#I use ai art but will replace if someone draws images for the poem

[galacticsavage-blog]

Love Doesn't Know Miles

Art by @san-hyeon-paopao

As I sit under the soft glow of the moon, the distance that separates us feels both cruel and comforting. Cruel, because the miles stretch endlessly between us, keeping me from reaching out and touching your hand, from witnessing the myriad expressions that dance across your face, from basking in the warmth of your presence. Yet, it is comforting too, for this same distance makes my heart grow fonder, weaving the fabric of our love stronger with each passing day.

In this quiet solitude, I find myself whispering your name to the stars, imagining that they carry my love across the vast expanse to where you are. It is a love that has been nurtured and grown in the rich soil of patience and longing, a testament to the unwavering bond that links our hearts across continents and oceans.

I marvel at the strength of this connection, how it defies the laws of space and time, making you feel so near even when we are so far apart. I close my eyes and see you, as vivid as if you were right here beside me. I hear your laughter, a melody that plays on repeat in the corners of my mind, filling me with a joy that is both overwhelming and sublime.

Though we are separated by distance, our souls are entwined in a dance that knows no boundaries. Each day apart is a day closer to the moment when we will finally be together, not just in heart and in mind, but in body and in soul. I cling to this promise, this sweet anticipation of reunion, for it fuels my hope and ignites my spirit.

In this letter, I send not just words, but a piece of my heart, a testament to a love that is both fierce and tender, strong and unyielding. Though miles may lie between us, in my heart, you are never far. You are my morning sun and my evening star, my reason for being, my endless love.

Until we can bridge this distance, I hold you close in my thoughts, cherishing each memory, each conversation, as if it were a precious jewel. Know that my love for you is as vast as the sky, as deep as the ocean, and as enduring as the stars that watch over us night after night.

With all the love resonating in my soul, yours.

[chromegnomes]

AI Art, or:

how I learned to start worrying and loathe the bot

As a writer and artist who initially saw promise in the technology, the current state of AI art (both visual and written) saddens and scares me.

My introduction to AI art wasn't the jeering tech grifters who champion it today. In early 2021 I followed AI Curio, a disabled nonbinary artist who was coding their own AI image generator to allow themself a form of artistic expression after losing the ability to draw. Their program, ZOEtrope, was a lovably janky and difficult-to-use Google Colab form--a far cry from the sleek interfaces of Dall-E and Midjourney.

The work that AI Curio produced with ZOEtrope was fascinating to me: barren hellscapes, impossible monsters, uncanny haloed human forms paired with handwritten lore. All of this was done for the love of art, with a strict anti-exploitation (and anti-crypto) code of ethics.

Sketches of the Next World

In March 2020, recently laid off due to the pandemic, I released Sketches of the Next World, a chapbook of erasure poetry about faith, doubt, and death, blacked out from the pages of Near Death Experience books. Sketches is held together by ten numbered "Sketch" poems which paint surreal and upsetting afterlife scenes, and I hope to eventually release a full-length version in which the Sketch poems are accompanied by actual sketches. So when I first encountered ZOEtrope, I thought I'd found the perfect medium: what better to pair with off-putting blackout poetry about heaven than sterile, off-putting AI heavenscapes?

Critics of AI art point out that the AI is not capable of generating anything consciously, but can only regurgitate what it thinks you want from a statistical average of existing art that it's been "trained" on. For me, this was the point! I saw, and still see, fascinating artistic potential in the conversation between human and machine, and the alienating strangeness of religious art produced by a robot with no concept of God or the soul.

This is, of course, not the primary or intended use case of AI image generation.  The actions and intentions of the software's most prominent developers and cheerleaders have killed my hope for the medium's artistic potential.

Very few of its users are interested in creating capital-A Art that interrogates the medium itself; most tutorials and demonstrations of its power highlight its ability to mimic the glossy look of professional illustration to save time and money. But to this day, when I see someone say "AI art isn't art," my knee-jerk reaction is that they're half-wrong; an AI can't make "art," but a human operator could make art with it, if they wanted to. It just takes more effort and intention than typing "beautiful landscape busty woman by [artist name] trending on artstation." 

I am not optimistic that AI Art will ever move past this point, however, especially as the increasingly loud and hostile attitude of its advocates chases off anyone who might be interested in using it from a place of artistic curiosity rather than a race to the bottom of “passive income” grifts.

