Jon Ureña's Blog, page 37
November 1, 2022
Random AI-generated images #17
I pay an undisclosed amount of money each month to a couple of neural networks, one of them trained on anime-like material, so they provide me with rendered images that make me go, “That’s some good shit,” which causes me to feel better for five seconds. It’s like an addiction. I need help.
I’ve posted thirty other entries that feature AI-generated images. Check them out.
[Check out the rest of this entry on my personal page; it contains many, many images]
I’ve posted thirty other entries that feature AI-generated images. Check them out.
[Check out the rest of this entry on my personal page; it contains many, many images]
October 30, 2022
We’re Fucked, Pt. 78: AI-generated images
Some neural networks excel at recognizing patterns in data, and as if that wasn’t enough, they can extrapolate those patterns into new data. In practice, the AIs involved in this entry study images (millions, perhaps billions of them) and produce new images based on the patterns they have recognized, patterns that you wouldn’t understand even if they explained them to you. Plenty of those images are masterful paintings and compositions far better than anything you will ever create with your mess of a human brain haphazardly cobbled together by evolution, that still believes you are fleeing from predators in a savannah. That’s just how it is. Learn to use AI-generated images as inspiration, because you’ll only rage against the machine in vain.
Anyway, if the measure of density of a chapter is how many images it manages to inspire, chapter 78 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked is hella thicc. Some of the pictures look like anime because one of the neural networks studied anime-like stuff exclusively, plenty of it perverted.
You can check out all the entries I’ve posted with AI-generated images (twenty-nine so far) through this link.
[Check out the rest of this entry on my personal page; it contains many, many images]
Anyway, if the measure of density of a chapter is how many images it manages to inspire, chapter 78 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked is hella thicc. Some of the pictures look like anime because one of the neural networks studied anime-like stuff exclusively, plenty of it perverted.
You can check out all the entries I’ve posted with AI-generated images (twenty-nine so far) through this link.
[Check out the rest of this entry on my personal page; it contains many, many images]
We're Fucked, Pt. 78 (Fiction)
Check out this chapter on my personal page, where it looks better
---
The breeze blows on the grass and weeds like a whistling ghost. Its cold seeps under my corduroy jacket and leeches the warmth from my bones. I shiver as though I'm sitting naked on the floor of a cavern.
Jacqueline has walked up to us although she risked soiling the soles of her boots, and is towering over my supine self. Her raven-black braid is draped over the thick lapel of her peacoat, but dark indigo highlights are undulating in the windblown loose locks around her ivory-white face, that hovers above me like an earthly moon. A sweet smile settles on her rosy lips, which would feel as soft and supple as the nipples now hidden by her turtleneck sweater and by the reinforced brassiere that supports her prodigious breasts. Her cobalt-blues, beneath which she conceals a thousand secret fountains and grottoes, are piercing deep into my psyche as if to flush my demons out of their hiding spots.
I'd love to stare up in silence at this divine being for the rest of my life; any words would mar the silence. But humans have to acknowledge their mental states through verbal constructs on a regular basis, to distract themselves from the certainty of their impending doom. I wring enough energy out of my bone-tired brain to string together a few words.
"Our adopted daughter vastly overestimated my physical prowess," I utter in a rusty voice.
Jacqueline narrows her eyes and broadens her smile. She brushes a raven-black lock away from her face.
"Sure, but she already trusts you enough to know that you would save her from a nasty fall."
"Or maybe she's that reckless and self-destructive."
Jacqueline chuckles.
"That may be part of it. She has taken quite a shine to you, hasn't she?"
"A nice glow-in-the-dark shine. Enough to travel with me across spacetime to our wretched present."
Nairu's warm breath is tickling the base of my neck. This Paleolithic creature deserves a bit of paradise, with food to eat, a wide-open sky, trees for shade, and grass for chewing.
My mind gets inundated with images of that boreal forest from which I snatched our girl. A lump rises to my throat. Nairu's abandoned kin must have prayed to their gods and devils to be spared from the unspeakable apocalypse that befell them. I wish I could leap forward another ten thousand years and disappear from this sickening age of mass destruction and despair.
"More importantly now," Jacqueline says warmly, "even in this growing cold, you two look comfortable. Don't mind if I join you."
As Jacqueline crouches, she smooths her plaid skirt over her thighs, then she lies down sideways beside me, resting her face on her palm. The close-up of her regal visage in the dark makes me feel like a cat snuggled up by a radiator.
"Jacqueline, thank you for everything," I say in a strained voice that risks becoming a broken whisper. "For welcoming this new daughter of ours into your home. For being here with me in this park. For existing at all in this insane world, when most of everything has come and gone."
Jacqueline's eyes glimmer. She softens her gaze and blows air through her nostrils. The vaporized exhalation lingers between our faces.
She slides a hand behind my head, brushing the top of Nairu's, to cradle my nape. My beloved leans her face down and kisses me on the lips. She pushes her tongue into my mouth while her fingers entwine themselves in my hair. I take a whiff of her fragrance, a flower garden blooming with myriad blossoms. When Jacqueline pulls away, my heart is pounding in my ears like a tribal drum.
"You're welcome, sweetie," she whispers. "Isn't it nice to feel the grass beneath us and hear the sound of the wind in the trees?"
"I've been far worse."
She nuzzles my nose with hers.
"It's going to be alright, you know."
I swallow to loosen my throat.
"As long as you're around, I'm sure it will be fine. If you become to Nairu even a fraction of the loving mommy you are to me, she'll be happy."
Growing up I only integrated bad examples of motherhood, so I'll have to avoid turning into the kind of mom that forgets her daughter's name, locks her out in the freezing rain, keeps her chained in the cellar, or hands her over to a warlord.
Jacqueline rests her head next to mine on the grass. With the tip of her index finger, she traces the seam of my upper lip.
