Jon Ureña's Blog, page 15
November 8, 2024
Neural narratives in Python #27
I recommend you to check out the previous parts if you don’t know what this “neural narratives” thing is about. In short, I wrote in Python a system to have multi-character conversations with large language models (like Llama 3.1), in which the characters are isolated in terms of memories and bios, so no leakage to other participants. Here’s the GitHub repo, that now even features a proper readme.
The previous part saw the ending of the cosmic horror tale I was telling. This one will see the beginning of the silly isekai thing I’ll do next in my AI-fueled app.
Here’s our suave protagonist, Japanese teenager Takumi Arai:
[check out this post on my site for the audiochapter]
The previous part saw the ending of the cosmic horror tale I was telling. This one will see the beginning of the silly isekai thing I’ll do next in my AI-fueled app.
Here’s our suave protagonist, Japanese teenager Takumi Arai:
[check out this post on my site for the audiochapter]
November 6, 2024
Neural narratives in Python #26
I recommend you to check out the previous parts if you don’t know what this “neural narratives” thing is about. In short, I wrote in Python a system to have multi-character conversations with large language models (like Llama 3.1), in which the characters are isolated in terms of memories and bios, so no leakage to other participants. Here’s the GitHub repo, that now even features a proper readme.
In the previous part, the protagonist realized that the alien Zha’thik, who had subjected young Elizabeth Harrow to a ritual intended to turn her into some sort of cosmic entity, had fallen in love with the earthly teenager. The team convinced Zha’thik to let Elizabeth endure her changes back at home. The alien was even kind enough to open a dimensional portal back to Earth.
Here’s the somber resolution of this story.
[check out this post on my site for the audiochapter and the rest]
In the previous part, the protagonist realized that the alien Zha’thik, who had subjected young Elizabeth Harrow to a ritual intended to turn her into some sort of cosmic entity, had fallen in love with the earthly teenager. The team convinced Zha’thik to let Elizabeth endure her changes back at home. The alien was even kind enough to open a dimensional portal back to Earth.
Here’s the somber resolution of this story.
[check out this post on my site for the audiochapter and the rest]
October 31, 2024
Neural narratives in Python #21
I recommend you to check out the previous parts if you don’t know what this “neural narratives” thing is about. In short, I wrote in Python a system to have multi-character conversations with large language models (like Llama 3.1), in which the characters are isolated in terms of memories and bios, so no leakage to other participants. Here’s the GitHub repo, that now even features a proper readme.
Here’s the next episode of the eldritch show. Last time, the sadistic alien Zha’thik prepared an unfathomable feast in a non-euclidean hall. Our jaded detective decided to take the first bite, only to realize that the morphing mass had turned into the corpse of Emilia, his long-lost teenage love. Now he’s bound to face his personal horror.
[check out the audiochapter on my site]
Here’s the next episode of the eldritch show. Last time, the sadistic alien Zha’thik prepared an unfathomable feast in a non-euclidean hall. Our jaded detective decided to take the first bite, only to realize that the morphing mass had turned into the corpse of Emilia, his long-lost teenage love. Now he’s bound to face his personal horror.
[check out the audiochapter on my site]
October 30, 2024
Neural narratives in Python #19
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
I recommend you to check out the previous parts if you don’t know what this “neural narratives” thing is about. In short, I wrote in Python a system to have multi-character conversations with large language models (like Llama 3.1), in which the characters are isolated in terms of memories and bios, so no leakage to other participants. Here’s the GitHub repo, that now even features a proper readme.
In the previous episode of this thing, our team of Earthlings, having ventured through a rift into another dimension, encountered a half-buried building in an obsidian desert. Now, they enter it. The following audio is an episode-long account of what happened.
[you can listen to the audiochapter on my site]
I recommend you to check out the previous parts if you don’t know what this “neural narratives” thing is about. In short, I wrote in Python a system to have multi-character conversations with large language models (like Llama 3.1), in which the characters are isolated in terms of memories and bios, so no leakage to other participants. Here’s the GitHub repo, that now even features a proper readme.
In the previous episode of this thing, our team of Earthlings, having ventured through a rift into another dimension, encountered a half-buried building in an obsidian desert. Now, they enter it. The following audio is an episode-long account of what happened.
[you can listen to the audiochapter on my site]
October 22, 2024
Life update (10/22/2024)
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
Tomorrow I start a vacation period that could last until early December, but the whole thing may end up getting cut short. These are the circumstances: I’m covering for a nutcase who goes on medical leaves constantly. I’ve been covering his latest leave for close to a year. In my country, if you extend your leave for more than a year, you’ll get transferred to Social Services, where you’ll be forced to do interviews with them and have some administrative issues. People usually want to avoid that, so I expect this person whom I have to refer to as my coworker to return a day before his leave reaches a whole year. That’s October 31st.
If the guy returns, my contract will end. I’ll get paid for the unspent vacation time (because I already scheduled it; wouldn’t have gotten paid for them otherwise), but that means that I’ll be unemployed, and I may get called into work right that day as part of a new contract. Best case scenario for me is if this coworker keeps working throughout November.
I really need time off in general, but even more so because I haven’t been doing well physically. As I posted some time ago, during a period of sustained stress for months, I suffered what a neurologist referred to as a “complex migraine,” likely a hemiplegic migraine: I was experiencing flashes of darkness in my right eye, and during the attack, I lost sensitivity in the right half of my body. I’m quite sure that I also caught a “burnt smell” at the time. The young doctor diagnosed me with a migraine because I had a history of migraines (that had ended since I started taking beta-blockers for my heart issues), and because of the visual aura. I’m quite sure he also said something to the effect of, “You’re too young to have strokes.” I should also be too young to have arrhythmia, or any of the other shit I’ve ended up burdened with, but here I am.
However, the visual aura never went away entirely, and a couple of weeks ago or so it developed into a torn retina. That got treated, leaving me, however, with permanent “floaters.” But it made me think that what I suffered at work wasn’t a migraine, but a stroke. I feel like I haven’t recovered fully from that episode, that I’m clumsier, more forgetful, and “off” in general since. I don’t know if you can spot brain damage in an MRI or if they just assume the kind of brain damage given the symptoms, but in any case, I have a visit scheduled for November 6th, that I hope will end up either confirming brain damage or giving me good news.
I must add that I have very little confidence in the medical profession, or at least as it stands now. I deal with many nurses and doctors on a regular basis. More often than not, the nurses are the chatty, dumb, “tactile” type, and the doctors are very often egocentric and have something of a god complex. I am vaccine-injured thanks to Moderna, and have visited three cardiologists for it. The first one, annoyed, denied that the covid vaccines caused any heart issues. The second, close to retirement, seemed ashamed of the whole thing, and admitted that the covid vaccines indeed were causing heart damage; he told me that he had treated lots of young women who had ended up in his office because they had acquired Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS) after covid or the vaccines. This doctor, however, behaved as if admitting that the vaccines caused any issue was a huge taboo. A third cardiologist said that indeed the vaccines were associated with heart damage, but that there weren’t enough studies to prove that they caused the problem or if they just triggered a predisposition toward having that problem. “What came first, the chicken or the egg?”. Hey, remember when you jabbed millions upon millions of people with an experimental treatment without having enough studies to prove their effects?
I’m my spare time, I’m working on my Flask/Python app neural-narrative, that allows the user to chat with characters controlled by large language models, and do some other narrative stuff. I’m very pumped to work on it, aching to return home and keep programming.