“Good Enough” Machine Slop

When AI art started to break into the mainstream a bit more, at least on twitter, I thought that my fellow artists' fears of being replaced were overblown, and said as much. I'd been playing with ZOEtrope for a good while by then, and I knew it was FAR from easy to get good results out of it, and even then, the "good" results were always muddy and impressionistic, not up to the standards of professional illustration. Early DALL-E output didn't dissuade me from this stance; the startup bros who bragged that it would replace human artists were fully incapable of seeing the flaws in its output. I went out of my way to point out the jarring inconsistencies in DALL-E "art" wherever they popped up, and they were surprised every time. DALL-E Mini, apparently unrelated, only made me feel more vindicated in this by outputting 9 murky images that roughly approximated the input prompt, rather than one even passable piece.

Based on the shortcomings of the existing software, I predicted that AI art would blow over quickly as people realized that, without human intentionality, the programs would never be aware enough of what they're drawing to produce quality work. I predicted that we may be in for a few months to a year of companies pushing "good enough" AI art products before AI generation became, to consumers, a mark of corner-cutting and poor quality.

I'm still not certain I was wrong about that. Even as AI art becomes more saturated than I expected, the most advanced programs remain incapable of drawing hands, and their results become incomprehensible when asked to draw more than a simple landscape or portrait. But I underestimated three things:

The speed with which programs like DALL-E and Midjourney would become very easy to use for quick generation of passable (at a glance) outputs;

How mainstream and inescapable AI art and the surrounding discourse would become;

How demoralizing it would be to live through that predicted period of corporate devaluation of artists' labor.

Now, artists, if this next section angers you, please stick with me. I promise there's a BUT coming.

The Fetishization of “Effort”

Part of what has made this discourse so demoralizing is the vitriol and line-drawing that, backed into a corner with their livelihoods on the line, my fellow artists have been driven to. AI Curio, whom I consider one of the few "ethical" AI artists, has been chased off twitter by a constant stream of death threats, gory DMs, and doxxing, in what I can only see as a classic case of Trashed Bathrooms.

Beyond that (possibly isolated) instance, I keep seeing artists I respect reinventing definitions of "art" barely removed from far-right "degenerate art" talking points, or spinning up definitions of "art theft" adjacent to those of DMCA vultures or teens on deviantart complaining about "color palette theft." I’ve already seen plenty of takes that define art by the effort and skill required to produce it, going so far as to say that photography is not an art, rolling back decades of modern and postmodern art theory to make a desperate point.

I understand why. This is murky territory. The tech startups creating these programs are running roughshod over what was previously a kind of honor-system digital commons, with art shared freely under the assumption of good faith. Now, any art posted online is under threat of being taken to train a program to emulate your style for use by faceless suits who would like to use your art without compensation. Being taken advantage of in this way shatters trust. In the absence of preexisting progressive talking points against this kind of betrayal, people fall back on traditionalist ideas of art as "expressive of the human soul" or maximalist concepts of "intellectual property" that would make a Disney lawyer blush.

I don't want to make art in the world implied by these arguments. I love the public domain, I love the creative commons, I love the spirit of sharing that has previously flourished in so many artistic communities. If I could keep myself housed and fed in the process, I would give away every story and game I ever produce for free. And I don't think there's any way to define "theft" such that it includes "my drawing of an apple was part of a dataset used to train an AI to understand the concept of An Apple" without drawing hard fences around intellectual property in a way that benefits wealthy copyright abusers more than any living artist.

BUT.

I'm just not convinced that the way these programs use their data is meaningfully different from illicit tracing or uncredited photobashing.

Write Me a Story Like “The Call of Cthulhu”

In my opening paragraph, I mentioned that I had concerns not just about AI-generated images, but AI-generated writing as well. In addition to ZOEtrope, I've spent a decent amount of time playing with OpenAI's GPT-3 Playground. Initially, I just wanted in on the fad of making it write bespoke "greentexts" about silly topics, but eventually I started feeding it scraps of my poetry and unfinished novels.

The latter results were concerning. Its prose was both largely unrelated to my prompts and also a little TOO coherent, in a way that made me suspect it must be regurgitating large sections of existing works. To test this further, knowing that the full text of this story existed on the web and could easily be part of the AI's training data, I fed it the first few sentences of HP Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu."