"And I have no intention of ever giving you up," she says in a deep purring voice.
"E-even after ten thousand years of brutal struggles, wars, earthquakes, plagues, ice ages and extinctions? Even after the human race disintegrates, leaving only scattered tribes of primitive savages? Even after the Earth becomes a burnt cinder drifting in the void?"
She slips her lips and tongue along the rim of my ear.
"Even if you get old and wrinkly," she murmurs in my eardrum.
Jacqueline has stirred the water in the teapot within me; as its contents heat up, they slosh around and boil, threatening to scald my internal organs. I'd love to take my clothes off then roll around naked over every inch of mommy's skin, with the zest of a dog that comes across a mud puddle in a park and rushes to turn itself into a swamp monster.
The wind gusts a long-ass moan through the leafless tree branches as the night takes a chillier turn. Nairu slides down from my chest, squeezing my right tit through my shirt and bra, and nestles against my shoulder as if to sniff my armpit. The three of us huddle together like house cats napping in a wrinkled blanket.
My limbs feel heavy and stiff, like sacks of sand strapped to my torso. I'm slipping into a languid trance. I close my eyes and unmoor my mind, which has grown fuzzy with drowsiness, so that it paints on the canvas of soft blackness whatever insane spectacle it pleases.
The first pinkish streaks of morning light stain an ethereal sky. A yellow sun appears, spreading waves of liquid gold. But the sky cracks open as if a projectile punched through the stratosphere, that sheds its pale inner membrane down over the horizon like a dirty gauze while the culprit, a rotund creature with shaggy, burnt umber fur outlined in buttermilk-yellow light, falls towards me with leisurely gravity.
The beast's leathery snout gleams with its own sticky sap. On either side of a chalk-white face, the roughly nostril-sized eyes, two black holes into a crumpled universe, betray the monster's dim-witted gentleness, like that of an uncle who would always lend a helping hand and dispense morsels of dubious advice. At the end of its elongated forelimbs, the inward claws, large as dinner forks, are holding awkwardly a folded, yellowed paper.
When the beast lets go of the paper, it unfolds itself with a dry crackling sound and takes off like a sparrow that had gotten captured and imprisoned in a birdcage. The decrepit paper flutters towards me. It touches my nose, flips over and hovers in front of me, displaying its underside. The paper's edges are browned and torn, and its coarse surface is sullied with bloody fingerprints, but it contains spidery handwriting in fading red ink and an archaic script.
I am a creature of great mystical power. My name is Dialectos, which in your language means "tongue." My soul is sustained by the constant stream of dark matter that suffuses every atom of the universe. At the end of my feet I have four toes, and at the end of my tail, two; each of them a gigantic stiletto. I enclose in my wings a tiny sliver of the blackest metal, found at the center of your Milky Way galaxy, where countless stars spin like pinwheels of fire. I do not speak the language of men, or even the tongue of beasts, and yet my speech is known to all living creatures. In the realm of the unseen, you humans and other beasts are like flies upon a wall.
Leire, your ancestors' bloodlines can be traced to the sphinxes that used to roam your continent like sentient wildcats, before the age of iron and steam engines. I hereby grant you full custody of Nairu, the little orphan from the Paleolithic age, who was exploring the fringes of her community when you kidnapped her, upending her life forever, to bring her past the barrier of the Younger Dryas apocalypse into a world of steel-boned cities, lightbulbs, telephones, radios, televisions, submarines, airplanes, rockets, computers, guns and atomic bombs.
You have violated the sanctity of time and space, as well as diverted the riverlike course of fate, so I shall appoint you to the job of loving the Ice Age child. Although she was born in a distant time, now she belongs to your tribe. You will feed her, bathe her, comb her hair, dress her in pink tutus and slippers, sing her lullabies, cuddle her when she has nightmares, buy her toys, stuff her face with pastries and ice cream, and teach her to play the harp. To help Nairu forget the horrors of the world that your gormless species has created, you will make her life fun and absurd. In return, I promise to reward you with a salary of dark matter.
Under your care, if the child grows into a lovely woman, your name will be inscribed in the Hall of Ancestors at her place of birth. But if you instead become the fiend that haunts the nightmares of children, I will cast you back in time, into a frozen cave where you'll meet a future self who will ask: "Who are you?" And you shall answer: "I'm Leire, the mommy who lost her daughter." That I promise and swear on the ancient blood that coats every blade of grass. For the next three thousand years, I shall periodically send you letters so you may remember your mission, and that I am always watching.
Signed this day, at the last hours of the eighth year of the calamity,
Dialectos.
The paper curls itself into a bowtie, then flies away towards the dawn's light. As the paper shrinks, it ignites into a fluttering white flame against the furnace-red sphere of the sun.
I smile to the darkness of my mind, and imagine my heart hardening to the extent that a thousand years of suffering couldn't crack it. I want to slice my head off with a kitchen knife, then hold the decapitated head in the sky so that my eyeballs and mouth, dripping red-and-green goo down on humankind's face, could scream one thing to everyone, even those who loathe me: "I love you."
---
Author's note: the two songs for today are "路標" ("Michishirube") and "鬼ヶ島" ("Onigashima"), both by the great Ichiko Aoba.
I keep a playlist that contains all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. Eighty-one songs so far. Here's the link.
---
The breeze blows on the grass and weeds like a whistling ghost. Its cold seeps under my corduroy jacket and leeches the warmth from my bones. I shiver as though I'm sitting naked on the floor of a cavern.
Jacqueline has walked up to us although she risked soiling the soles of her boots, and is towering over my supine self. Her raven-black braid is draped over the thick lapel of her peacoat, but dark indigo highlights are undulating in the windblown loose locks around her ivory-white face, that hovers above me like an earthly moon. A sweet smile settles on her rosy lips, which would feel as soft and supple as the nipples now hidden by her turtleneck sweater and by the reinforced brassiere that supports her prodigious breasts. Her cobalt-blues, beneath which she conceals a thousand secret fountains and grottoes, are piercing deep into my psyche as if to flush my demons out of their hiding spots.