Recently I decided to add the overarching notion of Story Universes to the hierarchy of places of a story, and that led me to tinker with other stuff. I have yet to finish returning the app to normal, in a significant part because I added a new type to ensure that strings that should have content indeed had it. In retrospect, that was a mistake, because it would have been enough with validating the content of the string at times and throwing a ValueError if the validation failed, so I’ll have to get busy reverting those changes.
Good news is that I’ve racked up about 400 pytest tests to ensure the proper behavior of those parts of the code. All the tests are written by versions of OpenAI’s Orion preview model, which are wonderful for routine work that is very useful but annoying to write. Of course, preparing a part of the code so that it can be testable necessarily forces you to ensure its code quality (using dependency injection, adhering to the Single Responsibility Principle, etc.). However, I also have a God Class lingering around, one that handles everything related to the file system, that I’ll need to chop up and test soon.
OpenAI recently released an initial version of a “swarm of agents” framework, that will allow you to easily set up chains of responsibility and action with an arbitrary number of AI agents. That has gotten me thinking about setting up a writers’ room page in my app in which you could speak in natural language, and different AI agents specialized in writing, analyzing lore, considering character development, etc. would work on whatever aspect of the ongoing story you want to touch. It could work pretty much like a real writers’ room, but without the nasty ego and other human aspects.
I’ll try to visit new places during this vacation time, although I’m limited by my lack of a car, poor stamina, IBS, etc. Thankfully I have plenty of money. I’m also aching to get lost in a good game, and I have eyed that new JRPG by the Persona dudes, Metaphor: ReFantazio, quite lustfully. I’m constantly reading similar stories (although usually with an isekai bent), and most Western games are falling one after the other to the ESG and DEI rot, so you can’t rely on those. However, I don’t know if I can justify to myself playing games when I’m constantly juggling creative projects.
Tomorrow I start a vacation period that could last until early December, but the whole thing may end up getting cut short. These are the circumstances: I’m covering for a nutcase who goes on medical leaves constantly. I’ve been covering his latest leave for close to a year. In my country, if you extend your leave for more than a year, you’ll get transferred to Social Services, where you’ll be forced to do interviews with them and have some administrative issues. People usually want to avoid that, so I expect this person whom I have to refer to as my coworker to return a day before his leave reaches a whole year. That’s October 31st.
If the guy returns, my contract will end. I’ll get paid for the unspent vacation time (because I already scheduled it; wouldn’t have gotten paid for them otherwise), but that means that I’ll be unemployed, and I may get called into work right that day as part of a new contract. Best case scenario for me is if this coworker keeps working throughout November.
I really need time off in general, but even more so because I haven’t been doing well physically. As I posted some time ago, during a period of sustained stress for months, I suffered what a neurologist referred to as a “complex migraine,” likely a hemiplegic migraine: I was experiencing flashes of darkness in my right eye, and during the attack, I lost sensitivity in the right half of my body. I’m quite sure that I also caught a “burnt smell” at the time. The young doctor diagnosed me with a migraine because I had a history of migraines (that had ended since I started taking beta-blockers for my heart issues), and because of the visual aura. I’m quite sure he also said something to the effect of, “You’re too young to have strokes.” I should also be too young to have arrhythmia, or any of the other shit I’ve ended up burdened with, but here I am.
However, the visual aura never went away entirely, and a couple of weeks ago or so it developed into a torn retina. That got treated, leaving me, however, with permanent “floaters.” But it made me think that what I suffered at work wasn’t a migraine, but a stroke. I feel like I haven’t recovered fully from that episode, that I’m clumsier, more forgetful, and “off” in general since. I don’t know if you can spot brain damage in an MRI or if they just assume the kind of brain damage given the symptoms, but in any case, I have a visit scheduled for November 6th, that I hope will end up either confirming brain damage or giving me good news.
I must add that I have very little confidence in the medical profession, or at least as it stands now. I deal with many nurses and doctors on a regular basis. More often than not, the nurses are the chatty, dumb, “tactile” type, and the doctors are very often egocentric and have something of a god complex. I am vaccine-injured thanks to Moderna, and have visited three cardiologists for it. The first one, annoyed, denied that the covid vaccines caused any heart issues. The second, close to retirement, seemed ashamed of the whole thing, and admitted that the covid vaccines indeed were causing heart damage; he told me that he had treated lots of young women who had ended up in his office because they had acquired Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS) after covid or the vaccines. This doctor, however, behaved as if admitting that the vaccines caused any issue was a huge taboo. A third cardiologist said that indeed the vaccines were associated with heart damage, but that there weren’t enough studies to prove that they caused the problem or if they just triggered a predisposition toward having that problem. “What came first, the chicken or the egg?”. Hey, remember when you jabbed millions upon millions of people with an experimental treatment without having enough studies to prove their effects?
I’m my spare time, I’m working on my Flask/Python app neural-narrative, that allows the user to chat with characters controlled by large language models, and do some other narrative stuff. I’m very pumped to work on it, aching to return home and keep programming.
Recently I decided to add the overarching notion of Story Universes to the hierarchy of places of a story, and that led me to tinker with other stuff. I have yet to finish returning the app to normal, in a significant part because I added a new type to ensure that strings that should have content indeed had it. In retrospect, that was a mistake, because it would have been enough with validating the content of the string at times and throwing a ValueError if the validation failed, so I’ll have to get busy reverting those changes.
Good news is that I’ve racked up about 400 pytest tests to ensure the proper behavior of those parts of the code. All the tests are written by versions of OpenAI’s Orion preview model, which are wonderful for routine work that is very useful but annoying to write. Of course, preparing a part of the code so that it can be testable necessarily forces you to ensure its code quality (using dependency injection, adhering to the Single Responsibility Principle, etc.). However, I also have a God Class lingering around, one that handles everything related to the file system, that I’ll need to chop up and test soon.
OpenAI recently released an initial version of a “swarm of agents” framework, that will allow you to easily set up chains of responsibility and action with an arbitrary number of AI agents. That has gotten me thinking about setting up a writers’ room page in my app in which you could speak in natural language, and different AI agents specialized in writing, analyzing lore, considering character development, etc. would work on whatever aspect of the ongoing story you want to touch. It could work pretty much like a real writers’ room, but without the nasty ego and other human aspects.
I’ll try to visit new places during this vacation time, although I’m limited by my lack of a car, poor stamina, IBS, etc. Thankfully I have plenty of money. I’m also aching to get lost in a good game, and I have eyed that new JRPG by the Persona dudes, Metaphor: ReFantazio, quite lustfully. I’m constantly reading similar stories (although usually with an isekai bent), and most Western games are falling one after the other to the ESG and DEI rot, so you can’t rely on those. However, I don’t know if I can justify to myself playing games when I’m constantly juggling creative projects.
October 15, 2024
New songs by Colours Run
If you want to know about my story with Tim Cameron and his band Colours Run, check out my previous post about it. In summary: back when I was a teen, until I was eighteen or so, I used to frequent some comedy forums named PWOT, where an English fellow by the name of Tim Cameron, and nickname of Camerhil, posted his songs. I found him brilliant. You had the sense that this guy opened his heart up to you. It’s like he felt he had little time to do that in this world, so he was in a hurry to make it somewhere with his music. In 2007 or so, along with his bandmates, he published an album, and then he disappeared to the US and was never heard from again. I never heard from him again, at least. As far as I can tell, you can’t even buy his works these days.
I used to treasure his songs, but I had lost most of them along the way. It was almost a miracle that I came across a twenty-year-old CD with about eleven songs of his, and that was all I had left. Last night, though, a kind soul gave me an early Christmas present; turns out that there are other former PWOT members out there who loved Tim’s music.
