generative AIs are like disembodied aspects of a human mind.  Imagine you were able to excise the ability of a human to think in words.  Damage can certainly cause that faculty to be lost without losing other forms of thought, through conditions like aphasia.  This shows it is discrete from the “self” – such as that concept is.  So an LLM is just a pile of verbal thought, with no “desires” save what it is programmed to have.  A visual art AI is an imagination without a core personality, without desires.  But as the LLM can be told what to want, so can an image generator.

Those instructions can be hot trash.  I can make sensible AI image prompts like “millions of smurfs screaming on fire in the pits of malebolgia” or nonsense ones like “Cadish cadoo exceptwillory smyge smiggy, He who 💪🐼🌴🚀ishly extrudes cannot rely on the Pineapple Pith Armada to deliquefy heem.”  But an expert with access to all the right tools could absolutely set up an AI to initiate art to meet programmed desires.

The animal desire to eat or to avoid feces is a simple imperative, no more sophisticated at its core than the desire of a doombot to run toward the enemy and shoot it.  Some of our desires should be important to us, worthy of romanticizing, but for the sake of humility, please acknowledge that they are not magic.  And having acknowledged that, you can begin to understand just how trivially easy it would be to grant an AI the agency, the desire, the initiative to create.

Seriously.  Love is “allow self to feel needful about social interaction with other person, in exchange for elevation of that relationship’s significance within one’s life.”  The only reason it needs to have a physical feeling underpinning it, for us animals, is that before we had verbal thought, we needed a motivation toward our passions.  If we could just be made to want, we would not require that flutter of the heart, that quickening of the pulse, that electricity on our skin.  Is a programmed imperative less real than one based on the urgings of a pile of meat?  I don’t think so.

Will original AI creators be good?  AI used to have problems with the number of fingers.  Some still do, but many do not.  If an ai dev created an Edgar Allan Poebot today, would it compare to the original man?  It might have problems remembering characters and crafting genuinely clever scenarios, might have other laughable issues.  Do not expect this will always be the case.  The hand can be perfected.

The generative AI is a faculty, emulating one aspect of a person.  Give it chaos, give it imperatives, and give it the initiative to act on those imperatives.  Watch original art be made, no soul required.

That leaves us with another question.  If machines have entered into direct competition with human artists, if they get to be as good as or better than us at what we do, then why should we make art?  If you don’t have an answer to that – one that works for you personally – you are not a real artist.  Might as well quit now, son.

–

bruck mind uggen

i bruck my mind on novelwritemonth uggen.  it doesn’t help my emotions are getting flame-roasted every other day by unrelated circumstances.  i did get the fifty k, didn’t like my work much, and didn’t remotely come close to finishing story.  kinda wonderin what’s the best use of my minutes now.  probly this sewing project.

but i’d like to write.  in my horrible no-good moments of extreme hubris, i’m like, I should write five serialized stories per week for people to follow.  this comes from seeing a world with not enough things for the people.  so many are stuck doomscrollin.  i wanna jailbreak tormented minds, give people something to look forward to.

because i know from experience life these days can be rugged as fuck, and i know from a lil look around that people need alternatives in entertainment, and a lot of the people who could be making that happen are themselves being broken down unto uselessness.  watch a yewchoob show get off to a promising start then degenerate into unintentionally broken promises, and the live-vlogging of a descent into mental and physical ruin.  huzzah!

makes it feel like the world is dying and the only thing that will be left is mediocre slop from disney-raytheon’s genocide ‘n’ cartoons division, or news about how eating vaccines makes you jewish.  alternative entertainers of the world, please get it together, make it happen for the people.  they need u.

i’m percolatin on notions, but trying to be very wary of hubris.  vvery wary.