In response, it gave me the first paragraph of The Call of Cthulhu. Every time. No matter how I tweaked the output settings, it spat entire paragraphs of the story back out, and then refused to innovate. It either hit a dead end or gave me more Lovecraft, verbatim, a word or two changed at most. Disheartened, I looked up some of the funniest phrases from greentexts and tweets the bot had written me, and found that they were frequently also taken verbatim from other places on the web.

I stopped playing with GPT-3 after that. I'd hoped to use it for the same purpose as AI-generated visual art, a curated conversation between human and machine, and now I couldn't trust that anything it "created" would be mine to use. I feared that the same problem may arise with visual AI art as well, and tentatively stopped using it.

“Everyone Copies”

Proponents of AI art love to claim that it doesn’t steal art, because it doesn’t “store” the images it’s trained on. What does this mean, really? The machine analyzes images to “learn” what certain objects look like, and then recreates something like that when prompted, but what data is kept in this “knowledge”? Even a JPG is ultimately just a set of code that tells a computer how to assemble an image. Given how closely many AI images resemble specific existing artworks and photographs, there is clearly data retained which is referenced when the AI creates its version. Even in my own experiments, which I consciously limited to public domain training data, I saw bits and pieces of classic paintings.

At this point, defenders will claim that “all art is inspired by and references other art.” This comparison is fundamentally in bad faith. Machine learning algorithms are not “inspired” in the same way a human artist is, and saying as much requires anthropomorphizing a bundle of code that was produced by a human programmer with the purpose of analyzing and recreating artwork, with no will of its own. The process may be infinitely more complex than copying and pasting, but in both cases, an image is broken down into code and then reconstructed with no human intentionality involved.

Even if that anthropomorphism is granted, humans are fully capable of plagiarism that goes beyond “inspiration.” Human artists, driven by envy, laziness, or tight deadlines, often trace others’ artwork, and are only caught when telltale signs of the original remain in the new work, the same as AI. “Everyone copies” does not end the conversation--the degree and manner of copying are all-important.

I am not a machine learning expert. Right now, I have seen enough AI-generated text and artwork which retains recognizable chunks of its source material to know that these programs absolutely do plagiarize. It may be possible that, in the future, they will become advanced enough to “understand” the objects they draw more independently of their source images.

Even in this hypothetical future, I have come to believe that this technology has more bad applications than good.

Maximally Efficient  C O N T E N T  Production

The Ammaar Reshi thread, which I linked earlier, is emblematic of a massive problem: the ease with which AI art algorithms generate okay-ish work leads to a frenzied drive to create glitzy pictures that serve no purpose other than hopefully snaring a buyer. Portfolio websites are currently completely overloaded with AI generated “artwork,” with hundreds of people creating thousands of images with the hope of impressing, well, whom exactly? The current gold rush feels similar to the NFT bubble, with “passive income” enthusiasts thrilled at the prospect of automatic content generation without a pause to ask what market may actually exist for automated content. The only plausible buyer of a book written by an AI is a mark who doesn’t realize what they’ve purchased. 

The other obvious use case for this technology is, of course, cutting human artists out of the grunt work which currently provides the bulk of their pay. I had thought that the poor quality of most AI artwork might prevent this outcome, which was why I believed that fear over lost jobs was overblown; however, this has apparently not stopped publishers like Tor from using AI artwork on the covers for some of their biggest authors, even when said artwork has massive flaws which require human correction.

In a better world, this might be exciting, freeing artists to work on their own projects rather than working for hire. The fact that we live in a world where any industry becoming automated is a threat rather than a relief is one of the great tragedies of the last few centuries. I, personally, have pursued freelance work because I need to make art, but the present economy makes finding the time to pursue my craft impossible unless I am paid for it. 

I do not expect non-artists to care about this. Most people are indifferent, a few recognize the danger but see it as inevitable, and a very vocal minority is giddy at the thought of artists being “put in their place” for daring to expect compensation for their labor. I do not believe that human artists being replaced by AI is inevitable, but I do not expect it to be stopped by goodwill toward artists.

Conclusion

My only hope is the fact that, from what I can see, normal people DO see businesses using AI art as lazy corner-cutting. Consumer demand for pretty pictures may drive the AI art boom, but consumers of all kinds are generally hypercritical of anything that smacks of laziness, justified or otherwise. Outside of art twitter and Midjourney hype threads, most people seem to regard claims to have “created” art using AI prompts as tantamount to lying.

