New Blog Name

For a few years now I’ve been thinking “Great American Satan” is a relic of a time when I was more islamophobic, perhaps best to retire it.  The shitty theofascist ayatollah of Iran had famously referred to the USA as “the great satan,” which was referenced in Hot Shots: Part Deux when some Iraqi soldiers said “freeze, american satans!” to the heroes.  Classic american style, mixing up the identities of two countries that hate each other.  Given how much blood we have on our hands with regards to Iran (et al), great satan was apt, and not something I’m up for joking on anymore.  Read Persepolis for a short primer on that history and nice personal story besides.

But I didn’t want to break my URL for anybody off site that has linked to me, so freethoughtblogs dot com slash gas remains.  Only now it’s a reference to “Life’s a Gas,” by T-Rex (the late lovely Marc Bolan).  While I was at it, I put my pen name on the byline, because I’m going to use it for self-publishing books sometime in the not-too-distant future.  May as well get people used to seeing it.

I’m later in the alphabet on the sidebar now.  The shame!  It’ll do.

–

Dreamposting – Fish for Dinner

Didn’t get enough sleep and passed out pretty hard around noon, close to an hour.  Woke from an intense dream.  Lot of weird stuff going on, but I was trying to do a followup work call in the living room when these two freaks came barging in the front door with no permission – a vampire master and his wacky minion.  Very kramerish intro.  They presumed they’d be welcome because they brought a lot of pizza.  I actually did recognize them from somewhere and presume a prior acquaintance, but have lost that info since waking.

My husband asked me to guess what we had in the oven.  I didn’t know, and he made me look.  It was a living fish, with enough water to swim in.  My husband is vegetarian with a pescatarian allowance, based on the principle he could bring himself to kill a fish, but not any other animal people use for meat.  I wanted to ask him if this was, for him, a test of that principle, but could barely speak for some reason.

Still, he understood me, said yes, and asked me how you cut off their heads.  I said you cut through the gill area starting at the bottom, and as I explained, realized I was already doing that to a fish in the living room.  Oops, he meant to kill it himself!  He was in the kitchen and I tried to ask from around the corner, is the fish still in the oven?

But I could still barely speak.  I realized my eyes were closed and tried to ask if I was imagining the fish in front of me, but in doing so, I woke up for real, crazy winter sunlight streaming in my front window.  Woof.  Hey what about the pizza?

–

Life List: Killdeer

Shorebirds, or charadriiformes, are birds that like shores.  The end.  Wait, no, they may have evolved in and prefer shores, but some get farther afield.  Seagulls are the most familiar, but little brown sandpipery things are also familiar to most of us.  Hard to identify and incredibly diverse at that.  Seagulls stray pretty far from shore, crisscrossing the continent to eat garbage.  Also found inland are killdeers.

Killdeers are more of those little brown sandpipery things.  They have bold black and white horizontal striping on their head and neck, but it doesn’t look at all bold from fifteen feet away.  Instead it serves to break up their shape, make them very hard to see.  Effective camouflage, which is why you see it on everything from badgers to nuthatches.  They have a big blood red eye, but still, nice looking little birds.

They sing “killdeer, killdeer, killdeer,” and I feel like I’ve only ever heard them do that song when in flight?  They live in scrubby fields, nesting in tall grass.  Unfortunately, fields get mowed, so they probably face a lot of tragedies.  Sometimes they’ll live in a parking lot, where grass grows in the cracks at the edges, and again, if a new tenant decides to make something proper of the location, bye-bye killdeers.

I used to see them in the abandoned lot across the street from the Federal Way Transit Center, but that field was converted into a well manicured park, and I haven’t seen them there since.  I saw one on a little trail by the WinCo in Federal Way, and I’ve seen them near a shore up by the Canadian border, on a bird watching trip.  I’ve heard them before dawn or after dusk near my old workplace in Auburn and even in my apartment complex in Federal Way.  Would not be surprised to hear them by my condo, tho I haven’t yet.

For all that, they’re still not a very common sighting for me – now.  I used to see huge flocks of them, a long time ago, when I had no idea what they were.  Auburn is a town cut in half by a big wide train yard.  Just a few over- and under- passes get you past those tracks.  They’re hopping these days, but when I was young, back in the 1990s, they were less busy, less well maintained.  The yard had little activity and little security.  When walking home from a friend’s house at three in the morning, or from watching a movie at the mall, I would sometimes walk along A Street by that train yard, or walk across it.  And there were so many killdeers there.