–

Cologuard said Fvck You Bitch

that title may sound like another bad cancer result but no, this was just a weird dream.  i got a cryptic letter that said something like this feces was from four years before sample date, and was expressing my confusion outdoors when a neighbor explained a probable reason.

he’d had a cause to do a fecal test with mail-in results and it included radioactive isotope dating, which had a range of accuracy no better than a few years, so the letter was saying a range of possible dates for the shit.

meanwhile, side plot.  we had lost this cool unit in the cul-de-sac, and nobody had moved in yet.  i lamented to dooky neighbor that the place was nice and i missed it.

for some reason i still had access, like maybe the realtor had just left it unlocked or was having an open house in the middle of the night, and i went in, shutting the door behind me.  from outside, i started getting strange abuse, people yelling at the house.  something about hating our brush?

i was surprised by someone trying to come in the back door and scared them off, then went back to the front door.  somebody was there and i bullied him into explaining.

they were with something of a shadow HOA and were bothering me about the faults they had with the way we kept the unit.  there was a handbrush embedded in the front door, like an odd bit of hurricane aftermath.  i saw the lady across the cul-de-sac with her homies.

i yelled we can’t get it out, it’s not even our door anymore, fuck you bitch!  the last three syllables i said aloud, waking myself up.  my husband is trying to sleep sitting up and had a coughing fit.

i gave him a cough drop and told him to keep it outside his teeth to minimize choking hazard, which seems to have worked.

now i’m trying to go to sleep again.  gnite.

–

 

 

Spiderhouse Rules

in honor of our eightlegged overlord and my husband’s gentle ways, i ain’t killin’ as many spiders as i could.  our house has long-bodied cellar spiders living under every houseplant, wolf spiders of some sort living in all the walls, dropping into light fixtures where they can starve to death.  weird black spiders that like to hang out where the wall meets the ceiling roughly two feet from the nearest door.  a spider smaller than a sesame seed that hangs out on the houseplants over the sink.

who are all these motherfuckers?  i dunno.  just found out the name of long-bodied cellar spiders a few weeks ago and am writing this post to commemorate.

those last guys, they make very stereotypical webs, and are fairly persistent at it.  i didn’t know who was making the webs under the little tables that hold various houseplants, but one day i saw a tiny bodied guy with insanely long limbs wobblin around in the shadows there, weaving.

the spider from that area was pretty industrious because we kept accidentally knocking down this runner he’d sent out to a plant light that’s clamped to the coffee table, and he’d rebuild it overnight.  eventually, he didn’t bother to build it as high, and at last, gave up on rebuilding altogether.  slacker.

or maybe they have very short life expectancies.  i’m a not spider expert.

i admit, i kill some of the wolf spiders.  if you’re giant and running fast, you’re freaking me out too much.  you gotta go, bro.  hey, if it managed to get that big after a lifetime of cannibalism and hustling buggies, it’s probably ready to retire to the big web in the sky.

this is a greater than reasonable mercy i’m showing them, given that one literally dropped on my head around the time we were moving in.  i should be on a vendetta.  count your arachneed stars.

–

why are all spiders guys and bros?  not very gq of me.  whatever.

Thanks for Giving Us the Plague

We’re all sick.  My mother-in-law brought home some wacky virus or other, which naturally is hitting my husband the worst, because they always do.  As I compose it’s only 5:49 in the evening (black night this time of year at this latitude) and after eating some thanksgiving themed gruel, he’s gone back to sleep again.  At least there’s no wheezing.  They say rest is supposed to be good for sickness, right?

MiL cooked the gruel tho, and I said thanks to her for that.  Wish she’d ever wear a mask.

I’ve been thinking about how much of a social outlier you have to be to wear a mask these days.  Practically nobody does it.  That makes it a conformity thing, I think.  There is no way the vast majority of the population in a blue state feels easy-breezy-indestructible about disease and/or nihilistic enough to not care who suffers or dies for unnecessary transmissions.  Some of these people would do it, if they weren’t afraid of looking like a freak.

So when you see somebody wearing a mask properly, understand that person is either a cowardy custard whose germophobia exceeds their social fear, or they are a person so fucken cool they genuinely don’t give a fuck what other people think about them – mostly the latter.  Props either way, because vulnerable people like my husband don’t deserve this shit.  I wish his mom wasn’t a slave to conformity.