I'd love to stare up in silence at this divine being for the rest of my life; any words would mar the silence. But humans have to acknowledge their mental states through verbal constructs on a regular basis, to distract themselves from the certainty of their impending doom. I wring enough energy out of my bone-tired brain to string together a few words.
"Our adopted daughter vastly overestimated my physical prowess," I utter in a rusty voice.
Jacqueline narrows her eyes and broadens her smile. She brushes a raven-black lock away from her face.
"Sure, but she already trusts you enough to know that you would save her from a nasty fall."
"Or maybe she's that reckless and self-destructive."
Jacqueline chuckles.
"That may be part of it. She has taken quite a shine to you, hasn't she?"
"A nice glow-in-the-dark shine. Enough to travel with me across spacetime to our wretched present."
Nairu's warm breath is tickling the base of my neck. This Paleolithic creature deserves a bit of paradise, with food to eat, a wide-open sky, trees for shade, and grass for chewing.
My mind gets inundated with images of that boreal forest from which I snatched our girl. A lump rises to my throat. Nairu's abandoned kin must have prayed to their gods and devils to be spared from the unspeakable apocalypse that befell them. I wish I could leap forward another ten thousand years and disappear from this sickening age of mass destruction and despair.
"More importantly now," Jacqueline says warmly, "even in this growing cold, you two look comfortable. Don't mind if I join you."
As Jacqueline crouches, she smooths her plaid skirt over her thighs, then she lies down sideways beside me, resting her face on her palm. The close-up of her regal visage in the dark makes me feel like a cat snuggled up by a radiator.
"Jacqueline, thank you for everything," I say in a strained voice that risks becoming a broken whisper. "For welcoming this new daughter of ours into your home. For being here with me in this park. For existing at all in this insane world, when most of everything has come and gone."
Jacqueline's eyes glimmer. She softens her gaze and blows air through her nostrils. The vaporized exhalation lingers between our faces.
She slides a hand behind my head, brushing the top of Nairu's, to cradle my nape. My beloved leans her face down and kisses me on the lips. She pushes her tongue into my mouth while her fingers entwine themselves in my hair. I take a whiff of her fragrance, a flower garden blooming with myriad blossoms. When Jacqueline pulls away, my heart is pounding in my ears like a tribal drum.
"You're welcome, sweetie," she whispers. "Isn't it nice to feel the grass beneath us and hear the sound of the wind in the trees?"
"I've been far worse."
She nuzzles my nose with hers.
"It's going to be alright, you know."
I swallow to loosen my throat.
"As long as you're around, I'm sure it will be fine. If you become to Nairu even a fraction of the loving mommy you are to me, she'll be happy."
Growing up I only integrated bad examples of motherhood, so I'll have to avoid turning into the kind of mom that forgets her daughter's name, locks her out in the freezing rain, keeps her chained in the cellar, or hands her over to a warlord.
Jacqueline rests her head next to mine on the grass. With the tip of her index finger, she traces the seam of my upper lip.
"And I have no intention of ever giving you up," she says in a deep purring voice.
"E-even after ten thousand years of brutal struggles, wars, earthquakes, plagues, ice ages and extinctions? Even after the human race disintegrates, leaving only scattered tribes of primitive savages? Even after the Earth becomes a burnt cinder drifting in the void?"
She slips her lips and tongue along the rim of my ear.
"Even if you get old and wrinkly," she murmurs in my eardrum.
Jacqueline has stirred the water in the teapot within me; as its contents heat up, they slosh around and boil, threatening to scald my internal organs. I'd love to take my clothes off then roll around naked over every inch of mommy's skin, with the zest of a dog that comes across a mud puddle in a park and rushes to turn itself into a swamp monster.
The wind gusts a long-ass moan through the leafless tree branches as the night takes a chillier turn. Nairu slides down from my chest, squeezing my right tit through my shirt and bra, and nestles against my shoulder as if to sniff my armpit. The three of us huddle together like house cats napping in a wrinkled blanket.
My limbs feel heavy and stiff, like sacks of sand strapped to my torso. I'm slipping into a languid trance. I close my eyes and unmoor my mind, which has grown fuzzy with drowsiness, so that it paints on the canvas of soft blackness whatever insane spectacle it pleases.
The first pinkish streaks of morning light stain an ethereal sky. A yellow sun appears, spreading waves of liquid gold. But the sky cracks open as if a projectile punched through the stratosphere, that sheds its pale inner membrane down over the horizon like a dirty gauze while the culprit, a rotund creature with shaggy, burnt umber fur outlined in buttermilk-yellow light, falls towards me with leisurely gravity.
The beast's leathery snout gleams with its own sticky sap. On either side of a chalk-white face, the roughly nostril-sized eyes, two black holes into a crumpled universe, betray the monster's dim-witted gentleness, like that of an uncle who would always lend a helping hand and dispense morsels of dubious advice. At the end of its elongated forelimbs, the inward claws, large as dinner forks, are holding awkwardly a folded, yellowed paper.
When the beast lets go of the paper, it unfolds itself with a dry crackling sound and takes off like a sparrow that had gotten captured and imprisoned in a birdcage. The decrepit paper flutters towards me. It touches my nose, flips over and hovers in front of me, displaying its underside. The paper's edges are browned and torn, and its coarse surface is sullied with bloody fingerprints, but it contains spidery handwriting in fading red ink and an archaic script.