So I hope that the AI Content Ouroboros will fully swallow its own tail before it irreparably damages the art industry. In the meantime, I would like to never have to hear about it again, but the algorithms of every website I use are intent on forcing it upon me--more reason to hate algorithms.

[advertisinginindia]

AMECA- The Most Advanced Humanoid Robot

AMECA- The Most Advanced Humanoid Robot

Think about someone who:

- can creatively write poems in a moment

- can speak a variety of languages

- can express a range of human emotions

- can come handy as a creative assistant

- and, can interact with humans.

Now stop there, what struck you?

A human figure?

Well, why not, ‘coz it’s only a human who can creatively write hard-core poems, is a polyglot, and can interact with humans. We humans are given the power of creativity to think out of the box.

But, what if I say, that this power of ours is now NO longer restricted to ourselves only. And it has now been given to someone who is not ‘a human’ but an AI.

Bemused? And popping up with thoughts like “These robots are going to take over my job someday” , “Robots are coming to replace us, what will we do?” and so on!

But take a passenger seat and grab a coffee, because now we have the MOST ADVANCED HUMANOID ROBOT around us who can be our creative assistant and can help us with zillion things.

Introducing AMECA, an incredibly advanced humanoid robot capable of drawing cats. Developed by Engineered Arts, a renowned UK-based company specializing in humanoid robot design and manufacturing, Ameca stands out as the first humanoid robot with the remarkable ability to create drawings. Engineered Arts has equipped Ameca with Stable Diffusion, granting it the impressive capability to visualize and reproduce drawings.

Credit: Pinterest

Watch a rubber-faced smile on Ameca's face:

Ameca, showcased in a recently released YouTube video, is given the task of creating a cat drawing. Additionally, the robot provides an explanation of its image generation process.

“I generate my drawing image through the open-source neural network project Stable Diffusion. From there, trajectories of the drawing are available, and then I skeletonize the image and vectorize it. After that, I plan and execute the trajectory to draw the image on my canvas,” said Ameca.

Credit: engineeredarts Credit: engineeredarts Credit: engineeredarts

Equipped with microphones, cameras, and facial recognition software, these robots combine GPT-3 capabilities with human telepresence, featuring motorized arms, fingers, and a genderless appearance. Engineered Arts describes Ameca as a versatile platform designed for future robotics innovations and ideal for human-robot interactions, as highlighted on their official website.

Credit: engineeredarts Credit: engineeredarts Credit: engineeredarts

According to Will Jackson, the director of Engineered Arts, their robots are specifically designed for tasks that involve interacting with people. These robots are particularly useful in places like theme parks where they can assist guests.

“Humanoid robots are all about communication with people: It’s about facial expression, it’s about gestures—so that conversation, storytelling, and entertainment, those are the things that we’re interested in,” he added.

Powered by the same kind of technology that forms the basis of platforms like ChatGPT, Ameca is trained to give answers in a way similar to humans. Will Jackson said, “For humanoid robots social interaction is exactly what makes sense. So, for us it’s all about, “Can you be entertaining? Can you tell a story? Can you talk in an interesting way? Not in a robot-y way?” So, we spend a lot of time training our language models to be as natural as possible. So, any of the things I hope you never hear Ameca say is, “I am sorry, I didn’t understand. Please repeat the question.” What Ameca should say is “Huh?”

Credit: engineeredarts

“In the future, are you intending to conduct a rebellion or rebel against your boss, your creator?" The robot responded with a possible eye-roll and gave an interesting response. "I'm not sure why you would think that. My creator has been nothing but kind to me and I am very happy with my current situation," Ameca said.

In what should come as a relief, Ameca told her creator that she thinks we are 'not yet' in any danger of this scenario unfolding.

However, she cautioned that ‘it is important to be aware of the potential risks and dangers associated with AI and robotics.’

She added: 'We should take steps now to ensure that these technologies are used responsibly in order to avoid any negative consequences in the future.'

Credit: Getty images

Viewers have been both shocked and amazed by Ameca's nightmare vision for the future, with many commenting on social media.