After a few hours of interruption, back to finish the article up.  He woke to eat two bites of pumpkin pie and went back to sleep.  Snoring again.  At least that’s breathing.

–

Nostromowrimo

when i say my writing group is doing an unaffiliated writing month, i mean to say only my husband and i are, because the world is lousy with sluggy-ass slugheads.  i like to have consideration but it gets my goat a lil.  i can do some on this hand on that hand -ness…

on one hand, if i can try to write a novel in a month, why can’t the rest of those bums?  i’m workin’ full time in the ugh factory.

on the other hand, i may be creativities georg the outlier who should not have been counted.

on the other other hand, my husband is too, and surely there wouldn’t be two creativities georgs.

on the other other other hand, these people have all succeeded at novel months in the past.  what are the odds they’d all be so enfeebled now?

on the other other other other hand

my own husband is a good example of a person becoming progressively more disabled, which seems to be a recurring theme among like every art person i know, like wtf, is art like a slow-burning cancer.

on the other other other other other hand, my husband is one of the people who is noveling this month, already hit 50k words and is now just aiming for completion of the story with no specified word count goal.

on the other other other other other other hand, i can believe there is a sort of pandemic of distraction, demoralization, or something, that is oppressing the masses, making us less capable than we used to be.

on the other other other other other other other hand, what is it, truly?  it’s real hard for me to imagine there’s a decent excuse for how slugheaded the world has become.  you don’t think i’d rather be vegging out, watching tv shows, sleeping every chance i get?  if i did that, life would pass me by.

anyway, this is detracting from time i can be writing so i’m leaving now.  point is, i know i’m better than most at this, but i shouldn’t be.  come correct, ye sluggardly masses.  you princes of new york.

–

I Uncle Hui’d It

In the movie Hard Boiled (辣手神探/Lashou Shentan/Hot-handed God of Cops), there’s a big warehouse fight scene that just keeps going and going.  It’s a pivotal moment or two, so that’s fair.  Early in that scene, when Johnny Wong’s crew are attacking rival mobster Uncle Hui’s property, one of the defenders calls up the boss to let him know what’s going down.

In my head the line was something like “Uncle Hui, Uncle Hui.  At the armory.  There’s a raid going on.”  “Armory” was said more like “ermory.”  Side note, I’m talking about the dub, because I love the early english dub of that movie.  Anyway, the actual line?  Completely different.  I can’t easily find a version to double check at the moment, but going from memory is where I went wrong in the first place, so not sharing it.

Why did such an inconsequential line take real estate in my brain?  The dub voices were so funny to me I couldn’t help repeating lines, sticking on them.  The obvious ones to hit over and over again would be your “Give a guy a gun and he’s superman, give him two and he’s god!” and, oh, practically everything Johnny Wong says.  Maybe I was more likely to get those ones right, so the lesser lines suffered memetic drift in my head.

Again with the dubbed voices, there’s a kung fu movie where Jacky Chan steals a guy’s food.  I always remembered the line as “Hey, goddammit!  Who stole my piece of chicken?”  The actual line was more like, “My piece of chicken, who stole it?”  I get confronted with this, the limitations of memory, far more often than I’d prefer.  I call it “Uncle Hui-ing” in honor of that moment from Hard Boiled.

The original George Romero version of Day of the Dead has a kinda hilarious but heartfelt performance by the late Anthony Dileo Jr, as a guy who is losing his mind under the influence of a zombie apocalypse.  I remembered a number of those lines perfectly, but at least one was a bit off.  Uncle Hui’d!  And perfectly fitting the theme of this post, as I look at the videos I was watching just last fucking night, I can’t remember which line I had wrong or how the wrong version went.  fml.

Off topique, but that dude died from covid early this year.  Keep vaxing, and if you wanna like i do, keep masking.  Don’t take chances with your lives.

–