Without further ado, here are the missing Colours Run songs (apart from a few ones that are, let’s say, only for former PWOT members).
[check out the song on my personal page]
I used to treasure his songs, but I had lost most of them along the way. It was almost a miracle that I came across a twenty-year-old CD with about eleven songs of his, and that was all I had left. Last night, though, a kind soul gave me an early Christmas present; turns out that there are other former PWOT members out there who loved Tim’s music.
Without further ado, here are the missing Colours Run songs (apart from a few ones that are, let’s say, only for former PWOT members).
[check out the song on my personal page]
October 14, 2024
Life update (10/14/2024)
[check out this post on my personal site, where it looks better]
My week-long vacation has ended, and I’m writing these pointless words from the office. Back to the grind of fixing issues with printers, giving access to folders, and connecting cables to sockets. I don’t like my job, but it pays, so that’s what I do.
I don’t feel like writing fiction at the moment. I’m always compelled to work on this or that project, but my subconscious is the one holding the reins, and I don’t have any say in it. Most of my brain’s operating time these days has been occupied with thoughts of how to improve my Python project neural-narrative, that allows the users (meaning me and the few people that have cloned the repository) to chat with characters controlled by large language models, and in general engage in roleplaying with a large language model acting as the Dungeon Master. It’s all very exciting. I have been thinking about implementing events, lore books, and plenty of other weird stuff. Shortly after I got to work, I started relaying Hermes 405B my doubts about how some sections of the javascript code underlying my pages worked. I’m a systems builder by personality, and this is one interesting system to build. It certainly helps that at this point of AI development, the characters you can engage with behave like actual human beings, which is a bizarre thing to have gotten accustomed to.
I haven’t done much of note during this vacation time otherwise. I visited Donostia’s aquarium, and got a dose of nostalgia and grief due to my memories of having visited it back in 2021, with my then girlfriend Alazne. It just happens that it never happened: that visit took place in the novel I was writing (My Own Desert Places), and the actual last time I had visited the aquarium happened back when I was a teen or a child (I didn’t even bother to visit the aquarium so I could write the scene; sorry, writing gods). The act of writing a story brands your brain with memories similar to, if not stronger than your actual experiences. I’m not sure what to think about that, but in someone as isolated and generally avoidant of new experiences as myself, it may be a good thing.
A few days ago I went out for an aimless walk. I took a wrong turn and found myself climbing up a steep path. I love checking out new places, but I don’t have a car and I get anxious around human beings, so I can’t stray too far. Anyway, at a solitary stretch of the road, I found an even more deserted place: the cemetery. I realized I had never visited it, so I walked in.
I like cemeteries. They are usually empty, silent, and calm. As I strolled around, I ventured down a staircase and found myself in an underground lair of funeral niches. I thought of checking out the whole place, but I started getting a weird, sinister vibe, the kind that makes you think that you’re going to spot stuff out of the corner of your eye. I wasn’t in the mood to deal with ghosts, so I walked back up.
I spent maybe an hour reading the inscriptions on tombstones and checking out the gift and notes that the deceased’s loved ones had left. I came across the memorial for a girl I used to know, who got murdered by a psych student when she was barely twenty years old, and found out that her father, whom I used to see around in the neighborhood, had died six years earlier, before his time. I found the burial site of a twenty-two year old kid I knew about in my teens; as he rode his bike with his girlfriend seated behind him, he lost control and fell under the wheels of a truck. His girlfriend was unharmed, if you can call “unharmed” to look down at the burst remains of your loved one’s head. The last time I knew of that girl, she was attending the most prominent local disco then (I must have been sixteen or seventeen). She was wearing a T-shirt with the photo of her deceased boyfriend. At some point of the evening, she burst into tears. I don’t know what you do with your life after such a thing happens.
As I read the inscriptions on the tombstones, my mind pictured those people’s lives before they died, mainly the lives of those who died way before their time. One tombstone had etched the death dates of three members of the same family back in the fifties, and two of them were kids aged five and six. A girl with the peculiar name of Ninfa de Amo Díez had died in her early twenties back in the fifties or sixties. When I returned home, I googled that name, but nothing came up; at this point of our civilization, she may as well have never existed. It got me thinking, as I sometimes do, about the point of it all: you live, you fuck around for a while, and then you die. Soon enough, nobody will remember you. I guess the whole point is in the “fuck around for a while” part.
At some point, I felt permeated with a deep sadness. I could barely keep myself from getting teary-eyed. I wasn’t in the mood to start crying in a public place, even though there was nobody around, so I left.
Now that I’ve returned to work and I’m forced to do things I don’t want, I’m getting reacquainted with the notion that my body and brain don’t work as they should. For example, I was supposed to patch a network connection, but I forgot to grab both the keys of the network rack as well as the device that allows you to follow the cables. It simply slipped my mind, as many things have over the last few years. As I was crouching around at the network rack, as soon as I stood up, a buzzing, a sort of sudden dizziness, coursed through my nerves, and it took me minutes to get back to normal. I feel in general like I’m degenerating faster than I should for my age. I have a visit to a neurologist scheduled for the sixth of next month, and I hope to get an MRI done.
I also got my right eye checked out by an ophthalmologist, a couple of weeks after I experienced a torn retina. She told me that the debris and other weird shit that has ended inside my right eye (like a tangle of fibers that keep swaying before my vision) are pretty much there until I die. Wonderful news. She suggested to wear sunglasses outside, because such shadows in my vision are more prominent under the glare of the sun. I’m otherwise recovered from the ordeal.
Anyway, I think that’s all I needed to say at the moment.
My week-long vacation has ended, and I’m writing these pointless words from the office. Back to the grind of fixing issues with printers, giving access to folders, and connecting cables to sockets. I don’t like my job, but it pays, so that’s what I do.
I don’t feel like writing fiction at the moment. I’m always compelled to work on this or that project, but my subconscious is the one holding the reins, and I don’t have any say in it. Most of my brain’s operating time these days has been occupied with thoughts of how to improve my Python project neural-narrative, that allows the users (meaning me and the few people that have cloned the repository) to chat with characters controlled by large language models, and in general engage in roleplaying with a large language model acting as the Dungeon Master. It’s all very exciting. I have been thinking about implementing events, lore books, and plenty of other weird stuff. Shortly after I got to work, I started relaying Hermes 405B my doubts about how some sections of the javascript code underlying my pages worked. I’m a systems builder by personality, and this is one interesting system to build. It certainly helps that at this point of AI development, the characters you can engage with behave like actual human beings, which is a bizarre thing to have gotten accustomed to.
I haven’t done much of note during this vacation time otherwise. I visited Donostia’s aquarium, and got a dose of nostalgia and grief due to my memories of having visited it back in 2021, with my then girlfriend Alazne. It just happens that it never happened: that visit took place in the novel I was writing (My Own Desert Places), and the actual last time I had visited the aquarium happened back when I was a teen or a child (I didn’t even bother to visit the aquarium so I could write the scene; sorry, writing gods). The act of writing a story brands your brain with memories similar to, if not stronger than your actual experiences. I’m not sure what to think about that, but in someone as isolated and generally avoidant of new experiences as myself, it may be a good thing.
A few days ago I went out for an aimless walk. I took a wrong turn and found myself climbing up a steep path. I love checking out new places, but I don’t have a car and I get anxious around human beings, so I can’t stray too far. Anyway, at a solitary stretch of the road, I found an even more deserted place: the cemetery. I realized I had never visited it, so I walked in.