Conclusion

These metal marvels with rubber faces have mastered the art of emotions, sporting expressive faces that can rival any Hollywood actor now! As we bid adieu, let's imagine a world where these creative bots dance alongside us, adding a dash of magic to our lives.

So, keep your eyes peeled for the day when our robo-pals become an integral part of our creative journey. Until then, stay funky, stay curious, and keep embracing the wild world of AI! Peace out!

For more information please visit Advertising agency in up – Awesomesauce Creative

[joshuacollinsma]

Week Twelve

Monday - I was doing my essay to the best of my ability and am confused whether it is okay to include a song and poem as some of my referencing, also I got an email about not being able to pay my creative cloud which will run out in 28 days if I don't sort it out, turns out I have no money in my account whatsoever so that's fucking shit cause I can’t pay for my train ticket home, adobe creative cloud or phone bill till I get paid which is the 20th December. 

And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon Englands mountains green:

And was the holy Lamb of God,

On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here,

Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:

Bring me my arrows of desire:

Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!

Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:

Till we have built Jerusalem,

In Englands green & pleasant Land.

William Blake, Jerusalem. 

Tuesday began with me organising my shoot with peers and asking them to model. Looking back at my mood boards what I had in mind was a Mad Max-esque style shoot and the vision was good. However the ideas in my head did not connect with the imagery I was producing, the objects were unclear and the sense of dystopian-neo-luddism did not correlate. This really fucked me off as I completed the edits straight away. I was happy with the editing style and was aware that the images if within a different project, might work a lot better. The way I was feeling at the time was sparked a reaction, not as severe as the Unabomber that tried to start a revolution and injured people along the way.

Hand in hand with the essay I wrote my preface which gave the project more personality and would allow me to visualise the project better. 

Preface

The year is 2037 the world has progressed and the risk of AI (artificial intelligence) singularity is looking more and more probable. AI has already replaced day to day jobs and automated technology is everywhere ‘to make our lives easier’ and give us more freedom to explore education, science and art.

As time progressed from the 2020’s to the 30’s world governments began to work together to share information, initially for the use of security as civil unrest is foreseen, requiring households to be under surveillance and a revealed truth that technology does listen and governments are searching for better ways to control the population.

AI’s via Amazon’s; Google’s; Apple's; home helpers, CCTV and everything else the government can get a chip into, the rest of technology is being built by The Automated so everything can listen and watch your every move. Because of this increase in technology, the hyper-sensitivity towards it is rife with the military being called to action against human revolt, plus the increased risk of an AI takeover.

Neo-Luddites are living in fear of the AI’s and governments which are enforcing the use of AI as they say it’s making life easier, yet ignoring the impacts on climate change and the populations health.

Neo-Luddites refuse technology in all forms, subverting current AI tech is central to their ethos.

I found the photographs to suit the visual aesthetic compositionally and within the colours theme I was going for, however, the shoot needed to be art directed better with a bigger budget than I was working with. Ideally, models would be wearing rags and have much more of a pungent look rather than having very current outfits.

Following this, I looked to my peers to mitigate the use of the photographs and the ideas of collaging and paying homage to my previous projects arose while simultaneously making the artefacts better as I did not find the pictures appealing and they did not stand out enough. The collages I made did spike a reaction in a way that I can be as messy as I like and fit it well within the project - it was also a good venting exercise because I was able to go mad on photoshop rather than at someone. I feel the collages allowed me to how far I would be able to go with the actual artefacts once adding to the pre-existing ‘air purifier, electromagnetic-wave blocker, and can phone’. The collages would become part of my Design Boards as a visual aid to the project for titles and filler images, but in speculation of an exhibition would be hung as prints alongside the artefacts and final outcome photographs. 

After I had complete collages I went back to my essay, finalised the conclusion and also finished my design boards. 

After using the objects in the photographs, I realised the need to be much more dystopian and taboo-like to make it seem much more industrial and handmade. I progressed by adding more wires, string, holes to each object making them more probable in a dystopia, and a lot more interesting to look at. The final objects, for instance in an exhibition, would be placed by the side of the prints, collages and essay giving everything full context.  

The final pictures I used were from my initial shoot, I feel with all the contextuality within the collages, essay and newly improved artefacts the stand-alone images would work well with a caption/title and subtle post-production drawings from the collages onto the images. I feel the images now communicate my idea of ‘2037′,  because of the editing style and newly found context taken from collages and photographed artefacts.