I am a creature of great mystical power. My name is Dialectos, which in your language means "tongue." My soul is sustained by the constant stream of dark matter that suffuses every atom of the universe. At the end of my feet I have four toes, and at the end of my tail, two; each of them a gigantic stiletto. I enclose in my wings a tiny sliver of the blackest metal, found at the center of your Milky Way galaxy, where countless stars spin like pinwheels of fire. I do not speak the language of men, or even the tongue of beasts, and yet my speech is known to all living creatures. In the realm of the unseen, you humans and other beasts are like flies upon a wall.
Leire, your ancestors' bloodlines can be traced to the sphinxes that used to roam your continent like sentient wildcats, before the age of iron and steam engines. I hereby grant you full custody of Nairu, the little orphan from the Paleolithic age, who was exploring the fringes of her community when you kidnapped her, upending her life forever, to bring her past the barrier of the Younger Dryas apocalypse into a world of steel-boned cities, lightbulbs, telephones, radios, televisions, submarines, airplanes, rockets, computers, guns and atomic bombs.
You have violated the sanctity of time and space, as well as diverted the riverlike course of fate, so I shall appoint you to the job of loving the Ice Age child. Although she was born in a distant time, now she belongs to your tribe. You will feed her, bathe her, comb her hair, dress her in pink tutus and slippers, sing her lullabies, cuddle her when she has nightmares, buy her toys, stuff her face with pastries and ice cream, and teach her to play the harp. To help Nairu forget the horrors of the world that your gormless species has created, you will make her life fun and absurd. In return, I promise to reward you with a salary of dark matter.
Under your care, if the child grows into a lovely woman, your name will be inscribed in the Hall of Ancestors at her place of birth. But if you instead become the fiend that haunts the nightmares of children, I will cast you back in time, into a frozen cave where you'll meet a future self who will ask: "Who are you?" And you shall answer: "I'm Leire, the mommy who lost her daughter." That I promise and swear on the ancient blood that coats every blade of grass. For the next three thousand years, I shall periodically send you letters so you may remember your mission, and that I am always watching.
Signed this day, at the last hours of the eighth year of the calamity,
Dialectos.
The paper curls itself into a bowtie, then flies away towards the dawn's light. As the paper shrinks, it ignites into a fluttering white flame against the furnace-red sphere of the sun.
I smile to the darkness of my mind, and imagine my heart hardening to the extent that a thousand years of suffering couldn't crack it. I want to slice my head off with a kitchen knife, then hold the decapitated head in the sky so that my eyeballs and mouth, dripping red-and-green goo down on humankind's face, could scream one thing to everyone, even those who loathe me: "I love you."
---
Author's note: the two songs for today are "路標" ("Michishirube") and "鬼ヶ島" ("Onigashima"), both by the great Ichiko Aoba.
I keep a playlist that contains all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. Eighty-one songs so far. Here's the link.
October 29, 2022
Random AI-generated images #16
Two neural networks, one of them trained on anime-like images, work tirelessly to spread their madness to the ends of the earth. This is the latest batch of about a hundred of such AI-generated pictures.
You can check out so far twenty-eight other entries featuring generated images through this link.
[Check out this entry on my personal page; it contains many images]
You can check out so far twenty-eight other entries featuring generated images through this link.
[Check out this entry on my personal page; it contains many images]
October 27, 2022
Random AI-generated images #15
Some of the money I earn at my job goes to secure the services of a couple of neural networks, one of them trained on anime-like images, so they sweeten my days with lovely depictions of whatever nonsense crossed my mind. This is the latest batch of about a hundred of such images.
You can check out the other twenty-seven entries with AI-generated images through this link.
[Check out the rest of this entry on my personal page; it contains many images]
You can check out the other twenty-seven entries with AI-generated images through this link.
[Check out the rest of this entry on my personal page; it contains many images]
Life update (10/27/2022)
Check out this entry on my personal page, where it looks better
---
This week I’m working afternoons. I’d rather always work in the afternoon; that allows me to spend at least a couple precious hours every morning writing, which is my main preoccupation these days. I’ve already polished about a thousand words of the chapter that will conclude the current sequence.
I was supposed to go to the dentist, but she got covid. My brother and his wife got the virus as well.
These last couple of weeks, my non-writing, non-working hours have been filled with Japanese matters: Ichiko Aoba’s music, manga, and Chainsaw Man. Mappa is doing interesting stuff with the adaptation. The pacing feels a bit weird given how quickly the manga moves, but I’m enjoying revisiting the deranged exploits of our boob-obsessed, mommy-worshipping neglected boy Denji.
The following video is the ending of a single episode of the anime (the third one). I can’t imagine how much money and manpower they spent on this.
Link to the video
As a manga reader who’s currently following the second part of this story, it’s been real nice to see Power again.
Link to the video
Besides all that, I’m doing as fine as someone so mentally unstable could.
---
This week I’m working afternoons. I’d rather always work in the afternoon; that allows me to spend at least a couple precious hours every morning writing, which is my main preoccupation these days. I’ve already polished about a thousand words of the chapter that will conclude the current sequence.
I was supposed to go to the dentist, but she got covid. My brother and his wife got the virus as well.
These last couple of weeks, my non-writing, non-working hours have been filled with Japanese matters: Ichiko Aoba’s music, manga, and Chainsaw Man. Mappa is doing interesting stuff with the adaptation. The pacing feels a bit weird given how quickly the manga moves, but I’m enjoying revisiting the deranged exploits of our boob-obsessed, mommy-worshipping neglected boy Denji.
The following video is the ending of a single episode of the anime (the third one). I can’t imagine how much money and manpower they spent on this.
Link to the video
As a manga reader who’s currently following the second part of this story, it’s been real nice to see Power again.
Link to the video
Besides all that, I’m doing as fine as someone so mentally unstable could.
October 23, 2022
We’re Fucked, Pt. 77: AI-generated images
Coaxing two neural networks to produce generated images of whatever nonsense is going on in a chapter creates a strange dynamic: plenty of the stuff they spit out inspires me to go on deranged tangents that in turn send new prompts their way. It’s like having talented creative partners that can’t refuse to cooperate with you no matter how much they’d want to.