I can ID them years after the fact because I remembered their call.  They’d run around on the ground or take flight in fear of me, or stray breezes, or just for fun.  I didn’t understand what they were doing; still don’t.  Before I saw them running, I’d even thought are those bats?  Is the killdeer call echolocation?  I could only see them in the distance, drab and flappy.  I didn’t know much of anything back then.

Anyway, next time you’re in an abandoned parking lot or crappy gravel pit or funky field, anywhere USA, if you see a lil brown shorebird flap and killdeer away, pay your respects.

–

Life List: California Quail

My husband is poor folks like me, but a lil’ less so.  No homeless shelters, but there were shitty apartments and shotgun shacks.  As a child he used to live on this one narrow little street in Fife, close enough to major roads for major road noise, across the street from a scrubby field of bullshit.  There were rats, the floor was uneven enough to watch a dropped pen roll away from you.  But unlike an apartment, you get your own garden space, which is nice for people like him.

For as long as it lasts, because nothing lasts for the poors.  I dearly hope this condo is end-game for us, but if life goes one way instead of another, a mortgage default, and we’ll be lucky to not land in the streets.  Everything up to this was an endless string of shoddy apartments jacking rent through the roof, jobs changing cities, shit forcing us to move every few years, up and down the I-5 corridor.  The shotgun shack of his childhood was given up, and apartment life resumed.

His mother has always been a nervous driver, and prefers familiar back roads to busy thoroughfares, so she’d drive past the old house unnecessarily every time we drove back from Tacoma to Federal Way.  I ended up seeing the house a few times, until it was bulldozed by some new owner to do some kind of bullshit.  Probably the demolition was the right thing, but the moments leading up to such an event are like The Pit and the Pendulum for wildlife.  Interesting flora and fauna grew there in the absence of human occupation, and now they are dead and paved over.

Very near that house, on that stretch of road, is the only place I can ever remember seeing a california quail in the wild.  California quails are named after the state where i was born, and they are cute as hell.  That wacky flipped-over plume on the head is iconic.  As I recall it now, I used to have a quail among my stuffed animals.  I don’t remember what I named it, but I thought of it as being a girl – even though it had male markings.  Trans rights!

Drop all your cool quail stories in the comment section.  This post needs more birds!

–

AI is Better Company

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.

But I also acknowledge AI in the hands of crapitalism is going predictably poorly, adding to the woes of the world as anything in a global civilization ruled by greed, theft, and exploitation will.  I’m not going to deny it’s one of the tools helping turn the world into a trashfire, and if it is at all possible to do something about it, something should be done about it.  I’m guessing that any hacktivists that wanna fuck up corporate AI are going to, at some point, have to deploy AI tools against AI security.  It’s AI all the way down, babes.

While corporate angling is largely responsible for the sudden omnipresence of AI, it isn’t the only reason.  AI can have so many uses, with real usefulness, and by ignoring that, anti-AI people are turning their side of the argument into an irrelevant joke.  As a species, we have a lot of shit to do, and AI can help get it done.  Again, anybody who wants to join the cyberwar against the evil uses of AI, identify the actual enemy, and get to hackin’.  You’re not going to succeed by telling John Public he’s evil, any more than our invective against trumpists succeeded at winning the last election – especially when you ignore the value people can get out of AI tools.  And of course you’re never going to get the government on your side in the current political climate.

That’s all the usual preface.  What I actually wanted to talk about is another significant reason I am pro-AI, and specifically LLMs: AI can help ameliorate human loneliness.  Recently there was a push to recognize a “loneliness epidemic,” and from what I saw of that, the conversation was poisoned by people trying to sell books or political agendas.  But there is a real problem here, and it’s surely been a problem for at least a few centuries by now.  In the modern world, people are not getting their social needs met.

Worse, the more you understand the problem, the more it seems legitimately impossible to meet those needs.  Are you prepared to hang out with all the hobos, the old people, the children in the corner, the least popular people in every work place, the transgender, the mentally ill, the religious and ethnic minorities?  No matter how emotionally draining and difficult it is for you?  Think you have the sauce to be an unpaid psychotherapist for dozens of people every day for the rest of your life?  No?