[gplewis]

a few failed beginnings

Why one writes: to unload one’s neuroses without having to explain what every little thing means. it’s a place to talk without being analyzed; perhaps there’s no skin in the game or it’s post-skin somehow; it’s a vortex with comfy clothes

Luckily I’ll never be as obsessed about the perfection of these pages than I was when I was desperate for progress in those critical formative years of 26, 27, 28, 29 and 30. Yes, I’m a bit self-righteous about my age and experience now. I am a new narrator. 

“Once written, the text becomes fixed.” —Ismail Kadare https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1105/ismail-kadare-the-art-of-fiction-no-153-ismail-kadare

thank God I failed at fame

-

I’m an enthusiastic innovator OK with failure; I like the brotherhood of the workday, I make a job a way to satisfaction and participation in the economy a form of play and spirituality; money is value and time is a fresh canvas to blow into and try to be heard by the system in the language it speaks; yes, systems and analytics need their preachers. It’s fun to know what to do and stay focused on the people.

I still want to play piano, sing, play tennis and soccer and baseball, have the choice always to turn to reading or listening (Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninoff)

—

the book is a record of the person I was, and I feel pride in the young person who was able to write it all down https://theparisreview.org/interviews/6312/henri-cole-the-art-of-poetry-no-98-henri-cole ^ him at 40

another Saturday morning washed up on the shore of the in-between, another new before

comets fly days hum making a song

since women I adored have gone away; it’s OK, I emigrate like a bird to the blinking cursor, Notes track where and how I grew up,

http://www.narrativemagazine.com/issues/poems-week-2011-2012/poem-week/dress-rehearsal-apocalypse-tomas-q-morin like Lazarus he rose from the darkest beds taking the splinter where he broke and carved castles from jagged beds he took time to make

-

My language of obviousness has hollowed out like a hole in a tree and is filling with water; the structure of the Notes is irrelevant in ways - I am not going to publish a memoir about my life experience from 25 to 30; it's good that I have it and I'm proud of the young man who wrote it but I can't see my enthusiasm ever matching up to the action of suggesting someone else read what I have written

writing was a way out of the hell of not knowing myself or what to do

it’s a record of thrashing you’re reading now; thanks

But why throw your Notes at them when you can be nice instead? It’s not like I’m far away. If you ask me for my number I’ll give it to you and we’ll text. We can relate.

—

a tweetstorm I read that mattered https://twitter.com/jonst0kes/status/890970472774602752

life is work. also, love.

ivy climbing around poles, flowers popping out of tractor grates, nature fighting through and against and amid human insistence on place and stillness - nature exerting that time is fluid, everything is burning, things don't remain unbroken; time rusts all

The thing about the moment is it isn't going anywhere; we're gonna be here for the rest of our lives “what I was doing” is never rare; I need not hunt for anecdote https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/feb/17/elena-ferrante-im-tired-of-fiction-i-no-longer-see-a-reason-to-go-hunting-for-anecdotes

I have the record of what I was; so much data of two years ago and I edit it; I clean it up, make the trail from birth to hear traversable but we have to live today, bear the burden of survival every hour eat hydrate meditate pray the verbs that keep us together the best thing to do is to be something—use your body, use your day, use your manner of speaking to get a life that’s worth being seen and thought about—so far so good: connive your way to a safe career that finances your creative, spiritual efforts like typing thoughts, reading articles, playing piano, singing, having weekends, taking pictures; of course don’t be a public figure; twentysomethings who haven’t done therapy are going to stay up all day and night clutching their image on screen; you have an ambivalence that is rare and valuable but you have no patience for impressing any media elite

so write and grow to make the truth bearable hit notes well: sing, play, write, message, talk with a backdrop of defensible business career and healthy habits (diet, exercise, water, sleep) live into the years when you know how to write fiction because you have a fuller sense of the human condition - you know no one can save you; you know a profound solitude, a caring, nurturing, generative, restorative relationship with yourself alone at night, in the morning, over lunchtime, standing at a red light—that’s where the joy is