I like cemeteries. They are usually empty, silent, and calm. As I strolled around, I ventured down a staircase and found myself in an underground lair of funeral niches. I thought of checking out the whole place, but I started getting a weird, sinister vibe, the kind that makes you think that you’re going to spot stuff out of the corner of your eye. I wasn’t in the mood to deal with ghosts, so I walked back up.
I spent maybe an hour reading the inscriptions on tombstones and checking out the gift and notes that the deceased’s loved ones had left. I came across the memorial for a girl I used to know, who got murdered by a psych student when she was barely twenty years old, and found out that her father, whom I used to see around in the neighborhood, had died six years earlier, before his time. I found the burial site of a twenty-two year old kid I knew about in my teens; as he rode his bike with his girlfriend seated behind him, he lost control and fell under the wheels of a truck. His girlfriend was unharmed, if you can call “unharmed” to look down at the burst remains of your loved one’s head. The last time I knew of that girl, she was attending the most prominent local disco then (I must have been sixteen or seventeen). She was wearing a T-shirt with the photo of her deceased boyfriend. At some point of the evening, she burst into tears. I don’t know what you do with your life after such a thing happens.
As I read the inscriptions on the tombstones, my mind pictured those people’s lives before they died, mainly the lives of those who died way before their time. One tombstone had etched the death dates of three members of the same family back in the fifties, and two of them were kids aged five and six. A girl with the peculiar name of Ninfa de Amo Díez had died in her early twenties back in the fifties or sixties. When I returned home, I googled that name, but nothing came up; at this point of our civilization, she may as well have never existed. It got me thinking, as I sometimes do, about the point of it all: you live, you fuck around for a while, and then you die. Soon enough, nobody will remember you. I guess the whole point is in the “fuck around for a while” part.
At some point, I felt permeated with a deep sadness. I could barely keep myself from getting teary-eyed. I wasn’t in the mood to start crying in a public place, even though there was nobody around, so I left.
Now that I’ve returned to work and I’m forced to do things I don’t want, I’m getting reacquainted with the notion that my body and brain don’t work as they should. For example, I was supposed to patch a network connection, but I forgot to grab both the keys of the network rack as well as the device that allows you to follow the cables. It simply slipped my mind, as many things have over the last few years. As I was crouching around at the network rack, as soon as I stood up, a buzzing, a sort of sudden dizziness, coursed through my nerves, and it took me minutes to get back to normal. I feel in general like I’m degenerating faster than I should for my age. I have a visit to a neurologist scheduled for the sixth of next month, and I hope to get an MRI done.
I also got my right eye checked out by an ophthalmologist, a couple of weeks after I experienced a torn retina. She told me that the debris and other weird shit that has ended inside my right eye (like a tangle of fibers that keep swaying before my vision) are pretty much there until I die. Wonderful news. She suggested to wear sunglasses outside, because such shadows in my vision are more prominent under the glare of the sun. I’m otherwise recovered from the ordeal.
Anyway, I think that’s all I needed to say at the moment.
October 7, 2024
Life update (10/07/2024)
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
For whatever reason, I’ve been thinking about my grandfathers. They are both long dead. Looking back, they were the kind of men who should have never been parents, and who due to their shortcomings, created all sorts of generational issues for their descendants.
I’m pretty sure that my grandfather on my mother’s side was autistic. He was that kind of extraordinarily introverted person with rigid thinking who had sensory issues and hated being bothered by anybody, even his kids. He fathered six or seven people, but didn’t raise them: he spent all day holed up in his study, clacking away at his typewriter. Not sure if his kids figured out what he was writing. If his kids were heard at all around his study, he’d stomp out at yell at them.
Apparently, at the end of his life, he confessed to one of his kids that he regretted the fact that he hadn’t been more open to people. I recall the last time he spoke to me: I had been dragged by my mother to her hometown, to hang out around her family, which annoyed me to no end as I couldn’t stand them. I was reading Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, which I never finished (too heavy for a seventeen-year-old), when I noticed my grandfather staring at me. A few seconds later he pointed out, “You’re reading, huh?” I lifted my gaze to his, to that pathetic smile of someone who wants to interact while having no clue how to do so. I told him, “Yes,” then lowered my gaze to my book again. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him looking around awkwardly as he rubbed his hands.
I didn’t like the guy. It’s no exaggeration to say that I exist because he was a complete shithead. He opposed my mother studying medicine, because he believed that women shouldn’t work. At the end of my mother’s first month as a nurse, he cashed her wages, and bought a book collection for himself, one large enough to fill most of the shelves of his long indoors balcony. My mother, outraged, skipped town. At the first town she ended up, she went searching for the first man who might support her, came across some doofus at a disco, got married and had children.
Regarding my grandfather on my father’s side, the situation was even nuttier. You see, until middle school, I spent the school breaks at my grandparents’, because both of my parents worked. I didn’t really interact with my grandparents (I can’t recall having talked more than five minutes total with either of them, if even that). My grandfather was the son of farmers from Valencia, and he got displaced as a child due to the Civil War. I remember him seated at their sofa, mumbling stupid stuff as he watched nature documentaries or cartoons. I spent most of my time at that home holed up in their guest room, seated at a desk to write or draw. At that point, I dreamed of becoming a cartoonist.
That grandfather was, let’s say, a bit peculiar. My primary school female classmates all knew him, and referred to him as “Jon’s grandpa.” One of the man’s hobbies was to hang out at the entrance of my primary school to approach little girls. He caressed their hair and told them what pretty princesses they were. This took place in the eighties and nineties, so he didn’t get in trouble; those were far more innocent times.
The last time he spoke to me, I came across him at a crossroads near his house. He looked sad and troubled; pretty sure he had already been diagnosed with the bone cancer that would eventually kill him. I remember him glancing at an African man passing us by, then saying, “Everything is changing so fast. I don’t know what’s happening.” I’m old enough to remember a time when meeting in this country a single person from South America was a novelty that prompted everyone to ask them questions. These days, half of the people you come across are ethnic aliens. Most of those accompanied by children are ethnic aliens. And we aren’t getting their “best and brightest” precisely.
Anyway, as my grandfather was lying in his deathbed from which he never stood up again, my parents told me a troubling anecdote: his caretaker had left for five minutes to buy some groceries, when my grandfather suddenly came with some bout of pain or something for which he would have to take the medicine. He called one of his children on the phone. The person told him, “Look at the row of medicine beside your bed. Take the one that says X.” My grandfather burst into tears, then cried out, “I can’t read!”
That man had organized his entire life around hiding the fact that he had never learned how to read. From the stuff he put on the TV, to the situations he involved himself in, if it included some text on the screen, sometimes he simply wandered away without a word. Imagine what sort of father he was; clearly he never taught his children anything. He must have gotten in his head that the shame of others learning that he was incapable of reading and writing was impossible to live with, even though it was understandable: he had been the son of impoverished farmers who couldn’t send him to school, and he endured the Civil War during his schooling years. Instead, due to the man’s choices, he produced a far bigger shame: that of a coward who hid from even his own children so they wouldn’t find out his secret.
In addition, that man allowed one of his sons, my father, to be physically abused for years. I never asked for the specifics, but my father’s uncle regularly beat him over the head, causing him obvious brain damage, if they committed any errors while assisting him as he played the accordion, or some shit.
Anyway, don’t know why I’ve thought about these two long-dead people recently. It’s not like they matter anymore. But the lessons I got from them, one that has been clear to me for a long time, is that some people simply shouldn’t have children; they have to recognize that in themselves and spare their descendants the pain. The world would be a far better place it people took that to heart.