I hope you enjoy AI-generated images, because I’m going to post a fuckton of them, all related to chapter 77 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked.
You can check out all the entries I’ve posted with generated images through this link.
[check out this entry on my personal page; it contains a fuckton of images]
I hope you enjoy AI-generated images, because I’m going to post a fuckton of them, all related to chapter 77 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked.
You can check out all the entries I’ve posted with generated images through this link.
[check out this entry on my personal page; it contains a fuckton of images]
October 22, 2022
We're Fucked, Pt. 77 (Fiction)
Check out this chapter on my personal page, where it looks better
---
Nairu has gotten stuck in a dopamine-driven feedback loop, hypnotized by the promise of controlled danger. As she stands on top of the play tower, the streetlamps bathe her in yellow ochre light and shade her features with stark shadows. She lowers herself to the slide and compresses her butt cheeks against the cold metal, then she submits her fate to the interaction of gravity and friction, which bring her in contact with the rubber tarmac. Our girl jumps to her feet and runs to the climbing wall while the white ghosts of her breath pursue her. She leaps to the top of the play tower like a mountain lion.
Our adopted daughter is careening down the slippery metallic surface when the soles of her leather boots squeak. Her legs fold, and she bounces off the slide in a burst of velocity. She sails through the air as if riding the crest of a rollercoaster. Her body plows belly first into the rubber tarmac, which squeezes a yelp out of her lungs.
My heart palpitates in alarm as a wave of dread rolls through me. Nairu lies spread-eagled on a dirty, spongy surface that has absorbed, helped by rainwater, the grime of hundreds of soles and dog paw pads. I witness in a flash the splatter of blood and grey matter that the impact spurted out of our girl's shattered skull, which remains tethered to the spine by a thin strip of skin. Jacqueline drops to her knees, takes the broken head by its hair, and cradles it against her breasts.
Her ashen face is frozen in a grimace as she glowers at me.
"We failed. We are unfit to be parents. It's all your fault."
My muscles twitch in spastic panic. Jacqueline has rushed to Nairu's aid, but our adopted daughter pushes herself to her knees. She spits dust. My girlfriend was about to kneel beside her when Nairu scrambles to her feet.
"Quite the dramatic fall, darling," Jacqueline says warmly. "Thankfully you're fine."
She brushes dirt off Nairu's chocolate-stained sweater. The child grins up at her adoptive mother, then giggles and scampers away towards the climbing wall, as if to reclaim her place atop the play tower.
My heart sinks back to my chest. The pilomotor reflex shuts down; slowly, the tiny hairs on my arms go limp. Jacqueline approaches me, strokes my neck and leans in to kiss my hairline.
"Is that how we lived as children?" I ask hoarsely. "After some potentially devastating mishap, we just sprung to our feet and kept playing, instead of remaining traumatized for years?"
Jacqueline sighs, blowing a plume of vapor.
"I wish I could remember. Don't they say that the majority of cells in your body get replaced every seven to ten years? Or is that a myth?"
"Maybe we never grew up, we just appear to age to our bodies."
"I have changed," she says as her fingers comb through the hair on my nape. "If I were to meet my child self, I wouldn't recognize her."
"Well, I'm glad that Nairu can giggle like that. I only laugh anymore as an evolutionary mechanism to prevent me from going insane."
Did we forget about our adopted daughter? She has climbed the tower and is standing on the edge, maybe waiting to be noticed. The closest streetlamp is bathing her in light, giving her a golden tinge, as if framed against the sunset sky. The shadow cast on her left cheek is inky black.
If I controlled her body, I'd make her step back, but I can barely make myself understood by the Paleolithic child. I walk closer, the same way an onlooker would approach the façade of a building if she had spotted a child leaning over the windowsill on a high floor. I've known our adopted daughter for less than a day, but if she were to fall and break her neck, the memory would petrify inside my brain, and for the rest of my life, most of the blood and thoughts would need to flow around the tumorous stone.
"H-hey, Nairu, please be careful. You're going to end up looking like a modern sloth again."
I'm paralyzed under the weight of her inscrutable gaze. I feel like I'm the kid and she's the parent, but then again, I would have perished in hours back at that boreal forest where Nairu lived and played. Why would I pretend to know the right answers, when in my own daydream I let a child slide down a kilometric slide-grater that reduced her to a waxy pile of death?
The corners of Nairu's mouth curl up in a mischievous smile, as if she had imagined herself slipping a caterpillar into someone's hand as a prank, and she could barely contain the giggles at the thought of the ensuing freak-out. She grins, then flings her arms out wide, bends her knees and leans forward.
"W-wait, what are you doing?!" I exclaim.
She leaps from the edge towards me like a linebacker hurling himself into a tackle. I hurry to catch her. When the few dozen kilograms of girl body hit my chest, the electricity in my heart crackles, the muscles along my back shudder with strain, and most of my breath rushes out of my lungs.
My vision whitens. I stumble backwards on my wobbly legs while Nairu giggles. One of my heels collides with a raised slab of concrete, and I drop down onto the grass.
When I regain my bearings, I move my toes to make sure that I haven't cracked my spine. However, I have likely smushed dog shit against the back of my corduroy jacket. Weeds are bending against my ears and the underside of my jaw as their vegetal blades dig into my flesh; some are brushing my earholes while they plan how to conquer my defenseless brain. Our adopted child is pressing down on my chest as she clings to me like a koala.
I lift my head off the ground and take a deep breath of cold air to fill my lungs, but a cough roughens my throat.
"Wh-what's the big idea, you little hellion?" I ask hoarsely. "You must have shattered my ribcage. Did you want me to know how it feels to breathe through a couple dozen puncture wounds to my lungs?"