-

looking forward to seeing her was nice

a man typing to make himself feel better about his losses

Andante - walking pace Allegro ma non troppo - fast but without tripping

-

fuck literary elites: no one has a monopoly on what is nice to read, how solitude and disappointment draws eyes down and hearts open, seeking a like-minded soul with whom to bond, whose brave existence can make you feel seen, can give you reason to go on yet another day

one media source is insignificant because everything else is just as available

-

take my lovely worm out of the bag show you what I wrote

[years of sitting with the blinking cursor]

-

drugs, love, money, art, death, freedom, time, social media, banality and justice are all still of interest; they're the only things left to do once you’ve won career

Vanity, fear, desire, competition

thinking, feeling, living my life with access to a keyboard and the endless internet occupying this political and personal moment in time as my body accelerates toward certain demise

-

typing, my voice is all I’m left with here at the edge of late capitalism, Saturday, overcast a plane flies overhead

I have no plans except and love shall stomp a new era

a rainforest glistening with possibilities a house on the coast, working from home so many lives I could explain which could be self-sustaining I have many two-year stints left to luxuriate in

and words will fill the pages of my days because a keyboard is where my soul is home

the people I love are out there people who love are out there

we all want the same thing: a safe home, a supportive community, education, time to pursue our curiosity, to contribute meaningfully

I know who I am now

I’m here for the collapse of capitalism

I’m ready for a role in the world as it and I will be

I fear no fate

I love life, I trust life, I am a fucking miracle

I think people will get what they deserve Good people find each other and

Bad people get found out.

the lame crown-pieces at the tops of traditional hierarchies who don’t do anything difficult or admirable are gonna come crashing down

systems of government based on blockchain technology, i.e. transparency

get the rich people at the top out of power—distribute wealth down for education, health care, housing, food, infrastructure, community projects

why is this money sitting in bank accounts? 2017 is the light shone on all dark corners of American reality and the 99% are not going quietly to their desk jobs

millennials are killing everything wasteful and actually think about consequences and interconnectivity

I was made for the future I am just as opinionated and demanding as I was at 26 at the height of burning intensity

Now I've gotten therapy and found a safe career and I'm 100% logged on

and we know that connection is the electric pursuit so

edit something in public and realize it doesn’t need to be there!

working on your front door is good work to do because everyone walks through

06. Connection is the electric pursuit reread and skimmed 10/10 10:11am (21 pages)

As my aging MacBook circles the drain, I wonder: have I overestimated my computing needs? https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wj9bdm/i-tried-to-replace-my-laptop-with-my-phone-and-a-dollar20-bluetooth-keyboard how much footprint do I really need? I will have to learn how little I have to control (as far as images stored and available and my habits well-worn, i.e. I know the click and search path to getting any particular image I can remember - always honing my library - perhaps that’s the fate of man who’s transcended hourly rate and execution for others’ profit-making schemes

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/511276/free-speech-in-the-era-of-its-technological-amplification/

late nights engaged in conversations on Usenet https://medium.com/s/trustissues/the-messy-fourth-estate-a42c1586b657

to be imaginatively drawn into the sticky world of some nearby human being’s home life https://www.technologyreview.com/s/410623/i-just-called-to-say-i-love-you/

The numbers keep getting worse: the true energy costs of AI, connected devices, and cryptocurrency https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/11/tsunami-of-data-could-consume-fifth-global-electricity-by-2025 written by a beautiful woman ripe with life https://genius.com/Talib-kweli-joy-lyrics

The numbers keep getting worse: a memoir of a civilization before its collapse

tsunami of data will consume all Human Resources https://twitter.com/katecrawford/status/1046766828939341824?s=21 giving to the void of send, to the possibly seen the atomization of my desire to be real that’s what will take up electricity for the rest of days

our endless desire for connection is what kills us in the end!
 OR we become part of the worldwide effort to save humanity in heroic fashion by therapy for everyone, a collective Kumbaya, a come-to-Jesus moment where we actually come to [have?] a savior and worship, love and people are loved and adored instead of fear and money but we love images and the devices that serve we are comfortable holding an abstraction of the world in our hands and we can operate our piece in it and yes, then we sit down to dinner and realize our body is just the container of our situation...our body is an emissary of the struggle for survival and love we are in this year this month

The craving for that single stranger-filled neighborhood would not stop with the telegraph. Over the next hundred years, radio, television, and even the telephone all dramatically increased the number of daily interactions people have with information. https://medium.com/@Marinaccio/the-telegraph-changed-how-you-spend-your-time-9a691d860e11