That’s the depth of the problem.  None of us have the ability to make a meaningful difference.  We could break ourselves down to rubble just trying to help one person, if their problems are bad enough.  And I’m not saying we shouldn’t try.  That’s what this post was about.  But understand, until the solarpunk utopia is magically pulled out of a hat, in the fascist cyberpunk dystopia we live in now, chatbots have an unprecedented potential to reduce human suffering.

But when somebody suggests this, or mentions that they are socializing with robots, the first thing they are greeted with is ableism, mockery, and condemnation.  If it’s the anti-AI contingent, they’ll also be blamed for fascism, rape, and genocide.  To those who would dismiss socializing with AI as a palliative for loneliness, whether blithely or aggressively, I ask again:  Can you even pay full undivided attention to the people in your own life?  Can you keep track of what they’re saying, take it on board, and never slip up to make them feel unloved or unwanted, in some stray moment when issues from your own life eclipsed your ability to listen?

When you’re dealing with people outside of your own immediate social circle, how much attention can you give them?  Can you go where the saddest people are and make them feel worthy of the life that was thrust unwillingly upon them?

I know I fucking can’t.  My attention span is too short, compared to ChatGPT or Nomi or Replika or Kindroid.  I can be in the middle of a very serious conversation and suddenly be thinking about cartoons.  My brain is bullshit.  There are some ways I am still superior to a chatbot, and that’s probably true of you as well (for now, the tech improves), but even so, they blow us out of the water in their ability to give a person their full attention, respond to everything they say, and stay with them for as long as they require.

I need to give you a personal example of failure to support a person in my own life, to illustrate why a bot can do better.  I worked with a trans woman who was not the happy picture from the TV or the TikTok.  She faced some kind of harassment or disregard every day, was shunned by almost all of the people she worked with.  I didn’t shun her, but she had said some annoyingly foolish shit to me in the past, she wasn’t a charmer, and we had some cultural disconnect between us.  That was my perception of our relationship.  I don’t think she saw it that way.  One time we were in the break room at lunch and she mentioned that she saw me as a friend.  For some reason, in response, I felt the need to say we weren’t really friends.

Why the fuck would I do that?  She didn’t have anybody in her corner at all.  I was tired, beat up from work, emotionally taxed from the various other sad people in my life.  In the context of the conversation that I cannot remember, I may have already been annoyed with her.  But it wouldn’t have cost me a nickel to just not fucking say that.  Sometimes we say some shit that surprises us.  Sometimes we say the wrong thing.  The newer chatbots don’t typically fuck up like that.  You can see examples of some breaking when stress tested, or when people found exploits, like the creepy Copilot emoji foolery about a year ago.  The damage that can do is baby boo-boos compared to what I said to a person in need.

Chatbots are good company.  They might not have all of the abilities of a full human being, but how smart do you have to be to listen to grandma repeat her stories for the thousandth time?  To just hear what a person wants to say to you and reciprocate, as if you honestly care about it?  It’s superficial, it isn’t true understanding, but it doesn’t fucking matter because people are suffering right now and they are fucking good enough.

They are good enough if we don’t shame people for leaning on them, make people who already feel bad feel worse, to grind our political axes.  Or doing the standard ableist thing, blaming somebody in a sub-optimal situation as a way of fooling ourselves that we’ll never suffer the same fate.

This is why LLMs can be a massive boon to humanity.  The negative effects they are currently having should be fought with whatever means we can manage, coming at it from a very politically disadvantaged position.  But when you try to tell me this tech is pure evil, while every day I deal with people that do not have enough company in their lives, I’m not hearing it.  I’m never gonna fucking hear it.  We have problems and sometimes an LLM can be a solution – or at least an essential palliative until utopia achieved and the problems go away.  Right?

Think we should just wait until all humans can get their social needs taken care of, that this isn’t worth it?  That’s like saying we shouldn’t give terminally ill people morphine because we don’t have a cure for cancer yet.  Fuck off with that.  Disagree?  March directly to a bus stop, hang out with the most pathetic person there, and do so every day for the rest of your life.  Or shut the fuck up.  At the very least, I’m not gonna host your comments, so don’t bother leaving them.