Nairu giggles. She snuggles closer, rubbing her warm cheek against my jaw, tickling my neck with her wool scarf. As if the barrier of my skin had been breached, the girl's softness invades my insides. This stranger from the cold wildlands of the past has bested me with her mysterious guile, making a mockery of thousands of years of language evolution.
My facial muscles relax. I let the back of my head rest on the grass, pressing my hair against mud, anthills, and whole ecosystems of bacteria; it will take less than an hour for those microscopic beasts to crawl in through my scalp, spilling some of my brains' juice in the process, and begin digesting my scalpels and bone saws. Meanwhile, Nairu burrows deeper into my corduroy jacket. By the time I catch myself, I have snaked an arm around our adopted daughter's back to hold her in a hug, while my free hand moves through hair that this morning absorbed shampoo and conditioner for the first time, hair soft as a baby bison's wool. My heartbeat echoes between the bricks of my chest, beating out the rhythm of Nairu's purring.
I close my eyes. In the isolation of a droning sound in my ears and a darkness tinged with citrine-yellow lamplight, I become a mother who is holding her firstborn child. Beyond the boundaries of our snug embrace, a blizzard swirls up and down, covering our hair in white ice, creating a maelstrom of whirling snowflakes as it sucks up in a frenzy leaves, bits of bark, and twigs. The frozen matter, as well as every form of organic litter, will be taken away by the whirlwind of the snowstorm, swept up into the sky and reincarnated as dust particles.
Nairu and I have begun an evolutionary journey into a stronger species by this act, by her invasion of my world, by our physical and psychic bond. Our bodies now resonate like the soundboard of a Stradivarius, like the vibrating walls of a gargantuan tuning fork.
Blessed be the innocent children! Back when I used to return to my dingy apartment in that border town, I sought interlocutors among my dilapidated sofa, the pile of board games, the washing machine, and my collection of dirty dildos, until I gave up and, curled up in a corner, felt like a piece of rotten meat thrown in a dustbin. My brain itself had long been picked over by scavenging vermin, leaving behind only a bitter and loathsome taste. I dealt with the ghosts of programming languages past, haunted by their convoluted syntaxes, buried under the piled layers of virtual scaffolding that supported their unfathomable intricacy. All of existence had become a black box, and it almost drove me to suicide. I inhabited a realm far beneath society's surface, at the bottom of an ocean populated by abyssal beasts that had to be fed with pain.
But now I have someone to play with! After learning to distinguish one sound from another, we are all destined to speak, or at least to bark. To my beloved partner I shall bark in French: "Je te mords les couilles!" Words will always be inadequate and inept compared to the wordless truth of music, but if Jacqueline and I teach Nairu Spanish to the extent that she can read the newspapers and understand the newscasters, our adopted daughter will despair at the post-apocalyptic world into which I snatched her. She'll scream that she has grown sick of our time together, that I'm a horrible human being who should be avoided at all costs, that her lungs are breaking out into plague-riddled boils, and that she wants to return to her forests and her freedom. Such an outburst would turn my brain into a sponge forever dampened by the sticky ooze of regret. After all, should any child fear to see her loved ones shot with bullets that tear out the insides of human bodies? Should any child fear her home being ravaged and bombed out? So we better focus on teaching Nairu how to play board games. With our Paleolithic wonder by my side, I won't need to depend on the moods of a depressed horse to beat Shadowcluster. And if anyone ever looks at Nairu with ill intent, or ridicules her squinty eyes, I will disembowel that person with a rusty spoon. Their viscera will rot in the dirt for the fleas to feast on.
I'm overwhelmed with an urge to snatch our girl up and flee from civilization. To shield Nairu from this insanity, we could whisk her away to a deserted tropical island, a sanctuary of natural beauty and blinding sunlight where the air would smell of brine and warm skin, where only birds would speak a language. The three of us would watch the clouds roll into giant clumps shaped like breasts. Nairu would paint the amber hues of sunset skies on my bare legs. We'd snuggle up in the sand and listen to the surf while the saltwater washed over our feet. My naked body would be drenched in sweat, and the sand would cling to my ass.
Perhaps I should take up on my old pal Git's advice and become a family of merfolk. We would spend the days hunting fish in the coral reefs, and at night we would congregate in the clear blue waters to admire the stars. A whole pod of dolphin children could join our mafia-run aquatic colony. We'd drag under the waves any human who swam too far from the shore.
We could travel to the Moon and live on its lava plains. I'd love to bathe in the dust of millennia. We would launch ourselves down the tubes carved out in the lunar crust by rising liquid rock, slippery slopes that lead all the way down to the center of the world.
---
Author's note: the two songs for today are "Oxford Comma" and "The Kids Don't Stand a Chance", both by Vampire Weekend.
I keep a playlist of the all the songs mentioned throughout this novel (seventy-nine so far): check it out.
Leire attempted to play the board game Renegade with a somewhat sentient horse back in chapter 20. Also, she sought counsel from an anthropomorphized open source software for distributed version control back in chapter 44; Git recommended that she should transform herself into a sea creature.
I promised to throw scraps at my pair of pet neural networks if they digested my prompts and vomited out fucktons of images related to this chapter. Check them out!
This chapter is just half of what I intended to include to conclude the current sequence. However, these last 2-3 weeks have been a nightmare at the office; I've felt more mentally unstable than in the previous few months, even unhinged at times. Posting two thousand words of my ongoing novel makes me feel better, so that's what I've managed to do today.
---
Nairu has gotten stuck in a dopamine-driven feedback loop, hypnotized by the promise of controlled danger. As she stands on top of the play tower, the streetlamps bathe her in yellow ochre light and shade her features with stark shadows. She lowers herself to the slide and compresses her butt cheeks against the cold metal, then she submits her fate to the interaction of gravity and friction, which bring her in contact with the rubber tarmac. Our girl jumps to her feet and runs to the climbing wall while the white ghosts of her breath pursue her. She leaps to the top of the play tower like a mountain lion.