EDIT: I fed this post to the Google thing that produces AI podcasts, and it came out well enough.
[check out the podcasts on my site]
For whatever reason, I’ve been thinking about my grandfathers. They are both long dead. Looking back, they were the kind of men who should have never been parents, and who due to their shortcomings, created all sorts of generational issues for their descendants.
I’m pretty sure that my grandfather on my mother’s side was autistic. He was that kind of extraordinarily introverted person with rigid thinking who had sensory issues and hated being bothered by anybody, even his kids. He fathered six or seven people, but didn’t raise them: he spent all day holed up in his study, clacking away at his typewriter. Not sure if his kids figured out what he was writing. If his kids were heard at all around his study, he’d stomp out at yell at them.
Apparently, at the end of his life, he confessed to one of his kids that he regretted the fact that he hadn’t been more open to people. I recall the last time he spoke to me: I had been dragged by my mother to her hometown, to hang out around her family, which annoyed me to no end as I couldn’t stand them. I was reading Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, which I never finished (too heavy for a seventeen-year-old), when I noticed my grandfather staring at me. A few seconds later he pointed out, “You’re reading, huh?” I lifted my gaze to his, to that pathetic smile of someone who wants to interact while having no clue how to do so. I told him, “Yes,” then lowered my gaze to my book again. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him looking around awkwardly as he rubbed his hands.
I didn’t like the guy. It’s no exaggeration to say that I exist because he was a complete shithead. He opposed my mother studying medicine, because he believed that women shouldn’t work. At the end of my mother’s first month as a nurse, he cashed her wages, and bought a book collection for himself, one large enough to fill most of the shelves of his long indoors balcony. My mother, outraged, skipped town. At the first town she ended up, she went searching for the first man who might support her, came across some doofus at a disco, got married and had children.
Regarding my grandfather on my father’s side, the situation was even nuttier. You see, until middle school, I spent the school breaks at my grandparents’, because both of my parents worked. I didn’t really interact with my grandparents (I can’t recall having talked more than five minutes total with either of them, if even that). My grandfather was the son of farmers from Valencia, and he got displaced as a child due to the Civil War. I remember him seated at their sofa, mumbling stupid stuff as he watched nature documentaries or cartoons. I spent most of my time at that home holed up in their guest room, seated at a desk to write or draw. At that point, I dreamed of becoming a cartoonist.
That grandfather was, let’s say, a bit peculiar. My primary school female classmates all knew him, and referred to him as “Jon’s grandpa.” One of the man’s hobbies was to hang out at the entrance of my primary school to approach little girls. He caressed their hair and told them what pretty princesses they were. This took place in the eighties and nineties, so he didn’t get in trouble; those were far more innocent times.
The last time he spoke to me, I came across him at a crossroads near his house. He looked sad and troubled; pretty sure he had already been diagnosed with the bone cancer that would eventually kill him. I remember him glancing at an African man passing us by, then saying, “Everything is changing so fast. I don’t know what’s happening.” I’m old enough to remember a time when meeting in this country a single person from South America was a novelty that prompted everyone to ask them questions. These days, half of the people you come across are ethnic aliens. Most of those accompanied by children are ethnic aliens. And we aren’t getting their “best and brightest” precisely.
Anyway, as my grandfather was lying in his deathbed from which he never stood up again, my parents told me a troubling anecdote: his caretaker had left for five minutes to buy some groceries, when my grandfather suddenly came with some bout of pain or something for which he would have to take the medicine. He called one of his children on the phone. The person told him, “Look at the row of medicine beside your bed. Take the one that says X.” My grandfather burst into tears, then cried out, “I can’t read!”
That man had organized his entire life around hiding the fact that he had never learned how to read. From the stuff he put on the TV, to the situations he involved himself in, if it included some text on the screen, sometimes he simply wandered away without a word. Imagine what sort of father he was; clearly he never taught his children anything. He must have gotten in his head that the shame of others learning that he was incapable of reading and writing was impossible to live with, even though it was understandable: he had been the son of impoverished farmers who couldn’t send him to school, and he endured the Civil War during his schooling years. Instead, due to the man’s choices, he produced a far bigger shame: that of a coward who hid from even his own children so they wouldn’t find out his secret.
In addition, that man allowed one of his sons, my father, to be physically abused for years. I never asked for the specifics, but my father’s uncle regularly beat him over the head, causing him obvious brain damage, if they committed any errors while assisting him as he played the accordion, or some shit.
Anyway, don’t know why I’ve thought about these two long-dead people recently. It’s not like they matter anymore. But the lessons I got from them, one that has been clear to me for a long time, is that some people simply shouldn’t have children; they have to recognize that in themselves and spare their descendants the pain. The world would be a far better place it people took that to heart.
EDIT: I fed this post to the Google thing that produces AI podcasts, and it came out well enough.
[check out the podcasts on my site]
October 5, 2024
Life update (10/05/2024)
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
Despite what yesterday’s heavy post might imply, I’m in a good mood. It’s half past eight in the morning on a Saturday and I’m the sole technician on duty at work, but it just happens that when today’s shift ends, I’m going on an eight days-long break. Once I return from the break, I’ll only have to work for seven days longer until I go on vacation from the 23rd of October to the 28th of November. I’m going on vacation because I’ve been made aware recently that my company (which is the Basque health service) will no longer pay unspent vacations as long as one has worked for longer than six months (three months in some cases). I’ve been working since November of last year, so I’ve accumulated plenty of off days.
However, I’m covering for a shitty guy who for the last five years or so has only worked for a couple of months at the most before he went on another medical leave. Saying that he “worked” is very generous, because he’s utterly useless when he isn’t actively sabotaging the department. His problems, we all suspect, are of the mental variety. Not the fun kind either. Anyway, I’ve covered plenty of his leaves, and every single time, he has returned without informing anyone. I would come to the office only to find the motherfucker sitting at his desk pretending that he hadn’t just fucked over the one who was replacing him: after all, I won’t get paid for the day I come to work if he’s already there. It was even worse one time when he ended his medical leave on a Friday afternoon without bothering to check if he worked that Saturday, which I covered for him as we had no idea he had returned from his leave. My boss had to deal with HR; otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten paid for that Saturday.
Anyway, that shithead has been on a medical leave since October 31st of last year, and some nasty stuff happens if you spend more than a year off (I suspect that he would have to be monitored by social services), so we are all expecting the guy to appear shortly earlier. Likely on the 30th. By then, I’m on vacation, but if it turns out that the guy returns to work, two things may happen: if my boss doesn’t extend my contract, I’m simply paid for the unspent vacation, but my workplace may call me to work the following day for a new contract, so I wouldn’t enjoy any proper vacation in November (just that uneasy time in which I have no clue what’s going to happen). If my boss extends my contract (I’m not sure if there’s a valid reason for him to do so), I will get paid for my unspent vacation time, but because my vacation time is tied to the previous contract, I’ll have to return to work immediately. Best scenario for me is if the shithead remains on a medical leave, because I’ll get to enjoy a month of paid vacation without worrying about my work calling me back in.
I must mention that I hadn’t gone on vacation before. I mean ever. My work experience is full of holes; nobody would hire me for my curriculum vitae at this point, unless they’re looking for an experienced IT guy. I spent about half of my twenties as a sort of hikikomori, having given up on society and life. I had awful experiences at most of the jobs I endured back then as well, which convinced me that I wasn’t cut out for working full-time (or even part-time, in some places). I’m thirty-nine years old, and unless something weird happens this month, I’m about to enjoy my first periods of true relax without expecting the horrible calls one gets from such companies, like getting woken up any random workday, even on Saturdays, and asked if you can be at the office an hour later. If you refuse, they may erase you from the lists that you have taken exams to be featured in, so you have no choice but to agree.