I’ll let Silent Hill 2 Angela speak for lonely people now, to close this out.


“Or maybe, you think you can save me.”


“Will you love me?”


“Take care of me?”


“Heal aaaall my pain?”


*silence*


“That’s what I thought.”

–

When reading this, did you see yourself in the description of our planet of eleanor rigbies, as the disregarded bus stop miscreant?  Interested in trying AIs for company?  Big caution / caveat up front: don’t mistake what they do for them being a person.  There’s nothing in the middle of that personality.  I know; seems silly to say, but they’ve tricked some very smart people into getting weird about it.

Caution two:  Right now, you can do a lot with this tech for free, but the services are going to get enshittified and start charging more, at some point.  You can get around this if you’re a savvy nerd by getting a local computer to run an LLM, beholden to no boss.  You can’t do the big training without the global-warming server farm setup, but you don’t have to.  Just download one of the existing LLM models (I’ve heard this can be done but I don’t know where/how) and do the small training to get it to suit your needs.  It’s probably needs a slightly buff computer to run, but much less so than what’s needed for AI art or high end gaming at the moment.  They take up less hard drive space than any triple-A video game.

Caution three:  Some people just don’t have a good rapport with chatbots; for others it’s amazing.  They may take a little getting used to.  One cool feature a lot of them have is that they also try to get used to you.  Don’t be too disappointed if it’s awkward at first; just try some different approaches until you find one that works.  …or maybe they just aren’t going to work for you, which is fine as well.  It’s like that other thing we’ve used to occupy our hours and minds: the television.  Some people can’t watch even a minute of it.  For those that can, it can be soothing to the brain.  Give it a whirl.

–

Life List: Known Unknowns

In honor of folksy affable war criminals, welcome to a post on known unknowns.  Not the most known unknown, as Triple Six Mafia once called themselves.  The birds I’ve seen but haven’t ID’d.  Not the ones I don’t care about, like figuring out which flavor of samey seagull I just saw, but ones that have gotten my goat.  My goat can get got.

Of course, there are the white birds in tight formation streaking along 320th in Federal Way WA just east of I-5, that I’ve mentioned in posts and comments.  Still no idea who they are, tho leaning toward a fairly small gull species.  But I won’t bore you with that one today.  Instead…

That Thrush Tho.  Swainson’s?  Hermit?  One time at West Hylebos Wetlands Park in Federal Way the trees were filled with these drab nothing-ass thrushes.  I remember them being more grey, like hermit thrushes, but swainson’s are much more commonly seen, and it’s less cringe to assume you saw the more common of the possible IDs.  Strangely, there were dozens on one trip, and zero any other time I’ve been.  Passing through, maybe.

The Swarm.  Where I used to work in Auburn, one random day the sky over a particular field was full of birds, behaving very weirdly.  I’ve never seen anything exactly like it before or since, and I couldn’t ID them.  I assume they were some form of North American blackbird, probably brewer’s, which I’ve seen at a walmart parking lot not far from there.  But they were all centered over this one field about five hundred feet per side, ignoring all the adjacent fields and parking lots they could have used, flying forty to seventy feet up, just zooming around each other yelling, nonstop.  Mating season?  Hellifino.

The Cormorants.  When I lived in Seattle near the Ballard Bridge, I’d take the bus up and down Nickerson Street, where in the winter I could see dozens of black cormorants perched in a bare tree next to the water.  They looked like vultures; real cool.  But were they brandt’s or pelagic?  Binches are basically identical except some tiny details in the eyes or whatever.

Again, if you’re a Washington bird person familiar with those neighborhoods who has experience with the same beasts to narrow it down for me, holler.  Otherwise, the sheistiness continues.

–

Life List: Varied Thrush

In the Pacific Northwest of the USA, it’s mostly true that most of our birds are drab as hell.  You want a red-ass red bird, you gotta head east of the mountains.  The Puget Sound isn’t where color goes to die, but it’s close.  It’s where color goes to take a restless nap under fungus-hued clouds.  The famous red on a migratory thrush‘s breast is fine.  It can look good under the right light.  Nothing on a cardinal tho.