Our adopted daughter is careening down the slippery metallic surface when the soles of her leather boots squeak. Her legs fold, and she bounces off the slide in a burst of velocity. She sails through the air as if riding the crest of a rollercoaster. Her body plows belly first into the rubber tarmac, which squeezes a yelp out of her lungs.
My heart palpitates in alarm as a wave of dread rolls through me. Nairu lies spread-eagled on a dirty, spongy surface that has absorbed, helped by rainwater, the grime of hundreds of soles and dog paw pads. I witness in a flash the splatter of blood and grey matter that the impact spurted out of our girl's shattered skull, which remains tethered to the spine by a thin strip of skin. Jacqueline drops to her knees, takes the broken head by its hair, and cradles it against her breasts.
Her ashen face is frozen in a grimace as she glowers at me.
"We failed. We are unfit to be parents. It's all your fault."
My muscles twitch in spastic panic. Jacqueline has rushed to Nairu's aid, but our adopted daughter pushes herself to her knees. She spits dust. My girlfriend was about to kneel beside her when Nairu scrambles to her feet.
"Quite the dramatic fall, darling," Jacqueline says warmly. "Thankfully you're fine."
She brushes dirt off Nairu's chocolate-stained sweater. The child grins up at her adoptive mother, then giggles and scampers away towards the climbing wall, as if to reclaim her place atop the play tower.
My heart sinks back to my chest. The pilomotor reflex shuts down; slowly, the tiny hairs on my arms go limp. Jacqueline approaches me, strokes my neck and leans in to kiss my hairline.
"Is that how we lived as children?" I ask hoarsely. "After some potentially devastating mishap, we just sprung to our feet and kept playing, instead of remaining traumatized for years?"
Jacqueline sighs, blowing a plume of vapor.
"I wish I could remember. Don't they say that the majority of cells in your body get replaced every seven to ten years? Or is that a myth?"
"Maybe we never grew up, we just appear to age to our bodies."
"I have changed," she says as her fingers comb through the hair on my nape. "If I were to meet my child self, I wouldn't recognize her."
"Well, I'm glad that Nairu can giggle like that. I only laugh anymore as an evolutionary mechanism to prevent me from going insane."
Did we forget about our adopted daughter? She has climbed the tower and is standing on the edge, maybe waiting to be noticed. The closest streetlamp is bathing her in light, giving her a golden tinge, as if framed against the sunset sky. The shadow cast on her left cheek is inky black.
If I controlled her body, I'd make her step back, but I can barely make myself understood by the Paleolithic child. I walk closer, the same way an onlooker would approach the façade of a building if she had spotted a child leaning over the windowsill on a high floor. I've known our adopted daughter for less than a day, but if she were to fall and break her neck, the memory would petrify inside my brain, and for the rest of my life, most of the blood and thoughts would need to flow around the tumorous stone.
"H-hey, Nairu, please be careful. You're going to end up looking like a modern sloth again."
I'm paralyzed under the weight of her inscrutable gaze. I feel like I'm the kid and she's the parent, but then again, I would have perished in hours back at that boreal forest where Nairu lived and played. Why would I pretend to know the right answers, when in my own daydream I let a child slide down a kilometric slide-grater that reduced her to a waxy pile of death?
The corners of Nairu's mouth curl up in a mischievous smile, as if she had imagined herself slipping a caterpillar into someone's hand as a prank, and she could barely contain the giggles at the thought of the ensuing freak-out. She grins, then flings her arms out wide, bends her knees and leans forward.
"W-wait, what are you doing?!" I exclaim.
She leaps from the edge towards me like a linebacker hurling himself into a tackle. I hurry to catch her. When the few dozen kilograms of girl body hit my chest, the electricity in my heart crackles, the muscles along my back shudder with strain, and most of my breath rushes out of my lungs.
My vision whitens. I stumble backwards on my wobbly legs while Nairu giggles. One of my heels collides with a raised slab of concrete, and I drop down onto the grass.
When I regain my bearings, I move my toes to make sure that I haven't cracked my spine. However, I have likely smushed dog shit against the back of my corduroy jacket. Weeds are bending against my ears and the underside of my jaw as their vegetal blades dig into my flesh; some are brushing my earholes while they plan how to conquer my defenseless brain. Our adopted child is pressing down on my chest as she clings to me like a koala.
I lift my head off the ground and take a deep breath of cold air to fill my lungs, but a cough roughens my throat.
"Wh-what's the big idea, you little hellion?" I ask hoarsely. "You must have shattered my ribcage. Did you want me to know how it feels to breathe through a couple dozen puncture wounds to my lungs?"
Nairu giggles. She snuggles closer, rubbing her warm cheek against my jaw, tickling my neck with her wool scarf. As if the barrier of my skin had been breached, the girl's softness invades my insides. This stranger from the cold wildlands of the past has bested me with her mysterious guile, making a mockery of thousands of years of language evolution.
My facial muscles relax. I let the back of my head rest on the grass, pressing my hair against mud, anthills, and whole ecosystems of bacteria; it will take less than an hour for those microscopic beasts to crawl in through my scalp, spilling some of my brains' juice in the process, and begin digesting my scalpels and bone saws. Meanwhile, Nairu burrows deeper into my corduroy jacket. By the time I catch myself, I have snaked an arm around our adopted daughter's back to hold her in a hug, while my free hand moves through hair that this morning absorbed shampoo and conditioner for the first time, hair soft as a baby bison's wool. My heartbeat echoes between the bricks of my chest, beating out the rhythm of Nairu's purring.