Anyway, enough about work. Recently I’ve watched two impressive first episodes of new animes which I highly recommend. First of them is Uzumaki, based on the manga of the same name by horror legend Junji Ito, which was Ito’s attempt at figuring out how to make spirals as disturbing as possible. The trailer spoils some of the great images from the first episode, so it’s better to go in without knowing much. In fact, the following clip of the first episode is the only one that isn’t particularly spoilery in that regard.
Finally an anime adaptation does justice to Ito’s style, including the choice of black-and-white.
Then there’s Dandadan. All I knew of this manga is that it follows the adventures of a UFO nerd and a ghosts nerd, and that it was wild as heck. Apart from that, the author had belonged to the creative team led by Tatsuki Fujimoto, author of Fire Punch and Chainsaw Man. Last night I watched the first episode of Dandadan’s anime adaptation; it turned out to be one of the wildest first episodes of any anime I’ve ever seen. You can tell that loads of talented visual artists and animators have worked on it. Here’s the intro.
I have no idea why I haven’t read the manga already; after all, I consume an ungodly amount of isekai series, some that are barely passable, so I could have easily have made space for this one. With such a high-quality anime adaptation, though, I’d rather get through its first season without spoiling myself.
I have checked out very little anime this year. Shame on me. There’s always at least a couple of anime series worth following each season.
Apart from that, I’ve been very invested in developing my Python app neural-narrative, that allows the users to chat with characters controlled by large language models (right now only Hermes 70B and Hermes 405B are programmed in, because they’re uncensored and don’t sound like helpful assistants). I got the idea of doing this throughout my experience with roleplaying in Skyrim with Mantella, a system that also uses large language models so you can talk with the characters. However, Mantella’s system annoyed me with the fact that the bios of all the NPCs are mixed together when you’re talking with several at the same time, which meant that a character’s secrets ended up being known by everyone else. It became a bit ridiculous to hang out with Alva, a vampire from Morthal, only for every new person I spoke to when Alva was involved to immediately realize that she was a bloodsucker.
My system works quite well currently: handles talking with any number of characters at the same time, it generates random worlds, regions, areas, and locations, it suggests interesting situations and dilemmas inspired by your conversations, and lets you travel from place to place. It even generates a travel diary of sorts when you move from area to area, involving whatever followers you have brought along. I wouldn’t have developed this system so fast if I wasn’t relying often on the preview version of OpenAI’s Orion model, which is fucking insane: sometimes I just have to present it with relevant code from other sections of my app, tell the AI what elements I want a new page to include, and it generates a perfect system on the first try. I’ve only had it fail once at a programming task, in a way that wasn’t my mistake for not including enough references. I’m kind of glad that I’m not working as a programmer these days, even though I trained for it and was my original goal, because I can’t imagine what sort of future human programmers are going to have when large language models are bound to surpass them all in the next few years.
I originally intended to program this system in order to post wild stories on my site. It just happens that, one way or another, I always end up going for the kind of wild smut that I don’t want to show to others. The AI is fully uncensored and I love to take advantage of that. I’m trying to figure out a way for the system to suggest less formless stories. The inclusion of interesting situations and dilemmas generated by the AI is one of those ways I’m trying to work on that.
Despite what yesterday’s heavy post might imply, I’m in a good mood. It’s half past eight in the morning on a Saturday and I’m the sole technician on duty at work, but it just happens that when today’s shift ends, I’m going on an eight days-long break. Once I return from the break, I’ll only have to work for seven days longer until I go on vacation from the 23rd of October to the 28th of November. I’m going on vacation because I’ve been made aware recently that my company (which is the Basque health service) will no longer pay unspent vacations as long as one has worked for longer than six months (three months in some cases). I’ve been working since November of last year, so I’ve accumulated plenty of off days.
However, I’m covering for a shitty guy who for the last five years or so has only worked for a couple of months at the most before he went on another medical leave. Saying that he “worked” is very generous, because he’s utterly useless when he isn’t actively sabotaging the department. His problems, we all suspect, are of the mental variety. Not the fun kind either. Anyway, I’ve covered plenty of his leaves, and every single time, he has returned without informing anyone. I would come to the office only to find the motherfucker sitting at his desk pretending that he hadn’t just fucked over the one who was replacing him: after all, I won’t get paid for the day I come to work if he’s already there. It was even worse one time when he ended his medical leave on a Friday afternoon without bothering to check if he worked that Saturday, which I covered for him as we had no idea he had returned from his leave. My boss had to deal with HR; otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten paid for that Saturday.
Anyway, that shithead has been on a medical leave since October 31st of last year, and some nasty stuff happens if you spend more than a year off (I suspect that he would have to be monitored by social services), so we are all expecting the guy to appear shortly earlier. Likely on the 30th. By then, I’m on vacation, but if it turns out that the guy returns to work, two things may happen: if my boss doesn’t extend my contract, I’m simply paid for the unspent vacation, but my workplace may call me to work the following day for a new contract, so I wouldn’t enjoy any proper vacation in November (just that uneasy time in which I have no clue what’s going to happen). If my boss extends my contract (I’m not sure if there’s a valid reason for him to do so), I will get paid for my unspent vacation time, but because my vacation time is tied to the previous contract, I’ll have to return to work immediately. Best scenario for me is if the shithead remains on a medical leave, because I’ll get to enjoy a month of paid vacation without worrying about my work calling me back in.
I must mention that I hadn’t gone on vacation before. I mean ever. My work experience is full of holes; nobody would hire me for my curriculum vitae at this point, unless they’re looking for an experienced IT guy. I spent about half of my twenties as a sort of hikikomori, having given up on society and life. I had awful experiences at most of the jobs I endured back then as well, which convinced me that I wasn’t cut out for working full-time (or even part-time, in some places). I’m thirty-nine years old, and unless something weird happens this month, I’m about to enjoy my first periods of true relax without expecting the horrible calls one gets from such companies, like getting woken up any random workday, even on Saturdays, and asked if you can be at the office an hour later. If you refuse, they may erase you from the lists that you have taken exams to be featured in, so you have no choice but to agree.
Anyway, enough about work. Recently I’ve watched two impressive first episodes of new animes which I highly recommend. First of them is Uzumaki, based on the manga of the same name by horror legend Junji Ito, which was Ito’s attempt at figuring out how to make spirals as disturbing as possible. The trailer spoils some of the great images from the first episode, so it’s better to go in without knowing much. In fact, the following clip of the first episode is the only one that isn’t particularly spoilery in that regard.
Finally an anime adaptation does justice to Ito’s style, including the choice of black-and-white.
Then there’s Dandadan. All I knew of this manga is that it follows the adventures of a UFO nerd and a ghosts nerd, and that it was wild as heck. Apart from that, the author had belonged to the creative team led by Tatsuki Fujimoto, author of Fire Punch and Chainsaw Man. Last night I watched the first episode of Dandadan’s anime adaptation; it turned out to be one of the wildest first episodes of any anime I’ve ever seen. You can tell that loads of talented visual artists and animators have worked on it. Here’s the intro.
I have no idea why I haven’t read the manga already; after all, I consume an ungodly amount of isekai series, some that are barely passable, so I could have easily have made space for this one. With such a high-quality anime adaptation, though, I’d rather get through its first season without spoiling myself.
I have checked out very little anime this year. Shame on me. There’s always at least a couple of anime series worth following each season.