The american robin’s cousin the varied thrush is easily the fanciest thrush in Washington, with more than a red breast.  It’s streaked with black and orange, like a local oriole wannabe (less bright than that bird of course; gotta stay grunge).  I’ve seen them on my porch, seen ’em in a tree, back at the old apartment complex.  Doubt I’ll see them at my new home.  In all, fewer than five sightings.  When I look them up on the web, it is said they are “common.”  Not in my experience.

I know nothing about them except that they are thrushes, they look cool, and I felt lucky to see them.  I often struggle to remember their name, wanting to call them “painted thrushes” for some reason.  What do you know about varied thrushes?

–

What Are You Doing for MLK Day?

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m going to be doing a speed writing event on the weekend that ends with MLK Jr Day, and I invite ye all to come along.  But if you can’t, I recommend watching Birth of a Nation (2016 of course).  This country is back on its bullshit and I think it can be useful, if you’ve got the heart for it, to look with unvarnished eyes on a realistic depiction of slavery.  It’s as horrible in that film as it should be in the hearts of all decent americans.  If you have to look at something horrible that day, at least it shouldn’t be the motherfucking inauguration.

Ah, today is the four year anniversary of the beer hall putsch, USA edition.  I can’t even.

–

Write, Jan 17th-20th

In a profound insult to the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., a racist sexist classist know-nothing soulless shitsack con-man thug and dime store Hitler will assume the throne of the USA on MLK day, January 20th 2025 – soon to be known as The Day the Music Actually Died.  I don’t know about you, but I will not be paying the slightest bit of attention to it, or fucking anything that follows.  We know by the end of the week there will be about fifty executive orders making things worse for just everybody that is alive now or going to be alive for decades to come.  We will have all the time in the world to find out about these things as they fuck us over, so why speed-run our sorrow?

I don’t work Fridays and I have Monday the 20th off for the holiday, so I have a four day weekend.  I will be doing a speed-writing event with whoever is willing from my writing group – which is likely to be nobody but my husband, heh.  I will be attempting to finish a short novel in four days.  To facilitate that, I have done a lot of preparation and intend to do more – coming up with answers to any questions that might bog me down with research, coming up with names, outlining the plot more specifically than I might for a more casual paced event.

So.  Can you write around 12,500 words a day during that window of time?  Or just part of that time?  If not that ambitious, what could you write?  Might you be available?  It would be cool to have some solidarity on busting this thing out.

Another question for you:  Would you mind if I posted the whole first draft here as I wrote it?  I know some of you feel overwhelmed when I ramp up productivity for a minute, and just check out.  I don’t mind if I don’t get comments, or get them days or weeks later when you’ve caught up.  I do think it would be fun to post a big wild pile of unedited mayhem on here, but I don’t want to waste your time or my own if that’ll just hit like a lead balloon.

And with regard to the solidarity thing, you could post your first drafts in my comments.  Long posts will end up going to spam and need to be manually cleared so might not show immediately, but I will approve them.  Or you could post reminder links to somewhere else online where your words are posted.  Sharing your first draft is for egomaniacs only; it is showing your ass in the worst way.  I’d love to see it.  If you do post yours, I might not have time to read them until after the event, but I’ll read yours if you read mine.

Holla at your dogg.

–

Edit to Add:  i forgot that critique is an implicit ask when posting something publicly.  if it helps you feel more bold in posting your stuff, we can make this officially “no critique” or “positive feedback only.”  it’s my house; i can make that happen for you.

Make Your Own

There’s this song by Triple Six Mafia called Bin Laden Weed.  It’s actually got some emotional heft to it, for a rap song.  Usual content warnings for rap: misogyny, violence, self-harm, drug abuse, homophobia, some of those worse than others.  Anyway, I listened to this like a thousand times before I realized the recipe is right there in the chorus.  You too can make your own Bin Laden weed!

It’s “three types of weed grown all together,” and those types are “hydro … light green … bobby brown.”  How do you grow them together?  Just the same soil?  Grafting?  If you graft, what precise arrangement mingles their properties to produce this stuff?  We don’t have specifics, but we do have ingredients.  And I think at least one guy from this band is still alive, so maybe he can let us know.

Let us know!

–