I close my eyes. In the isolation of a droning sound in my ears and a darkness tinged with citrine-yellow lamplight, I become a mother who is holding her firstborn child. Beyond the boundaries of our snug embrace, a blizzard swirls up and down, covering our hair in white ice, creating a maelstrom of whirling snowflakes as it sucks up in a frenzy leaves, bits of bark, and twigs. The frozen matter, as well as every form of organic litter, will be taken away by the whirlwind of the snowstorm, swept up into the sky and reincarnated as dust particles.
Nairu and I have begun an evolutionary journey into a stronger species by this act, by her invasion of my world, by our physical and psychic bond. Our bodies now resonate like the soundboard of a Stradivarius, like the vibrating walls of a gargantuan tuning fork.
Blessed be the innocent children! Back when I used to return to my dingy apartment in that border town, I sought interlocutors among my dilapidated sofa, the pile of board games, the washing machine, and my collection of dirty dildos, until I gave up and, curled up in a corner, felt like a piece of rotten meat thrown in a dustbin. My brain itself had long been picked over by scavenging vermin, leaving behind only a bitter and loathsome taste. I dealt with the ghosts of programming languages past, haunted by their convoluted syntaxes, buried under the piled layers of virtual scaffolding that supported their unfathomable intricacy. All of existence had become a black box, and it almost drove me to suicide. I inhabited a realm far beneath society's surface, at the bottom of an ocean populated by abyssal beasts that had to be fed with pain.
But now I have someone to play with! After learning to distinguish one sound from another, we are all destined to speak, or at least to bark. To my beloved partner I shall bark in French: "Je te mords les couilles!" Words will always be inadequate and inept compared to the wordless truth of music, but if Jacqueline and I teach Nairu Spanish to the extent that she can read the newspapers and understand the newscasters, our adopted daughter will despair at the post-apocalyptic world into which I snatched her. She'll scream that she has grown sick of our time together, that I'm a horrible human being who should be avoided at all costs, that her lungs are breaking out into plague-riddled boils, and that she wants to return to her forests and her freedom. Such an outburst would turn my brain into a sponge forever dampened by the sticky ooze of regret. After all, should any child fear to see her loved ones shot with bullets that tear out the insides of human bodies? Should any child fear her home being ravaged and bombed out? So we better focus on teaching Nairu how to play board games. With our Paleolithic wonder by my side, I won't need to depend on the moods of a depressed horse to beat Shadowcluster. And if anyone ever looks at Nairu with ill intent, or ridicules her squinty eyes, I will disembowel that person with a rusty spoon. Their viscera will rot in the dirt for the fleas to feast on.
I'm overwhelmed with an urge to snatch our girl up and flee from civilization. To shield Nairu from this insanity, we could whisk her away to a deserted tropical island, a sanctuary of natural beauty and blinding sunlight where the air would smell of brine and warm skin, where only birds would speak a language. The three of us would watch the clouds roll into giant clumps shaped like breasts. Nairu would paint the amber hues of sunset skies on my bare legs. We'd snuggle up in the sand and listen to the surf while the saltwater washed over our feet. My naked body would be drenched in sweat, and the sand would cling to my ass.
Perhaps I should take up on my old pal Git's advice and become a family of merfolk. We would spend the days hunting fish in the coral reefs, and at night we would congregate in the clear blue waters to admire the stars. A whole pod of dolphin children could join our mafia-run aquatic colony. We'd drag under the waves any human who swam too far from the shore.
We could travel to the Moon and live on its lava plains. I'd love to bathe in the dust of millennia. We would launch ourselves down the tubes carved out in the lunar crust by rising liquid rock, slippery slopes that lead all the way down to the center of the world.
---
Author's note: the two songs for today are "Oxford Comma" and "The Kids Don't Stand a Chance", both by Vampire Weekend.
I keep a playlist of the all the songs mentioned throughout this novel (seventy-nine so far): check it out.
Leire attempted to play the board game Renegade with a somewhat sentient horse back in chapter 20. Also, she sought counsel from an anthropomorphized open source software for distributed version control back in chapter 44; Git recommended that she should transform herself into a sea creature.
I promised to throw scraps at my pair of pet neural networks if they digested my prompts and vomited out fucktons of images related to this chapter. Check them out!
This chapter is just half of what I intended to include to conclude the current sequence. However, these last 2-3 weeks have been a nightmare at the office; I've felt more mentally unstable than in the previous few months, even unhinged at times. Posting two thousand words of my ongoing novel makes me feel better, so that's what I've managed to do today.
October 20, 2022
Random AI-generated images #14
I thought I would manage to finish the current chapter of my ongoing novel today, but it hasn’t been the case. I’m still recovering from moving and patching into the network about twenty PCs, nevermind dealing with their users, at the hospital complex where I work. I feel like I’ve been beaten up.
Anyway, a couple of paid services out there in the wild allow you to send written prompts to cutting-edge neural networks (one of them trained exclusively on anime-like images) so they spit back a visual representation of your nonsense. The following about 130 images are the latest batch that I’ve accumulated.
You can check out the so far twenty-five other similar entries through this link.
[check out the rest of this entry on my personal page; it contains many, many images]
Anyway, a couple of paid services out there in the wild allow you to send written prompts to cutting-edge neural networks (one of them trained exclusively on anime-like images) so they spit back a visual representation of your nonsense. The following about 130 images are the latest batch that I’ve accumulated.
You can check out the so far twenty-five other similar entries through this link.
[check out the rest of this entry on my personal page; it contains many, many images]
Artist spotlight: Ichiko Aoba
A couple of weeks ago I came across this Japanese songwriter that, according to a quick google, released her first album in 2010, aged only 19. Her stuff is the closest thing to musical ASMR regarding the way it affects my brain. Whenever I’m feeling overwhelmed by this world (which happens often), or I want to believe in beauty beyond what I can perceive, I put on my headphones and listen to Ichiko Aoba’s gorgeous music.
[check out the erst of this entry on my personal page; it contains embedded videos]
[check out the erst of this entry on my personal page; it contains embedded videos]
