#justforfollowingpeople

[copperbadge]

Oh god I got a discussion of therapy all over that poor person’s post about ADHD.....did not mean to spill quite that many personal beans but I queued it when I was tired and it posted before I noticed it was inappropriate. 

I wanted to reply to the comments individually but I felt like I’d be disjointed about it and maybe some people don’t want their comment on one post blasted to 30K people on another post, so in a general sense... 

I know there are different modalities to therapy -- I have no idea what mine were but I doubt it matters since it was twenty-five years ago and I was a child. Part of the problem is that the modalities which are clear-cut in theory seem unhelpfully loose in practice. I’ll look through a directory of therapists and a half-dozen will give different modalities from each other but talk about the same handful of therapeutic techniques, or address the same family of issues, or both. And most of the modalities both in the clinical and practical sense seem extremely unpleasant, so that is perhaps a Me Problem. 

I end up asking myself, “What’s my goal in doing this?” and I picture myself sitting down with a therapist who asks what I’m looking to address, because that would help narrow down my options. But I never have a good answer. So I think, “That seems like an hour a week that could be spent doing something less expensive” and close out of the search window. Then a few weeks later I think “Well, that might be useful, I’ll look around” and the cycle starts again. 

There are so many good uses for therapy, but a lot of what people say they use therapy for, I've done on my own for years, or am working on now and don’t feel like I need help. I don’t really have any problems identifying therapists who aren’t going to work for me for one reason or another, but it’s an issue if I can only tell a therapist what I don’t want to do. Saying “I’m not interested in doing roleplays” is fine as boundary-setting but if I can’t say “Because I want to accomplish this different thing” then all I’m doing is insulting someone’s profession, really. 

So what’s left? Just the vague sense that other people I like and admire find it useful, and my experiences were very much outlier, so maybe I should try it again. But if I can’t identify why I should try it again, and if I’m going to be aggressively combative about it (which...I don’t want to be but I do know me) then all I’m really doing is paying someone to be insulted by me for an hour, and I can do that to people who deserve it more, for free, on the internet. 

niennanir

The thing with therapy, speaking as someone who was a counselor for a period of years, is that it is a tool that supposes a baseline function. Going to Therapy when you have ADHD is very similar to being handed a hammer and told to use it when you have no arms.  

I did want to respond to this comment specifically because a) that’s very validating and b) it means that if I do want to continue looking I guess a good place to start would be asking my meds psych, because he at least deals with adults with ADHD on the reg and can be like “Well, first we gotta get you some robot arms.” 

I just like the idea of having robot arms, really. The hammer’s a bonus! 

...my meds psych is a very nice man but he’s also super earnest and will probably not understand why I find the robot arms thing so funny. 

[alwaysalreadyangry]

Hey! I have a ridic niche poetry / gpt complaint & you are possibly the only person I know of who shares this weird mashup of interests so I'm sending you this ask, feel free to ignore my word vomit / thoughts on yaoi, etc.

So ok, here's the thing: obviously chatgpt has changed the landscape wrt ai-generated text (for the worse, IMO) & given the spam that, say, Clarksworld, saw as a result I think it makes sense for journals & mags to bar submissions of work that wholly or partially uses ai, especially in the short term as norms & best practices around usage get sorted out. But today I was doing submission research & ran across a poetry place that bars it explicitly because they consider anything that uses ai text generation (out of any platform not just chat got) to be plagiarism. And, like. I have so many frustrations with this.

Because, yes, a person can use ai in a plagiaristic way, to create digital forgeries & the like, but like (a) by painting all uses as plagiarism it becomes harder to call out specific unethical uses, as well as make it harder to establish good boundaries for what constitutes ethical usage & best practice & (b) while I think there are many questions to be asked about training sets & what material is fair game for the companies making these models to use, I'm skeptical that output from models that haven't been fine-tuned with a specific person's work can constitute plagiarism. If you can't name a specific artist who's work is being plagiarized then that feels like it fundamentally can't be called plagiarism? Like, sure, if you want to say it's unethical in other ways, that feels fair, but is the idea that, what, any text that has been generated using ai is plagiarizing everyone? I don't think the basic premise holds; a better thing would be to say that ai is banned because of unanswered questions surrounding the datasets the model was trained on, or general ethics or whatever.

Anyway, I guess what I'm really annoyed about is the best criticisms of chatgpt & similar have largely come from people who actually have been doing interesting things with gpt / ai for years & some of the worst / most counterproductive takes seem to be coming from places like this which repeat Twitter takes without understanding the underlying issues. Aaaaand /rant.

Anyway hope you're doing well & are not spending the start of your weekend annoyed by submission guidelines as I am. (I will not subject you to my other rants about submission pet peeves, but if you have any of your own to complain about, please know I would listen with avid interest.)

(hope you don't mind me answering publicly - if i did it privately i'd lose the message you sent so this is what i default to!)

yeah i really feel you here - every time i see people talk about how AI can never make literature~ or whatever i feel like saying. it already has, just maybe not in the way you're thinking, or the way tech people with no real involvement with lit think it will, should, can.

so much of poetry & avant-garde literature and art of the last century has been made by cutting up and appropriating text or images found elsewhere, through chance operations, through bots and markov chains and generative software... the idea that ~AI (a misnomer of a term honestly) poetry, computer-generated poetry, is new is funny to me. i saw an exhibition in 2019 in vienna with this installation that dates back to 2001... the first fully autonomous poetry generator. the issue with the current state of things is like -- not about the whole concept of computer-generated or computer-aided poetry! but, like! with these increasingly large language models made by scraping the whole internet...

[emjee]

So I've decided that I'm dealing with ~election stress~ by messaging folks whose writing I love, but whose work I don't think I've commented on! So! You are first up! I've been reading & rereading your Joe/Nicky stories the past few weeks -- they are such comfort reads. I love how they are adults, whose decisions & lives aren't just centered on each other; rather their relationship works because it complements what they already care about & want from life. & I always enjoy reading fics that write about subjects from a place of deep interest, which clearly Nicky's Christian background is for you. Anyhow, thank you for your writing!!! It has brought much respite from ~the world~ of late & I am very grateful for that!!!

this is a beautiful way to transmit stress into something affirmative, thank you so much!! This entire message is a massive compliment, I’m blushing, truly. I’m so honored that something I wrote is a place of comfort for you. And one of my favorite things about Joe and Nicky is that they’re clearly individuals but they’re so thoroughly intertwined, which is basically my favorite relationship dynamic of all time, so I’m glad that’s coming through in my writing! And thank you for the bit about places of deep interest--life didn’t conspire to make me a church nerd for nothing, might as well get creative mileage out of it.

thank you again for this! and take care <3

[unpretty]

I have never full body agreed with someone more than with your opinions on quotation marks. The curly kind are evil, the straight kind are better, and programs are the fucking devil when you set up a new system and turn off the curly quotes anew. (Apologies for drink midnight ask-sending, I prefer to lurk and never interact with Tumblr people except for liking cute animal posts and shit so probably by sending this I am violating some sacred Tumblr pact of ask-send rules but YOU ARE RIGHT. Thx.)

i’m glad i’m not the only person who has problems with smart quotes, i honestly thought i was just a weirdo