Apart from that, I’ve been very invested in developing my Python app neural-narrative, that allows the users to chat with characters controlled by large language models (right now only Hermes 70B and Hermes 405B are programmed in, because they’re uncensored and don’t sound like helpful assistants). I got the idea of doing this throughout my experience with roleplaying in Skyrim with Mantella, a system that also uses large language models so you can talk with the characters. However, Mantella’s system annoyed me with the fact that the bios of all the NPCs are mixed together when you’re talking with several at the same time, which meant that a character’s secrets ended up being known by everyone else. It became a bit ridiculous to hang out with Alva, a vampire from Morthal, only for every new person I spoke to when Alva was involved to immediately realize that she was a bloodsucker.
My system works quite well currently: handles talking with any number of characters at the same time, it generates random worlds, regions, areas, and locations, it suggests interesting situations and dilemmas inspired by your conversations, and lets you travel from place to place. It even generates a travel diary of sorts when you move from area to area, involving whatever followers you have brought along. I wouldn’t have developed this system so fast if I wasn’t relying often on the preview version of OpenAI’s Orion model, which is fucking insane: sometimes I just have to present it with relevant code from other sections of my app, tell the AI what elements I want a new page to include, and it generates a perfect system on the first try. I’ve only had it fail once at a programming task, in a way that wasn’t my mistake for not including enough references. I’m kind of glad that I’m not working as a programmer these days, even though I trained for it and was my original goal, because I can’t imagine what sort of future human programmers are going to have when large language models are bound to surpass them all in the next few years.
I originally intended to program this system in order to post wild stories on my site. It just happens that, one way or another, I always end up going for the kind of wild smut that I don’t want to show to others. The AI is fully uncensored and I love to take advantage of that. I’m trying to figure out a way for the system to suggest less formless stories. The inclusion of interesting situations and dilemmas generated by the AI is one of those ways I’m trying to work on that.
October 4, 2024
Life update (10/04/2024)
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
For no apparent reason, my brain regularly reminds me of events from my long-gone youth, such as my middle school and high school years. Mainly I remember people whom I haven’t seen in more than twenty years. There’s this girl who invited me to hang out in middle school; she was autistically awkward, and seemed interested in me for unknown reasons. Last I knew of her was her receiving, during an arts and crafts class, a nasty gash that bisected her forehead and left a terrible scar presumably for the rest of her life. I never saw her again after middle school, but I remember her sadly from time to time; after all, if I could have cared for her, maybe she would have become my friend. In 2021, I wrote a poem about her. I don’t remember her name, so I can’t google her. I assume she killed herself.
There’s also this guy I hung out with in high school. Name’s Urko, if I recall correctly. He invited me out a few times, but I only recall us sitting at a bench as he went on about PlayStation 2 games. I was a PC gamer through and through, and must have been heavily into Morrowind at the time. I doubt I ever said much to him. I didn’t really want to hang out with anyone, but I was in a period of my life, spurred on by my mother, in which I forced myself to behave like a “normal person,” and normal people were supposed to want to hang out with others, so that’s what I did. Also, life at home wasn’t good either, so I suppose I didn’t want to spent too much time there.
Last time I spoke to the guy, I was playing a basketball match in which that guy also participated. The guy ended up spraining his ankle, and was carried away. Later that week, he approached me and said something to the effect of, “I won’t hang out with you anymore. When I sprained my ankle, you didn’t even ask how I was doing. You don’t care at all, do you?” And he was right, I didn’t.
When I was a teenager, I had the terrible luck of meeting a malignant narcissist. I hung out with him and others for a year and a half or so, until I grew bored of the whole thing. Well, he didn’t accept the fact that life was pulling us in separate ways: from then on, until literally the year of his death in a car accident, the guy, for no apparent reason other than because “he doesn’t understand that friendship is the most important thing in the world,” he made it a life mission to poison every single social group I ended up in, which at that point was mainly the ones I was obligated to find myself in, as in school. He went out of his way (he didn’t attend classes in my city) to befriend people of my class, and even my brother. He approached my then girlfriend and started trying to get her to break up with me. He got really mad, to the extent that it disturbed a friend of his, when my girlfriend, bless her cheating heart, exposed him for having done stuff such as breaking into my email and hijacking my website. In his twenties, that bastard was rising in the ranks of the regional socialist party as a politician, and was the kind to exploit his power to hurt people as much as he could, while smiling to the face of those he was manipulating. When I saw his obituary in the paper, I burst out laughing. Served him right. Why not, here’s an article in Spanish about his death. David Martínez, who unfortunately shares a name with the protagonist of the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners series, was truly my nemesis: nobody has bothered to hinder my existence remotely to that extent since.
It’s always been a struggle for me to care about human beings. Given that I didn’t have the instinct for it, for most of my youth I took it as an intellectual, deliberate pursuit. You cared about people when you made yourself care for them; that’s how I thought it worked for others. Whenever someone approached me, I felt anxious, guarded. As they spoke, in my mind I kept repeating, “Please, stop talking to me.” I couldn’t wait to return to solitude and to my turbulent relationship with my subconscious (who is a motocross legend, as well as the love of my life).
It’s not remotely your run-of-the-mill introversion, of course: I was diagnosed with high-functioning autism (so-called Asperger’s) in my mid-twenties. Due to the cause of autism, which seems to be a non-uniform pruning of neural connections during development, my neurological make-up is different to virtually everyone else, even other autistic people. I read somewhere that on those machines that test neural activity, autists are more different from each other than non-autistic people are from each other, let alone autistic people from non-autistic people. In practice, that means that the things that soothe non-autistic people very well may be terrifying for autistic people. The things that make most people feel good may be jarring or extremely annoying to autists. They are societies of one forced to coexist with foreigners.
I can’t even count how many times someone, I’m tempted to say “some moron,” has suggested to me to behave in this or that way, assuming that my brain worked like theirs and therefore I would experience the same results (that’s assuming that those people weren’t genuine morons and had a proper handle on the mechanisms of their brains). In truth, autists become acutely aware from early on that they’re different from everyone else, and a significant part of their lives consists on adapting to other people’s often bizarre behaviors and needs, that are only the norm because they’re the majority. Many people seem to believe that everyone feels as they feel, although I’m not shocked given how naive if not straight-up retarded most people are when it comes to organizing society.
Maybe because I’ve had my brain functions disrupted by a hemiplegic migraine and by severe stress lately, I’ve been thinking about that troublesome organ of ours. One of the writers I used to admire the most (even though I haven’t read anything of his since my early twenties), John Fowles, author of mainly The Collector and The Magus, suffered a stroke, and afterwards he never wrote fiction again. He said that the stroke had robbed him of his imagination, and he simply didn’t have the drive anymore. He had written because his brain was configured to work like that, for him to want to write in the first place.
Studies about people whose brain hemispheres were surgically separated to prevent severe epilepsy have pretty much proven that free will is an illusion (check, for example, this article on the subject). I’ve always suspected as much, so I don’t believe in my own delusions: I do things because I’m urged to do them. In my spare time, if I feel like writing, I do so. If I feel like producing music or programming, I do those instead. You could say that it’s a lack of discipline or something, because one may give up on a hard task and instead waste his time unproductively, but I’d say that the very “want” of doing something hard instead of wasting one’s time is the urge your brain forces you to follow. I’m just glad that I haven’t been pressured by my brain into killing people or doing similarly troublesome things that would land me in prison. On a regular basis, I do imagine many, many things that would land me in prison, though.
All these things also prove that you’re just your brain. If part of it dies, there’s no “soul” to correct the missing part. I’m fairly certain that ghosts exist, but I’m inclined to believe that they’re some sort of electromagnetic phenomena produced by the brain while it was alive (I’ve come across studies on the matter recently), phenomena that may be preserved in specific objects or locations because of subatomic entanglement. Why won’t those wave functions collapse, who knows. Anyway, there’s no “other place” after death, Abrahamic or not, that will justify all the pain and horribleness of life. And unless the universe itself is a simulation, that may very well be, we only consider reasons regarding its existence because its configuration has allowed us to exist, meaning that for all we know there are uncountable universes out there in which nobody can consider such matters.
Why did I write all this garbage? It’s 9:17 in the morning, I’m at work, and I have nothing else to do. Why did you bother reading it? That’s the real question, ain’t it.
EDIT: the AI-generated Google podcast Deep Dive has quickly become my favorite podcast (not that I listen to many podcasts these days). I’ve fed it this post, and it has come up with the following podcast:
[check out the podcast on my site]
For no apparent reason, my brain regularly reminds me of events from my long-gone youth, such as my middle school and high school years. Mainly I remember people whom I haven’t seen in more than twenty years. There’s this girl who invited me to hang out in middle school; she was autistically awkward, and seemed interested in me for unknown reasons. Last I knew of her was her receiving, during an arts and crafts class, a nasty gash that bisected her forehead and left a terrible scar presumably for the rest of her life. I never saw her again after middle school, but I remember her sadly from time to time; after all, if I could have cared for her, maybe she would have become my friend. In 2021, I wrote a poem about her. I don’t remember her name, so I can’t google her. I assume she killed herself.
There’s also this guy I hung out with in high school. Name’s Urko, if I recall correctly. He invited me out a few times, but I only recall us sitting at a bench as he went on about PlayStation 2 games. I was a PC gamer through and through, and must have been heavily into Morrowind at the time. I doubt I ever said much to him. I didn’t really want to hang out with anyone, but I was in a period of my life, spurred on by my mother, in which I forced myself to behave like a “normal person,” and normal people were supposed to want to hang out with others, so that’s what I did. Also, life at home wasn’t good either, so I suppose I didn’t want to spent too much time there.
Last time I spoke to the guy, I was playing a basketball match in which that guy also participated. The guy ended up spraining his ankle, and was carried away. Later that week, he approached me and said something to the effect of, “I won’t hang out with you anymore. When I sprained my ankle, you didn’t even ask how I was doing. You don’t care at all, do you?” And he was right, I didn’t.
When I was a teenager, I had the terrible luck of meeting a malignant narcissist. I hung out with him and others for a year and a half or so, until I grew bored of the whole thing. Well, he didn’t accept the fact that life was pulling us in separate ways: from then on, until literally the year of his death in a car accident, the guy, for no apparent reason other than because “he doesn’t understand that friendship is the most important thing in the world,” he made it a life mission to poison every single social group I ended up in, which at that point was mainly the ones I was obligated to find myself in, as in school. He went out of his way (he didn’t attend classes in my city) to befriend people of my class, and even my brother. He approached my then girlfriend and started trying to get her to break up with me. He got really mad, to the extent that it disturbed a friend of his, when my girlfriend, bless her cheating heart, exposed him for having done stuff such as breaking into my email and hijacking my website. In his twenties, that bastard was rising in the ranks of the regional socialist party as a politician, and was the kind to exploit his power to hurt people as much as he could, while smiling to the face of those he was manipulating. When I saw his obituary in the paper, I burst out laughing. Served him right. Why not, here’s an article in Spanish about his death. David Martínez, who unfortunately shares a name with the protagonist of the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners series, was truly my nemesis: nobody has bothered to hinder my existence remotely to that extent since.
It’s always been a struggle for me to care about human beings. Given that I didn’t have the instinct for it, for most of my youth I took it as an intellectual, deliberate pursuit. You cared about people when you made yourself care for them; that’s how I thought it worked for others. Whenever someone approached me, I felt anxious, guarded. As they spoke, in my mind I kept repeating, “Please, stop talking to me.” I couldn’t wait to return to solitude and to my turbulent relationship with my subconscious (who is a motocross legend, as well as the love of my life).
It’s not remotely your run-of-the-mill introversion, of course: I was diagnosed with high-functioning autism (so-called Asperger’s) in my mid-twenties. Due to the cause of autism, which seems to be a non-uniform pruning of neural connections during development, my neurological make-up is different to virtually everyone else, even other autistic people. I read somewhere that on those machines that test neural activity, autists are more different from each other than non-autistic people are from each other, let alone autistic people from non-autistic people. In practice, that means that the things that soothe non-autistic people very well may be terrifying for autistic people. The things that make most people feel good may be jarring or extremely annoying to autists. They are societies of one forced to coexist with foreigners.
I can’t even count how many times someone, I’m tempted to say “some moron,” has suggested to me to behave in this or that way, assuming that my brain worked like theirs and therefore I would experience the same results (that’s assuming that those people weren’t genuine morons and had a proper handle on the mechanisms of their brains). In truth, autists become acutely aware from early on that they’re different from everyone else, and a significant part of their lives consists on adapting to other people’s often bizarre behaviors and needs, that are only the norm because they’re the majority. Many people seem to believe that everyone feels as they feel, although I’m not shocked given how naive if not straight-up retarded most people are when it comes to organizing society.
Maybe because I’ve had my brain functions disrupted by a hemiplegic migraine and by severe stress lately, I’ve been thinking about that troublesome organ of ours. One of the writers I used to admire the most (even though I haven’t read anything of his since my early twenties), John Fowles, author of mainly The Collector and The Magus, suffered a stroke, and afterwards he never wrote fiction again. He said that the stroke had robbed him of his imagination, and he simply didn’t have the drive anymore. He had written because his brain was configured to work like that, for him to want to write in the first place.
Studies about people whose brain hemispheres were surgically separated to prevent severe epilepsy have pretty much proven that free will is an illusion (check, for example, this article on the subject). I’ve always suspected as much, so I don’t believe in my own delusions: I do things because I’m urged to do them. In my spare time, if I feel like writing, I do so. If I feel like producing music or programming, I do those instead. You could say that it’s a lack of discipline or something, because one may give up on a hard task and instead waste his time unproductively, but I’d say that the very “want” of doing something hard instead of wasting one’s time is the urge your brain forces you to follow. I’m just glad that I haven’t been pressured by my brain into killing people or doing similarly troublesome things that would land me in prison. On a regular basis, I do imagine many, many things that would land me in prison, though.
All these things also prove that you’re just your brain. If part of it dies, there’s no “soul” to correct the missing part. I’m fairly certain that ghosts exist, but I’m inclined to believe that they’re some sort of electromagnetic phenomena produced by the brain while it was alive (I’ve come across studies on the matter recently), phenomena that may be preserved in specific objects or locations because of subatomic entanglement. Why won’t those wave functions collapse, who knows. Anyway, there’s no “other place” after death, Abrahamic or not, that will justify all the pain and horribleness of life. And unless the universe itself is a simulation, that may very well be, we only consider reasons regarding its existence because its configuration has allowed us to exist, meaning that for all we know there are uncountable universes out there in which nobody can consider such matters.
Why did I write all this garbage? It’s 9:17 in the morning, I’m at work, and I have nothing else to do. Why did you bother reading it? That’s the real question, ain’t it.
EDIT: the AI-generated Google podcast Deep Dive has quickly become my favorite podcast (not that I listen to many podcasts these days). I’ve fed it this post, and it has come up with the following podcast:
[check out the podcast on my site]
